Kiss of the Fur Queen (21 page)

The woman was moaning now, and spluttering something to do with
Machimantou
— Satan — waiting for her in the Hell Hotel, that she had business with him, owed him something, had to let him fuck her till a dozen baby Satans popped from her cunt.

Jeremiah gazed wanly at the falling snow. How much longer could he endure in this … purgatory? Was six years of scraping drunks off the street not enough? Against the towering silhouette of the dark concert hall, he could see the grey, stoop-shouldered Cree, Sioux, Saulteaux — his people, shuffling, to where? To Israel for the Apocalits?

A bus whooshed by, ferrying the new day’s early workers — short-order cooks, nurses, radio announcers, who knew, maybe even an earnest Cree student on his way to Chopin.

The van kicked to life, taking client 2,647 off into the dark February morning. His fingers stiffened to claws, gnarled from the cold, the twenty-six-year-old Cree social worker gulped from a flask.

“N
othing we can do now, us old folk.” The hunter’s voice wound its way through the candle light. “Not one goddamn thing.” Jeremiah had travelled so quickly to be here, and so suddenly, that his head was still a whirl, his body still sitting on that plane. Across the old man’s craggy face, Mistik Lake shimmered, ice covered, studded with islands, a straggle of caribou crossing from the mainland.

Why wasn’t Gabriel here? How can he be in goddamn Tokyo dancing for the goddamn Japanese?

“So much fighting on our reserves now, so much hate, rage.” The ailing man had lost his eldest son, William William, thirty-seven, to a bullet at a Jane Kaka drink fest. “Who is going to get us out of this stinking mess, huh? Who?”

Above the elder’s defiantly full head of silver hair, his last-born climbed the stars, a crescent moon strapped across his bare chest. A wild-maned, tuxedoed Jeremiah pounded at a
grand piano whose rumble the patriarch would never hear. Next to the brothers’ portraits sat a third: Tiger-Tiger regal at his feet, the world champion stood beaming, receiving his trophy — and his kiss.

“You’re not going to die!” Jeremiah cried suddenly.
“Papa
, you’re not —”

“Ash! Kagitoo!”
Mariesis Okimasis snapped. “Of course he’s not going to die!” Her fingers a jangle of rosary beads, the admonishment left her current Hail Mary unscathed.

The ninety-seven relatives who stood crushed like maggots around the diminutive matriarch agreed: they would have none of death. And none stood more firm-jawed than Kookoos Cook.

“Now I may have reached the eighty-sixth year of my life,” the grizzled geezer would proselytize to all daft enough to listen, “but look at me. Feisty as a furball, tricky as a trout.” With that, Kookoos Cook rushed out the room so nimbly the candles had to fight for their lives. Briefly, the Weetigo stomped across the ceiling.

“Astum,”
rasped Abraham.

Spooked by the shadow, Jeremiah moved his head closer.
“Keegway kaweetamatin.”

But Kookoos Cook came charging back, scraping Abraham’s battered old accordion across the floor like a frozen thigh of caribou.

“Jeremiah Okimasis, goddamn you young pup,” wheezed Uncle Kookoos. “You play one verse of
‘Kimoosoom Chimasoo’
on your father’s old titty tickler and hell be up and jigging
faster than you can say ‘tickle my titties.’ ” The sprightly elf yanked the instrument by its straps and banged it into his nephew’s face.

Mariesis swore she’d stab the pestilence with her rosary crucifix.
“Ash!
Kookoos Cook! Put that
kitoochigan
away
seemak
, right away,
awus!”

The crowd parted, and there, bag and snow-sprinkled beaver hat in hand, stood Gabriel Okimasis, twenty-seven years old, his face blue, his hair a wonderland of icicles. The wind having grounded all air travel north of the fifty-fifth parallel, he had jumped on a Smallwood Lake—to—Wuchusk Oochisk diesel truck and bribed a hunter from his bed to his Ski-Doo, to traverse, by night, seventy-five miles of subarctic lake so brutal they had almost died.

“I never thought I’d see you again,” Abraham whispered, the voice so feeble, Gabriel feared his breath might extinguish it.

From the living room, women could be heard rattling off “pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death” in such breakneck Cree that sparks were seen shooting out of Jane Kaka’s fetid mouth, thanks to Black-eyed Susan Magipom, who, not having spoken to her brother since Father Bouchard’s edict twenty-three years earlier, had finally dared enter his house with the whispered theory that five thousand Hail Marys recited quick-as-a-mink was the one sure way of scaring “the fucking shit right out of death.”

