Kiss of the Fur Queen Read online

  “Ho-ho!” laughed Abraham as he spied another silver trout glimmering just below the surface. Gabriel looked up. He would miss this dear old man. Across the wide expanse beyond the patriarch, Neechimoos Island — five miles into the province of Saskatchewan — was floating in midair, unrooted.

  The Fur Queen kissed the caribou hunter gently on the cheek, waltzed him into the air, then made a perfect landing atop a pile of clothing folded in a dark brown vinyl suitcase. Mariesis Okimasis, squatting on the sun-splashed floor of her new two-bedroom house — pastel-painted plywood walls, white linoleum floor tiles, pine-log cabin receding in her memory — had discovered that her youngest child had almost left behind his copy of her husbands famous portrait. Wasn’t that the drone of the airplane coming to take him away? Again?

  Hearing footsteps, she turned. Framed in a wash of golden light, Gabriel stood, twirling in one hand — pink, mauve, purple — a bloom of fireweed. How handsome he was!

  Flanked by his parents, Gabriel ambled down the yellow sand road that led to the new airstrip a mile behind the village. They passed three whitemen working on a new house beside the three already completed. Farther along, a gaggle of men and women and children and dogs and blackbirds was helping move Kookoos Cook’s worldly wealth, such as it was, out of his beloved old log cabin to the first plywood house.

  “Quit school, my son,” Mariesis said, trying her best to sound matter-of-fact. “Stay home with us.”

  Kookoos Cook’s ancient brown couch was banging its way out the one-room cabin’s splintery doorway as Slim Jim Magipom and Big Bag Maskimoot wheezed under its obstinate weight. For there was Kookoos Cook, plain as politics, perched on the top, his thighs crossed vise-like, trying to sip a steaming cup of tea.

  Many had been the day over the last two years when Uncle Kookoos had complained venomously about the housing program Sooni-eye-gimow had foisted upon “this here reserve” — the new houses were mere cardboard boxes with plywood walls so thin a man could hear his neighbour fart and chip off the ice on February mornings. So when moving day arrived, Kookoos Cook had threatened to chain himself to his wood-stove “like a common jailbird.” Except that he had forgotten — “Jesus son-of-a-bitch goddamnit!” — that he had lost his rusty old chain at a poker game.

  “I have to be with Jeremiah,” replied Gabriel after a lengthy silence imposed by Kookoos Cook and his tempestuous sofa.

  “You have been away since you were five. You’ll be fifteen next January. For Jeremiah, it’s too late. But you, you’re our youngest.”

  The road opened out to the clearing where the landing strip began. Like every edifice in the new, emerging Eemanapiteepitat, the little terminal was fashioned out of plywood. The red Twin Otter Beechcraft that would be taking Gabriel to Smallwood Lake and the southbound train sat on the gravel runway Kookoos Cook had helped clear just the summer before. Village men alighted from the plane, some unloading cases of whisky, some falling in the dirt, others grunting accusations at empty air.

  As Gabriel settled himself into a window seat, he caught a glimpse of Annie Moostoos deftly dodging a weaving man threatening to knock the single tooth out of her head with an empty whisky bottle. She scooted to safety inside the plywood outhouse that leaned precipitously to windward beside the terminal building. The man was about to rip the door from its hinges when Annie’s gnarled brown hand reached out and pulled it shut.

  “Tell Jeremiah to watch your wallet. I hear Winnipeg is full of crooks,” his father laughed through the open door.

  Mariesis’s weather-worn oval face popped up beside her husband’s. “He’s full of shit,” she said with a loving slap to her husband’s shoulder. “Tell Jeremiah if he misses Holy Communion on Sundays, I’ll never cook caribou arababoo for him again. Do you hear me?”

  As the plane revved for take-off, Gabriel could see his parents leaning against a post beside the terminal, holding each other, waving sadly. Close behind them, hands on hips, stood Father Bouchard. And behind the priest, drink-filled revellers stumbled down the winding road back to the village.

  With lynx-like stealth, Annie Moostoos’s scrawny thorax emerged from the outhouse. The crone peered left, then right, like a hunter tracking ptarmigan. Assured her tooth was safe once more, she stepped out just as a gust of wind slammed the flimsy door against her head. And there she lay, lifeless as a day-old corpse.

  FOURTEEN

  “Tansi.”

