Kiss of the Fur Queen (25 page)

Jeremiah launched into the next phrase. “Group B.
Peechinook’soo
, three, four,
peechinook’soo
, three, four …,” clapping as he walked.

Dutiful as soldiers, four Muskoosisuk smiled, clapped, and talked,
“Peechinook’soo
…,” as Jeremiah’s focus kept returning to one little boy. Because he looked so like Gabriel Okimasis at the age of six? Not exactly, but …

“And Group C. Now this one’s gotta be sort of moany and spooky, kinda like this,” and Jeremiah moaned,
“Peeyatuk, peeyatuk …”

“Peeyatuk
…,” moaned the last four children, then exploded into titters because the goofy little whine reminded of them of ghosts they had known.

“Now, we put it all together.” Swinging by his desk, the excited Cree-language revivalist fished a gourd from a drawer. “Groups A, B, C. Ready?” He raised the object — an improvised Brazilian maraca — and shook it with a vengeance, the rattle that resulted bossa nova crossed artfully with samba.

“Ayash oogoosisa, oogoosisa, oogoosisa
…” went the first four children,
“Peechinook’soo
three, four,
peechinook’soo
…” went the second, while the last quartet moaned,
“Peeyatuk.”
Like a priest sprinkling holy water, Jeremiah rattled the maraca, counted out the beat — “One, two, one, two.” Cree rap with a Latin stamp? The patent was theirs.

“So what you’re saying, people, is this,” Jeremiah brought the music to a close. “Group A, ‘The Son of Ayash,’ over and over. Group B, ‘is approaching, three, four,’ over and over. Group C,” and he moaned like a ghost, “ ‘Be careful, be careful.’ Our hero, the Son of Ayash, has to be careful, for he is
entering the dark place of the human soul where he will meet evil creatures like,” he shook the maraca one last time, “the Weetigo. Questions?” But the undersized Natives were restless. “Jenny! Cynthia!” Jeremiah was sounding unpleasantly like a school marm, “Puh-leeze!”

“But Willie has a question, question, question,” a pretty little echo circulated. “But he’s too shy, shy, shy, shy.” Willie Joe Kayash, whose home was a shelter for battered women and whose father was nonexistent. Willie Joe Kayash, the lad who reminded Jeremiah of Gabriel as a child.

It took some ancient Okimasis diplomacy but, eventually, Willie Joe spoke. “What … what …,” his mouth a little red cherry, ripe for the plucking. “What’s … what’s a … a Weetigo?” How fresh children smelled. You could take them in your hands, put them in your mouth, swallow them whole.

“A Weetigo is a monster who eats little boys,” said Jeremiah, “like you.” And he dismissed the assembly.

When the room was empty, Willie Joe skipped back in and jumped on Jeremiah, the rope-like arms wrapped around his waist, the hot face buried in his groin.

“A Weetigo ate me,” the child mumbled into the faded blue denim. And then bit. Up Jeremiah’s spine shot a needle longer than an arm. In a panic, he disengaged himself and squatted, his eyes inches from the six-year-old’s. He had a raging hard-on.

“What do you mean, Willie Joe?”

Willie Joe said nothing, but, like a clandestine lover, kissed Jeremiah, square across the lips, then went skipping out:
“Ayash oogoosisa, oogoosisa …”

Into a vortex screaming with monsters Jeremiah stumbled, clawed hands reaching for his testicles, wet tongues burrowing past his lips, his orifices pried, torn, shredded. One minute, no more, and he made it to the director’s office.

“The Friendship Centre has begun the process, yes,” the Mohawk gentleman behind the desk explained, “whereby the perpetrator — stepfather to the child — is being charged, yes, and, hopefully, yes, he will be jailed, yes.”

For Jeremiah, jail was nowhere near enough.

L
ike a bear with a honeypot, Jeremiah sat hunched at a typewriter, glaring at the page in its steel-trap jaw. If it wasn’t for the hum and the stop-start tap of the ageing IBM Selectric, the Muskoosis Clubroom would have been stone silent.

He snarled and tore the sheet of paper out. So disgusted was he for taking up Amanda’s challenge — “Write me a role and I’ll move to Toronto” — that leaping out the window looked attractive when he remembered that the Native Friendship Centre was only four floors high, and he was on the third.

Yes, he had written a spot of music — freak accident though that may have been — interspersed with words he dared to claim were poetry, if in Cree. And, yes, the work had been successful, on a very modest scale. But did that make him a dramatist? And in English, that humourless tongue?

“Atimootagay!”
he banged out each letter and, in glum despair, scowled at the slush-bound street below.