“I’ve been … busy,” Gabriel finally replied.

“Busy? With … what?”

“Dancing.”

“Dancing? Hmph. Are you … married?” Another jab of pain. “Do you … have … children?”

The words jammed up in Gabriel’s throat. He was going to retch.

What choice did Jeremiah have? With his eyes and his heart, he took his brother’s hand. Together, they would risk hastening the old man’s death, together, the brothers Okimasis would kill their father.

“Papa, kigiskisin na …?”
Gabriel’s Cree was rusty, but functional still. “Remember … when you sent us … to that school, when we were —”

The door behind him opened, the smell of pipe tobacco billowed, and in strode Father Bouchard, a worn leather satchel dangling from a hand. The still handsome priest stood darkly radiant, his crucifix wedged like a handgun in the sash of his cassock.

Knowing a dying man when he saw one, the ageing priest nodded. Once. Which was enough to send Mariesis and Annie Moostoos zooming to the dresser. Off came the candles, the photographs. The priest rummaged in his satchel and presto: a stole and a maniple in black, gold-tasselled taffeta thrown over starched white surplice, an altar bearing three blessed candles, paten and chalice, a small bottle filled with holy water, and, in left hand, a black missal.

The priest paused to whisper at Mariesis, who shuffled to the bed and whispered to Gabriel. Gabriel shook his head. She tugged at his cardigan. Gabriel pulled free.

“But, my son,” Mariesis exploded, “your father’s soul will burn in hell if he doesn’t take his last communion!”

“He’s not finished talking to us,” Gabriel shot back, suddenly gripped by hatred of the priest, of the power he wielded.

Father Bouchard knew precisely whom Gabriel’s fury was meant for. But he knew, too, that Holy Orders were as impregnable as granite.

“ ‘My son.’ ” Abraham startled the assembly with a voice surprisingly strong. “ ‘The world has become too evil. With these magic weapons, make a new world,’ said the mother to the hero, the Son of Ayash.”

Shocked that this most Catholic of men should resort to pagan tales for the third time that his sons could recall, they moved onto the bed.

“So the Son of Ayash took the weapons and, on a magic water snake, journeyed down into the realm of the human soul, where he met evil after …” Slipping into the world of dreams, the hunter beheld the Son of God nailed to his gold-plated crucifix, the priest’s Gallic visage hovering like a storm cloud.

“This I know.” In their grief, what the brothers heard, and remember, of the priest’s reading was: “That my Avenger liveth, and he, at the Last, will take his stand upon the Earth …”

“Evil after evil,” continued the hunter, “the most fearsome among them the man who ate human flesh,” the Cree descant whirring, light as foam, over the English dirge. The priest plumbed the chalice, emerged with the host to place
it on the hunter’s tongue. The tongue darted out, grabbed the body, flicked back in. The lips fell closed, the hunter ceased to breathe.

Taking bottle in hand, Father Bouchard cast three sprays of holy water on the death mask.

The Fur Queen raised her lips from the world champion’s cheek, exhaling a jet of pure white vapour.

O
ne week later, mist on Mistik Lake thinned to reveal a man on a Ski-Doo hauling a sledful of firewood. Off Chipoocheech Point, he came upon a body lying face down in the snow. If Uncle Wilpaletch hadn’t found him, Jeremiah Okimasis would have frozen to a corpse by nightfall, is what they say.

It had all begun innocently enough at Kookoos Cook’s kitchen table, after the funeral and Gabriel rushing off to reconnect with the Gregory Newman Dance Company in San Francisco. Laughing, drink-crazed Cree were tearing through a case of Five Star whisky, Jeremiah keeping up shot for shot while ripping off a Kitty Wells record and ramming in its place Johnny Cash. It had been night then. But Jeremiah recalled waking with a pounding head, splayed on the floor, fully clothed and filthy, and it was day.

He recalled the fresh case of whisky Uncle Kookoos had
banged down at his side, and his aunt Black-eyed Susan Magipom waltzing with the stove, howling along with Loretta Lynn in her off-coloratura soprano, and it was night once more and, suddenly, Happy Doll Magipom had Black-eyed Susan by the hair, banging her head with a piece of firewood and blackening her eyes and the blood was spurting and the screams were piercing and Big Dick McCrae and Bad Robber Gazandlaree were trying to restrain Happy Doll Magipom but couldn’t and, suddenly, it was daylight again.

Jeremiah recalled escaping — Filament Bumperville had charged in with a rifle and shot the cuckoo clock to smithereens — with a bottle and his goose-down parka and finding himself inside a snowfall, a forest of crystals, the hush cathedral-like, as if the world had died.

