Kiss of the Fur Queen (23 page)

From the heart of a fire, an old woman blinked. Each time she spoke, her mouth spouted smoke. To the brothers Okimasis, the face kept melting and regenerating, melting and regenerating, the eyes and mouths of a thousand women.

“That winter,” the thousand-faced creature intoned, “the caribou failed to arrive. People in the north grew ill from malnutrition. Or starved. Then came news of men from the south,” the old woman’s voice soothing yet disturbing, “men with the ability to talk to God directly, people said.”

The drums had stopped, but eight hours of their nonstop presence had implanted their blood-like pulse in the marrow, and the brothers Okimasis spent that evening — and the night, the week that followed — drifting in a dream-like euphoria. Poowow, to dream,
poowamoowin
, the act of dreaming.

“Hope rose on Mistik Lake — these men might save them. But Chachagathoo, the shaman, warned that
K’si mantou
, the Great Spirit, would not abandon them.” The brothers cast each other fearful glances: that name, the name that as children they had been forbidden to speak, the name with
machipoowamoowin
, bad dream power. So that’s who the woman had been, a shaman. Except what in the name of Jesus was a shaman? And why was it suddenly so cold?

“But the hunger became so severe,” Ann-Adele Ghostrider’s mouth exuded flame now, “first one died. Then another. And more. Until one day, a man became possessed by Weetigo, the
spirit who feasts on human flesh. At this time, the first priest arrived on Mistik Lake.”

Like a grass snake, as Ann-Adele spoke, a sound insinuated itself into the hush. Where was it coming from? The forest? Across the channel? The bowels of the earth? And what was it? More drumming? Or someone pounding at some great steel door, demanding it be opened?

Gabriel was perplexed, but Jeremiah knew. Suddenly, he was dying of thirst.

“The crazed man was brought to the priest, who proclaimed his soul to be possessed by Satan. But the shaman said no. When she started curing the man, when she started exorcising the Weetigo, the priest stopped her. The man died. And the priest accused the shaman of witchcraft. He had her sent to jail in Winnipeg. There, in despair, she hung herself.”

Like breath, a gust of wind resuscitated the dying fire. The flames hissed. What was that it had just said?

Now the wailing was coming from the fire. Her long hair flowing, her body draped in a diaphanous white robe, an ancient woman surfaced from the coals and ascended to the sky, screaming with the agony of being roasted alive. And the brothers heard the coals moaning with the voices of women:
“Peeyatuk. Noos’sim, peeyatuk …”

“Witch,” Jeremiah whispered. He had to get out of here, right this minute. “Witch,” he repeated, louder this time. “She was a witch. Chachagathoo was a witch.” His mind, his heart were on fire.

“No!”
Ann-Adele Ghostrider startled them with the passion,
and the pain, inside her voice. “No, no, no! Chachagathoo was the last shaman in that part of the world, the last medicine woman, the last woman priest!”

“But our parents told us that she was an evil woman,” Gabriel argued. “We weren’t ever to speak her name.”

“Your parents’ generation? In the north? Lied to and lied to and lied to!”

“I think … I think I’ve had enough … for one night.” And the darkness swallowed Jeremiah.

Gabriel shrugged, wanting to explain to their host that this was simply Jeremiah’s way. What he saw, however, was her sadness, the exhaustion. And the flames inside her pupils, the burning shaman ascending to the stars.

Then it struck him: if
machipoowatnoowin
, bad dream power, was obviously powerful enough to snuff out a human life, then would not
mithoopoowamoowin
, good dream power, be as strong?

S
nuggled like a teddy in his sleeping bag, Gabriel looked up. Askew as it was, the roof was a roof, thank God, for he and Jeremiah had almost destroyed the tent trying to erect it. Their excuse, to amused bystanders, had been that the synthetic material that came pre-packaged with shish-kebab skewers for pegs took them by surprise. “In the old days,” they had explained with beet-red faces, “tents were canvas and much more cooperative,” and you carved your own pegs from stalks of willow. When their fire — for heating their one can of beans — had ended up a poignant little smoke curl, their audience had rewarded their Indian skills with an invitation to supper, thank the living Lord Jesus, for otherwise, they would have had to drive all the way to Espanola for chicken chop suey.

But where was Jeremiah? For if Wasaychigan Hill, being an Indian reserve, was anything like Eemanapiteepitat,
would it not be as volatile, as unpredictable, as insane? What if he got shot point-blank in the forehead like their brother, William William?