And suddenly, Mistik Lake lapped rhythmically, July was at its peak, and arctic terns were clucking from their holding patterns high overhead —
“click
, Jeremiah,
click, click” —
telling the Cree ex-pianist of their holiday this January past in far Antarctica, where penguins threw formal-dress receptions that were the envy of the world.

And Jeremiah was nine, Gabriel six, the brothers sitting at the stern of their father’s blue canoe. Squeezed into the seat — planks nailed hastily together — they rowed the narrow, pointed vessel in reverse as, from the prow, their father cast his silver net into the cold, dark waves.

“So,
Ayash oogoosisa,”
said Abraham Okimasis as he wove sun diamonds with water and webs of nylon,
“eehee, Ayash oogoosisa
had to go out into the world at a very young age …”

A suitcase in one hand, his father’s portrait in the other, Gabriel stood at the threshold of an empty living room. Lit like a rooming house, its plaster barely hung. And the smell of mothballs, mould, even stale urine, though subtle, still penetrated. Cardboard boxes spilling over with his life sat scattered at his feet.

Pensively, he set the suitcase down. He could still hear Gregory: “If you didn’t do so much running around, you wouldn’t get sick so often.”

Cracked down the middle, a mirror sliced his image in two; he had one eye, in the centre of his forehead. He pawed at a cobweb, cleared the dust away, and peered into the glass.

The sheen of youth was fading. He was attractive, not
exquisite, not the way he once had been. What’s this? The blemish on his neck still there? After two weeks?

Gabriel had had the flu twice this year, so this might be the third, but was anyone immune at this time of the year?

Still, Gregory’s voice bled through: “Where did you go after the preview last night? Come on, Gabriel. Production meetings don’t go to 3:00
A.M.
Where do you go after the show — in New York, Amsterdam, Vancouver? How many people come by the house whenever I’m out for even half an hour? Do you think I have no nose? That I can’t smell bed-sheets, sweat?”

From one side of his “Holy Trinity” — the photos of his brother, his best friend, his surrogate son — Jeremiah glanced at the clock in the rusted old stove of his rooming house. Four
A.M.
He yawned, stretched, and vowed that he would work until the sun came up.

“Mother (to Son):” afraid the old typewriter would crumble and die if he struck it too hard, he picked at the letters gingerly, “Here, the weapons you will need: a spear, an axe, a fox’s pelt”

“G
ot
this feelin’, burnin’ inside me; got this feelin’,” the wild-haired tenor snarled into the microphone. Then, chillingly, his voice swooped sky high, “And I don’t know oh what to do, oh what to do.”

Behind him, three black-shirted men stroked impassively at drums, bass, and keyboard while their soloist’s half-closed eyes hung fixed … on what? Or who? wondered Gabriel. Sitting at a small round table, sipping at a beer, waiting anxiously for Jeremiah, he decided the singer could do with a more expressive body, looser at the hips, not so jerky. But this Robin Beatty, as the posters proclaimed his name to be, was looking at him, Gabriel was certain. Did that little shudder at the base of his spine not tell him so? His microphone so hot Gabriel half-expected it to melt, Robin swooped from a growl to a wail, “Every time I look into your eye-eye-eyes …”

Jeremiah popped his head through the black velvet curtain over the club’s back wall and assessed the territory.

“Don’t go away,” barked the singer.

“We’ll be right back.”

“What’s this?” asked Gabriel, looking at the tattered manila envelope Jeremiah had plunked beside his beer.

“Open it,” said Jeremiah, trying to contain his excitement.

Out came a sheaf of paper the thickness of a score.

“ ‘Ulysses Thunderchild’?” Gabriel read. “ ‘A play by Jerem …’ ”

“Well? You gonna have a peek?”

Gabriel turned a page.

“ ‘Remember, my son, the human soul is filled with danger, that you will meet evil men …’ ” His voice faded but his reading went on. Time passed.

“You …,” Jeremiah squirmed like a five-year-old, “don’t think it’s … any good?”

Robin Beatty ambled by. “Hi,” the lanky jazz singer threw the greeting at Gabriel like a frisbee and Gabriel threw it back. His eyes followed Robin to the stage.

“Son of Ayash.” Jeremiah tapped the script. “Closest thing the Cree have to their own Ulysses. Except I’ve given it this … modern twist, shall we say.”

“Such as?” Gabriel asked, barely concentrating.

“Well,” said Jeremiah cavalierly, “if James Joyce can do ‘one day in the life of an Irishman in Dublin, 1903,’ why can’t I do ‘one day in the life of a Cree man in Toronto, 1984’?”

