Kiss of the Fur Queen (13 page)

For refuge, he looked at the thirtyish, russet-haired, hazel-eyed Mr. Michael Armstrong, manoeuvring his chalk across the blackboard with practised skill. And he thought about the man’s prostate gland, the essence of his maleness, which was considerable, especially in the way his buttocks bulged with such a daring yet delicate curve and then swooped under to join the well-muscled yet elegant thigh. It was a distraction that would affect his biology marks.

What was wrong with the essence of femaleness, as unabashedly illustrated by the dozen young women around him, that it should leave him cold as stone? He could hear Father Bouchard’s words drifting through the sun-streaked Eemanapiteepitat church: the union of man and woman, the union of Christ and his church.

Like a jackbooted foot kicking at a padlocked door, a terrible guilt pummelled his heart.
Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa
. Suddenly, a terrible need came over him, to run into his mother’s arms and hide, crawl back into her womb and start over. He heard his father calling him back home:
“Weeks’chiloowew!”

The bell was shrieking, the room a bedlam of movement and gabbling voices.

Gabriel slid lethargically into his baseball jacket and shuffled down the corridor. What was there for a person like him — no friend, not one acquaintance, save Jeremiah, who did nothing but play the piano. Chattering teenagers with books brushed past him, locker doors slammed, and a bright orange sheet of paper with bold black lettering hung tacked to a door. A little hatted man stood in a boat, plunging a pole into what might have been water.

“What’s up?” Taken unawares, Gabriel had no ready answer. “Something on your mind?” With each passing month, the rising and falling of Jeremiah’s Cree cadence was fading from his English.

Among the last of the stragglers was the dark new student with the buckskin handbag. She glanced at the brothers, the brothers glanced at her. Then she was gone.

“Jeremiah, I wanna go home.”

“Okay, I’ll walk with you.”

“No. Home. Mistik Lake.”

“Gabriel, it’s taken me over two years to get used to it. You can’t quit just like —”

“We don’t belong here,” retorted Gabriel. “Two thousand kids and —”

“Play football, basketball, take up bodybuilding, anything. Just do something with your time or you’ll die of loneliness. Cities, they’re like that.”

Gabriel stood silent, wanting desperately to burst into tears.

“Come on, Gabriel. Buy you a Sweet Marie.”

T
ick-tock, tick …
went the metronome atop Mrs. Bugachski’s old brown piano, Jeremiah, straight-backed at its keyboard, mired in daily practice. Slumped in an armchair, Gabriel stared blankly at Jesus on the wall above his brother. Polish icons wallowed in grotesque extravagance, he mused, the gashes and crown of thorns particularly profuse with blood, the exposed heart glans-like in its voluptuous tumescence. The ticks and tocks, the heartbeat of Christ, the grandfather clock in Father Bouchard’s Eemanapiteepitat parlour …

Gabriel remembered sitting beside his father on the varnished pinewood bench that April evening, as the priest thoughtfully informed the hunter that his younger sister, the wild and wilful Black-eyed Susan Magipom, had a place reserved in hell for leaving her husband, physically abusive though he may be, and for daring to move in with another man. With a great puff of smoke from his gnarled, black
pipe, the priest advised the hunter that associating with the woman gave approval to her sin until she had returned to her rightful husband and repented. Gabriel had been all of five years old when this model father, husband, world champion, Abraham Okimasis, stopped speaking to his sister. In an isolated community of six hundred people, Mariesis and her children were forced to communicate with her by subterfuge: here a stolen smile and a whispered word, there a cup of tea behind closed doors. Except for the smoke-filled poker games that raged through the night whenever Abraham went off hunting with his eldest son, William William.

Gabriel could see the pendulous silver crucifix across the breast of the priest’s black cassock. What was it about the naked man nailed to that beam of wood that caused his pulsing restlessness?

Tick-tock, tick …

The biology textbook sat open on Gabriel’s lap, unread, the television blank, Jeremiah’s endlessly repeated C-major scale unlistened to. Gabriel couldn’t find a comfortable sitting position; his body ached for movement, freedom from this claustrophobic, kitsch-jammed living room, the only home Jeremiah could find where his banging on a keyboard five hours a day wouldn’t drive the landlady to insanity, for Mrs. Bugachski was all but deaf. What sense was there in visiting — on a Friday night — when his brother paid no heed?
Tick-tock, tick …

The orange-and-silver bus, empty but for five passengers, pulled up across the street from the Jubilee Concert Hall,
leaving a solitary figure by the curb, the theatre glittering like a cosmic queens tiara.

