Kiss of the Fur Queen Page 11

  The great hall reared its regal brow a distance to their right. To feast on it, however, Jeremiah’s eyes had to pass the lights of Indian skid row, a vision that stayed with him, even when he slept.

  “Mom’s keeping Uncle Kookoos’s Winchester thirty-thirty locked up in her closet every New Year’s Eve until he behaves himself,” Gabriel’s narrative hobbled on. “ ‘No way Kookoos Cook is murdering the vile and slovenly Jane Kaka on my front step,’ she says.” He hopped over a ridge of hard-packed snow.

  Like a galleon on a nighttime sea, a figure surfaced from the silver-lined half-light. Visible only in silhouette at first, she commanded the summit of the concrete staircase that swept up to the entrance of the theatre. Resplendent in a black velvet, fur-lined cape that fell to her feet in folds, a constellation of diamonds twinkling, she scanned the street impatiently, waiting for a husband, a friend, a lover?

  “So.” Gabriel took a deep breath. “Wanna go for a drink?” praying that the offer sounded as throwaway as a simple “how-dee-do.”

  But Jeremiah was rooted to the pavement, staring across the street, at the entrance of the Leland Hotel. A woman so young she could have been a child leaned against a wall, lost, lonely, a halo of blood-red neon hovering above her head. Wearing a summery della robbia blue windbreaker, her legs exposed between a miniskirt and brown suede boots, the pale blue rose in her hair appeared to vibrate from her shivers. She was pregnant, five months, maybe six. She staggered, just as a hulking junk heap of a car pulled up, springs groaning from the weight of young white men out looking for a thrill. Could that be Rob Bailey, the football star from his history class, in the driver’s seat?

  “Hey, chickie.” Rob Bailey’s reedy voice insinuated itself into the gauze-like wash of light. “You look like you could use some cuddling.” Evelyn Rose McCrae and Madeline Jeanette Lavoix appeared, keeping vigil by their teenaged sister with the sad synthetic rose. The impulse to race across the street overwhelmed Jeremiah, the need to scream: “Go! Go back inside the bar! Go home, go anywhere, but don’t stay here!”

  “Jeremiah!” Gabriel’s voice. “Jeremiah, what are you doing?” Gabriel took a step towards him just as the woman in the cape of midnight velvet burst, like a gust of wind, down the staircase.

  Perfumed air billowing before her, hazel eyes glimmering, she stopped directly in front of Gabriel. Admiration — for his beauty? his bearing? — flickered across the woman’s fiery glare. Then, from her cape, a slender hand dropped a small pink envelope into Gabriel’s gloved hand.

  “What the hell was that all about?” Jeremiah was beside him. Gabriel almost tore the envelope in half. Inside were two white strips of paper, of the kind gift boxes are made. “Hold them up,” Jeremiah’s voice more bark than suggestion. In the insufficient light, they read: “New Year’s Eve Gala. The Royal Winnipeg Ballet. December 31, 1969, 10:00 P.M.”

  Before they remembered to breathe again, the brothers Okimasis were drifting through the large glass portals of the Jubilee Concert Hall, their hearts a jumble of disbelief.

  “Just a minute please, sirs” A stern male voice hooked them from behind. “I’m afraid you need tickets to get in here.”

  “Indeed you do.” Tauntingly, Gabriel waved them in the doorman’s face.

  A gorgeous blush fanned out across the peach-smooth cheeks. Gabriel had half a notion to kiss his cherry-red lips.

  EIGHTEEN

  In the second-floor foyer, Jeremiah gazed at the grand piano, a nine-foot Bösendorfer gleaming by the light of a chandelier so enormous it looked like a spaceship. A waxen, priest-like gentleman sat stiff-backed at its keyboard, his skeletal, liver-spotted fingers trembling over the keys as though stricken with Parkinson’s disease. No matter, thought Jeremiah, Chopin’s “Harp Etude” still sounded like springwater gurgling in moonlight.

  Behind him, Gabriel stood gaping at the tables groaning with bounty. Shrimp he had never tasted. These he might begin with. As satin whispered, as champagne glasses clinked, as laughter and chatter swirled — everyone there pretending he didn’t exist — he reached into the nearest platter. For the next half hour, he would not take a moment’s pause, from charred buffalo croustade and venison terrine, from smoked trout with beetroot and corn-bread, from rabbit spring rolls with spiced pears, from grilled marinated quail.