Gabriel ripped open the zipper of the sleeping bag and patted in the dark for his jeans. How could good Cree campers forget a tool as traditional as a flashlight?

Wasaychigan Hill had not seen a man named Jeremiah Okimasis, Gabriel was informed at several doors, at several points on the main dirt road, “but check the forty-niner,” a semi-nude, Rubenesque femme fatale named Gazelle suggested. “Lapatak St. Pierre’s old corn field. All you gotta do is follow that pounding rhythm. In fact, I’ll take you there myself, big boy.” She raked his genitalia with glazed-over eyes.

Gabriel pleaded crabs, waited for cloud cover, and followed the pounding rhythm, away from moonlight and the hussy, through a forest so thick he wondered when a bear would tap him on the shoulder to borrow ten dollars.

Finally, a field, at its centre a fire so large it could have roasted covens of witches. Against it, silhouettes — of dogs? wolves? — baying at the moon, or crying for blood. The sound now like the gates of a prison clanging and clanging.

Four hundred young men and women stood around an aged Buick, those within reach hand-thumping at its hood, its roof, its trunk.

Gabriel circled the demonized assembly. Poowow, to dream. So this was a forty-niner, where drink, drugs, and song swept senses to a plane where dreams loomed clear, visceral. For not
one among these hundreds was here, in Lapatak St. Pierre’s old corn field, on Manitoulin Island, on the planet.

His brother stood sucking back a beer. The glow from the fire made the side of his face almost reptilian. He tossed the empty bottle and took four uncertain steps to the cases on the ground, torn open, half-finished, ravaged.

“Haven’t you had enough?”

Jeremiah looked up. So, his
virginal
baby brother had hunted him down, as expected. Still, he could not think what to say. Could he even talk?

“Well?”

From the sky, black fell like an axe, Jeremiah’s spirit fish guts crawling with maggots.

“Say,” an oily male voice oozed in, “aren’t you Gabriel Okimasis, the famous Indian
ballet
dancer?” A short distance off, four ripe young men grappled with delirium, their glassy eyes fixed on Gabriel. What was a Cree Nijinsky to say? Yes, I am? How very nice to meet you all? Which one of you would like to join me in an unlubricated, nipple-shredding, scrotum-banging pas de deux?

“So,” a lanky punk drawled, on an intake of marijuana smoke, “where’s your panty-hose, Flossy?”

Gabriel looked to Jeremiah:
weechee-in
.

But though the pall had lifted from Jeremiah’s eyes, the dryness in his throat had thickened, the perfect alibi. For how else would he face the truth: that he was embarrassed to be caught in cahoots with a pervert, a man who fucked other men? On an Indian reserve, a Catholic reserve? He
reached into the box, grabbed two bottles, and walked into the night.

“Yeah. I seen him in them magazines,” a third young man sneered.

“I seen him on TV.”

Gabriel looked into their eyes, and was taken completely by surprise. For where he had anticipated hatred, what he saw, instead, was terror. Of what? The fact that the flesh of the mother had formed their flesh, female blood ran thick inside their veins? Terror that the emotion of a woman, the spirit of a woman, lived inside them?

“Told you it was him, prancin’ around out there.”

Bottle in hand, the biggest, meanest, the most terrified and stupid, took a step forward. Whereupon Gabriel turned, and walked sadly back to the campsite.

“Hey, faggot! Where the fuck you think you’re goin’?”

“Hey, shaman! Where the fuck you think you’re goin’?” the ragged old drunk had shrieked as she fell on him. Jeremiah had dislodged himself, though his throat, he swore, bore the imprint of her fangs, even as her cheesy breath rankled at his nostril hairs, and her cackle, like a trapped fly, buzzed against the drum of his left ear.

His perch atop the picnic table seemed precarious at best, Jeremiah unaware that his feet were splayed, like rubber, on a bench somewhere below. What time was it? How had he gotten here? Who had given him this mickey of rye? Where was a cigarette? An oscillating ball of fire was all that he could see,
in the distance, though his ears vaguely discerned the howling of wolves beyond the drumming of his heart.

Suddenly, astride the feathery back of Peesim, his pet brown eagle, he could see all of North America thirty miles below.

There they were, the caribou, feeding at the northern extremity of the barrens this summer, the tundra a ripple of wind-blown fireweed, the icebergs tall as basilicas.

