Kiss of the Fur Queen Read online

  “ ‘Remember, my son, the human soul is filled with danger, that you will meet evil men …’ ” His voice faded but his reading went on. Time passed.

  “You …,” Jeremiah squirmed like a five-year-old, “don’t think it’s … any good?”

  Robin Beatty ambled by. “Hi,” the lanky jazz singer threw the greeting at Gabriel like a frisbee and Gabriel threw it back. His eyes followed Robin to the stage.

  “Son of Ayash.” Jeremiah tapped the script. “Closest thing the Cree have to their own Ulysses. Except I’ve given it this … modern twist, shall we say.”

  “Such as?” Gabriel asked, barely concentrating.

  “Well,” said Jeremiah cavalierly, “if James Joyce can do ‘one day in the life of an Irishman in Dublin, 1903,’ why can’t I do ‘one day in the life of a Cree man in Toronto, 1984’?”

  Suspecting madness, Gabriel stared at Jeremiah, swallowed. “You’re right. Someone’s gotta do it.” His gaze slid back to Robin, beyond Jeremiah. “But why the modern twist?”

  “Because I want my Muskoosisuk to get it. Could we relate to Dick and Jane and that damned dog Spot when we were kids? No. Ever wonder why the school dropout rate for Native people —?”

  “Okay, okay, I wasn’t asking for a dissertation.”

  “And I want you … to direct it.” There.

  “Direct it?” spluttered Gabriel. “I’m a choreographer, not a …”

  “An out-of-work choreographer.”

  “Are you kidding?” Jeremiah chattered at a train-weary Amanda. “No theatre in town would touch it.” Leaving Union Station a hulking silhouette, the taxi rammed through the evening rush respectful of neither life, death, nor the law. “ ‘Your script?’ this one guy said. ‘No conflict. It’s not a play.’ ” Still, he suspected that his liberal sprinklings of Cree might have thrown off its readers.

  “Fools,” sniffed Amanda. “They’ll be sorry.”

  “Especially since I’ve snagged the best damned actress in the soaps.”

  “Second-best. Joan Collins, she’s the first best.”

  “Remember, my son,” Amanda advised in a voice not her own, “the way into the underworld of the human spirit is filled with danger, that you will meet evil men.” She stood on the altar of yet another dead church mouthing lines with the passion of a doorknob.

  “You say you are not the Son of Ayash?” a barrel-chested Cree man asked of Gabriel.

  “Fuck,” cursed the Weetigo, aka Bobby Peegatee of Pask’sigeepathi, Saskatchewan, when the top page of his script ripped in half.

  “No,” Gabriel squinted at his script, “I am not the Son of Ayash.”

  “No matter, noos’sim. You must be hungry after such a long, hard journey.”

  “Take this magic spear, this axe, this fox’s pelt,” said the mother, Amanda, with slightly stooped shoulders, “for you will have to defend yourself. I’m sorry.” Amanda’s voice splintered from the mother’s. “I can’t go on.”

  “What’s the problem?” asked Gabriel.

  “These lines, they’re so … they’re unplayable.” She shimmied off the altar. “I can’t do a thing with them.”

  “Why not?” asked Jeremiah, squirming from the sweat in the crevasse of his buttocks. “Why are they … unplayable?”

  “They’re wooden. There’s no human inside this character.”

  “But there is,” Jeremiah whined.

  “Jeremiah, you’re trying to write a realistic play from a story that’s just not realistic.”

  “And what, pray tell, is this story all about?”

  “Magic.”

  Magic? What did she want, a bunny pulled from a hat, a woman sawed in half, water turned into wine?

  Finally, all diplomacy, sympathy, and tenderness, Gabriel spoke up. “I think what she means, Jeremiah, is that it’s all up here —” he tapped his forehead, “when it should be down here —” he pointed to his groin. What the hell. “It’s all head, Jeremiah, all head and no gut. Watch.”

  Before Jeremiah could pull himself back together, the actors were shouting, wailing, and snarling as, like ping pong balls, they hurled themselves across the sun-splashed space, so in the grip of improvisation they had eyes like demons.

  “Yes!” Gabriel flailed his arms like an orchestral conductor fencing with an agitato. “Fill that space. Feel it with the tips of your fingers, your forehead, the soles of your feet, your toes, your groin.”

  Jeremiah banged at the piano — dissonance like shards of steel — though he had no idea why. “What are you doing?” he yelled at his brother.

