Kiss of the Fur Queen (19 page)

“Ach!” broke in her husband. “That’s all them white folks ever do is kill each other. No wonder they packed their bags and swam over here to be with us plain ordinary old Indians, hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo.” He chortled and popped into his mouth a fish jowl the size of a host.

With a wry little smile at Jeremiah, Gabriel bit into a triangle of bannock.

“So what’s with these
ballet slippers?”
Jeremiah asked, in English this time. Mariesis shuddered, so pleasurable was the sound to her. “You haven’t been taking ballet, have you?”

Gabriel would take his time. If Jeremiah had unearthed his secret, he would have to work for it.

“Well?”

“What else is there for me to do? After school?” Gabriel
struggled through a mouthful of the lumpy starch. “Besides hang out on North Main?” How he would love to throw his tea at his brother’s face, scorch that supercilious smirk off.

“Yeah, but ballet?” What was this guy, anyway, one of them limp-wristed pansies?

“You take piano. I take dance. What’s your problem?”

“So why do you have to make such a big secret of it?”

“Mati siwitagan,”
quietly requested the hunter, for “salt” in English was beyond his ken. His eyes holding Gabriel’s hostage, Jeremiah passed the small tin receptacle.

“I didn’t want the boys at school to call me …” Gabriel flailed. “You know, a poof, a sissy, a girlie-boy. So I lied. YMCA. Bodybuilding. Just like you told me.”

“I didn’t tell you to lie …”

The boys, however, had learned not to court their father’s ire when he had cracked Chichilia’s skull with a canoe paddle for speaking badly of Father Bouchard.

“Why?” Gabriel rebounded. “You jealous? Of my body?”

Jeremiah’s cheeks turned a brilliant red. But he had no answer.

In the silken light, above the hunter’s head, the white fox winked. Somehow, its askew little grin made Gabriel think of the wicked Chachagathoo.

“One hundred years ago, when this mission was first established …”

Grey and sombre, the crucifix loomed through the driving rain as the two brown eagles, Achak and Peesim, curved
gracefully above it. Their summer pets were now full-grown, and Gabriel and Jeremiah sat astride them, knights on steeds with wings. As the ice-edged September wind whipped their faces into sheets of white, Gabriel pulled his mother’s white fox pelt up closer to his ears.

“There was a woman here who flouted the church, who did not worship the one true God, who practised witchcraft …” Father Bouchard’s rant still shook the landscape like angry thunder. “Who made communion with Satan. Whom God punished,” the priest had roared from his pulpit. “This woman was sent to prison in the south, where she died a lonely death …”

Gabriel and Jeremiah had sat with their father on the right side, Mariesis with the women on the left. The sermon, for once, had riveted them: who was this Satan that had his own communion? What did he look like? Who was this woman — Chachagathoo — with whom he had done business?

Through the heart of a coal-black cloud, the red Twin Otter Beechcraft plunged south.

“Away from friends, from family, from community. And away from heaven, for the soul of this woman went down to hell …”

Where, exactly, was this hell?

S
wooping like a hawk, a gleaming young man scooped a sylph-like girl and flung her so high that she floated, free of gravity, a grey-blue curve. In a flash he caught her and swung her back down to join five others crawling like crabs on the worn pine floor. Each time the action was repeated, Gabriel, gaping like a child at a circus, forgot to breathe.

The black-garbed man with his back to him owned these dancers, Gabriel was certain. How else could he, with a wave or a shout, manipulate their limbs, mould their torsos, control their breathing? “Yes, Eric, up, two, three …”

Who was this man, wondered Gabriel, this lord of Studio D with the carriage of a gymnast, the voice of honey, and the will of iron?

Later, alone in the change room — naked, tumescent — Gabriel stood before the mirror, imagining the stranger.
“And three and four and strrretch …,” the Slavic alto soared as, to a rousing polonaise, teenaged girls in tights blew in one clean line diagonally across Studio C. Gabriel stood shyly in a corner behind the only other male flesh in the class: two pink-skinned boys so gangly they teetered.

“Now, Gabriel, now!” cried Olga Ichmanova, and Gabriel leapt, his bulk thudding like a tank on the hardwood. Mercifully, by the fifth grand jeté, he had traversed the room. What on Earth was he doing eviscerating his crotch when he should be on Mistik Lake gutting trout with that redoubtable fisherman, Abraham Okimasis? Madame Ichmanova’s revulsion clung to his back like the scales of a whitefish.

