Kiss of the Fur Queen (24 page)

“I can’t.” Jeremiah squirmed.

“Alodius!” trilled a woman in the crowed, “play some real music.”

“Yay, Alodius!” bellowed the assembly. “Play ‘Half a Nageela!’ ”

Jeremiah and Amanda slithered onto a sofa crammed with fifteen Indians jiggling like a great vat of custard. Old Alodius rammed into a “Havah Negilah” so vicious that men’s balls jangled, women’s nipples tittered, and Jesus fell off his wall perch, bounced off the piano, and landed on the floor with a Galilean do-si-do. The dance floor seethed with Clarabelle Cow St. Pierre, Bugs Bunny Starblanket, Minnie Mouse Manitowabi, Big Bum Pegahmagahbow, Petunia Pig Patchnose, all mixed into one riotous, bubbling stew. Like an old wet bitch, the whole house shook.

Then, smooth as an otter, Alodius slid into a sentimental
country waltz. His impromptu band followed, and the crowd mellowed, men and women pairing off intimately, romantically, hornily. The kewpie-doll Philomena M. Moosetail wove her chubby-buttocked, pie-eyed way from the stove to a window with a soup pot clutched to her belly.

“Ever thought you were born on the wrong planet?” Jeremiah asked Amanda, relieved the volume of the music finally permitted conversation. “Into the wrong … era? The wrong …,” he laughed pathetically, “race?” Amanda slid a hand over his as Philomena draped the dirty white curtain across her overpadded shoulders and, with a grunt, wrapped an arm around a prince-like man.

“Hey, Luce,” ululated the Lady Philomena, “C’mon, Lucy, take a pictcha!” With a full-bodied kiss, the Ojibway monarch bestowed the silver bowl on her chosen victor.

“I just couldn’t figure it out. I mean, what the fuck are Indians doing playing —” the camera flashed, Jeremiah resurfaced, “Chopin?”

Amanda was about to speak — to answer his question? Tell him she was tired? Tell him that she loved him? Even she didn’t know — when the piano fell back into its dreamy three-four time.

“Oh, get off your high horse,” she spluttered instead. “Who the hell do you think you are, the Saviour of the Indians?”

Outside the window, a sparrow whistled the day’s first song.

“Come on.” Amanda grunted her way out of the jumble of limbs. “There’s … oof! … something I wanna show you.”
She scooped a black box off the coffee table. Chocolates? Apparently not, if you could go by its label:
Tender Is My Heart:
Episode 12.

“I can’t, Jake,” said the housewife, whose dissimilarity to Amanda was not quite convincing. “I can’t live with you no more.” But Amanda was right; the Cree was not northern Manitoba. Liberally mixed with its sister-language, Ojibway, it was a challenge for Jeremiah. The stress on her face read like a road map.

“I already tole you, Dorothy, baby,” replied her husband, a barrel-chested Indian with a belly like a bean bag, wearily unbuttoning his red flannel shirt-jacket, “it’s over between me and Martha Cheepoogoot. Finished.
Kaput.”
He threw the shirt at a chair, and stood, fuming, in his sweat-stained T-shirt.

“Do you know how many times I’ve heard you say that?” she asked him bitterly, brushed back a tear, slipped her purse strap over one exhausted shoulder, and took a step to the door.

Jeremiah and Amanda lay naked but for a tangled sheet, watching television in a room so white they might have been in a hospital but for the furniture and prints — island fauna gambolling about a northern Arcadia — in this motel ten miles from Wasaychigan Hill. “Dorothy, please? Don’t leave me.”

Jeremiah couldn’t quite believe it: Indian showbiz! And Amanda Clear Sky, an actress, a star!

“Yeah,” she had yawned, “famous from Muskrat Dam to
Bearskin Lake.” The dregs of their breakfast lay scattered on dressers, end-tables, the floor of varnished maple. As the television couple quarrelled on and on, Amanda straddled Jeremiah.

“You are born an artist.” She wiggled her tongue in his ear. “It’s a responsibility, a duty; you can’t run away from it.”

Jeremiah shuddered; a worm was inside him. Or a … No, no, Champion-Jeremiah, we won’t think about that. Not now. Not ever. That door is closed.

Still, he was sure he had just heard skittering. Of what — mice? Bones? And what had he caught a whiff of? What was that mustiness? Mothballs in some long-forgotten holy sacristy? Incense?