  “Northern Manitoba?” a fragment of conversation finally trapped the brothers’ ears. “Ripe for the plucking,” the voice a finely modulated southern Manitoba drawl.

  “The last frontier!” trumpeted a neighbour. “Uninhabited.” The brothers stole a flabbergasted peek. “Or might as well be.”

  “Kieran-Watson’s already put its money on diamonds,” a third offered. “It’s been, what, three years now they’ve been prospecting up north of Mistik Lake?” So that’s what they had been in search of, those flatulent, hirsute men the Okimasis family had run into that summer on Nameegoos Lake.

  “Diamonds?” the first gentleman chuckled. “Try uranium, try natural gas …”

  The tuxedoed businessmen’s northern Manitoba was miraculously transformed: mines spewing diamonds at the northern end of Nameegoos Lake, oil wells on the shores of Kasimir Lake, uranium gushing from Mistik Lake — the nickel, gold, and copper deposits of Smallwood Lake, Thompson, and Flin Flon were piffle by comparison — pipelines, skyscraper jungles, freeways, the Churchill River a leviathan providing light and heat to half of North America. The boys’ dreams were on fire: they saw Cree Indians so wealthy they could commute to Las Vegas for blackjack every weekend, to Rio de Janeiro for Carnival, to Disneyland on a moment’s notice to teach Kookoos Cook’s favourite jig, “Kimoosoom Chimasoo,” to Mickey Mouse — Chopin’s arpeggios had become mere ambience, Gabriel’s ravenous chomping slowed to a meditative chew — the Okimasis family living in a thirty-seven-room palazzo, Abraham owning a fleet of yachts, Mariesis drowning in mink and pearls, Jeremiah proud owner of a nine-foot Bösendorfer, Gabriel, in a Cadillac, cruising up to Eemanapiteepitat Concert Hall to feast on all the caviar his heart desired (he actually hated the stuff but it seemed fashionable). The twenty-first century had dawned — glorious, golden — on their home and Native land.

  Suddenly, the boys noticed they each had a champagne flute in hand and that the foyer was almost empty. Snapped from their reverie, they toasted their hometown’s heavenly future: “Happy Year! Happy Year! As Kookoos Cook would say.” And they bumped and tripped their way into the cavernous hall.

  If it wasn’t for the hair in front of them, piled so high and sprayed to such brutal hardness that it could have passed for a volcanic rock formation, the brothers Okimasis would have had an unbroken view of the stage. But at least they were there, ensconced like princes in red plush seats only seven rows from the front.

  When Gabriel caught sight of a host-like pate popping up just below the stage’s edge, he assumed a janitor or a maintenance man was tending to last-minute business. But the janitor was wearing a tuxedo, and when he bowed to the audience, he elicited a flurry of genteel claps accompanied by lowing. Thinking to minimize their conspicuousness, Jeremiah clapped soundlessly and murmured twice. Gabriel, hearing the rumble in his brother’s throat, likewise mooed politely. When the little bald man raised a chopstick above his head, Gabriel was sure he was about to perform a magic trick, but no white rabbit was pulled from a hat. Instead, a respectful hush descended.

  When the chopstick came down, a bassoon whined, serpentine, penetrating. Then a shimmer of strings bled in, to cling, like dew, to the reed’s exquisite legato. It dawned on Jeremiah that a live orchestra was hiding beneath the stage, and he leaned over to apprise Gabriel of this novel circumstance. He was about to explain the precise instrumentation of these opening bars to Ludislav Buchynski’s Prism, Mirror, Lens when the chunky matron in front of him swung about the litter of otters on her shoulders — the animals’ cute little faces smiled at the boys, as though in recognition — clamped her steel-trap glare on Jeremiah and hissed. The red velvet curtain parted.

&nb
sp; At first, the stage was dark. When the coo of an alto flute entwined itself around the bassoon’s sustained high A-flat, a shimmer of watery light revealed a clump of dancers standing, heads bowed, arms hanging lifeless. When, like distant thunder, the timpani and contrabasses rumbled, the grey-sheathed clump began to undulate. Pair by pair, arms wafted up, bodies moved apart, and the dance began.

  The blue haze shifted, stars began to pock the sky; the northern lights had found their way into the hall. Under them, through them, with them, fifteen dancers fanned out and regrouped, fanned out and regrouped, their feet strangers to gravity, their patterns as unpredictable as air.

