Kiss of the Fur Queen (15 page)

“I disagree,” a low, rich voice cut through the din. The laughter stopped. Heads swivelled.

“Yes, Amanda? And vat is it you disagree vis in Mr. Okimasis’s interestink presentation?”

Amanda Clear Sky, dusky Indian maiden of eighteen years, disengaged herself from her desk and stood for all to see.

“There were many bloody periods in human history,” her tone unflinching, with a sheen of anger, “many of them occurring right here in North America.”

Once he had summoned the nerve to meet her stare, Jeremiah’s eyes stung. “Such as?”

“Such as the Cherokee Trail of Tears.” Her English was impeccable, not a speck of accent. “Such as Wounded Knee, smallpox blankets, any number of atrocities done to the Indian people. Was the colonization of North America not every bit as bloody as the French Revolution?”

“Yes, but Miss Clear Sky,” the doddering teacher crawled to Jeremiah’s rescue, “zat is Nors American history. Zis is European history vee are studyink …”

“Ugh. The Princess Pocahontas has spoken.” Two rows from the front, Rob Bailey was holding court, the same
person, Jeremiah wanted desperately to believe, who he had seen in the car that pulled up to the Leland Hotel on New Year’s Eve. The bell shrieked.

Jeremiah was crouching at his locker rummaging pointlessly, his mind a jumble of rage and embarrassment, when Amanda Clear Sky came striding airily out the door of Herr Schwarzkopf’s history room.

“So what you’re saying —” Amanda winced as the warm spray from his words hit her face. “What you’re saying is that Indians aren’t supposed to know about the rest of the world, right?”

“No,” Amanda replied, not stopping, her buckskin purse swinging wildly from a hand.

“That they should limit their knowledge of history to their own kind?” Jeremiah continued.

Amanda stopped so suddenly that Jeremiah had to save himself from crashing into her. Her eyes hovered inches below his, her breath bubble gum, pink, cherry.

“You just shouldn’t forget that we have a history, too, that’s all.” She marched off. “I was doing you a favour. Trust me.”

“Doing me favour, come on. You were just trying to make a fool of —”

“Look.” Amanda whirled around. “What use is there pretending to be what you are not? You and me and your little brother, we’re the only three Indians in a school filled with two thousand white middle-class kids. We can’t let them walk all over us.”

“What do you mean, we can’t—?”

“Don’t you get it?
They
were making a fool of you, not me. You looked so …” Her voice suddenly grew soft.

“So …” “So what?”

“In need of help.” She turned and walked away.

Was he to run and thank the woman for assistance kindly rendered or should he conceive some bloodless vengeance? He started rummaging again, but couldn’t remember what he was looking for. He heard footsteps.

“See you later,” Gabriel rushed by.

“Gabriel! Gabriel, wait!”

Gabriel raised a cheap vinyl gym bag. “YMCA.”

“I need to talk to you.” I need to talk to someone was more the point. And who else was there for him to talk to? Mrs. Bugachski’s piano?

Gabriel turned, his smile nervous, vaguely fearful. “Bodybuilding,” he chirped, flexed an arm, and disappeared.

“A
nd second position and two and plié …” Miss Churley’s steely voice sliced through the music like a razor blade. From the rear of the studio, Gabriel followed her stern-faced commands; he gripped the barre, thrust his pelvis out, and bent his knees, amazed that such a simple move could be so downright painful. Still, he was glad that he had finally dared advance from mere observer to actual participant.

The chipmunks in front of him were so damned cute that he yearned to scurry through their ranks and pinch each plump little cheek. But the mothers were sitting by the door, watching their daughters with nodding heads and brimming eyes. Instead, he held his right palm up as though feeling for rain, and he stretched his neck to the point where he wondered when his head would touch the ceiling.

“And third position and two and three …”

Pink as cotton candy in their leotards and slippers, the buns
on their heads like inverted acorns, the baby ballerinas stretched out to infinity, the mirrored walls multiplying them into the hundreds. Thank God there were only twenty-four of them, cringed Gabriel momentarily, for his masculine self-image had never been subjected to such a humbling low. Avoid his reflection in the distance as he might, the fact remained that few of these five- and six-year-old girls came up to his navel, making him look, and feel, like a Weetigo. When a mother smiled his way, he interpreted the look as one of wild amusement; the black leotards exposing his bulbous, quivering groin would make a priest yodel
“Weeks’chiloowew!”
Still, he forged on manfully, scraping his dainty-slippered right foot from third position back to first in an approximate execution of Miss Churley’s unbending will.

