Kiss of the Fur Queen Page 13

  And the body of the caribou hunter’s son was eaten, tongues writhing serpent-like around his own, breath mingling with his, his orifices punctured and repunctured, as with nails.

  And through it all, somewhere in the farthest reaches of his senses, the silver cross oozed in and out, in and out, the naked body pressing on his lips, positioning itself for entry. Until, upon the buds that lined his tongue, warm honey flowed like river water over granite.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  The Winnipeg Central Library saved Jeremiah Okimasis from killing himself that spring.

  For if he hadn’t come across, by accident, the record-listening booths, he would never have discovered the antidote to the suicide-inducing loneliness of city Saturdays. There, that first dream-and-music-filled day, he had whiled away the hours, at times near tears, visualizing himself on stages from Leningrad to Rome. How, after all this time, could he have missed such a gold mine? From then on, Saturday would not be Saturday without the George Street edifice.

  On his third visit, on a day so sombre the clouds were shaped like coffins, he was on his way to drown himself in the bittersweet melodies of Chopin’s mazurkas when avoiding North Main Street became an absolute necessity. If only for the champion of the world, the caribou hunter Abraham Okimasis, would Jeremiah live beyond age eighteen. Which was how, slinking down an unfamiliar street, he came upon a sound that would have made the dead Polish composer rise from his grave in protest.

  Inside a church, a pail was being banged, with maddening insistence, to accompany a terrible yowling. Dogs? In church? Were southern city animals trained to sing, even if it was some primitive, half-formed species of tune? Loping up the concrete steps two by two, he didn’t even see the sign above the entrance.

  What he saw took him by complete surprise. For where pews should have been — with mutts in choirboy regalia singing praise to the good God on high — bobbed a clutch of feather-tufted dancers, while watching from the sides stood Indians civilized enough for jeans and other human dress such as T-shirts.

  Had he just walked into a Buffalo Bill Wild West extravaganza? A John Wayne movie? Where were the horses, the tired pioneers, the circle of dusty chuckwagons? And where was the howling and the pounding coming from? From the middle of the circle these paint-streaked warmongers were describing with a pointless shuffle? Or might this be a fair, like the Red River Ex, where one could pay a dime, shoot a medicine man dead, and win a Huckleberry Hound the size of a moose?

  He scanned the sanctuary for a shooting gallery, slot machines, wheels of fortune, even merry-go-rounds and Wild Mouse rides. But no, the place was more funeral than fair. But for the refreshment stand, he would have left at once; a Mr. Big, at least, might justify ten minutes of Chopin thrown to the wind.

  Gnawing at the candy bar, Jeremiah leaned against a pillar and watched the spectacle. On a wind-blown plain, back-lit by a sunset, an orchestra tremoloing away behind a grassy knoll, such dross might pass for something. But, confined by the walls of this church gone to seed, blasted by fluorescence, the outline of a giant crucifix high above the place where the altar should have been, it looked downright perverse. Who did these people think they were, attempting to revive dead customs in the middle of a city, on the cusp of the twenty-first century? Bored, he polished off his snack, threw the wrapper on the floor, and made for the exit.

  “Oh my gawd, it is you!” the voice, at his back, resonated. He turned. And would have burst out in hysterics if his mouth hadn’t been a mire of chocolate, caramel, and nuts. For there, likewise jostled by the burgeoning throng, stood Amanda Clear Sky as the Princess Pocahontas. “I don’t believe it! I don’t be —”

  “Amanda?” Jeremiah squinted at the spectre. “Is that you? In that … get-up?” stopping himself just this side of the adjective “ridiculous.”

  “What do you mean, ‘in that get-up’? This is my regalia, my dancing outfit. This is moi.” Poutily, she planted hands on hips. “Where’s your get-up, Mr. Northern Manitoba, your moccasins, your plumage, your noble Cree heritage?” Her laugh bounced like bubbles from one wall of his heart to the other.

  “Disney Indians,” he scoffed, “Hollywood Indians dress like that, dance like, sing like …”

  She rolled her eyes in melodrama fashion. “Oh, forget it. You got my invitation. You’re here. And God up in the clouds is smiling on her people.” And she laughed again, though uneasily.

