Kiss of the Fur Queen (27 page)

“My people are starving,” he finally screamed back, “because the caribou have not come. And you come here to tell me some stupid stupid bullshit about there being a reason?” Then the wind was gone, the only sound left his hysterical sobbing.

Done with waving Gabriel’s length of white muslin — formerly a Milky Way tablecloth, now a northern Manitoba blizzard — two sprightly assistants ducked beneath the floor.

Down the aisle, the Weetigo oozed, black, slime-coated, formless.

“Come to me, Migisoo,” the flesh devourer hissed through ten loudspeakers, “I’ve been waiting for you.” The voice like water dripping in a cavern.

“Weetigo!” spat Migisoo. “You’ve already taken five children from us. Haven’t you feasted on enough human flesh while we lie here with nothing but our tongues to chew on? Get away from us, get away,
awus!”

The percussionist in the wings attacked his drum kit as Migisoo and the Weetigo leapt into their dance of hate.

Gabriel dodged the monster with nimble-footed grace, though as the dying Migisoo he stumbled here, tripped there, even fell. Until it looked dead certain that the struggle would be lost. Suddenly, the creature leapt into the hunter’s mouth. And was gone.

“Another Hit for the Okimasis Brothers!” screamed the headline, a photograph of Gabriel dancing with the Weetigo gracing the review. Through his rasping, Gabriel could hear the applause, like the north wind lashing the caribou hunter.

The paper sat open on a chair by the examining table, Gabriel sucking at the nozzle of a respirator. The reason?
Pneumocystis carinii
protozoa were filling up the air sacs of his lungs one by one, choking them to death. “Your T-cell count is its lowest ever,” the ear-ringed doctor explained. “And this role you’re performing, for … how much longer?” The patient signalled “ten” as the doctor adjusted the machine. “Ten more weeks. You’ll have to be extra careful. Conserve your energy, no alcohol, no drugs.” He popped the nozzle out. “But folks in your position have gone on to lead full lives for a dozen, fifteen years. It’s all in the attitude.

“Now about this respirator. Twice a day, more if you feel that shortness of breath coming on.”

On the street, Gabriel stopped for a light. A businessman ambled by, did a double-take, then stopped, apparently to revel in the view. The old charge shot up Gabriel’s vertebrae, then back down to his groin.

Ten minutes later, he emerged from the alleyway behind the clinic, respirator in hand like a briefcase, a hundred bucks tucked away.

Gabriel found himself peering in his dressing-room mirror, studying his tongue, his throat, his palate. Yes indeedy, leadlike markings everywhere. Thrush. What next? Leukemia? Cancer of the rectum?

Jeremiah found himself at centre stage nervously facing an overheated audience. “Chachagathoo, the Shaman,” a show so controversial that the cardinal of Toronto had snuck into
the show dressed as a Rosedale matron, so Indian rumour rabidly insisted, had just been given the award of the theatre season.

Soaked in sweat, his head in a wet towel, Gabriel sat slumped into a chair. Behind him, Jeremiah paced, butting out cigarette after cigarette on the dressing-room table.

“It’s not fair to Mom,” he pleaded, “not in a situation as serious as this.”

“How do you say AIDS in Cree, huh? Tell me, what’s the word for HIV?”

“Gabriel, please? I’ll pay her way down, I’ll —”

“Not now, Jeremiah, please.” Gabriel started crying. “My head hurts.”

“Silent night,” sang a woman. To Gabriel, it was the earth, serenading him. “Holy night …”

Beyond the aria, he could hear the spruce trees groaning from the snow, the air so clean it sparkled. In his father’s dogsled, four-year-old Gabriel Okimasis knelt alone at the front, for Champion was away at school. One hand hanging on to the canvas siding, he waved a tiny whip —
“Mush
, Tiger-Tiger!” The eight grey huskies were flying through the sky, to God. The trail curved; who knew what surprises lay around the next bend, a rabbit, a weasel, five ptarmigans all Holy Ghost white?

Behind him stood his father, hand to handlebar, brandishing his moose-hide whip, below him his mother, her back
against the
kareewalatic
, covered by her goose-down sleeping robe from the neck down.

What’s this? A face? Yes. In the forest, and part of it, and larger, blotting out the trotting dogs. Gabriel closed his eyes. But when he opened them again, the old man was glaring at him. Why did God look so angry, so embittered, so dreadfully unhappy?

An arctic fox appeared, in sequined gown of white satin, gloves to her elbows, wings whirring. And she was singing: “Holy infant so tender and mild.” Such pouty red lips.