Gabriel surveyed North Main of a blustery mid-November evening, twenty-six bars — thirteen on each side of the boulevard — probing him with their oscillating lights, like the hundred eyes of some vapour-breathing beast. Ragged clumps of faceless people rolled in and out of entranceways. A red-and-yellow bell blinked at Gabriel in a futile attempt to ring, its sway a comical series of electronically choreographed neon. “The Hell Hotel,” the sign above it read, the
B
apparently damned to
H
by mechanical malfunction. The invitation was all too clear.

In the little lobby, beside a wall streaked with dried blood, he waited for a mob of young non-Indian men in baseball caps to rumble by in boisterous tomfoolery, insinuated himself into their mass, and slipped into the tavern, he hoped, unnoticed.

The place was a veritable explosion of madness, drinkers two and three deep clustered around entire fleets of tables pouring beer and liquor down their throats as though the world would end at midnight. Amidst a knot of zombie-like figures whom he couldn’t identify as human, the dazed teenager slid into a chair, pretending that this was just routine behaviour. From the carpet at his feet, another splotch of desiccated blood stared at him.

“Where’s your mama, boy?” squawked a toothless hag with a shock of fuzz-ball hair. “You oughtta be in bed with your teddy, not carryin’ on with us tired old Saulteaux.” She laughed a terrific cackle.

“Shut up and give him a beer,” burped a younger brown woman. “He’s sooo cute. Hey, you know that? You’re cute.”

“Whachyou doin’ later on, sweetie?” asked a third.

“Leave him alone,” a scar-faced man commanded. “He’s way too young for you.”

“Give him a fuckin beer! He’s one of us. He’s tribe, man.” And so the razzing went. Gabriel followed orders and drank, one beer followed by another and another until the world took on the hue of sunset, filled with warmth, then with a giddy, frothy silliness. People came, people went. Gabriel laughed when he was told to laugh, spoke when he was told to speak, remained silent when silence was asked of him. And before he knew it, he was sitting beside a man with sparkling eyes and black-tufted hair, with a “What’s your name?” and a “So what brings you here?” His replies were thrown carelessly into the clangour of laughter, the weeping of country music. Finally, he leaned back in his chair, pierced the mans eyes with his, and bathed in the surge of power that shot through him. Time oozed into a haze of pleasurable pulsation, and Gabriel found himself stumbling down a dark passageway, Wayne? Dwayne? — what was his name again? — somewhere in front of him.

At the far end of the alley, he thought he saw — to his dying day, he could not be sure — a mass of bodies, men, he thought, young men with baseball caps standing in a tight circle around … around what? He could hear male grunting from within the ring, female whimpering, moaning, the northern Manitoba Cree unmistakable in the rising and
falling of her English. Gabriel brushed past the panting, throbbing huddle to follow his new mystery friend.

Gabriel thought he caught the flash of a woman’s leg, bare, jeans a crumple at the ankle, a naked posterior — male — humping. And then Gabriel and his plaid-coated friend were around a corner, and a second, and in another black passageway.

And here, the mouth of the caribou hunter’s son was taken by this city-tasting mouth, its tongue moist, alive upon, around, inside his own, the teeth, the breath all beer and cigarettes. His jacket was opened, his T-shirt pulled up, his zipper pulled down, his maleness flailed. The cold November air was like a spike rammed through the hand — his feet floated above the earth — and he saw mauve and pink and purple of fireweed and he tasted, on the buds that lined his tongue, the essence of warm honey.

Two days later, the brothers Okimasis would see, on a back page of the Winnipeg
Tribune
, a photograph of Madeline Jeanette Lavoix, erstwhile daughter of Mistik Lake, her naked body found in a North Main alleyway behind a certain hotel of questionable repute, a red-handled screwdriver lying gently, like a rose, deep within the folds of her blood-soaked sex. Jeremiah would recall, with a simmering rage, one Evelyn Rose McCrae. Gabriel would say nothing.

