Kiss of the Fur Queen Read online

  Jeremiah clung to the ivory until his knuckles equalled them in whiteness. These weren’t keys on a piano but a length of curved, peeled spruce, the handlebar of a sled. Mist rose, silence paralysed the air. Where was he? What was that? The cracking of spring ice on Mistik Lake?

  These weren’t dogs pulling at his sled, these were young, naked men, winged like eagles, straining at the harness, panting out whorls of vapour. And at the lead, where Tiger-Tiger should be labouring, his little brother, cutting through swirling clouds, sailing past the moon for the planet Jupiter. The cities of the world twinkled at his feet — Toronto, New York, London, Paris: the maw of the Weetigo, Jeremiah dreamt, insatiable man-eater, flesh-devourer, following his brother in his dance.

  Then Jeremiah saw it, or thought he could: the Fur Queen’s cape — the northern lights — the finish line was near! And there she was, the Fur Queen herself, smiling from the great dome of space, holding out the legendary silver chalice.

  Hands reached for him, clutched at his arms, his shoulders, his back. Champagne glasses, cameras, microphones were aimed at him. Men with notepads and pencils, women with pens and large red moving mouths, babbling in this language of the Englishman, hard, filled with sharp, jagged angles.

  Something about “Jeremiah Okimasis, twenty years old.” Something about “Jeremiah Okimasis, from the Eemanapiteepitat Indian Reserve.” Something having to do with “Jeremiah Okimasis, first Indian to win this gruelling contest in its forty-seven-year history …”

  “Your cheating heart …,” bled Hank Williams’s wailing tenor.

  Where was Gabriel? Didn’t he come here on Saturday nights with his cheating heart in search of what, diversion? Inspiration? God the Father? Proud King Lucifer?

  The table was a battlefield of beer glasses, surrounding a silver bowl, the Crookshank Memorial Trophy, the launching pad for many a concert artist. So drunk that only the starch of his tuxedo collar — soiled, punctured by a cigarette — held up his head, Jeremiah stared at his reflection in the trophy. Try as he might to will Gabriel into its smoke-obscured universe, the image remained infuriatingly alone. Beyond it, across the room, drunken Indians as far as the eye could see.

  He had tried. Tried to change the meaning of his past, the roots of his hair, the colour of his skin, but he was one of them. What was he to do with Chopin? Open a conservatory on Eemanapiteepitat hill? Whip its residents into the Cree Philharmonic Orchestra?

  Oops. A broken beer glass. Hey! What more appropriate tool with which to bid the noble instrument farewell. He lay his left hand on the table and, with his right, raised the shard. First, he would slice into the thumb.

  “Oogimow! Oogimow!” the voice high-pitched, yet strangely euphonious. “Tantee kageegimootee-in anima misti-mineeg’wachi-gan?” Cree? In Winnipeg? Why not? He was, after all, in the Hell Hotel.

  Teetering among the chairs and tables, Evelyn Rose McCrae smiled her gap-toothed smile; long-lost daughter of Mistik Lake, her womb crammed with broken beer bottles. A white fur cape fell away from her shoulders, her forehead rimmed by a Great Bear formation of seven glimmering stars.

  “I won it,” Jeremiah slurred, “playing the piano. See?” He showed her his left thumb, bleeding from the nick. Evelyn Rose lurched forward and laughed, now Madeline Jeanette Lavoix, erstwhile daughter of Mistik Lake, skewered in the sex by fifty-six thrusts of a red-handled Phillips screwdriver, a rose of legend.

  “Can I touch it?” cried Madeline Jeanette. “Can I play with it?” Again, she laughed, and fell across Jeremiah’s table.

  “You can even sit on it if you want,” slurred Jeremiah. “Have yourself a good long pee.” Madeline Jeanette and Evelyn Rose laughed together, their voice one voice.

  And, suddenly, the Madonna of North Main stood before him, the sad blue plastic rose in her hair, peeking through the star tiara. Twenty-seven months’ pregnant now, her belly protruded ten feet, translucent, something inside stabbing, slashing, only the skull vaguely human.

  “Hey, Luce!” she cackled to someone way across the room. “You ass-fuck devil, you! Come on, take a pictcha!” Then, with a sigh as vast as the north, she heaved the trophy to her milk-heavy breasts and grabbed Jeremiah. “You make me so proud to be a fuckin’ Indian, you know that?”