  Jeremiah quickly found the spectacle repetitive, the dancers too conscious of their beauty, too anxious that it be admired. He found the play of lights on a star-filled sky much more to his liking. But, finally, it was the music that captured him. He closed his eyes, the better to take pleasure in its beauty. What came to him, however, surfacing like a dream from the great dome of his blindness, was the streaks of neon above the entrance to the Leland Hotel, the “o” crowning the Indian girl, large with child. Falling snow turned her transparent, ethereal, the foetus in her belly full-formed and glowing. Disengaging from the womb, the child tumbled seemingly forever, to a bed of broken beer bottles and screwdrivers filed sharp as nails. The shards loomed closer. And closer. And it was Jeremiah’s own groin that suddenly rammed into them, again and again.

  Shaken, repelled, he opened his eyes, willed the vision away. Then he turned to peek at Gabriel, prepared to see him squirming restlessly or nodding off. The boy, however, was wide awake.

  Beat by beat, step by step, the dance had seduced and then embraced Gabriel. The dancers burst from their spinning circle, swivelled and shimmied, their upraised arms describing ornate figures, the company one throbbing mass.

  In one breathtaking glissando, a solo oboe soared above the orchestra and wailed a series of wavering semitones, like the keening of old Cree women at a wake. As trumpets punctured air with arhythmic, discordant shrieks, the timpani and basses raised a thunderous vibration.

  The arms were a sea of moving antlers. And Gabriel Okimasis, three years old, was perched on a moss-covered rock, the warm breath of a thousand beasts rushing, pummelling, the zigzaging of their horns a cloud of spirit matter, nudging him, licking him as with a lover’s tongue. And whispering: “Come with us, Gabriel Okimasis, come with us …”

  “So,” Jeremiah said, “what did you think?”

  Slumped into his seat, his eyes glazed, Gabriel stared at the curtained stage.

  NINETEEN

  Pretty as Miss Muffett on her tuffet, Marie Antoinette, queen of France, sat on a stool, pink crinoline with white frilled hem spilling around her like a foam bath. Her shoulders draped in ermine, her poker face all but hidden by a powdered wig and a crown that resembled a clipper at full sail. Behind her, the fabled guillotine; beside it, one terrified presenter.

  “And this woman, born with …” Jeremiah’s tongue could have been anaesthetized for all its gummy thickness, “born with … ahem, born with her mouth wrapped around the biggest silver spoon the Western world has ever known,” he had practised his English-Canadian accent for this occasion until his tongue had hurt, “was about to prove this theory.” Never before had he had to address a room filled with white people. He could hear them shifting in their seats, embarrassed, no doubt, by his backwoods ungainliness.

  “So while France starved, the queen ate cake. Now if I … now if I were …” He cursed the flamboyant, sadistic Herr Schwarzkopf for his insistence on what he termed teatro verismo class presentations. “Ahem, now if I were to eat cake while you were eating straw and the boiled s-s-s-soles of your shoes and couldn’t even pay your rent rent rent, what would you want to do? To me?”

  Finally, and mercifully, Herr Schwarzkopf redirected his chilling German glare at the grade-twelve history class.

  “Vell?”

  “Cut your head off,” the jock Rob Bailey responded with an undisguised lack of interest.

  “Right.” Jeremiah plunked the queen of France under the blade of the midget guillotine and viciously pulled the string. The razor blade, weighted with magnets and radio batteries, slid down and struck with a muffled thud. The stringy neck of the hapless royal doll flew open. A jet of blood sprayed out, two specks landing on Jeremiah’s forehead. The laughter was explosive. And sustained.

  “Theory proven: Never take silver spoons for granted.” Finally, Jeremiah’s presentation was the laugh-provoking spectacle he had planned with such meticulous care. There was applause. Rob Bailey’s stuttered taunt “War war warpaint!” failed to register. Instead, the caribou hunter’s son, his confidence in glorious bloom, threw off one last flourish. “And she wasn’t the only one.” His ts and ds had improved these past two weeks, and he was determined that this become public knowledge, “for there were hundreds whose heads fell to the guillotine in what was surely …” He wiped his forehead, he felt the goo, his voice began to quaver, “What was surely the most violent and bloody peer …” his hand came down, he saw the ketchup, and thought Marie Antoinette a most fortunate woman, “bloody period in the his … tory. Of the world.” His first theatrical production had been a disaster.

  “I disagree,” a low, rich voice cut through the din. The laughter stopped. Heads swivelled.

