Kiss of the Fur Queen (12 page)

Like a lukewarm summer wave, the silken strings of a hundred violins swept over them, the bulbs of twenty thousand fluorescent lights a blinding buzz. The chancel of a church for titans, the gleaming central promenade of the Polo Park Shopping Mall lay before them.

Gabriel gasped: at least three miles of stores if he was judging distance right. And the people! You could put fifty Eemanapiteepitats inside this chamber and still have room for a herd of caribou. And such an array of worldly wealth, a paradise on earth.

“Weeks,” he whispered, his knees wobbly.

“Weeks what?” Jeremiah checked to see if the poor boy’s eyeballs had jumped their sockets.

“Our shopping. It’s gonna take us weeks.”

“Not when a hundred bucks is all
Sooni-eye-gimow
gives you for a clothing allowance.”

“Anee-i ma-a?”
Gabriel pointed through the glass at a pair of tan knee-high leather boots, the toes so pointed that one kick and the victim would be punctured grievously.

“You wanna look like an Italian gigolo?” Jeremiah sneered.

Shoppers labouring under piles of merchandise passed by, their reflections wriggling in the floor-to-ceiling windows like fat suckers in a reedy cove.

“What’s a gigolo?” Innocent as a five-year-old, Gabriel
scampered after Jeremiah, who had just walked up to the perfect store.

“A gigolo,” the elder sibling proclaimed, as though from a pulpit, “is a man who sells a woman who wears shoes like these,” pointing at multicoloured footwear with heels so sharp they could have roused the envy of a porcupine.

“You,” Gabriel peered through the glass with grave suspicion, “can sell” — how could humans stand in such outlandish constructions — “a woman?”

“In cities,” Jeremiah airily dismissed him, “it’s done all the time, all the time. It’s like selling meat. Come on, we gotta get you out of those rags. You look like you just crawled out of the bush.”

“I didn’t crawl,” huffed Gabriel. “I took a plane.
And
a train.” Grabbing Gabriel’s sleeve, Jeremiah plunged deep into the entrails of the beast.

No-nonsense, flat-heeled oxfords winked at Gabriel, who rebuffed their gentlemanly advances as too no-nonsense, too business-like. If heels the height of coffee mugs came unrecommended — the price of cowboy boots, in any case, was prohibitive — then shoes of an athletic bent might be more to the point, with jazzy red or blue stripes down their sides. Jeremiah pooh-poohed the idea as too informal; white high school classrooms were not “gymnasia.”

“What, then,” asked Gabriel in mounting exasperation, “do city boys wear on their feet?”

Whereupon Jeremiah announced that white boys lived in dark penny loafers with socks so white they looked like snow.

As, like Odyssean sirens on treacherous shoals, the hundred violins slid shamelessly into “Ave Maria,” socks began to wave at Gabriel, in colours, weaves, and textures that made his heart strings fibrillate. He had never heard of argyle socks, for instance, and was scandalized to hear that Argyle was a Scottish earl who drank his enemies’ blood on the battlefield and then went home to eat their children. So brutal was the tale that Gabriel threw a curse at an entire rack of the lugubrious knitwear. He announced, instead, his preference for a six-pack of wool-polyester socks so white they looked like snow. The tricoloured bands around their tops would not be seen, of course, but knowing they were there would boost his confidence, Gabriel explained in understated Cree. He insisted, moreover, that he wear a pair home with his brand-new muskrat-coloured patent-leather penny loafers. Leaving his tarnished, near-soleless paratrooper boots and malodorous lumberjack socks with the bouncy bleached-blond clerk, the brothers went tittering out the door like Eemanapiteepitat housewives at a late-night bingo.

At Fischman’s, they passed miles of sombre suits that made them think of priestly gatherings in Olympic-sized football stadiums. They mistook the
t
of “Eaton’s” for a crucifix, missed their elevator stop, and ended up scrumming through racks of shift dresses waiting for nuns divorced from God. But for the mannequin in white fox fur who whispered
“ootee-si”
— “this way” — the brothers would have been suspected of transvestite tendencies.

By the time they entered Liberty’s Fashions for the
Discerning Man, the lethargic mall air made Gabriel’s head swim in circles, and the unkind lighting overhead became so oppressive that he swore the underwear at Liberty’s had spirits of their own, that he could see their penumbra glowing like saintly haloes.

Jeremiah, however, was wrestling with visions of his own. “Remember Aunt Black-eyed Susan’s story,” he asked distractedly, his heart still palpitating from their brush with the Cree-whispering mannequin, “about the weasel’s new fur coat?” A sudden swerve to Cree mythology might disarm such occult phenomena.