  PART FIVE

  Adagio espressivo

  THIRTY-FOUR

  “You see,” Jimmy Roger Buck gurgled deep, wet, and, Jeremiah imagined, slime green-yellow. “If us Indians are the thirteenth tribe of Israel,” the chubby brown Saulteaux rolled the phlegm around his mouth, “then we oughta be going back to Israel.” He spat. “Before the Apocalits, Jeremiah Okimasis. We got to get there before the Apocalits.”

  Jeremiah would have burst out laughing if his jawbone wasn’t frozen near solid, his skull pulsating with a hangover that he swore had haunted him for six years. “Are you kidding?” his teeth clattered. “Them Palestinians would laugh us clean out of the country.” Steam rose from the sidewalks, the streets, from buildings, enshrouding the slumbering city in a ghostly fog.

  “Palace Indians!” Jimmy Roger Buck jumped on the word. “See? Told you they have Indians in Israel.” Jimmy Roger Buck’s humour, more potent than Chopin and Bach and Rachmaninoff combined.

  “Hup!” Jimmy Roger Buck exclaimed merrily. “Looks like we got a live one.” The two men flicked on their flashlights and, like burglars on the prowl, slunk down the steaming passageway.

  “I wouldn’t talk so fast,” Jeremiah whispered back. “Remember that guy last year?”

  “Deader than a door knot,” concurred Jimmy Roger Buck as they approached the large lump. “Careful now” For one such lump had recently leapt at its saviour with a kick so accurate a testicle had burst, so it was said in Street Patrol circles.

  As the skulking duo were about to poke the body with their toes, it exploded with a megalithic fart.

  The rotund Jimmy Roger Buck broke into a back-alley jig. “It’s alive, it’s alive, it’s alive-alive-oh!” The stench was so hideous it was a while before either could squat down for a closer look.

  Her ragged skirt hiked almost to her hips, the woman lay beside a toppled garbage can whose multicoloured spew included a rat’s frozen corpse. An object by her head caught Jeremiah’s eye. Metal. Empty. Lysol.

  “All right, up and at ’em.” Jimmy Roger Buck shook the heap with a heavy-mitted hand. No response.

  “Come on, girl,” Jeremiah pleaded, “you’re gonna freeze to death out here.” The woman was ageless, her face a ground-beef patty, holes for eyes.

  “Come on, Jimmy Roger Buck. Help me,” and, together, the men hauled on the passed-out wretch, “heavy as a tombstone,” as Jimmy Roger Buck would trumpet later to the staff at the centre. The team had to grunt for a good minute before the bulk achieved enough verticality to be dragged down the alley to the old van. “Winnipeg Indian Friendship Centre, Street Patrol,” it said on the side. Jeremiah had always thought the sign should include, “See a passed-out Indian? Call us first.”

  One more grunt and Jimmy Roger Buck reached for the van’s sliding door. The hulk lurched forward, Jeremiah jerked her back, and, with a thunk, she landed with her face across his chest. What was that? Something wet? Across his coat? Then he saw it: white lumps of starch, peas half-digested, mutilated hunks of what must have been roast beef, all swimming in a tomato-red goo with stripes like pus.

  “Mmmm,” said Jimmy Roger Buck, “jus in time for breckfas.”

  The woman was moaning now, and spluttering something to do with Machimantou — Satan — waiting for her in the Hell Hotel, that she had business with him, owed him something, had to let him fuck her till a dozen baby Satans popped from her cunt.

  Jeremiah gazed wanly at the falling snow. How much longer could he endure in this … purgatory? Was six years of scraping drunks off the street not enough? Against the towering silhouette of the dark concert hall, he could see the grey, stoop-shouldered Cree, Sioux, Saulteaux — his people, shuffling, to where? To Israel for the Apocali
ts?

  A bus whooshed by, ferrying the new day’s early workers — short-order cooks, nurses, radio announcers, who knew, maybe even an earnest Cree student on his way to Chopin.

  The van kicked to life, taking client 2,647 off into the dark February morning. His fingers stiffened to claws, gnarled from the cold, the twenty-six-year-old Cree social worker gulped from a flask.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  “Nothing we can do now, us old folk.” The hunter’s voice wound its way through the candle light. “Not one goddamn thing.” Jeremiah had travelled so quickly to be here, and so suddenly, that his head was still a whirl, his body still sitting on that plane. Across the old man’s craggy face, Mistik Lake shimmered, ice covered, studded with islands, a straggle of caribou crossing from the mainland.