“I love …,” he giggled instead, for, at that moment, his groin had turned to ice, “I love … that part, that part where you go …,” he mimicked, badly, “ ‘I can’t, Jake. I can’t live with you no
more.’
” He toppled Amanda and convulsed in the pillow. Amanda was beginning to suspect epilepsy when, sounding like a witch, her television character screamed: “Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!”

“Take that, bitch.” His wife’s hair wound around a fist, Jake banged her face against the fridge. “Now get the fuck out of my house.” He threw her at the door, in his hand a bleeding clump of hair.

Amanda bit Jeremiah’s ear. Half in pain, half in joy, Jeremiah wailed: yes, Father, make me bleed, please, please make me bleed.

“Okay then, bitch,” Amanda parodied her soap opera husband, “get the fuck out of this room and get back to your
piano.” To suffocate the word, and her laugh, Jeremiah slid his tongue into her mouth. But now she was taking his penis into her body.

“If the
Gitche Manitou
ever came down to Earth,” he read the card above the bed as, with Amanda’s assistance, he thrust and thrust, “He would stay at the Manitowaning Lodge, Manitoulin Island, Ontario.” Good for him. Or was it
her?
On television, a door slammed shut.

“Damn.” Jake punched a hole through a wall.

“Next week,” the telecaster’s FM voice slid in. “Can Dorothy Asapap make it on her own? Can Jacob Asapap raise the children on his own? Find out in the next episode of
Tender Is My Heart
. Moosonee-TV, northern Ontario’s window on Cree-Ojibway country.”

Panting, Amanda reached around Jeremiah’s waist and silenced the television with the remote.

“There,” she gasped, and wrestled her way from under his weight.

Jeremiah moaned. And fell to the side.

He couldn’t get erect. His sex was dead. The very thought made him sick, as with a cancer. Somehow, misogynistic violence — watching it, thinking it — was relief.

“Put it on rewind.” He took a cigarette and lay back on the pillow. “Play it again.”

“S
o
, you coming home?” though Gabriel tried his best at sounding cold, even angry — thank God telephones transmitted sound, not sight — his performance was not quite convincing. For, naked as the day, he lay luxuriating in black satin sheets, his lower limbs entangled in some unseen task. His pleasure in the posture, in fact, was making conversation increasingly difficult. From some source equally invisible, Sarah Vaughan’s honeyed alto crooned of sirens and madness.

Three hundred miles north of the rose-hued bedroom, Jeremiah stood huddled in a telephone booth, fending off a hangover so acute it was victory just to be propped upright. “I’m north of the island somewhere, outskirts of … Sudbury, I think.”

“By land and water,” Gabriel stated with machine-like
precision despite virtually surging with joy, “it’ll take you nine hours.” At his waist, his fingers sank into a head of golden curls. “By land alone, it’ll only take five.”

“Forget the ferry. I barely have enough for gas.”

“Then I’ll see you tonight.” And see, Gabriel thrilled at the prospect, what revenge I dream up for your treachery.

Trying to keep his breakfast down, Jeremiah gulped his way back to the car. Furious with him for his recent bout of cowardice, of fraternal irresponsibility, the little yellow Beetle had not said a word to him all morning, not in Cree, not in English.

Gabriel set the telephone down, flexed his thighs, and, distractedly, gazed at the opposite wall. Zebra-striped by noon-light through horizontal blinds, the photographs of Gregory Newman in his salad days — as prince, as hero, as danseur noble — looked glamorous enough, if somewhat vintage. But they were boisterously upstaged. For there atop the oak armoire, applauded by the masses, feted by a queen, beamed the champion of the world. Gabriel closed his eyes and let the wave sweep him off.

From the folds of black satin, like a loon from a lake, the golden head reared, lips overflowing.

In a chamber of mirrors — another church made redundant by the death of faith — Gabriel sat with legs splayed across the hardwood floor, stretching his tendons, massaging his feet, garbed in the habit of his calling: slippers, tights, leg-warmers,
sweat-stained T-shirt. In crumpled shirt and jeans, Jeremiah sat slumped at a creaky grand piano, the keyboard as silent as a tomb.

“Go on.” Gabriel had to work at his prodigal brother. “Play something.” Through his hangover, Jeremiah unenthusiastically picked out a five-finger run — up, down. But hey! The damned thing was in tune.

“Yeah, right,” he feigned disgust. “The fingers are gone.” In a silence this large, with only Gabriel watching, sitting like this felt eerily natural. “Gone, gone, gone. Forget it.” Like a house one sees for the first time since childhood, the keyboard invited, enticed, but belonged to others now.