  Jeremiah stopped breathing. In the two years he had spent in this city so lonely that he regularly considered swallowing his current landlady’s entire stock of angina pills, he had given up his native tongue to the roar of traffic.

  “Say that again?”

  “Tansi,” repeated Gabriel. “Means hi, or how you doing? Take your pick.” He was smiling so hard that his face looked like it might burst. “Why? Cree a crime here, too?”

  How strange Jeremiah looked. Clipped, his eyes like a page written in some foreign language. Even his clothes looked stilted, too new, too spick and span, as if lifted from a corpse in a coffin.

  “It’s … your voice. It’s so … low.” Jeremiah couldn’t get over Gabriel’s height, his breadth of shoulder, the six or seven black bristles sprouting from his chin. He didn’t look fourteen going on fifteen, more like eighteen.

  “Mom send me a jar of her legendary caribou arababoo?” Jeremiah chirped as they waltzed, arms over shoulders, out the station doors and into the white light of morning. Gabriel’s navy blue windbreaker, his red plaid flannel shirt, his entire person sparked off microscopic waves of campfire smoke, of green spruce boughs, of dew-laden reindeer moss.

  “Nah,” said Gabriel. “She says city boys don’t eat wild meat.”

  “Yeah, right.” Jeremiah rolled his eyes. “So. Tell me. How’s Eemanapiteepitat?”

  “Annie Moostoos went and got killed by the airport outhouse door.”

  “Airport outhouse door? Yeah, right.”

  “Tapwee! We have an airport now. Uncle Kookoos helped clear the land for it last summer. Before you know it, he predicts, jet planes will be landing in Eemanapiteepitat like flies on dog shit.”

  “Neee, nimantoom.” Jeremiah laughed, light as a springtime killdeer. For two brown Indian boys — not one, but two — were dancing-skipping-floating down Broadway Avenue, tripping over each other’s Cree, getting up and laughing, tripping over each other’s Cree, getting up and laughing.

  “The mall,” said Jeremiah early next morning as he reached for the handle of the large glass door, “was invented in Winnipeg,” his confidence in this stunning piece of information all the greater by reason of its being utterly unsubstantiated. If he was going to usher Gabriel into the rituals of urban life, then he was going to render the experience memorable, even if he had to stretch truth into myth.

  Like a lukewarm summer wave, the silken strings of a hundred violins swept over them, the bulbs of twenty thousand fluorescent lights a blinding buzz. The chancel of a church for titans, the gleaming central promenade of the Polo Park Shopping Mall lay before them.

  Gabriel gasped: at least three miles of stores if he was judging distance right. And the people! You could put fifty Eemanapiteepitats inside this chamber and still have room for a herd of caribou. And such an array of worldly wealth, a paradise on earth.

  “Weeks,” he whispered, his knees wobbly.

  “Weeks what?” Jeremiah checked to see if the poor boy’s eyeballs had jumped their sockets.

  “Our shopping. It’s gonna take us weeks.”

  “Not when a hundred bucks is all Sooni-eye-gimow gives you for a clothing allowance.”

  “Anee-i ma-a?” Gabriel pointed through the glass at a pair of tan knee-high leather boots, the toes so pointed that one kick and the victim would be punctured grievously.

  “You wanna look like an Italian gigolo?” Jeremiah sneered.

  Shoppers labouring under piles of merchandise passed by, their reflections wriggling in the floor-to-ceiling windows like fat suckers in a reedy cove
.

  “What’s a gigolo?” Innocent as a five-year-old, Gabriel scampered after Jeremiah, who had just walked up to the perfect store.

  “A gigolo,” the elder sibling proclaimed, as though from a pulpit, “is a man who sells a woman who wears shoes like these,” pointing at multicoloured footwear with heels so sharp they could have roused the envy of a porcupine.

  “You,” Gabriel peered through the glass with grave suspicion, “can sell” — how could humans stand in such outlandish constructions — “a woman?”

  “In cities,” Jeremiah airily dismissed him, “it’s done all the time, all the time. It’s like selling meat. Come on, we gotta get you out of those rags. You look like you just crawled out of the bush.”

  “I didn’t crawl,” huffed Gabriel. “I took a plane. And a train.” Grabbing Gabriel’s sleeve, Jeremiah plunged deep into the entrails of the beast.