“You mean where Weesageechak comes down to Earth disguised as a weasel?” Gabriel alighted on a manly pair of spirit-white Stanfield’s, and examined the Y-front with such rapacity that the bespectacled curmudgeon of a clerk, smelling sabotage, flared his nostrils. “And the weasel crawls up the Weetigo’s bumhole?” Gabriel poked a finger through the opening.

“Yes …” Jeremiah, in spite of himself, exploded with jagged laughter. “In order to kill the horrible monster.”

“And comes back out with his white fur coat covered with shit?” laughed Gabriel, dropping the Stanfield’s on a pile of sky-blue boxers.

“You know,” said Jeremiah, suddenly philosophical. “You could never get away with a story like that in English.”

Gabriel’s voice swooped down to a conspiratorial undertone, “ ‘Bumhole’ is a mortal sin in English. Father Lafleur told me in confession one time.”

“He said the same thing about ‘shit,’ ” said Jeremiah.

Gabriel dashed across the aisle to a selection of skin-hugging jockey-style shorts — with no hole for the penis. The nearby rack of neckties launched into “O Sole Mio” as Gabriel decided on three pairs of black jockeys designed by Alberto Bergazzi.

At Wrangler’s, Gabriel wedged his lithe frame into a pair of blue jeans so tight that Jeremiah expressed concern. At Popeye’s, the black patent-leather belt with a large silver buckle cost less than ten dollars. At Sanderson’s, the red cotton shirt with pearl-white buttons became number one in Gabriel’s heart. At Jack and Jill’s, it was the red, white, and blue silk baseball jacket with striped knit wrists and collar, to Jeremiah’s puzzlement.

At every store, Gabriel virtually danced into each article of clothing and stood before the mirror not so much preening as plotting “his Winnipeg years.” Like moulted skin, his old wardrobe accumulated in multicoloured shopping bags. At Aldo’s Barbershop, once the deed was done — to his specifications, not Brother Stumbo’s — his appearance had changed so dramatically that if Jeremiah had not witnessed the metamorphosis, he would have taken his sibling for a rock star with a tan.

Which is when they came across the belly of the beast — one hundred restaurants in a monstrous, seething clump. Never before had Gabriel seen so much food. Or so many people shovelling food in and chewing and swallowing and burping and shovelling and chewing and swallowing and
burping, as at some apocalyptic communion. The world was one great, gaping mouth, devouring ketchup-dripping hamburgers, french fries glistening with grease, hot dogs, chicken chop suey, spaghetti with meatballs, Cheezies, Coca-Cola, root beer, 7-Up, ice cream, roast beef, mashed potatoes, and more hamburgers, french fries … The roar of mastication drowned out all other sound, so potent that, before the clock struck two, the brothers were gnawing away with the mob.

“Why did Weesageechak kill the Weetigo?” asked Gabriel, as he washed down a gob of bleeding beef with a torrent of Orange Crush.

“All I remember is that the Weetigo had to be killed because he ate people,” replied Jeremiah through a triangle of pizza. “Weesageechak chewed the Weetigo’s entrails to smithereens from the inside out.”

“Yuck!” feigned Gabriel, chomping into a wedge of Black Forest cake thick with cream.

They ate so much their bellies came near to bursting. They drank so much their bladders grew pendulous. Surely this place had a washroom hidden away somewhere. Gabriel went hunting.

There — glaring light, ice-white porcelain, the haunting sound of water dripping in distant corners — standing nearby was a man. Six feet, thin, large of bone, of joint, brown of hair, of eye, pale of skin. Standing there, transported by Gabriel Okimasis’s cool beauty, holding in his hand a stalk of fireweed so pink, so mauve that Gabriel could not help but
look and, seeing, desire. For Ulysses’ sirens had begun to sing “Love Me Tender” and the Cree Adonis could taste, upon the buds that lined his tongue, warm honey.

The brothers Okimasis burst into the bronze light of late afternoon.

“ ‘My coat!’ moaned the weasel. ‘My nice white coat is covered with shit!’ ” Gabriel continued the story of Weesageechak, the image of a certain man aflame with fire-weed clinging to his senses with pleasurable insistence.

“Feeling sorry for the hapless trickster,” said Jeremiah circumspectly, “God dipped him in the river to clean his coat. But he held him by the tail, so its tip stayed dirty.”

‘“And to this day,’ ” Gabriel took his brother’s words away, “as Auntie would say, ‘the weasel’s coat is white but for the black tip of the tail.’ ” Exulting that they could still recall their wicked Aunt Black-eyed Susan’s censored Cree legends, the brothers Okimasis danced onto the sidewalk.