In the second round, Gabriel’s one hundred and fifty pounds made the building shake. The crone at the piano botched a chord and Olga Ichmanova glared shards of glass. The thought of joining Jeremiah at a seminary glowed irresistibly.

As the third round approached, he caught sight of someone at the doorway. Chestnut-haired, dressed in black, briefcase in hand, the man stood staring. At Gabriel. Mother of Jesus, now he had an audience! He took a deep breath and leapt again.

“Those muskles must strrretch, Mr. Okimasov, they must strrretch!” trilled the matronly Olga Ichmanova, and
bang
went Gabriel,
bang, bang
, right up to the wall of mirror on the opposite side, drenched in sweat and so embarrassed he could have shit his leotards.

After hours, Gabriel stood — “And three and four and strrretch …” — chest and forehead pouring sweat across a
thigh slung over the barre, which he suspected was a communion rail in a vengeful second coming. How could he get his groin to open further without ripping? “And one and two …,” he panted. Save for sporadic thumping on the ceiling — a late rehearsal in the studio above — the room was as silent as a chapel.

“May I make a suggestion?” How long had Gregory Newman, guest choreographer and teacher, been standing there examining him?

Unencumbered of coat and briefcase, smelling of some rich, masculine perfume, he stood hard by Gabriel, his face next to his, his fleshy fingers nudging at the Cree youth’s spine, at his neck, his thigh, his knee, his foot, his arm, his wrist, his thigh.

“Think of your pelvis,” suggested Gregory, “as a plate with an offering.”

Flying into yet another grand jeté, Gabriel felt his whole groin area opening, breathing. Suddenly, he felt himself devoured.

“I
t’s this way.” Gabriel’s tone was hushed, obsequious in the lab-white corridor.

What is this, Jeremiah itched to ask him, the witching hour? Were they at the gates of a cemetery?

“God,” he exlaimed instead. “How much does he pay for this place?” Down a blood-red carpet the thickness of muskeg they floated, Jeremiah afraid to breathe, sure uniformed security would swarm them from some unseen alcove.

“He doesn’t pay rent,” mumbled Gabriel, apologetic yet proud. “It’s the dance company’s.” At the door numbered 2204, he pressed the button.

How many times, the question jabbed at Jeremiah, had this secretive young man been to this address?

“You made it!” Flawlessly turned out in black, accessorized with silver, Gregory Newman stood swimming in the view of a Gabriel mesmerizing in white. A froth of laughter artfully
diluted by sentimental jazz trickled from the room behind him. The choreographer embraced his guest, so pleased to see him that he closed his eyes.

Gabriel stood aloof. If Jeremiah had been upset by the ballet slipper, how, God help them both, would he react to Gregory — a friend, that was all, a mentor, a professional associate who offered him possibilities?

Gradually, the host’s eyes opened, only to see, over Gabriel’s right shoulder, a large, dark lump. Instantly, the man let go of Gabriel.

“I …,” Gabriel cleared his throat, “brought someone with me.” Why, in the name of Jesus, had he moved into an apartment with Jeremiah? To have his night life monitored, documented, filed for posterity, not to mention be driven mad, like Mrs. Bugachski, by the piano
Sooni-eye-gimow
had been fool enough to rent for the dump?

The choreographer made a devastating sweep of the Cree pianist’s person. The pianist’s scrotum shrank to raisin size.

“Ahhh, come in,” his mouth cooed anyway, “party’s just … raging away.”

Like reeds at a riverbank, thirty silhouettes stood bending, swaying, the living room flawlessly conceived, its light the consistency of gauze. Framed posters,
objets d’art
, sculptures of nudes, dancers — the place was a virtual gallery; admission should be charged, thought Jeremiah. Candles, greenery, flowers, so profuse that all that was missing was a widow sniffling into a damp white handkerchief. Where was the casket, the wax-faced corpse grinning one last time?

Gabriel summoned all the bravado he could muster: he would shrug away his pique, focus on the positive. The subdued music, the elegant company, the view — all far from the cacophony of a Jane Kaka event.

Jeremiah stood propping up a wall, fingering a beerless beer glass. How, in these parts, did one request a refill? Whistle for a waiter? Bellow like a moose?