  Then he remembered the lime-green notice. He almost fell backwards, it was all so ludicrous.

  “So?” With a saucy grin, the dusky Indian maid held out a slender hand, “Wanna dance?”

  “Me?” Discomfort speedily truncated by a flushed-faced embarrassment. “Dance? I don’t think so.”

  “Come on!” She grabbed his hand, her breath all cinnamon. He pulled it free.

  “You just told me I’m not dressed for —”

  “You don’t have to be.” Grabbing both his hands this time, she started dragging him. “Not for the inter-tribal, anyways,” evidently the dance a deep male voice was announcing on a microphone. “Come on!” People were not only staring, for God’s sake, they were pointing, laughing! “Come on, come on, come on, come on!”

  “I can’t dance!” Fuck off! was more like it.

  “What are you doing to that poor boy?” a female voice interjected, not a moment too soon. When a sweat-faced Jeremiah turned to look, a tiny, brown woman, cute as a blueberry, blinked up at him.

  “Oh, Granny,” Amanda relented, her mock disgust not mock enough for Jeremiah’s liking. “It’s just Jeremiah, the guy I’ve been telling you about, playing hard-to-get. You know these Cree.”

  “Oh, these Cree.” The marble-eyed septuagenarian sighed and fanned her cracked-earth face with some dark bird’s wing — a hawk’s? an eagle’s? “Sometimes I wish they were more like us lusty, enthusiastic, gung-ho Ojibway,” she bobbed at Jeremiah. “Don’t you?”

  Well, no, not exactly, Jeremiah felt he should say. I don’t even know if I enjoy being Cree, he knew he shouldn’t say. That his embarrassment had descended to a simmering dislike dismayed him. But why shouldn’t he hate this place, these cheap goings-on, this conquered race of people?

  “Ann-Adele Ghostrider.” The old woman regaled Jeremiah with two robust handshakes. “But I have a Cree name, too: Poosees.” She batted threadbare eyelashes.

  “Hmph.” Jeremiah took some comfort in the fact: imagine, a woman called Cat or, better, Pussy.

  “I travel too much,” Poosees sighed. “For a girl my age? Way too much! Pooh! Anyways, some old Cree fart away up in South Indian Lake — Parliament Moose, can you believe that for a name? — takes a shine to me. Five years ago. Gave me that name because I have a kind of … cat-like personality, this Parliament Moose says to me. Now I ask you: what in the name of Jesus Christ is poosees-like about me?”

  “Your whiskers,” Jeremiah suggested, as a sudden burst of sunlight announced that the withered upper lip on the merry old dame was adorned by a caragana-hedge of fine white bristles.

  “Why, thank you. My granddaughter here tells me you play piano better than ten white people jammed in a blender. Might this be true?” Green and pink beads sparkled from her white deer-hide tiara. “Or is she just goofin’ around on me again?”

  Her pupils spewing sparks, Amanda brushed past her flustered Cree captive. “I’ll make you dance yet.” And quicker than a sparrow, she was off through the crowd and into the dance. Jeremiah followed her progress with panic-struck eyes. What was he to say to this ancient stranger? Nothing, apparently — to his immense relief — for she took the initiative.

  “You northern people,” she sighed, as with nostalgia, “it’s too bad you lost all them dances, you know? All them beautiful songs? Thousands of years of … But never mind. We have it here.” She, too, was looking at the dance now. The drumming, the chanting crescendoed — pentatonic mush, Jeremiah opined.

  And what the hell was this tired old bag yattering on about anyway? What dances? What songs? “Kim
oosoom Chimasoo”? The “Waldstein Sonata”?

  “Them little ol’ priests,” Poosees persisted, “the things they did? Pooh! No wonder us Indian folk are all the shits.”

  Jeremiah turned away. Then he saw her, on the dance floor: the della robbia blue windbreaker, the calf-length boots, the pale blue rose in her hair, now ten, eleven months’ pregnant, her womb engorged, mountainous. In a circle of dancers cor-ruscating with magenta, turquoise, luminescent orange, she looked like a handful of dirt. Evidently, however, this was of no concern, for she was possessed, her eyes glazed over, her feet inching along as if her body had neither heart nor soul. How could she find the strength to stand, never mind to dance? How had she — they — survived that freezing New Year’s Eve?

