Kiss of the Fur Queen (20 page)

When the roaring in his ears subsided, Jeremiah was lying on the floor, Gabriel standing over him, his face smeared bloody.

Clutching at his belly, Jeremiah whimpered, “What would Dad say?” His body went limp, his voice sepulchral, “Sick. That’s what he’d call —”

Gabriel landed with the whole of his weight. He would gouge out his brother’s eyes. Where was a knife, a screwdriver, a pencil? Fine, he would use his naked fingers. “And you,” between pummels, he spat, “how can can you still listen to their sick propaganda? After what they did to us?”

With his last drop of rage, Jeremiah pulled Gabriel’s neck to breaking point, then hissed into his ear: “Is big, eh? Is big.”

“Noooooo!” Gabriel smashed his elbow into Jeremiah’s face. “I. Am gonna break your arm. You will never, ever play another note on that fucking piano.”

Atop the Yamaha upright, the Fur Queen smiled.

G
abriel watched lather travel from his chest down his belly to the forested isle from which a quivering spire protruded — most majestically, so had sworn the hordes of pilgrims. He hadn’t been back to the apartment in three months.

“Gabriel,” through the double barrier of door and shower torrent, Gregory was almost inaudible, “telephone!”

“So,” Jeremiah’s voice was still scarred by grievous injury, “you coming?”

“Would I miss it?” Gabriel’s voice may have been chirpy, but a plum-sized lump had rammed into his throat. “But I’m leaving right after.”

“Leaving?” This was new. “You’re not coming to the reception?” If I win? Jeremiah ached to add.

“I’m moving to Toronto. Leaving tomorrow. Eight
P.M.”
There. Had he thrown that off with sufficient nonchalance? “With Gregory.” Gabriel shut his eyes, waiting for the blast.

“Gabriel! The concert’s tomorrow night, not afternoon!”

“Gee, Jeremiah …” His cheeks flooded crimson. “Didn’t you get my note?”

What note? Had one come? If so … Time. Gabriel needed time.

“Gabriel,” pleaded Jeremiah, “I’ve been working towards this for fifteen years. Mom and Dad and the rest of them, they’re a thousand miles away. You’re the only family I’m gonna have …”

“Just a sec,” said Gabriel and put a hand over the mouthpiece. “Greg, it’s Jerem —”

“I know.” Gregory slid a Gitane between his lips.

“It’s about this competition … I made a mistake about the time and —”

“Plane tickets read tomorrow night, 8:15. I have appointments next morning.”

“Greg, please. We can at least change my ticket.”

A jet of cigarette smoke enveloped, then swallowed, then obliterated Gabriel.

T
ry as he might to think exclusively of the technical complexities of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s “Preludes,” all Jeremiah could think of was airports, planes, taxis. Even the long red carpet that led to the stage, and the double row of miniature floor lights, looked like a runway. Fine, he was a big, fat jumbo, taking off for parts unknown.

Pale white faces hovered, staring, probing, judging him. Just who the hell did this cheeky brown man imagine himself to be, walking to the spotlight with such a graceless gait, such an unmusicianly trundle? For since his fluke acceptance into the final round one week earlier, controversy had raged.

It was said, among the judges — being from England, they had to be excused their ignorance of facts aboriginal — that he was a Commanche Indian whose forebears had performed the chase scenes in the movie
Stagecoach
. Others claimed he was Apache and therefore a cousin to that drunken lout Geronimo.
Still others claimed that he came from the country’s most remote and primitive hinterlands, where his father slaughtered wild animals and drank their blood in appeasement of some ill-tempered pagan deity. And all because this tuxedo-clad, flowing-haired Indian youth — Apache, Commanche, Kickapoo — was about to perform Rachmaninoff.

When Jeremiah sat down at the nine-foot Bösendorfer — the bench still hot from the ardent posteriors of such up-and-coming stars of the keyboard as John H. Smith, Mary Perkins, and that Ukrainian upstart, Inka Radnychka — the silence was so thick that a Winnipeg
Tribune
photographer took a picture of it for the next day’s paper. And through it all, Jeremiah could see nothing but his brother, emerging from Mayfair Towers, laden with luggage, a taxi waiting, a gentleman in midnight black two steps behind him, as in an ecclesiastic rite.

Jeremiah raised his left hand. Their fingers extended, it came down, hitting with a bang an octave: B-flat.

At first, the process was laborious. His left wrist still ached, though Gabriel, thank the living Lord Jesus, had only sprained it. His constitution, moreover — of an athlete, a fisherman, the doctor had squeaked — had ensured that it sprang back to normal in no time flat. The ideal therapy, the doctor had merrily capped off the consultation, would be “something like playing the piano, preferably daily.” After prolonged visualization of amputation, Jeremiah had been so relieved he had rushed into Our Lady of Lourdes on the way back to the university for ten quick Hail Marys.

He shifted from B-flat to its relative minor.

Gabriel, in the back seat of a sleek black taxi, a chestnut-haired, emerald-eyed Svengali. With a yank into the sun-splashed key of D, Jeremiah sent the vision reeling like a drunk into the shadows.

Decibel by decibel, he built his crescendo on the runway of Winnipeg International Airport. The pianist was so angry, he screamed, causing the trio of white-haired judges to remark, at the reception afterwards, on this contestant’s positively animal passion. Never had they heard a melody line so scorching.

The Air Canada DC-10 sank its talons into the pianist’s heart, its wing-lights twinkling, its wheel-spin accelerating, the rubber losing contact with the tarmac.

Jeremiah played a northern Manitoba shorn of its Gabriel Okimasis, he played the loon cry, the wolves at nightfall, the aurora borealis in Mistik Lake; he played the wind through the pines, the purple of sunsets, the zigzag flight of a thousand white arctic terns, the fields of mauve-hued fireweed rising and falling like an exposed heart.

Straddling the back of Achak, his pet brown eagle, Gabriel curved sadly over the office towers of Winnipeg, the Jubilee Concert Hall a candle-lit basilica, his brother’s octaves the hooves of a thousand caribou surrounding, enveloping him, crying, “Gabriel, please, please, don’t leave me!”

Jeremiah clung to the ivory until his knuckles equalled them in whiteness. These weren’t keys on a piano but a length of curved, peeled spruce, the handlebar of a sled. Mist rose,
silence paralysed the air. Where was he? What was that? The cracking of spring ice on Mistik Lake?

These weren’t dogs pulling at his sled, these were young, naked men, winged like eagles, straining at the harness, panting out whorls of vapour. And at the lead, where Tiger-Tiger should be labouring, his little brother, cutting through swirling clouds, sailing past the moon for the planet Jupiter. The cities of the world twinkled at his feet — Toronto, New York, London, Paris: the maw of the Weetigo, Jeremiah dreamt, insatiable man-eater, flesh-devourer, following his brother in his dance.

Then Jeremiah saw it, or thought he could: the Fur Queen’s cape — the northern lights — the finish line was near! And there she was, the Fur Queen herself, smiling from the great dome of space, holding out the legendary silver chalice.

Hands reached for him, clutched at his arms, his shoulders, his back. Champagne glasses, cameras, microphones were aimed at him. Men with notepads and pencils, women with pens and large red moving mouths, babbling in this language of the Englishman, hard, filled with sharp, jagged angles.

Something about “Jeremiah Okimasis, twenty years old.” Something about “Jeremiah Okimasis, from the Eemanapiteepitat Indian Reserve.” Something having to do with “Jeremiah Okimasis, first Indian to win this gruelling contest in its forty-seven-year history …”

“Your cheating heart …,” bled Hank Williams’s wailing tenor.

Where was Gabriel? Didn’t he come here on Saturday nights with his cheating heart in search of what, diversion? Inspiration? God the Father? Proud King Lucifer?

The table was a battlefield of beer glasses, surrounding a silver bowl, the Crookshank Memorial Trophy, the launching pad for many a concert artist. So drunk that only the starch of his tuxedo collar — soiled, punctured by a cigarette — held up his head, Jeremiah stared at his reflection in the trophy. Try as he might to will Gabriel into its smoke-obscured universe, the image remained infuriatingly alone. Beyond it, across the room, drunken Indians as far as the eye could see.

He had tried. Tried to change the meaning of his past, the roots of his hair, the colour of his skin, but he was one of them. What was he to do with Chopin? Open a conservatory on Eemanapiteepitat hill? Whip its residents into the Cree Philharmonic Orchestra?

Oops. A broken beer glass. Hey! What more appropriate tool with which to bid the noble instrument farewell. He lay his left hand on the table and, with his right, raised the shard. First, he would slice into the thumb.

“Oogimow! Oogimow!”
the voice high-pitched, yet strangely euphonious.
“Tantee kageegimootee-in anima misti-mineeg’wachi-gan?”
Cree? In Winnipeg? Why not? He was, after all, in the Hell Hotel.