Where had it come from, this fog? He found himself peering into an endless tunnel, a flame appearing, disappearing, reappearing, teasing him, taunting him. He raised the bottle. His lips had no feeling. The walls of his heart had crumbled. The flame was fading. He would lie down, right there in the knee-deep snow, and sleep forever. Where was he? The edge of the world?

“God! Someone! Help me!” Whose voice was that? It couldn’t be his. It sounded too far away.

“Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ahhhhh,” a giggle insinuated itself into the whorl of mist, throaty, arcing, like notes from a xylophone, as if it gave its owner immense pleasure to hear herself laugh. For it was most definitely a feminine voice.

Who the hell was that? Was he raving like Crazy Salamoo Oopeewaya, arguing with God?

The honeyed giggle swooped again. “Sometimes you humans just make me laugh.”

Jeremiah squinted. He had lost his glasses.

“Hello, Jeremiah,” someone cooed with a voluptuous, full-fleshed languor. Like a curtain, the mist parted. And there, leaning against a grand piano made of ice, stood a torch-singing fox with fur so white it hurt the eyes. “I take it you are
the
Mr. Jeremiah Okimasis?” She was far too spectacular: missile-like tits, ice-blond meringue hair.

Jeremiah rubbed his eyes. Had he died and stumbled into some freakish afterlife? “Who are you?”

“Ohhhh,” the arctic fox flicked at her kewpie-doll lips with a cute pink tongue, puffed on her cigarette-holder, and purred, “Just a showgirl takin’ a break she thought would never get here.” She breathed out a small jet of smoke. “Name’s Maggie. Maggie Sees. It used to be Fred but it bored the hell outta me so I changed.” With an arm sheathed in white chiffon, she flipped her bushy tail, like a boa, over a slender shoulder. Her eyeshadow was so thick she could barely lift the lids. “These audiences are too much for me. If you really wanna know, my little honeypot, they’re a buncha fuckin’ pigs.”

“Do you know how far north we are?”

“Do I know how far north we are?” mimicked the wily little beast in feigned umbrage. “Ha! Where d’ya think I was born? Miami? Where d’ya think my mother was born? Not to
mention my father, my grandmother, my great-grandmother — honeypot, I have ancestors in these parts that go back to when the moon was a zit-faced teenager.” She spat. “What’s the matter? You never seen a girl before?”

“I’m sorry but I’ve just never seen a … a fox that could talk, that’s all.”

“Honeypot, the way you been suckin’ back that whisky these past three days, you’re bound to see a few things you never seen before. C’mon, gimme some o’ that shit.” Jeremiah obliged. The fox tipped the bottle and, delicate as china, took a little sip. “Can’t smear my lipstick,” she tittered, “I’m due back on stage in minutes and wouldn’t you know it, I left my Raspberry Dream back in Vegas, fuuuuck.” She pulled a tissue from her cleavage and dabbed daintily at the corners of her lips.

“May I ask …?”

“Does your bum hum when you cum?”

Jeremiah tried again. “Why are you putting on … a show … five thousand miles north of Caesars Palace?”

The fox flicked the butt from her holder, pulled a fresh doobie from her cleavage, and,
poof!
She was smoking once again. “Because they need me here, honeypot. Name a place, they need me.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Why do you think I put on these faaabulous shows?”

“To entertain?”

“And why do I entertain?”

“Well …”

“Because without entertainment, honeypot, without distraction, without dreams, life’s a drag. No?”

“Well …”

“Without celebration, without magic to massage your tired, trampled-on old soul, it’s all pretty pointless, innit?”

“What’s pointless?”

“Life, honeypot, life.” She sashayed to the piano bench, perched cross-legged in her strapless sheath of white chiffon and Cinderella-petite glass slippers. “Do
you
think there’s a point?”

“Let’s see now.” Jeremiah had to think so hard that his lips disappeared and his forehead turned to corduroy. “You are born. You grow up, you go to school, you work — you work like hell — you get married, sometimes, you raise a family, sometimes, you grow old. And then you die.”

“Exactly. This is what Miss Maggie thinks. We dance, we fight, we cry, make love, we laugh and work and play, we die. Then we wake up, in the dressing room, with make-up all over the goddamn place, sweating so you smell like dog’s crotch. I mean, get over it, Alice. You ain’t got much time before that grand finale. So you get your little Cree ass out there. Just don’t come here wastin’ my time going, ‘Oh, boo-hoo-hoo-hoo, poor me, oh, boo.’ ”