And then Peesim was gone and Jeremiah was falling, hurtling through the great womb of space, aiming straight for a cotton-candy bank of snow, when his head grazed something. Like an aluminum plate, the moon twirled down, down, ending its plummet with a clatter against the leg of a picnic table. Holding his ringing head, Jeremiah rolled in the grass and groaned.

“Get out!” Hot, rank breath blasted at his face. “Get out! Oh, evil spirit, get out!”

She was back! To feast on his flesh, devour his soul, her crown, her white fur coat, her eyes of fire. And she was clutching at his throat, squeezing it shut. Chachagathoo, rising from her grave.

“Get away from me.” Like a two-year-old, Jeremiah sobbed. “Get away, get away,
awus, awus, awus!”
One hand hit the lid of a trash can toppled over next to his head.

“Leave this body at once!” No. It was the monster gnawing at his innards, devouring him live, that Chachagathoo had come to get, not him. Except, she wasn’t grimacing now. “Get up! Eeeeeeeeeeeeee-ha-ha-ha!”

Laughing? What on earth could she find comical? The pustules on her face were melting, dripping down her cheeks, her neck. And, like an eggshell, her wrinkled face was cracking, another face looming from the egg’s interior.

“I command you to get up!” the new face pealed, the laugh much higher this time, and younger.
“Get up!”

Only make-up? Thank God, its only … “Amanda?” Again, the woman shook him by the shoulders. “Amanda Clear Sky?”

“Does your bum hum when you cum?” Her breath all cinnamon, she laughed. Where had he heard those words before? “Granny told me you …” She couldn’t stop laughing. “You should have seen yourself fall off that picnic table, the garbage can lid went eeeeeeeeeeee-ha-ha-ha!”

I
n
a kitchen with room for twenty, ninety happy people stomped and jiggled with such fury that the floor was likely to collapse into the basement, so warned the crusty old veteran who had survived such catastrophes in wartime Naples. Fortunately, “the Wasaychigan Hill Philharmonic Orkestraw” was small: a banjo, a fiddle, and “my dead wife’s tired old washboard.”

“No, no, no,” the button-eyed codger shouted at Jeremiah so his elfin voice could be heard, “not Melodius! Alodius! Alodius Clear Sky! It sounds like an ointment, but it’s better than being named Bob White, eh?” Jigging so fast that her face was a blur, a stick-thin woman named Annie Cook bumped Alodius who bumped Jeremiah who bumped a jelly-bellied man with a rolling pin. Jeremiah was apologizing profusely, to a baker named Zachary as he learned, when Amanda came sailing through the horde with steaming mugs of coffee held high.

“Dad,” she gushed as she handed one to Alodius, “Jeremiah is the first Indian concert pianist in the history of the world.” Jeremiah just had time for one quick blush and the second mug when Alodius grabbed him. Like Moses in the book, the white-haired widower parted the sea of raging human flesh.

“Sit,” he barked.

Barely held together by Scotch tape and wire, the old, brown piano grinned bad yellow teeth at no one in particular. Jeremiah wedged himself between the bench and the instrument, and sat.

“Play,” barked Amanda’s father. In this house of drink-mad Ojibways, what choice did a lost Cree soul have? Extending an index finger, he tweaked middle C; the three strings of the note snarled back with a virtual tone cluster. Jeremiah winced. He considered clawing his way into some twelve-tone Schoenberg but, instead, sat paralysed.

“Come on,” Amanda pleaded.

“But I haven’t touched a piano in ten years.”

“Ten years! Come on, play some —”

“Play the goddamn thing or I’ll throw you out of my house!” roared Alodius, and banged the piano top with such gusto the sound board boomed.

Distraught, Jeremiah waded into Chopin’s Sonata in B-minor, its opening downward four-note arpeggio followed by thick chords ascending and descending simultaneously. The result was criminal. He skipped to the second theme, a passage more lyrical and kinder to the touch. Their bombast
ambushed by a strain so untuned, the Orkestraw plunged into a simmering silence that stopped the dancers cold.

If one ignored the squeaking — a pedal so sick it should have been shot — Chopin’s music was now the only sound. One by one, the rag-taggle bunch, with apple-red cheeks and beer-filled eyes, crept up to the piano and peered like gnomes past the shoulder of a pianist who wanted to be dead. Pair by pair, eyes turned slit-like, brows scrunched, thick lips puckered like assholes.

“That there is whiteman music,” charged a middle-aged man with a nose like a baseball.

“Play some honky-tonk,” Amanda tried.