The ghost-pale, muscle-bound young woman in jeans and white blouse began wading her way through the bobbing columns as the creaky old woman at the piano continued ad infinitum with the flabbiest waltz Gabriel had ever heard. As she progressed, Miss Churley paused to adjust a little arm here or a little leg there, here a waist, there a neck, fully confident that such touches would result in a splendid harvest of Manitoban Pavlovas. The closer she got, the higher Gabriel raised his ribcage; it felt right, somehow, to strike such a pose when danger approached.

“Too tense, Mr. Okimasis, way too tense. Relax, this is not kung fu.” She nudged his right foot in and turned his palm over: “And your palm is down, not up. You can do your praying to the
Gitche manitou
when class is over.” With a vise-like
grip, she grabbed his hips and turned them out. “Pooh!” she gasped, as if she had just been hit by a soundless blast of gas, “tight as a bedspring.” She jiggled his arms, and slapped his thighs around like a Swedish masseuse.

Gabriel took a deep breath and willed himself into a state of rubber-like pliancy. His left hand poised on the barre, his right floated up, his neck grew, his hips no longer bedsprings. The pink little girls were now mere plumage on the wings of some fabulous subarctic creature. Still caged in Studio B of the School of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, he was free of gravity, trying out this newfound language that spoke to him in a way nothing else had ever done.

“And back to first and three and plié …”

“N
ow a gavotte performed sedately; offer her your hand with conscious pride; take an attitude not too stately, still sufficiently dignified,” quavered an oily, undisciplined male voice over a squabble of strings, woodwinds, and one untuned piano.

Oh, well, Jeremiah thought as he sat grappling with the tired instrument in the school gymnasium, at least I got the job. For despite the cacophony and the amateurishness of his fellow musicians, he was thrilled to be playing in a real live musical. And it may only have been the Anderson High School production of
The Gondoliers
, but to Jeremiah, it was as good as Broadway. If only Uncle Kookoos could see him now. He capped off the second verse of the gavotte with a robust little thump and plunged into the chorus.

The cadaverous Mr. Long rammed his claw-like left hand into the score before him and flung the page back with such
passion that the paper almost ripped. His right hand beating four-four time as if the Vienna Philharmonic were at his feet, Mr. Long thrust his left so high that Jeremiah thought he might well snap his back brace, summoning into the unruly fray his even more unruly flute section. The hefty twins in honey-blond milkmaid braids and ruffle-sleeved Bavarian beerhall dirndls puffed their cheeks like Dizzy Gillespie and pursed their lips like wursts; the resultant sound could have passed for an air-raid siren.

In a plot that was a virtual quagmire of misinformation, there were two facts of indisputable and universal clarity: first, the pianist in the orchestra was as Indian as Sitting Bull and, second, one of the gondoliers-cum-princes, as identical as Tweedledum and Tweedledee, was white as nougat, the other brown as cocoa.

Gabriel Okimasis beamed like a torch. He was walking on air, his toes were tingling, his heart atwitter, for never had he expected to be a star in a real live show with lights and tights and wigs and music and choreography. Instinctively, he knew that he was doing something revolutionary, perhaps historical, definitely head turning. For murmurs had coursed like electric charges through the audience when he had made his first appearance on stage. Jeremiah would later inform him Amanda Clear Sky had clapped her hand to her mouth, suppressing a minor heart attack.

It had all happened so fast that Gabriel’s head was still a whorl, a snow dome turned upside-down inside his head. His dream had been to become a member of the chorus, a lowly
Venetian gondolier. He had had four months of elementary dance training. His voice, if not that of a Cree Caruso, had been found capable of holding a simple tune, in the tenor range. As this was Anderson High, not La Scala, Gabriel was a gondolier.

Then the stunning, self-obsessed Alex Brisbane had fallen victim to bronchitis, plunging Mr. Long into a tailspin of panic. For he now had to reassign the principal role of gon-dolier-cum-prince Giuseppe Palmieri on one week’s notice. Mr. Long’s emotional contortions had been prolonged and tortured. But Gabriel Okimasis had been most crafty in his manoeuvres.