  Why wasn’t Gabriel here? How can he be in goddamn Tokyo dancing for the goddamn Japanese?

  “So much fighting on our reserves now, so much hate, rage.” The ailing man had lost his eldest son, William William, thirty-seven, to a bullet at a Jane Kaka drink fest. “Who is going to get us out of this stinking mess, huh? Who?”

  Above the elder’s defiantly full head of silver hair, his last-born climbed the stars, a crescent moon strapped across his bare chest. A wild-maned, tuxedoed Jeremiah pounded at a grand piano whose rumble the patriarch would never hear. Next to the brothers’ portraits sat a third: Tiger-Tiger regal at his feet, the world champion stood beaming, receiving his trophy — and his kiss.

  “You’re not going to die!” Jeremiah cried suddenly. “Papa, you’re not —”

  “Ash! Kagitoo!” Mariesis Okimasis snapped. “Of course he’s not going to die!” Her fingers a jangle of rosary beads, the admonishment left her current Hail Mary unscathed.

  The ninety-seven relatives who stood crushed like maggots around the diminutive matriarch agreed: they would have none of death. And none stood more firm-jawed than Kookoos Cook.

  “Now I may have reached the eighty-sixth year of my life,” the grizzled geezer would proselytize to all daft enough to listen, “but look at me. Feisty as a furball, tricky as a trout.” With that, Kookoos Cook rushed out the room so nimbly the candles had to fight for their lives. Briefly, the Weetigo stomped across the ceiling.

  “Astum,” rasped Abraham.

  Spooked by the shadow, Jeremiah moved his head closer. “Keegway kaweetamatin.”

  But Kookoos Cook came charging back, scraping Abraham’s battered old accordion across the floor like a frozen thigh of caribou.

  “Jeremiah Okimasis, goddamn you young pup,” wheezed Uncle Kookoos. “You play one verse of ‘Kimoosoom Chimasoo’ on your father’s old titty tickler and hell be up and jigging faster than you can say ‘tickle my titties.’ ” The sprightly elf yanked the instrument by its straps and banged it into his nephew’s face.

  Mariesis swore she’d stab the pestilence with her rosary crucifix. “Ash! Kookoos Cook! Put that kitoochigan away seemak, right away, awus!”

  The crowd parted, and there, bag and snow-sprinkled beaver hat in hand, stood Gabriel Okimasis, twenty-seven years old, his face blue, his hair a wonderland of icicles. The wind having grounded all air travel north of the fifty-fifth parallel, he had jumped on a Smallwood Lake—to—Wuchusk Oochisk diesel truck and bribed a hunter from his bed to his Ski-Doo, to traverse, by night, seventy-five miles of subarctic lake so brutal they had almost died.

  “I never thought I’d see you again,” Abraham whispered, the voice so feeble, Gabriel feared his breath might extinguish it.

  From the living room, women could be heard rattling off “pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death” in such breakneck Cree that sparks were seen shooting out of Jane Kaka’s fetid mouth, thanks to Black-eyed Susan Magipom, who, not having spoken to her brother since Father Bouchard’s edict twenty-three years earlier, had finally dared enter his house with the whispered theory that five thousand Hail Marys recited quick-as-a-mink was the one sure way of scaring “the fucking shit right out of death.”

  “I’ve been … busy,” Gabriel finally replied.

  “Busy? With … what?”

  “Dancing.”

  “Dancing? Hmph. Are you … married?” Another jab of pain. “Do you … have … children?”

  The words jammed up in Gabriel’s throat. He was going to retch.

  What choice did Jeremiah have? With his eyes and his heart, he took his brother’s hand. Together, they would risk hastening the old man’s death, together, the brothers Okimasis would kill their father.

  “Papa, kigiskisin na …?” Gabriel’s Cree was rusty, but functional still. “Remember … when you sent us … to that school, when we were —”

  The door behind him opened, the smell of pipe tobacco billowed, and in strode Father Bouchard, a worn leather satchel dangling from a hand. The still handsome priest stood darkly radiant, his crucifix wedged like a handgun in the sash of his cassock.

  Knowing a dying man when he saw one, the ageing priest nodded. Once. Which was enough to send Mariesis and Annie Moostoos zooming to the dresser. Off came the candles, the photographs. The priest rummaged in his satchel and presto: a stole and a maniple in black, gold-tasselled taffeta thrown over starched white surplice, an altar bearing three blessed candles, paten and chalice, a small bottle filled with holy water, and, in left hand, a black missal.

