Kiss of the Fur Queen

Gabriel finally locates his drunk brother in a field in the middle of a forty-niner, an Indigenous celebratory session where “drink, drugs, and song [sweep] senses to a plane where dreams loom […] clear, visceral” (249). Meanwhile, a group of drunk men recognize Gabriel as a famous ballet dancer and make anti-gay comments about him. