Kiss of the Fur Queen (16 page)

“No.”

“Do you know how many times we’ve been invited anywhere?” The clatter in the room conveniently covered their clipped exchange. Or so they hoped.

“He’s not coming?” Gabriel heard someone behind him exclaim with mock surprise, then, “Aw, ain’t that too bad.”

“Why aren’t you coming?”

“Going —” Gabriel could hide his irritation no longer. “Doing. Something else.” There. That sounded less abrasive. He must not do anything that might jeopardize his mission.

“You’re missing out on a good time, Gabriel,” Barry Sexton cried out.

Gabriel slipped on his coat, strode down the hall. Like a drug his body needed if it was to live another hour, the night pulled at him.

“So you’re not gonna tell me where you’re going.” Jeremiah was pursuing him.

Gabriel continued walking, zipping his coat, his face expressionless. “I’m going out to meet a friend.”

“What friend? Why don’t you bring him to the party?” Jeremiah almost had to run to keep pace. Gabriel rammed his
tuque on his head. “I really resent you making a fool of me like you just did, Gabriel. In front of that big-eared fag, Duncan Riley? I mean, come on,”

“I can go out and meet whoever I choose and it will be none of your goddamn business.” The words took even Gabriel by surprise.

In the classroom, the cast began to pound on desks and sing Marco Palmieri’s love ballad. “Take a pair of sparkling eyes, hidden ever and anon …”

Jeremiah grabbed Gabriel’s arm and pulled him to a stop. “Why do you have to be so goddamned secretive? Gabriel, for God’s sake, I’m your brother, you can tell me any —”

“Exactly. You’re my brother, not my mother.”

Glaring at each other was like glaring into a mirror, their eyes, their rage, identical. For siblings battling each other, wrestling with the darkness that had come scratching at their door, the sound from the room beyond suddenly resembled wordless chanting underpinned by bass drums, as in a ritual for warriors of some long-lost tribe.

“Fine,” Jeremiah resigned himself, “just. Just. Go.”

Suddenly, Gabriel wanted to wrap his arms around his brother. But right now, he had to leave.

“Go,” Jeremiah whispered, and walked away.

When Jeremiah opened his locker door, a page of lime-green paper fluttered down, landing at his feet. A photocopied picture stared out at him — two luxuriant sprays of feathers radiated sun-like from the man’s back, one above the other, a rooster’s
crown of something brush-like sprouted from his head, his wrists were bound in bracelets, his legs and feet in buckskin leggings and moccasins, all replete with floral-patterned beadwork. Bent at the waist, the man could have been searching for some small object in the grass, except that one hand held aloft, as if to recognize some luminous presence towering above him, a large bird’s wing, a hawk’s, perhaps an eagle’s.

Jeremiah recoiled. There was something so … pagan about the image, primitive — the word made his eyes sting — Satanic.

Frightened by his reaction, he concentrated on the print: “Pow Wow, The Winnipeg Indian Friendship Centre, 371 Ballantyne Avenue, Saturday, May 16, 1970.” He skimmed to the handwriting at the bottom: “Show up. I dare you,” its signature elegant, “A. Clear Sky, Ojibway.”

“Nervy broad.” He crumpled the paper and flung it aside just as twenty-one pale-skinned high school boys roared out of their makeshift dressing room and went howling down the hallway. “Take a pair of sparkling eyes …”

He dropped his
Gondoliers
score into the locker, grabbed his coat, and skipped off to join the marching throng. He even sang, though quietly, “Hidden ever and anon, in a merciful eclipse …”

“B
aby, baby, whoa, whoa, whoa …” Gabriel could hear the siren screaming for him, “Oh you can do-oh-anything, oh-anything you want with me tonigh-igh-ight …” drums, guitars, and horns driving her rhythm-and-blues contralto. It took only seconds for Gabriel’s toes, knees, and hips to surrender to the rhythm. The church and country music he had grown up with, the smattering of white-boy pop from Brother Stumbo’s radio, seemed prissy by comparison now. This music meant business.

But would they let him in? He passed for eighteen, but this wasn’t some two-bit blood-and-beer-soaked dive on North Main Street whose hold on life was precarious at best. This was the Rose, a downtown establishment, so Gabriel had heard, of “pedigree.” Though he had also heard in the hallways and showers of Anderson High, including from Jeremiah: “Wanna blow job? Go check out them
faggots at the Rose.” Such yearning as had simmered just beneath the convulsive, near-hysteric hatred had only fuelled Gabriel’s hunger.

“Wayne” had told him that he did look “more mature” than fifteen, had assured him that he wouldn’t have a problem. Where was Wayne, anyhow? To hell with him. Gabriel summoned the wile that had become a way of life and pushed the door open.

Instantly, he felt the change that took hold of the room. Even blind men would have sensed it. Chatter stopped, laughter went unfinished; cigarettes hung in midair, beer bottles went undrunk, whisky tumblers untouched. Even the music seemed to have been cut in half, the singer now wailing, a cappella, an ornate, soulful blue cadenza.

Like a surplice of fine linen, a hundred eyes enveloped Gabriel. A thrill shot up his spine until he was confident his hair ends were on fire, crackling, emitting sparks.

As through the glow of stained-glass windows, the bronze Cree angel fluttered, the whirr of his downy wings like rustling taffeta, sending out redolence of campfire smoke, pine needles, of reindeer moss after rain. Only when he came to roost on a stool at the far end of the bar did life in the room trickle back to normal, clink by clink, laugh by laugh, word by word.

The bartender had missed the entrance and Gabriel had time to disguise himself. He scrunched his forehead, deliberately softened his gaze, as if a woebegone expression would add the requisite three years to his age.

Beyond the bottles that lined the mirrors, young and old were scattered at bar stools and tables, engaged in raucous, laugh-cluttered conversation, or sat solitary, lost in fantasy. Women too, though those few could have passed for men. Clandestine, enticing impurity that outcasts, freaks of nature, and mortal sinners seek out as refuge from tormentors. Half of Gabriel had an urge to run, to Barry Sexton’s party and Jeremiah, the other half to dive in and wallow shamelessly.

“Got ID?” a mellow voice addressed him. The bartender, a slight man with a thick moustache, had materialized as if by condensation. Gabriel had no idea what to say, his nerves were a tangled knot. “No ID. No service.” The man’s face hung impenetrable. “Sorry,” and awaited Gabriel’s departure.

“Aw, let him stay.” The whisky-sodden cowboy two stools away lurched to uncertain life, when, as if on cue, Wayne with the laughing eyes and the black-tufted hair sidled up to the barman.

“It’s okay, Jack, he’s with me.” And before twelve words had crossed the bar, a full brown bottle sat foaming at Gabriel’s elbow.

The conversation — with Wayne, with the glowing cowboy, with sundry others who drifted up and drifted off — meandered around Gabriel’s sultry beauty, desirability. And as it roamed, so did Gabriel’s focus, drawn to the small dance floor just beyond Wayne’s left shoulder.

One meal from emaciation, a tall figure reeled about like a devotee in the throes of charismatic entrancement. Two features about this person struck Gabriel as most arresting,
and most disturbing: he was the only other Indian in the room, and he was neither male nor female. Or perhaps both. The creature was blessed or cursed, one of God’s more vicious jokes, the soul of a woman trapped in the body of a man. He willed the creature away; he-she should leave, disappear, disintegrate.

Instead, his eyes remained hostage as, inch by inch, the dancer extracted a threadbare white feather boa from a sleeve, as if for Gabriel’s exclusive view. What did he have in mind? A striptease? A disappearing act? Suicide by hanging? Perhaps. For the man-woman was wrapping the wispy garment around his-her neck, but then stopped to wave and twirl its ends flamboyantly about, as though baptizing Gabriel with sprays of holy water, a sorceress, a priestess, clandestinely reviving a sacrament from some dangerous religion. Would God, in all his wisdom and power, not have good reason for peopling his Earth with such bold freakishness?

Gabriel found himself in a wood-panelled living room. Somehow, time had passed through him. A dozen other men were present, that much he remembered. Coats, shirts, jeans, underwear, socks lay scattered on the floor, over chair backs, across coffee tables. Everywhere he looked, naked limb met naked limb met naked limb, an unceasing domino effect of human flesh, smell, fluid. Whisky, beer, wine swirled, splashed like blood, smoke from marijuana rose like incense.

And the body of the caribou hunter’s son was eaten,
tongues writhing serpent-like around his own, breath mingling with his, his orifices punctured and repunctured, as with nails.

And through it all, somewhere in the farthest reaches of his senses, the silver cross oozed in and out, in and out, the naked body pressing on his lips, positioning itself for entry. Until, upon the buds that lined his tongue, warm honey flowed like river water over granite.