Grey and soulless, the mall loomed behind them, the rear end of a beast that, having gorged itself, expels its detritus.

“B
y ze tvilight of ze fifteens sentury and ze dawn of ze sixteens,” Herr Schwarzkopf’s German accent so grated on Jeremiah he wanted to hold the old man’s mouth in place, “Spain’s Keeng Ferdinand unt Kveen Isabella ver to set in motion ze vave vereby Roman Catolicism — unt Christianity in general — vas efentually to spread across ze Americas.” At a wooden desk by the sheet-glass window, Jeremiah sat watching the grizzled geezer’s jowls flap about. “All vas not vell, howefer,” confided Herr Schwarzkopf like a gossip spreading slander, “vizin ze Roman Church itself at zis time. For efen as missionaries ver penetratink dipper unt dipper into ze New Vorld …”

“Penetration,” wrote the seventeen-year-old Cree scholar in his notebook, “1492.”

“In Europe itself, ze signs ver eferyfer zat ze church vas soon to break up into all manner of varring, hateful factions.
Martin Looser vould be only ze beginnink.” Herr Schwarzkopf paused to extract a huge red handkerchief from a breast pocket, apply it to his generous Hanseatic nostrils, and honk so loud that Jeremiah envisioned a flotilla of boats in Danzig harbour.

Soundlessly, the door opened and a teenaged girl with straight black hair down to her slender waist slipped in, a clutch of textbooks in one hand, a beaded deer-hide purse with fringes hanging from one shoulder. In the overwhelming whiteness of complexions in the room, she was as dark as chocolate. Something inside Jeremiah cringed. With the subtlest of nods, Herr Schwarzkopf directed the girl to the one vacant seat, and lectured on.

“It is zerfore no coinsidense zat zis vas alzo ze era of ze burnink of vitches.” Saliva spewed from his lips. “Any voman suspected of heretical zoughts against ze great patriarchy vas roasted alife at ze stake. Nine million vomen, szzzt! Like hot dogs.” For Herr Schwarzkopf, it appeared, the more gruesome the account, the better; if the occasional man, too, had been burnt as a witch, he ignored the fact and, apparently, wished his students do so as well. “Ze Spanish Inkvisition, a powverful arm of ze Roman church …”

Hearing — and feeling — the new arrival sliding into the seat not far behind him, Jeremiah was put on his guard: was it because this young — and undeniably Indian — girl confronted him with his own Indianness, which his weekly bus sightings of the drunks on North Main Street had driven him to deny so utterly that he went for weeks believing his
own skin to be as white as parchment? He had worked so hard at transforming himself into a perfect little “transplanted European” — anything to survive. He was suddenly enraged, unbalanced, diverting his terror by doodling, mindlessly, bloodlessly, into his notebook: “Nine million women roasted. Live. And they deserved it.”

The corpse lay bloody and glistening on Gabriel’s desk, its limbs splayed as if crucified, its innards exposed, disgusting. Was that the little pig’s heart thumping lightly? Crinkling his nose, he poked at the organ with his pincers. The stainless-steel utensil came away with a drop of thickened blood clinging to its tip.

“The prostate,” announced the wide-shouldered, white-shirted Mr. Armstrong in answer to a question from the room, “is the largest of the four accessory glands of the male reproductive system. Its main function is to produce prostatic fluid, one of several substances that compose semen.” Thirty fifteen-year-olds, male and female, shifted audibly in their seats in tense anticipation. What next about this semen? What more about this all-important sperm? “Positioned immediately below the bladder and encircling, like a doughnut, the tube known as the urethra, the prostate gland may be small and puny looking — on this cadaver, in fact, it has not even yet formed properly — but it serves a complex and necessary function. Without it, a male would not be male.”

Hands sheathed in latex gloves, Gabriel peered closer at the miniature hunk of flesh, veins, and bone, envisioning this
gland with such a mystical allure. He poked around the bladder, the urethra, the genitals, amazed that such inconsequential size could hold such power.

“And we,” Mr. Armstrong continued with grave circumspection, “the male of the species, that is, all have a prostate gland.”

Gabriel stirred his way through the little swirl of blood.

And this is what they drink, he mused, the priests, as they celebrate their Holy Communion. Male blood. He removed his eye from the pan. This is what they eat, my mother and father, as they take the body of Christ into their mouths. The essence of maleness. He imagined himself shoving the dead pig foetus whole into his mouth and down his throat. The thought made him gag.