  “Devil worship,” said Ann-Adele Ghostrider. “That’s what they called this. The nerve!”

  Yes, Jeremiah thought, the nerve. And right on the money. He mumbled some excuse and left. Chopin’s mazurkas could wait no longer.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  As if artfully arranged, Jeremiah and Gabriel knelt in the tenth pew, the fresh June sunlight that fell across their faces, shoulders, arms, rendered doubly rich by the stained glass of windows. Gabriel’s gaze, however, was directed at the walls between the windows, bristling with images of blood, agony, cruelty, superimposed with games of make-believe at Birch Lake Indian Residential School.

  Our Lady of Lourdes must have some well-heeled parishioners if it could afford such expensive-looking sculptures. Each painstakingly carved out of some rich dark wood, the depictions were so life-like that Gabriel swore he could hear whips snapping, Christ sighing in reply.

  No one in this sparse and motley congregation looked particularly devout. The women in their flowery hats may have been involved enough; some had the decency to rattle their rosaries from time to time, move their lips like fish, or hold their hands to their hearts. But the men, in suits as nondescript as muskrat fur, gave the distinct impression that they were really at the races, or in some fishing boat on Falcon Lake.

  From the rear balcony, a small choir was making mincemeat of the harmonies to Abraham Okimasis’s favourite hymn, “Faith of Our Fathers.” Fortunately, thought Jeremiah, Holy Communion was on the way, and he wouldn’t have to listen much longer. Withdrawing into his conscience for the words, “We will be true to thee till death,” he prepared for the feast.

  Unlike Jeremiah, who had been to this church a dozen times before, Gabriel reminisced, unimpeded, merrily. What else was a first-time customer to do? The service was boring, interminable, and, when all was said and done, unnecessary. He contemplated the carving of Jesus being spanked across the buttocks: he envied the man. Yes, Father, please, make me bleed!

  Jeremiah rose and took a step towards the aisle. “Well?” he whispered.

  “Well what?” Gabriel whispered back.

  “Are you coming?”

  “I haven’t been to confession” — a ruse; Gabriel wanted nothing to do with communion, holy or otherwise — “so I can’t go.”

  Jeremiah knelt back down. “You don’t need confession. Not these days.”

  “I’m not going.”

  “We promised.”

  “Promised? Promised who?” Gabriel was suddenly so annoyed by the turning heads he could have ripped the mosslike eyebrows off the stubby small man in front of him.

  “Mom. And Dad.” If they hadn’t been in church, Jeremiah would have slapped him.

  “You promised Mom and Dad. I didn’t.”

  “Come on, Gabriel. Just this once.”

  Jeremiah looked so pitiful that Gabriel relented. What did he care? It would be an act of kindness, for their mother, nothing more.

  At the communion rail, the brothers squeezed between two well-nourished, black-garbed Italian widows, the space so confined they had to take turns breathing. Gold chalice in one hand, paper-thin wafer in the other, the priest turned his back on the tabernacle and started down the altar steps.

  Natty in pretend red cloak and ankle-length white tunic, Jesus sat straight-backed and princely at the table’s centre. Judas leaned over to offer him bread stolen from the school kitchen. The six-year-old Lord took a slice, turned to his guests — the boys of Birch Lake School, six to his left, six to his right, including Jeremiah-Judas — and told the starving crew that they would each get a piece, on one condition: that they refrain from speaking English. The table exploded with a flurry of Cree so profane and so prolonged — the scandalous ditty “Kimoosoom Chimasoo” the most profane and prolonged — that the feast would have been sabotaged but for Brother Stumbo’s piercing whistle announcing bedtime.

  Past the scrap of cardboard on the fence — “The Okimasis Brothers present ‘The Last Supper’ ” — stampeded the midget Cree apostles.

  At the communion rail, the line of faces went on forever, every size and shape of nose well represented. Gabriel imagined their owners anticipating the great event by moistening their tongues. The very thought made his taste buds harden.

  One by one, the tongues darted out as the priest, with a confidential murmur, placed the wafer on them. One by one, the tongues darted in, the straw-haired altar boy deftly catching wayward crumbs with his gold-plated paten.