  “Yes, Amanda? And vat is it you disagree vis in Mr. Okimasis’s interestink presentation?”

  Amanda Clear Sky, dusky Indian maiden of eighteen years, disengaged herself from her desk and stood for all to see.

  “There were many bloody periods in human history,” her tone unflinching, with a sheen of anger, “many of them occurring right here in North America.”

  Once he had summoned the nerve to meet her stare, Jeremiah’s eyes stung. “Such as?”

  “Such as the Cherokee Trail of Tears.” Her English was impeccable, not a speck of accent. “Such as Wounded Knee, smallpox blankets, any number of atrocities done to the Indian people. Was the colonization of North America not every bit as bloody as the French Revolution?”

  “Yes, but Miss Clear Sky,” the doddering teacher crawled to Jeremiah’s rescue, “zat is Nors American history. Zis is European history vee are studyink …”

  “Ugh. The Princess Pocahontas has spoken.” Two rows from the front, Rob Bailey was holding court, the same person, Jeremiah wanted desperately to believe, who he had seen in the car that pulled up to the Leland Hotel on New Year’s Eve. The bell shrieked.

  Jeremiah was crouching at his locker rummaging pointlessly, his mind a jumble of rage and embarrassment, when Amanda Clear Sky came striding airily out the door of Herr Schwarzkopf’s history room.

  “So what you’re saying —” Amanda winced as the warm spray from his words hit her face. “What you’re saying is that Indians aren’t supposed to know about the rest of the world, right?”

  “No,” Amanda replied, not stopping, her buckskin purse swinging wildly from a hand.

  “That they should limit their knowledge of history to their own kind?” Jeremiah continued.

  Amanda stopped so suddenly that Jeremiah had to save himself from crashing into her. Her eyes hovered inches below his, her breath bubble gum, pink, cherry.

  “You just shouldn’t forget that we have a history, too, that’s all.” She marched off. “I was doing you a favour. Trust me.”

  “Doing me favour, come on. You were just trying to make a fool of —”

  “Look.” Amanda whirled around. “What use is there pretending to be what you are not? You and me and your little brother, we’re the only three Indians in a school filled with two thousand white middle-class kids. We can’t let them walk all over us.”

  “What do you mean, we can’t—?”

  “Don’t you get it? They were making a fool of you, not me. You looked so …” Her voice suddenly grew soft.

  “So …” “So what?”

  “In need of help.” She turned and walked away.

  Was
he to run and thank the woman for assistance kindly rendered or should he conceive some bloodless vengeance? He started rummaging again, but couldn’t remember what he was looking for. He heard footsteps.

  “See you later,” Gabriel rushed by.

  “Gabriel! Gabriel, wait!”

  Gabriel raised a cheap vinyl gym bag. “YMCA.”

  “I need to talk to you.” I need to talk to someone was more the point. And who else was there for him to talk to? Mrs. Bugachski’s piano?

  Gabriel turned, his smile nervous, vaguely fearful. “Bodybuilding,” he chirped, flexed an arm, and disappeared.

  TWENTY

  “And second position and two and plié …” Miss Churley’s steely voice sliced through the music like a razor blade. From the rear of the studio, Gabriel followed her stern-faced commands; he gripped the barre, thrust his pelvis out, and bent his knees, amazed that such a simple move could be so downright painful. Still, he was glad that he had finally dared advance from mere observer to actual participant.

  The chipmunks in front of him were so damned cute that he yearned to scurry through their ranks and pinch each plump little cheek. But the mothers were sitting by the door, watching their daughters with nodding heads and brimming eyes. Instead, he held his right palm up as though feeling for rain, and he stretched his neck to the point where he wondered when his head would touch the ceiling.

  “And third position and two and three …”

  Pink as cotton candy in their leotards and slippers, the buns on their heads like inverted acorns, the baby ballerinas stretched out to infinity, the mirrored walls multiplying them into the hundreds. Thank God there were only twenty-four of them, cringed Gabriel momentarily, for his masculine self-image had never been subjected to such a humbling low. Avoid his reflection in the distance as he might, the fact remained that few of these five- and six-year-old girls came up to his navel, making him look, and feel, like a Weetigo. When a mother smiled his way, he interpreted the look as one of wild amusement; the black leotards exposing his bulbous, quivering groin would make a priest yodel “Weeks’chiloowew!” Still, he forged on manfully, scraping his dainty-slippered right foot from third position back to first in an approximate execution of Miss Churley’s unbending will.