“Gabriel,” said God the Father from behind the singing lady fox, “Gabriel, get out of bed.”

“No,” moaned Gabriel in his sleep, “no, please, no.” He started screaming. And thrashing. “Get away, get away, get away, you’ve already taken five children.”

“Gabriel!” shouted Jeremiah. “You’re dreaming.”

“Haven’t you feasted on enough human flesh?” Punching and punching, Gabriel all but broke Jeremiah’s nose.

“Shut up!” Jeremiah sobbed. His face smeared bloody, he clawed at Gabriel’s arms. “Gabriel, shut up!”

“W
ho do you think met Dad? On … the other side?” Gabriel’s soft voice drifted through the white-walled room. “Jesus? Or Weesageechak?” Reclined on pillows, the hunter’s youngest son gazed at the portrait of the Fur Queen kissing his father, the hand that held the photo connected by tubes to plastic-bagged fluids. Jeremiah stood at the window, scowling at the evening traffic seven floors below.

“The Trickster, of course,” Gabriel finally answered himself, “Weesageechak for sure. The clown who bridges humanity and God — a God who laughs, a God who’s here, not for guilt, not for suffering, but for a good time. Except, this time, the Trickster representing God as a woman, a goddess in fur. Like in this picture. I’ve always thought that, ever since we were little kids. I mean, if Native languages have no gender, then why should we? And why, for that matter, should God?”

“Father Lafleur would send you straight to hell for saying that.”

“When I die. I want Mom to be allowed her Catholic mumbo-jumbo. But I do not want priests anywhere near my bed. Do you hear me?”

“As if she would agree to such a thing,” said Jeremiah bitterly.

“If she doesn’t, I will not see her.”

In the Air Canada jet, seventy-six-year-old Mariesis Okimasis sat hunched against a window looking at the clouds below, where the child Gabriel used to tell her God lived. In her purse, inside a snuff tin, a gift: Annie Moostoos’s single tooth, knocked out, at last, by the inhumanly tall Magimay Cutthroat in a vicious poker game. “Give it to my godson,” the now toothless crone had wept. “It will help him live past ninety, just like me.”

In her bedroom at Wasaychigan Hill, Ann-Adele Ghostrider placed her white ermine cape in a small brown suitcase and closed its cover. Outside her window, the wind was rising and snow was blowing. Would she get there in time?

The Weetigo came at Gabriel with its tongue lolling, its claws reaching for his groin.

“Haven’t you feasted on enough human flesh while we sit here with nothing but our tongues to chew on?” hissed Gabriel. But the cannibal spirit now had the face of Father
Roland Lafleur. Gabriel crept towards the holy man. “But I haven’t eaten meat in weeks, my dear Sagweesoo,” Gabriel whined, and flicked his tongue at the old priest’s groin. “Don’t move away.”

The creature lunged at Gabriel, brandishing a crucifix.

“Get away from me,” Gabriel thrashed. “Get away,
awus!”

The door squeaked open. In shuffled an exhausted Mariesis Okimasis, Jeremiah and Amanda behind her. A string of emerald-green rosary beads wound in her hands, Mariesis took one look at her son and rushed to his bed.
“Nigoosis, nigoosis, nigoosis …”

Mariesis’s wrinkled hand placed the rosary on Gabriel’s chest, the naked, silver Jesus glinting in the candle light, writhing in pain.

Jeremiah helped Gabriel extract a pill from a wax paper cup. Gabriel’s face was wan, hollow, a damp white towel wound around his head.

“Morphine,” said Jeremiah, in English, as Gabriel downed the tablet with a mouthful of water. “What’s it like?”

“Dulls the pain,” replied Gabriel, “for a while.” He looked at Jeremiah. “Are you … scared? That I might die?”

Jeremiah blinked. What should he say? Yes? No? Sometimes? Finally, he pulled his eyes away, threw his hands up to his mouth, and cried; yes, he was scared. He was scared shitless that he was about to lose his brother.

“Katha matoo,”
said Gabriel softly. “Please?”

“I … I promised Mom and Dad I’d take care of you. And I fucked it up. Fucked it up completely.”

“Remember that day the caribou almost ran us over?” Gabriel smiled. “And you dragged me up that rock? Saved my life. But I’m not a child any more, Jeremiah. Haven’t been for a long time. There is nothing you could have done about this. What I did, I did on my own. Don’t mourn me. Be joyful.”

“Jeremiah, you’ve got to get a priest,” Mariesis urged, in Cree, over her older son’s shoulder. Jeremiah said nothing. “If your brother doesn’t get his last rites …” Mariesis was crying now.

“Mom!”