Suspecting madness, Gabriel stared at Jeremiah, swallowed.
“You’re right. Someone’s gotta do it.” His gaze slid back to Robin, beyond Jeremiah. “But why the modern twist?”

“Because I want my
Muskoosisuk
to get it. Could we relate to Dick and Jane and that damned dog Spot when we were kids? No. Ever wonder why the school dropout rate for Native people —?”

“Okay, okay, I wasn’t asking for a dissertation.”

“And I want you … to direct it.” There.

“Direct it?” spluttered Gabriel. “I’m a choreographer, not a …”

“An out-of-work choreographer.”

“Are you kidding?” Jeremiah chattered at a train-weary Amanda. “No theatre in town would touch it.” Leaving Union Station a hulking silhouette, the taxi rammed through the evening rush respectful of neither life, death, nor the law. “ ‘Your script?’ this one guy said. ‘No conflict. It’s not a play.’ ” Still, he suspected that his liberal sprinklings of Cree might have thrown off its readers.

“Fools,” sniffed Amanda. “They’ll be sorry.”

“Especially since I’ve snagged the best damned actress in the soaps.”

“Second-best. Joan Collins, she’s the first best.”

“Remember, my son,” Amanda advised in a voice not her own, “the way into the underworld of the human spirit is filled with danger, that you will meet evil men.” She stood on the altar of yet another dead church mouthing lines with the passion of a doorknob.

“You say you are not the Son of Ayash?” a barrel-chested Cree man asked of Gabriel.

“Fuck,” cursed the Weetigo, aka Bobby Peegatee of Pask’sigeepathi, Saskatchewan, when the top page of his script ripped in half.

“No,” Gabriel squinted at his script, “I am not the Son of Ayash.”

“No matter,
noos’sim
. You must be hungry after such a long, hard journey.”

“Take this magic spear, this axe, this fox’s pelt,” said the mother, Amanda, with slightly stooped shoulders, “for you will have to defend yourself. I’m sorry.” Amanda’s voice splintered from the mother’s. “I can’t go on.”

“What’s the problem?” asked Gabriel.

“These lines, they’re so … they’re unplayable.” She shimmied off the altar. “I can’t do a thing with them.”

“Why not?” asked Jeremiah, squirming from the sweat in the crevasse of his buttocks. “Why are they … unplayable?”

“They’re wooden. There’s no human inside this character.”

“But there is,” Jeremiah whined.

“Jeremiah, you’re trying to write a realistic play from a story that’s just not realistic.”

“And what, pray tell, is this story all about?”

“Magic.”

Magic? What did she want, a bunny pulled from a hat, a woman sawed in half, water turned into wine?

Finally, all diplomacy, sympathy, and tenderness, Gabriel spoke up. “I think what she means, Jeremiah, is that it’s all
up here —” he tapped his forehead, “when it should be down here —” he pointed to his groin. What the hell. “It’s all head, Jeremiah, all head and no gut. Watch.”

Before Jeremiah could pull himself back together, the actors were shouting, wailing, and snarling as, like ping pong balls, they hurled themselves across the sun-splashed space, so in the grip of improvisation they had eyes like demons.

“Yes!” Gabriel flailed his arms like an orchestral conductor fencing with an agitato. “Fill that space. Feel it with the tips of your fingers, your forehead, the soles of your feet, your toes, your groin.”

Jeremiah banged at the piano — dissonance like shards of steel — though he had no idea why. “What are you doing?” he yelled at his brother.

“Play!” Gabriel screamed back. “Just play!”

“Stick to that goddamn piano” — Amanda lunged at him with teeth bared, spit flying — “where you belong!”

Who the hell did the bitch think she was? Jeremiah clawed at the keyboard, tidal waves of red smashing at his eyeballs.
“Aiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiayash oogoosisa, oogoosisa
…” Shooting to the ceiling, the wail dove, resurfacing as samba-metered hisses. And one by one, the company fell in with the chant, a dance, a Cree rite of sacrifice, swirling like blood around the altar and bouncing off the bass of the piano like, yes, magic.

J
eremiah’s “Barcarolle Ulysses Thunderchild” gently rocked as the blood rose slowly in the Plexiglas syringe. Through his earphones, Gabriel listened and envisioned, as Jeremiah had suggested, their father’s blue canoe adrift, the fisherman a Cree-Venetian gondolier. Except that Mistik Lake was filled not with water but with fresh human blood. The poker-faced technician removed the needle and pressed a bandage over Gabriel’s bared forearm.