T
he Winnipeg Central Library saved Jeremiah Okimasis from killing himself that spring.

For if he hadn’t come across, by accident, the record-listening booths, he would never have discovered the antidote to the suicide-inducing loneliness of city Saturdays. There, that first dream-and-music-filled day, he had whiled away the hours, at times near tears, visualizing himself on stages from Leningrad to Rome. How, after all this time, could he have missed such a gold mine? From then on, Saturday would not be Saturday without the George Street edifice.

On his third visit, on a day so sombre the clouds were shaped like coffins, he was on his way to drown himself in the bittersweet melodies of Chopin’s mazurkas when avoiding North Main Street became an absolute necessity. If only for the champion of the world, the caribou hunter Abraham Okimasis, would Jeremiah live beyond age eighteen. Which
was how, slinking down an unfamiliar street, he came upon a sound that would have made the dead Polish composer rise from his grave in protest.

Inside a church, a pail was being banged, with maddening insistence, to accompany a terrible yowling. Dogs? In church? Were southern city animals trained to sing, even if it was some primitive, half-formed species of tune? Loping up the concrete steps two by two, he didn’t even see the sign above the entrance.

What he saw took him by complete surprise. For where pews should have been — with mutts in choirboy regalia singing praise to the good God on high — bobbed a clutch of feather-tufted dancers, while watching from the sides stood Indians civilized enough for jeans and other human dress such as T-shirts.

Had he just walked into a Buffalo Bill Wild West extravaganza? A John Wayne movie? Where were the horses, the tired pioneers, the circle of dusty chuckwagons? And where was the howling and the pounding coming from? From the middle of the circle these paint-streaked warmongers were describing with a pointless shuffle? Or might this be a fair, like the Red River Ex, where one could pay a dime, shoot a medicine man dead, and win a Huckleberry Hound the size of a moose?

He scanned the sanctuary for a shooting gallery, slot machines, wheels of fortune, even merry-go-rounds and Wild Mouse rides. But no, the place was more funeral than fair. But for the refreshment stand, he would have left at
once; a Mr. Big, at least, might justify ten minutes of Chopin thrown to the wind.

Gnawing at the candy bar, Jeremiah leaned against a pillar and watched the spectacle. On a wind-blown plain, back-lit by a sunset, an orchestra tremoloing away behind a grassy knoll, such dross might pass for something. But, confined by the walls of this church gone to seed, blasted by fluorescence, the outline of a giant crucifix high above the place where the altar should have been, it looked downright perverse. Who did these people think they were, attempting to revive dead customs in the middle of a city, on the cusp of the twenty-first century? Bored, he polished off his snack, threw the wrapper on the floor, and made for the exit.

“Oh my gawd, it
is
you!” the voice, at his back, resonated. He turned. And would have burst out in hysterics if his mouth hadn’t been a mire of chocolate, caramel, and nuts. For there, likewise jostled by the burgeoning throng, stood Amanda Clear Sky as the Princess Pocahontas. “I don’t believe it! I don’t be —”

“Amanda?” Jeremiah squinted at the spectre. “Is that you? In that … get-up?” stopping himself just this side of the adjective “ridiculous.”

“What do you mean, ‘in that get-up’? This is my regalia, my dancing outfit. This is
moi
.” Poutily, she planted hands on hips. “Where’s
your
get-up, Mr. Northern Manitoba, your moccasins, your plumage, your
noble
Cree heritage?” Her laugh bounced like bubbles from one wall of his heart to the other.

“Disney Indians,” he scoffed, “Hollywood Indians dress like that, dance like, sing like …”

She rolled her eyes in melodrama fashion. “Oh, forget it. You got my invitation. You’re here. And God up in the clouds is smiling on her people.” And she laughed again, though uneasily.

Then he remembered the lime-green notice. He almost fell backwards, it was all so ludicrous.

“So?” With a saucy grin, the dusky Indian maid held out a slender hand, “Wanna dance?”

“Me?” Discomfort speedily truncated by a flushed-faced embarrassment. “Dance? I don’t think so.”

“Come on!” She grabbed his hand, her breath all cinnamon. He pulled it free.

“You just told me I’m not dressed for —”

“You don’t have to be.” Grabbing both his hands this time, she started dragging him. “Not for the inter-tribal, anyways,” evidently the dance a deep male voice was announcing on a microphone. “Come on!” People were not only staring, for God’s sake, they were pointing, laughing! “Come on, come on, come on, come on!”