Teetering among the chairs and tables, Evelyn Rose McCrae smiled her gap-toothed smile; long-lost daughter of Mistik Lake, her womb crammed with broken beer bottles. A white fur cape fell away from her shoulders, her
forehead rimmed by a Great Bear formation of seven glimmering stars.

“I won it,” Jeremiah slurred, “playing the piano. See?” He showed her his left thumb, bleeding from the nick. Evelyn Rose lurched forward and laughed, now Madeline Jeanette Lavoix, erstwhile daughter of Mistik Lake, skewered in the sex by fifty-six thrusts of a red-handled Phillips screwdriver, a rose of legend.

“Can I touch it?” cried Madeline Jeanette. “Can I play with it?” Again, she laughed, and fell across Jeremiah’s table.

“You can even sit on it if you want,” slurred Jeremiah. “Have yourself a good long pee.” Madeline Jeanette and Evelyn Rose laughed together, their voice one voice.

And, suddenly, the Madonna of North Main stood before him, the sad blue plastic rose in her hair, peeking through the star tiara. Twenty-seven months’ pregnant now, her belly protruded ten feet, translucent, something inside stabbing, slashing, only the skull vaguely human.

“Hey, Luce!” she cackled to someone way across the room. “You ass-fuck devil, you! Come on, take a pictcha!” Then, with a sigh as vast as the north, she heaved the trophy to her milk-heavy breasts and grabbed Jeremiah. “You make me so proud to be a fuckin’ Indian, you know that?”

“Y
ou see,” Jimmy Roger Buck gurgled deep, wet, and, Jeremiah imagined, slime green-yellow. “If us Indians are the thirteenth tribe of Israel,” the chubby brown Saulteaux rolled the phlegm around his mouth, “then we oughta be going back to Israel.” He spat. “Before the Apocalits, Jeremiah Okimasis. We got to get there before the Apocalits.”

Jeremiah would have burst out laughing if his jawbone wasn’t frozen near solid, his skull pulsating with a hangover that he swore had haunted him for six years. “Are you kidding?” his teeth clattered. “Them Palestinians would laugh us clean out of the country.” Steam rose from the sidewalks, the streets, from buildings, enshrouding the slumbering city in a ghostly fog.

“Palace Indians!” Jimmy Roger Buck jumped on the word. “See? Told you they have Indians in Israel.” Jimmy Roger Buck’s humour, more potent than Chopin and Bach and Rachmaninoff combined.

“Hup!” Jimmy Roger Buck exclaimed merrily. “Looks like we got a live one.” The two men flicked on their flashlights and, like burglars on the prowl, slunk down the steaming passageway.

“I wouldn’t talk so fast,” Jeremiah whispered back. “Remember that guy last year?”

“Deader than a door knot,” concurred Jimmy Roger Buck as they approached the large lump. “Careful now” For one such lump had recently leapt at its saviour with a kick so accurate a testicle had burst, so it was said in Street Patrol circles.

As the skulking duo were about to poke the body with their toes, it exploded with a megalithic fart.

The rotund Jimmy Roger Buck broke into a back-alley jig. “It’s alive, it’s alive, it’s alive-alive-oh!” The stench was so hideous it was a while before either could squat down for a closer look.

Her ragged skirt hiked almost to her hips, the woman lay beside a toppled garbage can whose multicoloured spew included a rat’s frozen corpse. An object by her head caught Jeremiah’s eye. Metal. Empty. Lysol.

“All right, up and at ’em.” Jimmy Roger Buck shook the heap with a heavy-mitted hand. No response.

“Come on, girl,” Jeremiah pleaded, “you’re gonna freeze to death out here.” The woman was ageless, her face a ground-beef patty, holes for eyes.

“Come on, Jimmy Roger Buck. Help me,” and, together, the men hauled on the passed-out wretch, “heavy as a tombstone,” as Jimmy Roger Buck would trumpet later to the staff at the
centre. The team had to grunt for a good minute before the bulk achieved enough verticality to be dragged down the alley to the old van. “Winnipeg Indian Friendship Centre, Street Patrol,” it said on the side. Jeremiah had always thought the sign should include, “See a passed-out Indian? Call us first.”

One more grunt and Jimmy Roger Buck reached for the van’s sliding door. The hulk lurched forward, Jeremiah jerked her back, and, with a
thunk
, she landed with her face across his chest. What was that? Something wet? Across his coat? Then he saw it: white lumps of starch, peas half-digested, mutilated hunks of what must have been roast beef, all swimming in a tomato-red goo with stripes like pus.

“Mmmm,” said Jimmy Roger Buck, “jus in time for breckfas.”