  “Play!” Gabriel screamed back. “Just play!”

  “Stick to that goddamn piano” — Amanda lunged at him with teeth bared, spit flying — “where you belong!”

  Who the hell did the bitch think she was? Jeremiah clawed at the keyboard, tidal waves of red smashing at his eyeballs. “Aiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiayash oogoosisa, oogoosisa …” Shooting to the ceiling, the wail dove, resurfacing as samba-metered hisses. And one by one, the company fell in with the chant, a dance, a Cree rite of sacrifice, swirling like blood around the altar and bouncing off the bass of the piano like, yes, magic.

  FORTY-FIVE

  Jeremiah’s “Barcarolle Ulysses Thunderchild” gently rocked as the blood rose slowly in the Plexiglas syringe. Through his earphones, Gabriel listened and envisioned, as Jeremiah had suggested, their father’s blue canoe adrift, the fisherman a Cree-Venetian gondolier. Except that Mistik Lake was filled not with water but with fresh human blood. The poker-faced technician removed the needle and pressed a bandage over Gabriel’s bared forearm.

  Gabriel stepped from the examining room into the reception area where three young men in jeans and Reeboks flipped through magazines. A steely alto rang, “Number 9722,” to which summons one of them rose.

  By the exit, Gabriel stopped at a rack of pamphlets on various diseases, but these he ignored, for what attracted him was the cover photo on the tabloid next to them. As he clattered down the stairs, he tore through the pages.

  “When Robin Beatty was born,” the feature article led, “in North Vancouver, he claims the first words he spoke were ‘da-da-da,’ which is why scat-singing comes so naturally.” So smitten with the text was Gabriel that, once on the sidewalk, he tripped over a poodle and fell against its master, a man squished like pâté into motorcycle leather. Finding his assailant not uncomely, the leather man’s knees flagged, his eyes went glassy, his thick throat purred like an engine.

  Behind the clinic, the leather man and Gabriel sequestered themselves. There, employing all the trickery he had acquired in Paris, Copenhagen, Sydney, Tokyo, Gabriel laboured at the great knot of tissue, all while the pretty white poodle watched philosophically. And not until twenty after ten did he come marching out the alleyway, his jeans pocket crackling with a new fifty-dollar bill — not the lighting budget for “Ulysses Thunderchild,” but enough for a costume. Besides, late for rehearsal, he had no time for tortured moralizing, not even for a single mea culpa.

  “Taxi!”

  Nude but for a towel, Gabriel padded down the barely lit corridor, a cryptic little grin here, there a nod, here a glance fraught with meaning. The air was rife with the odour of naked male flesh.

  “Oops. Sorry.” The young man standing on Gabriel’s foot had the smell of fresh summer lemons.

  “That’s okay,” said Gabriel, retying the white terrycloth around his waist. Why, so suddenly, was his heart doing somersaults and tumbles? “Aren’t you Robin Beatty, the famous Canadian rock star?”

  The semi-naked singer tossed off a meaty, wet chortle. Slightly crooked teeth, thought Gabriel, a human with flaws, the pattern of his thoughts having always gone askew whenever he was stoned, overtired, or both.

  “Tell me,” Gabriel blurted, “how do you do the publicity for your band?”

  Three hours later, Gabriel had not made a penny, not for the lighting budget, not for actors’ salaries. Instead, he and Robin Beatty had tripped out of the Garden Baths, s
kipped across the boulevard, and gone singing, sliding, and dancing through a park aglitter with moonlight and ice.

  In the basement of the Church of St. Paul the Apostle, Gabriel peered into the light of a portable make-up mirror, muttering his lines and, almost viciously, slathering on his make-up. When he arrived at that now familiar blemish on the right side of his neck, he brushed it over with the honey-beige base until the purplish red could pass for a hickey.

  Word had trickled out from rehearsal that Flora Jane Bustagut, first-time actress, was a natural, a genius no less. The praise had gone directly to the head of the pretty, petty Ms. Bustagut, who then took great pleasure in torturing Gabriel, in front of cast and crew — “Ha-ha, can’t act, ha-ha, can’t act” — followed by the announcement that she intended to become the biggest star the Indian nations had ever known. The rage still clawed at Gabriel: this nasty little cockroach prancing around thinking she is already Marilyn Monroe. Why the fuck didn’t she just move back to her fish camp in Eeweecheegisit, Quebec?

  American Beauty rose in hand, Robin Beatty floated into Gabriel’s mirror. The neophyte actor shot his reflection a nervous smile, then went back to his ministrations.