  The priest paused to whisper at Mariesis, who shuffled to the bed and whispered to Gabriel. Gabriel shook his head. She tugged at his cardigan. Gabriel pulled free.

  “But, my son,” Mariesis exploded, “your father’s soul will burn in hell if he doesn’t take his last communion!”

  “He’s not finished talking to us,” Gabriel shot back, suddenly gripped by hatred of the priest, of the power he wielded.

  Father Bouchard knew precisely whom Gabriel’s fury was meant for. But he knew, too, that Holy Orders were as impregnable as granite.

  “ ‘My son.’ ” Abraham startled the assembly with a voice surprisingly strong. “ ‘The world has become too evil. With these magic weapons, make a new world,’ said the mother to the hero, the Son of Ayash.”

  Shocked that this most Catholic of men should resort to pagan tales for the third time that his sons could recall, they moved onto the bed.

  “So the Son of Ayash took the weapons and, on a magic water snake, journeyed down into the realm of the human soul, where he met evil after …” Slipping into the world of dreams, the hunter beheld the Son of God nailed to his gold-plated crucifix, the priest’s Gallic visage hovering like a storm cloud.

  “This I know.” In their grief, what the brothers heard, and remember, of the priest’s reading was: “That my Avenger liveth, and he, at the Last, will take his stand upon the Earth …”

  “Evil after evil,” continued the hunter, “the most fearsome among them the man who ate human flesh,” the Cree descant whirring, light as foam, over the English dirge. The priest plumbed the chalice, emerged with the host to place it on the hunter’s tongue. The tongue darted out, grabbed the body, flicked back in. The lips fell closed, the hunter ceased to breathe.

  Taking bottle in hand, Father Bouchard cast three sprays of holy water on the death mask.

  The Fur Queen raised her lips from the world champion’s cheek, exhaling a jet of pure white vapour.

  THIRTY-SIX

  One week later, mist on Mistik Lake thinned to reveal a man on a Ski-Doo hauling a sledful of firewood. Off Chipoocheech Point, he came upon a body lying face down in the snow. If Uncle Wilpaletch hadn’t found him, Jeremiah Okimasis would have frozen to a corpse by nightfall, is what they say.

  It had all begun innocently enough at Kookoos Cook’s kitchen table, after the funeral and Gabriel rushing off to reconnect with the Gregory Newman Dance Company in San Francisco. Laughing, drink-crazed Cree were tearing through a case of Five Star whisky, Jeremiah keeping up shot for shot while ripping off a Kitty Wells record and ramming in its place Johnny Cash. It had been night then. But Jeremiah recalled waking with a pounding hea
d, splayed on the floor, fully clothed and filthy, and it was day.

  He recalled the fresh case of whisky Uncle Kookoos had banged down at his side, and his aunt Black-eyed Susan Magipom waltzing with the stove, howling along with Loretta Lynn in her off-coloratura soprano, and it was night once more and, suddenly, Happy Doll Magipom had Black-eyed Susan by the hair, banging her head with a piece of firewood and blackening her eyes and the blood was spurting and the screams were piercing and Big Dick McCrae and Bad Robber Gazandlaree were trying to restrain Happy Doll Magipom but couldn’t and, suddenly, it was daylight again.

  Jeremiah recalled escaping — Filament Bumperville had charged in with a rifle and shot the cuckoo clock to smithereens — with a bottle and his goose-down parka and finding himself inside a snowfall, a forest of crystals, the hush cathedral-like, as if the world had died.

  Where had it come from, this fog? He found himself peering into an endless tunnel, a flame appearing, disappearing, reappearing, teasing him, taunting him. He raised the bottle. His lips had no feeling. The walls of his heart had crumbled. The flame was fading. He would lie down, right there in the knee-deep snow, and sleep forever. Where was he? The edge of the world?

  “God! Someone! Help me!” Whose voice was that? It couldn’t be his. It sounded too far away.

  “Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ahhhhh,” a giggle insinuated itself into the whorl of mist, throaty, arcing, like notes from a xylophone, as if it gave its owner immense pleasure to hear herself laugh. For it was most definitely a feminine voice.

  Who the hell was that? Was he raving like Crazy Salamoo Oopeewaya, arguing with God?

  The honeyed giggle swooped again. “Sometimes you humans just make me laugh.”