“His soul will go to hell,
tapwee!”

“Okay, okay, okay.” Jeremiah’s Cree was like machine-gun fire. “We’ll get him a priest! We’ll get him a priest!”

“T
here’s No Business Like Show Business,” read Gabriel’s birthday card across the dressing-room mirror. Certain he had just catapulted through a time warp of five hundred years, Jeremiah butted out a cigarette, lit another. Everything was as Gabriel had left it: the eyebrow pencils, the make-up — magic weapons of a shaman, a weaver of spells. Only the portrait of their father was gone.

The door behind him opened, and Amanda’s reflection glided into the mirror.

“Granny’s gonna be late,” she said softly. “Snowstorm. She’s doing what she can.”

“My brother is dying, and here I am playing dress-up in some stupid fucking sandbox.”

Outside the Belmont Theatre, crowds jostled for admission to the closing night of “Chachagathoo, the Shaman.”
Eight grey huskies crossed the tundra, Gabriel Okimasis driving them as fast as they could go. He could see, or thought he could, the finish line a mile ahead. What he could also see, however, was other mushers leading him, three, perhaps even four. Which meant forty others somewhere to the rear of him. But what did these forty matter? What mattered was these three or four ahead of him. What mattered was he was not leading
.

And he was so tired, his dogs beyond tired, so tired they would have collapsed, right there, if he was to relent
.

“Mush!” was the only word left that could feed them, dogs and master both, with the will to travel on
.

Below the Fur Queen portrait, Mariesis’s rosary lay entwined in Gabriel’s fingers. Ann-Adele Ghostrider’s old, brown hand removed the beads and replaced them with an eagle feather.

“Mush
, Tiger-Tiger!” Gabriel moaned feebly.

About to throw the rosary into the trash can, she hung it, instead, on a Ken doll sporting cowboy hat and white-tasselled skirt. The medicine woman lit a braid of sweetgrass and washed the patient in its smoke. Her prayer now a low chant, she stood at the foot of the bed as Robin Beatty, weeping, held his lover’s head gently in his arms.

Strength. Willpower. Endurance. Did he have enough? Did he have any? Did his dogs?

“Mush!” Gabriel cried to his lead dog, “Faster, Tiger-Tiger, mush!”

And then a darkness came upon him, creeping up behind him from the depths of the roaring in his ears. And at the distant end of this new darkness appeared the small, flickering flame. Growing larger with each ripple
,
the white fame began to hum, a note so pure human ears could never have been meant to hear it. Then the presence took on outline — the caribou hunter could discern a cape, fold after fold of white fur
.

The smoke detector shrieked. Then an alarm down the hall started ringing. And another and another. Until the entire institution reverberated. Fire trucks pulled up, then ambulances.

“Open zat door!” What now, raved Jeremiah, the army? He poked his nose out. And came face to face with a towering blonde nurse.

“Vat is zat schmell?”

“Sweetgrass. A sacred herb,” Jeremiah tried to explain, “like incense for Catholics!” He slammed the door, just as Mariesis came teetering around the corner with an ancient priest in tow. As hospital staff evacuated patient beds, the caribou hunter’s wife charged up to the door and confronted Amanda.

“Open up,” she barked, in Cree. “Let the priest in.”

“No,” Amanda barked back, in Ojibway.

“Nibeebeem macheeskooteek taytootew!”
cursed Mariesis, with murder in her eyes.

“He will not go to hell,” screamed Amanda, her native Ojibway allowing her to understand just enough Cree.

Monstrous in full kit, the fire chief came face to face with Amanda.

“Madam,” he stated, “you’ll have to move.”

“No.”

Jeremiah’s sweating face reappeared in the crack. The fire
chief begged him. “Sir, unless the smoke detector inside that room is stopped, the whole hospital has to be evacuated.”

“There’s a man dying in here!” Jeremiah cried. “We’re Indians! We have a right to conduct our own religious ceremonies, just like everyone else!” He slammed the door again.

“Jeremiah!” Mariesis wailed behind the great wall of fireman. “Let this priest in or I’ll kill you!”

Jeremiah yanked the door, reached under the fire chief’s armpit, shoved the midget priest away, pulled Mariesis inside, and slammed the door a third time.

The caribou hunter thought he saw a crown, made of white fur, hovering above the cape. And the crown sparkled and flashed with what could have been an entire constellation of stars. Then Gabriel Okimasis saw a sash, like an elongated flag, white, satin, draped across the bodice of a young woman so fair her skin looked chiselled from arctic frost, her teeth pearls of ice, lips streaks of blood, the eyes white flames in a pitch-black night
.