  “Just came to wish you last-minute good luck.”

  “Thanks.” Gabriel worked his eyebrow pencil furiously. He couldn’t look at Robin. Not at the moment.

  “You look …” Robin paused: Gabriel Okimasis made up like … like a Cree Dionysus. “Beautiful.” Gabriel bent over to lace on a moccasin. “Better leave you to your opening night.” Robin reached for Gabriel’s chin and forced it gently up. Ardently, Gabriel prayed to God in His Kingdom that Robin could not read eyes like he did his music. “What’s the matter, babe?”

  What was Gabriel to answer? The show, I’m scared shitless of the show, I’m a dancer and a choreographer, not a director, much less a goddamn actor? Or that, of all the days on Earth, how could I have chosen this day to go back to the clinic for the results?

  Mouths move, words take flight. But Gabriel’s demeanour said it all too clearly.

  The two held each other so tightly their bones cracked. Puzzled as puppies, Flora Jane Bustagut, Anne Terabust, and Bobby Peegatee looked on from a distance as Gabriel choked back a cry. His tongue grazing Robin’s earlobe, he whispered, “Don’t … please don’t … tell Jeremiah.”

  “ ‘Respected Cree dancer-choreographer Gabriel Okimasis,’ ” read Amanda, “ ‘doing his first turn as actor and director, is surely the most beautiful man who ever walked the earth.’ Blah, blah … wait a minute. Here. ‘But the cannibal spirit shedding his costume at death, revealing a priest’s cassock, confuses the viewer. The image comes from nowhere. And goes nowhere.’ ”

  “What’s she talking about?” Jeremiah growled.

  “You didn’t say it loud enough, Jeremiah,” said Gabriel.

  “Didn’t say what loud enough?”

  Jeremiah tried to ask again. But, finally, his memory opened the padlocked doors.

  “Silent night,” sang a crystalline soprano. To Champion Okimasis, it was the earth, serenading him. “Holy night …”

  Beyond the aria, he could hear the endless stands of spruce groaning within their shrouds of snow, the air so clean it sparkled: silver, then rose, then mauve. Four-year-old Champion knelt at the front of his father’s dogsled. He hung on to the canvas siding with one hand and, with the other, waved a miniature whip, chiming, “Mush, Tiger-Tiger, mush, mush!” The eight grey huskies were flying through the sky, past the sun, to the heaven of Champion’s way of thinking. The trail curved unpredictably; who knew what surprises lay around the next bend, which creature might be feeding on spruce cones or pine needles, a rabbit, a weasel, five ptarmigans fluttering off in their winter coats of Holy Ghost white?

  Behind him, his father brandished his moose-hide whip — “Mush, Tiger-Tiger!” — below, his mother, her back against the kareewalatic. Inside her goose-down sleeping robe, Gabriel lay suckling at her breast. Jeremiah laughed.

  What’s this? A face? Yes. In the forest and larger, blotting out the trotting dogs. Champion closed his eyes, hoping it would go away. But when he opened them again, the old man was still glaring. At him. Why did he look so angry, so embittered, so dreadfully unhappy?

  Gradually, against the old man’s mouth, an arctic fox appeared. The pretty white creature wore a sequined gown of white satin, gloves to her elbows, white wings whirring. And she was singing, not just to anybody but to him, the little Cree accordion player: “Holy infant so tender and mild.” Such pouty red lips.

  “Jeremiah,” said God the Father from behind the singing lady fox, “Jeremiah, get out of bed.” Thunder? In December? “Come with me.”

  The fox — maggeesees — was gone. Sleepily, Champion-Jeremiah slid out of bed.

  By the light of a moon full to bursting, the now eight-year-old floated down an aisle lined with small white beds, cradles filled with sleeping brown children. Out a door, and up and down corridors, the long black robe swaying like a curtain, smelling of cigar smoke, incense, sacramental wine.

  By the puffy amchair of pitch-black leather, Father Roland Lafleur, oblate of Mary Immaculate, unbuttoned his cassock, unzipped his trousers. So white, thought Champion-Jeremiah, so big. Black and white hair all around the base, like … a mushroom on a cushion of reindeer moss.

  Now he remembers the holy man inside him, the lining of his rectum being torn, the pumping and pumping and pumping, cigar breath billowing somewhere above his cold shaved head.

  What had he done? Whatever it was, he promised that, from now on, he would say the prayer in English only: “Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name. And make me bleed. Please, Father, please, make me bleed.”

