Kiss of the Fur Queen (11 page)

Jeremiah’s father would depart on any ordinary day to make the rounds of the more distant sections of his trapline, leaving his wife and children at camp with just the right amount of all they needed to survive until he returned. Abraham Okimasis would wade through banks of snow that grew to six feet high, through icy winds that blind and kill, through temperatures that freeze to brittle hardness human
flesh exposed for fifty seconds to put food into his children’s mouths. Days, sometimes weeks later, his dogteam would appear in the hazy distance of whichever northern lake the family happened to be living on that winter, his sled filled with furs for sale — mink, beaver, muskrat — the sole winter source of life-sustaining income for the northern Cree.

Jeremiah’s father would tell his adoring children of arguments he had had with the fierce north wind, of how a young pine tree had corrected his direction on his homeward journey and thus saved all their lives, of how the northern lights had whispered truth into his dreams. And his soul was happy, his spirit full and buoyant, his smile a gift from heaven. Time alone, he said to them with just so many words: The most precious time one human being can have during his too few moments on Earth.

“Yes, but Father,” he wanted to say from the back seat of a rapidly filling bus, “you never told us how to spend time alone in the midst of half a million people. Here, stars don’t shine at night, trees don’t speak.”

The smells all mingled into one: of carbon monoxide, seventeen intensities of perfume, aftershave, cologne, breath of steak, chicken liver, onions, garlic, teeth gone bad, minty mouthwash, unkempt clumps of armpit hair overhead. Too much human living in one constricted space. The bus curved onto North Main Street.

Night had bled dusk dry; light from a thousand neon veins now stained the grey cement of street, of sidewalk, of rundown buildings. Traffic slowed to a laboured crawl. The
sidewalk began to writhe. Strands of country music — tinny, tawdry, emaciated — oozed through the cracks under filthy doorways. The doors opened and closed, opened and closed. From their dark maws stumbled men and women, all dark of skin, of hair, of eye, like Jeremiah, all drunk senseless, unlike Jeremiah. Had the music student not looked upon this scene somewhere before? On a great chart with tunnels and caves and forbidden pleasures? He leaned forward to see if he could catch a glimpse, beyond the swinging doors, of horned creatures with three-pronged forks, laughing as they pitched Indian after Indian into the flames.

“You goddamn fucking son-of-a-bitch!” a woman of untold years screamed, as she landed with a crunch on the hood of a parked car and slid to the curb. “You can’t do this to me,” she shrieked. “This is my land, you know that? My land!” Precariously, she pulled herself up by clinging to a parking meter; her coat white, yellowed with age, polyester fur.

A tattooed, beer-bellied, bearded, greasy-haired white Cyclops stood at an open doorway and roared: “And this is my bar, you know that? My bar! Come back in here one more time and I’ll rip the fuckin eyeballs right outta that fuckin ugly heada yours!”

The bus pulled up to a palace afloat on a nighttime sea, glimmering tantalizingly: the four-storey façade of glass and concrete, giant chandeliers, crimson carpet, swirling silver lettering over its entrance — the Jubilee Concert Hall. Like blackflies in June, ticket buyers clustered around the box-office wickets. Between them and Jeremiah’s bus stood a
Plexiglas-covered display stand bearing the image of an exotic olive-complexioned man in a black tuxedo, a grand piano at his fingertips.

Into the curve of the propped-up piano top drifted, teetering dangerously on white high heels, a reflection of the Indian woman in soiled white polyester.

A car came by that would have looked at home framed by the Californian surf and sunset: open convertible, white, chrome gleaming. Four teenaged men with Brylcreamed hair lounged languidly inside, crotches thrust shamelessly, and laughed and puffed at cigarettes and sucked at bottles of nameless liquids.

“Hey, babe!” they hooted smoothly to the polyester Indian princess, “Wanna go for a nice long ride?”

A brief verbal sparring followed, from Jeremiah’s perspective, in pantomime. Then the princess stepped into the roofless car and the bus pulled forward.

Gallantly, though not easily, Jeremiah left the episode behind him. Until, one week later, he thought he saw the woman’s picture on a back page of the Winnipeg
Tribune:
the naked body of Evelyn Rose McCrae — long-lost daughter of
Mistik Lake — had been found in a ditch on the city’s outskirts, a shattered beer bottle lying gently, like a rose, deep inside her crimson-soaked sex. Jeremiah would report the image he had seen splashed across Mr. Ashkenazy’s grand piano. But the Winnipeg police paid little heed to the observations of fifteen-year-old Indian boys.

In Mrs. Slotkin’s basement, all that year, Jeremiah Okimasis practised the piano until his fingers bled.

“W
hachyou thinkin’ about,
nigoosis?”
Abraham Okimasis stood at the bow of his blue canoe, hauling in a fishing net, yard by laborious yard, from the deep. As the dripping twine and blue-green nylon emerged, the fisherman fanned out its diamond-shaped webs, each holding captive an air-thin sheet of sparkling August sunlight. A trout surfaced, trapped in a convoluted tangle, and Abraham grasped its wriggling spine.

“Son?” he repeated. Gabriel’s head came up over the stern in time to see the creature in his father’s hand flailing, its glistening white belly punctured with a handhook, a spurt of blood. “You gonna miss Birch Lake?”

Gabriel looked into his father’s laughing eyes — was he joking? Who could ever tell? — and wished desperately to ask, “Why would I miss that place?” Instead, his mouth said, quietly, “Mawch.” No.

“Taneegi iga?”

“Because …”

Abraham cast the dying fish into the wooden crate at his son’s rubber-booted feet.

“That priest there,” he went on, “the guy who runs the place, what’s his name again?”

“Lafleur. Father Lafleur.”

“Every time your mother and I ask Father Bouchard how you and Jeremiah are doing down there, he tells us that Father Lafleur is taking care of you just fine, that with him guiding you, your future is guaranteed.”

Gabriel turned his gaze back to the depthless water. His fingers punctured the glassy surface and ripples shattered the reflection of his face. From his last encounter, two months earlier, he could still feel the old priest’s meaty breath, could still taste sweet honey, the hard, naked, silver body of the Son of God. Of the four hundred boys who had passed through Birch Lake during his nine years there, who couldn’t smell that smell, who couldn’t taste that taste?

“You know,
nigoosis.”
The fisherman’s voice skimmed like the love cry of a loon across the silent lake. “The Catholic church saved our people. Without it, we wouldn’t be here today. It is the one true way to talk to God, to thank him. You follow any other religion and you go straight to hell, that’s for goddamn sure.”

It was at that moment that Gabriel Okimasis understood that there was no place for him in Eemanapiteepitat or the north. Suddenly, he would join Jeremiah in the south. He could not wait!

“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.

“T
ansi.”

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.