Tock, tick-tock …
went the old brown metronome. The fingers of Jeremiah’s right hand obeyed each tick and tock — C … D … E … Time and again, Lola van Beethoven had promised
him that such devoted attention to the development of finger technique would give his fingers the magic touch of Serkin, Gilels, and, yes, Vladimir Ashkenazy, whose name he loved to roll around his tongue. So, G … F … E …

Halfway into his daily marathon, Jeremiah decided he had earned his break of ginger ale on ice, with an Oreo or two for good behaviour. The crowd of bleeding saints in Mrs. Bugachski’s living room stared out at him, from terracotta statuettes, from pictures, coasters, placemats, even stitched into her doilies, carved into her furniture. The white satin angels on the Christmas tree seemed to be singing to him. If only they could fly, he would send them north with knapsacks filled with presents. It was twelve years, after all, since he and Gabriel had spent a Christmas with their parents. At least five hundred dollars to fly the eight hundred miles home? One thousand dollars? For two teenaged boys? Jesus on the wall above the piano winked, and an idea rang like a gong. So thrilled was Jeremiah that he crossed himself and bowed before the Lord.

His gift may not reach Eemanapiteepitat for Christmas Eve but he could try, at least, for New Year’s Eve.

A
gunshot pierced the starlit night, three faint echoes following. Eemanapiteepitatites who heard the blast — and who couldn’t hear such noisemaking, unless they were as deaf as retired midwife Little Seagull Ovary had become of recent years? — cowered in their houses.

“Kaboom yourself,” said Mariesis Okimasis as she pulled aside a corner of the floral-patterned cotton curtain and peered out at the snowbound nightscape. “I hope they kill each other, the fools. That way, we won’t have to put up with these godforsaken New Year’s Eves.” Seeing nothing of tragic consequence as she had hoped, she dropped the curtain and was about to march across the kitchen when she decided on one more peek.

“Then why, pray tell, are you looking out that window?” inquired Abraham, with the mock exasperation that he loved to use whenever a reserve party got overheated and she took
to playing the spy so she could report child murders, wife beatings, and fire bombings to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who almost never arrived. “They see you looking out that window and for sure they’ll shoot that nosy beak right off your face, hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo.”

He stood beside their scrawny Christmas tree with its strands of popcorn, cranberries, and crinkly paper angels, stubby pencil pointed to the calendar tacked to the wall above the humble brown chesterfield. Every square of December 1969 but one was filled with an uncertain X. With contented finality, the hunter crossed out the last square, just as another shot rang out and Mariesis came zooming across the room with horror slashed across her face.

“Nimantoom!”
she hissed. “They’re coming for us, quick, hide in the bedroom, turn the lights out, pretend we’re not at home!”

“We are gonna sit right here on this old brown chesterfield,” retorted Abraham, charging through his wife’s protestations like a moose in mating season, “just like we planned. And we are gonna listen to the tape that Jeremiah sent us one more time because we like his music and because that’s as close as we are ever gonna get to spending New Year’s Eve with those two boys so long as we live and breathe.” With a prince-like flourish, he pressed a button on the tape recorder — borrowed from the priest for the purpose — sitting on the coffee table and plunked himself on the couch. The “Auld Lang Syne” that came wafting out of the machine was distant, tinny, like a child crying in the darkness for its mother.
But, at least, Jeremiah Okimasis was playing the piano for his parents.

Kaboom
went another gunshot, this one just outside their door. Mariesis screamed. Four quick pounds on wooden steps and the kitchen door banged open, its hinges wailing with the pain. And who should be standing there but Santa Claus, a week late but finally arrived.

“Quick,” rasped Santa Claus, “give me my gun!”

“Kookoos Cook! It’s still four hours to midnight!” In the ensuing argument between the hunter and this Kookoos Cook Santa Claus driven mad by whisky, drowning in the absorbent cotton and cheap red felt of a costume torn to shreds by the twenty-seven New Year’s Eve parties then raging across this ebullient reserve, Jeremiah’s “Auld Lang Syne” played on with the placidity of an old church hymn. And in that most mystical way peculiar only to those who dream in Cree, the paper angels on the Christmas tree began to sing: “Should old acquaintance be forgot …”

“Meanwhile, back in Eemanapiteepitat,” sighed Jeremiah wanly, “Kookoos Cook is loading up his rifle for the big midnight shoot-out.” He and Gabriel were ambling, aimless and disconsolate, down a dim and mostly empty Portage Avenue festooned with spruce boughs and coloured lights and large red plastic ribbons. Through bulky speakers over its door, a store they passed piped out a ragged orchestration of “Auld Lang Syne.” It was so cold the brothers half-expected tall office buildings to crack.