  Back in bed, it was too dark to see what kind of chocolate bar it was. Sweet Marie? Coffee Crisp? Mr. Big?

  FORTY-SIX

  “ ‘What’s reason? God! Great Spirit! What reason?’ ” Crouched against the wall behind his mother, Jeremiah scrawled on the pad with such force the page tore down the middle. Never mind. He would write out the scene again. Besides, once the caribou hunter Migisoo was shrieking at the wind, what would he say next?

  “My sons think I threw away their money on my new TV,” Mariesis confided to her guests, eight Elders playing poker on the floor and puffing so much smoke that the living room looked like hell. “Goddamn son-of-a-bitch!” she cursed. “I get this fucking three one more time and I throw you pigs out of my house.”

  “You should have taken someone to Smallwood Lake with you,” Jeremiah countered, “to help you read the labels when you shopped.” The hunter Migisoo collapsed beside the large grey rock where his wife, Sagweesoo, lay dying of starvation.

  “Astum, doos, astum, doos,” prayed Kookoos Cook, for if the deuce didn’t come to him, he stood to lose his lead dog, Socks, to the vile eighty-two-year-old Jane Kaka McCrae.

  Thrilled that she could visit her sister-in-law openly now that her self-righteous, pig-headed brother was six feet under, Black-eyed Susan Magipom said, “She can read.”

  “Not English, she can’t,” said Jeremiah. “All she knows in English are ‘tank you’ and ‘fuckin’ bullshit.’ ”

  Mariesis tossed in three of her five cards. “Gimme three good ones, goddamnit,” she said, wishing she could knock the solitary crusted black tooth out of the dealer’s gaping mouth. “I may not be able to see my sons on my new TV,” Mariesis adjusted the Al Capone fedora over her still-black braids, “but it cooks my goose in just thirty minutes, fuckin’ bullshit, not the cards I wanted!”

  Behind the 115-year-old Little Seagull Ovary, who had been decorated by the Governor-General for her career as midwife of the century, Mariesis’s new microwave oven announced that the twenty-pound goose Choggylut McDermott and his wife, Two-Room, had shot on both sides was ready to be eaten.

  “Tank you,” said Mariesis to the third round of betting. She quelled her heaving bosom with a palm, for in her hand now bristled two aces and a deuce. Suddenly, she felt
the Jesus on the rosary she used as a necklace. “Jeremiah,” she asked, “do you still pray?”

  My people are starving, Migisoo howled to the wind, because the caribou have not come. And you come here to tell me some stupid stupid bullshit about there being a reason?

  “If you ever forgot God,” Mariesis prayed to Christ on his cross that her foes be destroyed by monstrous hands, “if you ever forgot what those priests taught you at that school, it would kill your father. I tell you, he would just die.”

  “Neee” sneered the ninety-year-old Annie Moostoos, “isn’t he dead already?” Finished dealing, she raked up her hand, deftly changed two for two, and sequestered her one tooth behind closed, though quivering, lips.

  “Answer me,” Mariesis twisted around to glare at her son, “do you and Gabriel still take Holy Communion?”

  The only sound was the slash of Jeremiah’s pen, the snap of cards, and the whetting of cash-hungry tongues, for the pot had hit two thousand dollars, a hunting rifle, and a dog named Socks, though the mutt was tied to a post behind Kookoos Cook’s pink bungalow, unaware that she might have to relocate, tonight, to the most slovenly dive in Eemanapiteepitat.

  “Well?” Mariesis was about to insist when, with a great gust of halitosis, Jane Kaka threw her cards on the quilt and trumpeted, “Ta-da!” For there before eight pairs of disbelieving, rheumy eyes lay a Jack and four mighty Kings.

  Kookoos Cook cursed Jane Kaka with such blasphemy that Father Bouchard would have turned in his grave, except that “the hoary old bag” was still alive, as Black-eyed Susan had whispered to her nephew at the airport.

  In the faded picture on the shelf across from Jeremiah, the Fur Queen kissed world champion Abraham Okimasis. And winked. On his pad, Jeremiah carved a line under the words: “Scene Four: 1860. The first missionary arrives on Mistik Lake.”

  FORTY-SEVEN

  A styrofoam cup in one hand, a small, plastic vial in the other, Gabriel stood, running cold tap water and gazing at his image in the mirror, when Jeremiah entered. The red-and-yellow capsules danced across the floor.