  No-nonsense, flat-heeled oxfords winked at Gabriel, who rebuffed their gentlemanly advances as too no-nonsense, too business-like. If heels the height of coffee mugs came unrecommended — the price of cowboy boots, in any case, was prohibitive — then shoes of an athletic bent might be more to the point, with jazzy red or blue stripes down their sides. Jeremiah pooh-poohed the idea as too informal; white high school classrooms were not “gymnasia.”

  “What, then,” asked Gabriel in mounting exasperation, “do city boys wear on their feet?”

  Whereupon Jeremiah announced that white boys lived in dark penny loafers with socks so white they looked like snow.

  As, like Odyssean sirens on treacherous shoals, the hundred violins slid shamelessly into “Ave Maria,” socks began to wave at Gabriel, in colours, weaves, and textures that made his heart strings fibrillate. He had never heard of argyle socks, for instance, and was scandalized to hear that Argyle was a Scottish earl who drank his enemies’ blood on the battlefield and then went home to eat their children. So brutal was the tale that Gabriel threw a curse at an entire rack of the lugubrious knitwear. He announced, instead, his preference for a six-pack of wool-polyester socks so white they looked like snow. The tricoloured bands around their tops would not be seen, of course, but knowing they were there would boost his confidence, Gabriel explained in understated Cree. He insisted, moreover, that he wear a pair home with his brand-new muskrat-coloured patent-leather penny loafers. Leaving his tarnished, near-soleless paratrooper boots and malodorous lumberjack socks with the bouncy bleached-blond clerk, the brothers went tittering out the door like Eemanapiteepitat housewives at a late-night bingo.

  At Fischman’s, they passed miles of sombre suits that made them think of priestly gatherings in Olympic-sized football stadiums. They mistook the t of “Eaton’s” for a crucifix, missed their elevator stop, and ended up scrumming through racks of shift dresses waiting for nuns divorced from God. But for the mannequin in white fox fur who whispered “ootee-si” — “this way” — the brothers would have been suspected of transvestite tendencies.

  By the time they entered Liberty’s Fashions for the Discerning Man, the lethargic mall air made Gabriel’s head swim in circles, and the unkind lighting overhead became so oppressive that he swore the underwear at Liberty’s had spirits of their own, that he could see their penumbra glowing like saintly haloes.

  Jeremiah, however, was wrestling with visions of his own. “Remember Aunt Black-eyed Susan’s story,” he asked distractedly, his heart still palpitating from their brush with the Cree-whispering mannequin, “about the weasel’s new fur coat?” A sudden swerve to Cree mythology might disarm such occult phenomena.

  “You mean where Weesageechak comes down to Earth disguised as a weasel?” Gabriel alighted on a manly pair of spirit-white Stanfield’s, and examined the Y-front with such rapacity that the bespectacled curmudgeon of a clerk, smelling sabotage, flared his nostrils. “And the weasel crawls up the Weetigo’s bumhole?” Gabriel poked a finger through the opening.

  “Yes …” Jeremiah, in spite of himself, exploded with jagged laughter. “In order to kill the horrible monster.”

  “And comes back out with his white fur coat covered with shit?” laughed Gabriel, dropping the Stanfield’s on a pile of sky-blue boxers.

  “You know,” said Jeremiah, suddenly philosophical. “You could never get away with a story like that in English.”

  Gabriel’s voice swooped down to a conspiratorial undertone, “ ‘Bumhole’ is a mortal sin in English. Father Lafleur told me in confession one time.”

  “He said the same thing about ‘shit,’ ” said Jeremiah.

  Gabriel dashed across the aisle to a selection of skin-hugging jockey-style shorts — with no hole for the penis. The nearby rack of neckties launched into “O Sole Mio” as Gabriel decided on three pairs of black jockeys designed by Alberto Bergazzi.

  At Wrangler’s, Gabriel wedged his lithe frame into a pair of blue jeans so tight that Jeremiah expressed concern. At Popeye’s, the black patent-leather belt with a large silver buckle cost less than ten dollars. At Sanderson’s, the red cotton shirt with pearl-white buttons became number one in Gabriel’s heart. At Jack and Jill’s, it was the red, white, and blue silk baseball jacket with striped knit wrists and collar, to Jeremiah’s puzzlement.

  At every store, Gabriel virtually danced into each article of clothing and stood before the mirror not so much preening as plotting “his Winnipeg years.” Like moulted skin, his old wardrobe accumulated in multicoloured shopping bags. At Aldo’s Barbershop, once the deed was done — to his specifications, not Brother Stumbo’s — his appearance had changed so dramatically that if Jeremiah had not witnessed the metamorphosis, he would have taken his sibling for a rock star with a tan.