“Bullshit,” Gabriel fired back. “You haven’t touched a fish crate in fifteen years.”

“What is this? Penance?”

“Yes. For running like a rat from those spineless fag-bashers? Yes. Play!”

Jeremiah began, for, indeed, was not the dear brown boy owed amends?

First came his left hand, pounding on its own a steel-hard, unforgiving four-four time, each beat seamlessly connected by triplet sixteenth notes, an accidental toccata. From where? “Ha!” Before he knew it, his other hand had joined, its discords like random gunshots:
bang, bang!

No less surprised, and tickled bubblegum pink, Gabriel leapt to his feet and started rocking to the pulse —
peeyuk, neesoo, peeyuk
 … Some spectacular celebration was about to
begin, he could feel it in his bones.
“Weeks’chihowew!”
he yodelled, and catapulted his dancer’s frame at space.

As if sculpted from marble, five male dancers came twirling downstage, stomped up to the audience, and twirled back upstage, gull plumes in cellophane flashing from their waists like kilts made of lake spray. At one end of the line, Gabriel Okimasis executed a turn so nimble witnesses swore later that he had outwitted gravity, then snapped into a robot-like march to a circle of blue-white light.

In the crowded semi-darkness, Gregory Newman watched, impressively tanned — an interlude in Mexico, according to the press — but the light in his eyes had lost its spark; a permanent glower had seduced their emerald green.

Teacher of the young, connoisseur of beauty, celebrated artist, he would fool himself no longer. The boy-man on stage was beautiful, in his prime, poetry in motion, a choreographer with promise. But behind the show of innocence and northern piety, what a piece of dirt, a slut, a whore, a slab of meat fucked through every orifice, from Tokyo to Toronto, from Rome to Buenos Aires.

Behind him, a door flew open and closed just as quickly. Amidst a flurry of rustling cloth, hissed apology, feverish breathing, Amanda Clear Sky wedged her way to the only empty seat that she could make out in the darkness.

“Is this the piece by Gabriel Okimasis?” she ventured of her scowling neighbour.

As politely as he could, Gregory shushed her.

“Well, is it?”

“Yes, but you’re sitting on my coat.”

Partly concealed by a scrim behind the dancers, Jeremiah laboured at a black grand piano. As seamless as thread, his triplet sixteenth notes connected the four-four time of an unrelenting, drum-like bass. How had a casual improvisation grown, in ten months, into a showpiece stomped to by professional dancers, a sonata in four contrasting movements scored, phrased, liberally fermataed? It was quite beyond his grasp. All he knew was that he had to play or his relationship with Gabriel was history, and he’d be back in the alleyways of Winnipeg. And should the collar of his rented black tuxedo choke off his windpipe, so be it; hands on the keyboard, dressed for the casket, he would die a Cree hero’s death.

Like a thunderclap, silence struck. Jeremiah leapt from his bench, and with a beaded drumstick pounded at the bass strings of the instrument. The quintet of circling dancers launched into a pentatonic chant,
“Ateek, ateek, astum, astum, yoah, ho-ho!”
And, suddenly, the piano was a pow wow drum propelling a Cree Round Dance with the clangour and dissonance of the twentieth century.

Gabriel knew that his magic had worked, for the audience was speaking to some space inside themselves, some void that needed filling, some depthless sky; and this sky was responding. Through the brothers, as one, and through a chamber as vast as the north, an old man’s voice passed. “My son,” it sighed, “with these magic weapons, make a new world …”

Amidst the storm of clapping, hooting, and shouting, Gabriel stood on stage with his dancers, glowing like the sun, proudly introducing his brother to the world. And at his bidding, the wild-haired pianist, utterly confounded, bowed once, twice. And the house went dark.

“A
yash
oogoosisa, oogoosisa, oogoosisa.”
The sun-filled chamber danced to Jeremiah’s Cree.

“Ayash oogoosisa, oogoosisa
…,” echoed four children’s voices, somewhat raggedly.

“Think of it as music,” suggested their instructor. “Let it swing. One more time:
Ayash oogoosisa, oogoosisa …”

A dozen Indian children squatted in a circle at the centre of the room, impressively orderly for six- to ten-year-olds. Four of them repeated, better this time.

On the wall, a home-made logo identified the gathering as “The Muskoosis Club of Ontario,” a round-faced bear in denim coveralls grinning toothily from the capital O. Such was Jeremiah’s day job — providing urban Indian children, most from broken homes, with REC: recreation, education, culture.