“Funny, you don’t look like brothers.” Gregory’s voice seared through the sandalwood haze. What was that hint of accent? British? Australian? Scandinavian? He sucked at a roll-your-own cigarette whose fumes reeked bittersweet, arresting. Handing the cigarette to Jeremiah, the diffident host sailed for the kitchen. What remained for a lowly aboriginal but to indulge in the object that hung from his fingers?

Suddenly, the air around him swirled, the Persian carpet slid, swayed, shimmied. People, plants, even stone-cold objects came to life.
Oh my God!
He had just smoked marijuana! What if his brain was fried to a cinder? Too late.

With a rhythm South American, possibly Brazilian, a man wearing purple sang of children lost in space and parents who were dead. Sprouting heads like huskies and wings like crows, three bare-shouldered women sidled up to the singer and taunted Jeremiah. A daisy-chain of dishes clattered out of the kitchen, shouted
“eematat!”
and bossa novaed out the window. A mile above the city, their red lips parted and snakes slithered out singing, “Jeremiah, you are not, you are not, Jeremiah, you are not.”

Not what? Not like this high priest of culture and his art gallery of nubile flesh?

“True!” Jeremiah silently, defiantly sang back. “My nostrils yawn like graves, my head is melonish, my complexion pocked, scarred, yellowish, and my hips are wide enough to bear twelve children!”

“True!” The reptiles slid into a cool-blue diminished seventh. “True, Jeremiah,
eematat, eematat!”

Around Gabriel, mouths hung everywhere, mouths with no heads, no bodies, just arms and hands, a hammock of veins and blood that scooped his body up and rocked him and rocked him, like an infant in a cradle, the mouths singing lullabies in tongues that he had never heard. He squirmed himself free of all earthly weight and, naked, bathed in the billow created by the songs.

Jeremiah could see Gabriel, a three-year-old child, frolicking, laughing. How beautiful his baby brother was: spirit, pure, unsullied. How could any mortal hope to touch him?

In the moonlight, Gabriel’s face, his neck were bathed by male breath, hot, minty. Until the silvery, naked Jesus that hung from the chain around this whiteman’s neck came to rest across his own neck, hard, cold. He caught sight of Jeremiah walking by in the hallway outside.

Pulling on his coat, fending off his misery, Jeremiah stopped breathing but walked on anyway. For there, against the bedroom wall, black on white, Gregory Newman hung nailed to his brother, by the mouth.

Through the elevator walls, like the breathing of a corpse, Jeremiah heard the voice: “Is big, eh? Is big.”

He clamped his eyes shut, swallowed hard, and willed his body dead. It existed no longer; from this day on, he was intellect — pure, undiluted, precise.

E
ven from the hallway, Gabriel was certain that Jeremiah’s scale was uncharacteristically stiff that morning, and ponderous: C-minor, so a certain Cree with intellectual airs had informed him, the key Beethoven used to express the most tragic and suicidal of his innumerable yearnings.

“Where were you?” Jeremiah neither turned nor stopped his exercise; the notes — and that insufferable metronome — dripped on like some ingenious method of torture.

“I …,” said Gabriel from the doorway, “stayed over.”

“Where?”

“At Greg’s.”

The scale, and the ticking, stopped. Jeremiah swivelled. “When are you gonna get serious about your life?”

Gabriel shed duplicity, evasion, untruth with his parka on the tired old sofa.

“You don’t want me to dance. You don’t want me to hang
out on North Main. You don’t want me to make friends. What am I supposed to do?”

“Who is this … Gregory Newman?”

“What are you? The FBI? Mariesis Okimasis? Father Lafleur?”

Gabriel was all of seventeen, for God’s sake, barely past childhood — cradle snatched “Mom and Dad told me to look after you,” Jeremiah lied.

“You try too hard. At everything. You and those lily-white fingers. That’s what you want, isn’t it? To become a whiteman.”

Jeremiah’s hand hit Gabriel so hard his cheek, for a moment, turned pale.

“What were you doing with … that guy … last night?”

“Nothing …”

“You … you had your tongue shoved down his throat, for Gods sa —”

“So what? It’s not your tongue.”

Jeremiah slammed Gabriel against the wall. Knocked off the piano, the metronome crashed into a corner, landing upright:
tick-tock, tick …

“How can you let someone do what that disgusting old priest did to you? How can you seek out … people like that?”

“And you?” Gabriel grabbed the wrist and flung it to the side with such force that Jeremiah reeled. “You’d rather diddle with a piano than diddle with yourself. You’re dead, Jeremiah. At least my body is still alive.”