  Here was a sturdy specimen, mused Gabriel, square of shoulder, generous of chest, with a dimpled chin, grey-blue eyes partly obscured by glasses, no more than forty years of age. In Superman leotards, the priest would look none too shabby.

  When the mumbling celebrant reached him, Jeremiah hurriedly asked God to accept Mariesis Okimasis into His Kingdom upon her death. When he realized that the prayer had sprung up in his mind fully formed, that he had had nothing to do with its conception, he was genuinely in awe. His mouth fell open, his tongue unfurled.

  “The body of Christ,” the priest confided, and deposited the host.

  “Amen,” replied Jeremiah, swallowed, and rose.

  The Jesuit’s crotch was arrestingly level with Gabriel’s line of vision; but there was little to amuse the eye, the green silk chasuble so jealously concealed all possible event. Rebuffed, Gabriel’s gaze raked its way up the belly, chest, and neck to the face, where he knew he had induced a flashing spasm in the holy man’s gaze. The Cree youth curled his full upper lip — and watched with glee as celibacy-by-law drove mortal flesh to the brink.

  Flailing for his soul’s deliverance, the priest thrust out a hairy, trembling hand. And by immaculate condensation or such rarefied event, a length of raw meat dangled from his fingers. What was a humble caribou hunter’s son to do? He exposed himself. And savoured the dripping blood as it hit his tongue, those drops that didn’t fall onto the angel’s paten below.

  “The body of Christ,” said the wizard. But the instant the flesh met Gabriel’s, a laugh exploded where his “Amen” should have been. The laugh was so loud — the joke so ludicrous, the sham so extreme — that every statue in the room, from St. Theresa to St. Dominic to Bernadette of Lourdes — even the Son of God himself — shifted its eyeballs to seek out the source of such a clangour.

  “Madre di Dio!” gasped the widow to Gabriel’s left, crossed herself, and clutched a rosary to the earthquake of her bosom. The priest turned pale but soldiered on; a dozen more diners were waiting, screaming with hunger.

  Up the aisle Gabriel bumped and clattered, his mouth spewing blood, his bloated gut regurgitant, his esophagus engorged with entrails. At every step he took, ghost-white masks and gaping mouths lunged and shrieked: “Kill him! Kill him! Nail the savage to the cross, hang him high, hang him dead! Kill him, kill him! …”

  TWENTY-SIX

  “What’s wrong with going to church?” Jeremiah pummelled Gabriel with the question, in Cree.

  “Only old people go to church,” Gabriel replied with cavalier insousiance, “when they know they’re running out of time. Look at Uncle Kookoos.” No response from Jeremiah, who was trying to marshal his thoughts. The church receded behind them. “I mean, how many kids at Anderson High practise some form of religion?
How many of them believe in something?”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “The churches sit empty and the malls get bigger.” Word by word, Gabriel’s confidence, like his Cree, bloomed. “Some day, the world will have a mall the size of Manitoba, and then everyone will be happy. Back home people may take their religion dead serious. But we’re city boys now, Jeremiah. To us, it should mean nothing.”

  “Speak for yourself.”

  “Well, then, what does it mean to you, this … Catholic thing?”

  Flail as he might, Jeremiah couldn’t find the words to express what he believed.

  “These church-goers,” Gabriel felt obliged to fill the silence, “they talk about respect, and love and peace and all that jazz, and the minute they’re out of that church, they’re just as mean and selfish as they were before. It’s as if going to church gives them the right to act like, well … like assholes. You know what I mean?”

  “They’re not all like that,” Jeremiah all but yelled back. “Take our parents. They’re Catholics and they’re good people.”

  “Yes, they are, but what about all those Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland? Blowing each other’s brains out over the love of Jesus Christ.”

  “That’s political,” said Jeremiah. Thinking how childish Gabriel sounded, how simplistic his argument. “It has nothing to do with religion or, or, or spiritual belief.”

  “Yes, it does. Every war in the history of the world has had religion at its root. And what about those guys who beat the shit out of their wives while the host is still melting on their tongues? All that does is make one lose respect for organized religion.”

  “But what else is there?”

  “There’s Indian religion. North American Indian religion.”