  Which is when they came across the belly of the beast — one hundred restaurants in a monstrous, seething clump. Never before had Gabriel seen so much food. Or so many people shovelling food in and chewing and swallowing and burping and shovelling and chewing and swallowing and burping, as at some apocalyptic communion. The world was one great, gaping mouth, devouring ketchup-dripping hamburgers, french fries glistening with grease, hot dogs, chicken chop suey, spaghetti with meatballs, Cheezies, Coca-Cola, root beer, 7-Up, ice cream, roast beef, mashed potatoes, and more hamburgers, french fries … The roar of mastication drowned out all other sound, so potent that, before the clock struck two, the brothers were gnawing away with the mob.

  “Why did Weesageechak kill the Weetigo?” asked Gabriel, as he washed down a gob of bleeding beef with a torrent of Orange Crush.

  “All I remember is that the Weetigo had to be killed because he ate people,” replied Jeremiah through a triangle of pizza. “Weesageechak chewed the Weetigo’s entrails to smithereens from the inside out.”

  “Yuck!” feigned Gabriel, chomping into a wedge of Black Forest cake thick with cream.

  They ate so much their bellies came near to bursting. They drank so much their bladders grew pendulous. Surely this place had a washroom hidden away somewhere. Gabriel went hunting.

  There — glaring light, ice-white porcelain, the haunting sound of water dripping in distant corners — standing nearby was a man. Six feet, thin, large of bone, of joint, brown of hair, of eye, pale of skin. Standing there, transported by Gabriel Okimasis’s cool beauty, holding in his hand a stalk of fireweed so pink, so mauve that Gabriel could not help but look and, seeing, desire. For Ulysses’ sirens had begun to sing “Love Me Tender” and the Cree Adonis could taste, upon the buds that lined his tongue, warm honey.

  The brothers Okimasis burst into the bronze light of late afternoon.

  “ ‘My coat!’ moaned the weasel. ‘My nice white coat is covered with shit!’ ” Gabriel continued the story of Weesageechak, the image of a certain man aflame with fire-weed clinging to his senses with pleasurable insistence.

  “Feeling sorry for the hapless trickster,” said Jeremiah circumspectly, “God dipped him in the river to clean his coat. But he held him by the tail, so its tip stayed dirty.”

  ‘“And to this day,’ ” Gabriel too
k his brother’s words away, “as Auntie would say, ‘the weasel’s coat is white but for the black tip of the tail.’ ” Exulting that they could still recall their wicked Aunt Black-eyed Susan’s censored Cree legends, the brothers Okimasis danced onto the sidewalk.

  Grey and soulless, the mall loomed behind them, the rear end of a beast that, having gorged itself, expels its detritus.

  FIFTEEN

  “By ze tvilight of ze fifteens sentury and ze dawn of ze sixteens,” Herr Schwarzkopf’s German accent so grated on Jeremiah he wanted to hold the old man’s mouth in place, “Spain’s Keeng Ferdinand unt Kveen Isabella ver to set in motion ze vave vereby Roman Catolicism — unt Christianity in general — vas efentually to spread across ze Americas.” At a wooden desk by the sheet-glass window, Jeremiah sat watching the grizzled geezer’s jowls flap about. “All vas not vell, howefer,” confided Herr Schwarzkopf like a gossip spreading slander, “vizin ze Roman Church itself at zis time. For efen as missionaries ver penetratink dipper unt dipper into ze New Vorld …”

  “Penetration,” wrote the seventeen-year-old Cree scholar in his notebook, “1492.”

  “In Europe itself, ze signs ver eferyfer zat ze church vas soon to break up into all manner of varring, hateful factions. Martin Looser vould be only ze beginnink.” Herr Schwarzkopf paused to extract a huge red handkerchief from a breast pocket, apply it to his generous Hanseatic nostrils, and honk so loud that Jeremiah envisioned a flotilla of boats in Danzig harbour.

  Soundlessly, the door opened and a teenaged girl with straight black hair down to her slender waist slipped in, a clutch of textbooks in one hand, a beaded deer-hide purse with fringes hanging from one shoulder. In the overwhelming whiteness of complexions in the room, she was as dark as chocolate. Something inside Jeremiah cringed. With the subtlest of nods, Herr Schwarzkopf directed the girl to the one vacant seat, and lectured on.