Daring to anticipate such a possible development, he had not only increased his dance classes to daily sessions, not only taken on weekly singing lessons, not only committed to memory the roles of both Marco and Giuseppe Palmieri, he had even rustled up lessons in basic Italian from a woman on Corydon Avenue named Annabella Bombolini. And all accomplished with utmost secrecy. Even Mr. Whiting at the education office of the Department of Indian Affairs, from whom Gabriel had had to wheedle tuition fees for these lessons, had promised to tell no one but a certain anonymous superior in far-off Ottawa from whom he needed approval for such unusual expenditures. The final step had been to convince Mr. Long, in the privacy of his classroom, at twilight, that he, Gabriel Okimasis, youngest son of a caribou hunter from the distant north, was capable of being as Italian as Giuseppe Palmieri. For this crucial encounter, Gabriel,
who knew he could be as prince-like as a maharaja, had displayed his looks to best advantage. Mr. Long had relented.

Word had leaked out that the casting was, for want of sensitive nomenclature, nontraditional, which had proved great box office. For here it was, opening night, and not an unsold ticket remained for any of the five performances. Ticket buyers had found the Indian pianist curious, even thought-provoking, but an Indian-Italian gondolier, a Cree-Spanish prince, whichever the case may turn out to be, they had never imagined.

Gabriel preened his feathers and shimmered. For, at this moment, he was the king of Barataria, the king of Spain, the king of Manitoba, the champion of the world.

Gliding up to the lip of the stage, Gabriel bowed, bobbed his head to the side, and winked at his brother. Jeremiah caught the wink and, by way of a love-bedazzled smile, threw it back. The withered Duchess of Plaza Toro yanked Gabriel’s arm and they twirled upstage, back to the front steps of the cardboard Baratarian palazzo that leaned as dangerously as the fabled Tower of Pisa.

The orchestra landed with a screech on the final chord of the dance, the duchess and her gondolier-cum-prince swished up to a semi-dignified finish, and the Duke of Plaza Toro, clapping delicately, squawked, “Bravo!”

“S
o where did you pick up them fancy steps?” Hoping idle banter might quell the turmoil of his post-performance adrenaline, Jeremiah tossed out a question that seemed innocent enough.

Gabriel, however, wasn’t ready to share his little secret.

He deflected the query by making a ghost-like face in the mirror. Then he burst out laughing, and began scraping his face, the cold cream and make-up clinging to the tissue paper like jam and peanut butter.

“There,” he said, “the mask is off.” He looked past the tremulous corneas into the depths of his pupils and there perceived, already, the other Gabriel eyeing him, beckoning, enticing.

Jeremiah stood behind his brother, tugging at the knot of the second necktie he had ever worn. One mirrored face appeared above the other.

“So.” Jeremiah decided that teasing this Manitoban gondolier-cum-prince might take some of his edge off. “You’re not gonna tell me?”

“Tell you what?”

“Where you learned to dance like that?”

“Here … here and there.” With concentrated fury, Gabriel worked a puff of cotton around the lobe of his ear. “Mr. Long was helpful.”

Jeremiah sank a comb thoughtfully into his hair. Why should a simple question cause such a flutter in Gabriel’s answer? What was that flicker he just saw skittering across his eyes?

“Coming to the party, Gabriel?” Barry Sexton, the blue-eyed, blond Baratarian Grand Inquisitor, was the host of the opening-night festivities.

“Neee, nimantoom!”
Gabriel snuck the Cree out like a sin. “We’re actually being asked to one of their homes. Or did I hear wrong?”

“Tapwee,”
confided Jeremiah.

“What was that, Gabriel?” Duncan Riley scrunched his freckled nose from a neighbouring mirror.

“Nothing,” Gabriel snapped back into English. “I was just … talking to myself.”

“He said he was coming,” Jeremiah offered as graceless ruse. “And so am I.”

“All right!” crowed Barry Sexton, the remainder of his exclamation swept away by the tidal wave of chatter. In the mirror, the brothers’ mouths smiled but their eyes welled up with an inexpressible loneliness.

Gabriel brushed it off by shimmying into his shirt and starting on his socks.

“Maw neetha niweetootan,”
he said, his face hidden over his knees.

“You’re not going?” So taken aback was Jeremiah that answering in Cree was the last thing on his mind. His English rang out like a white boy’s.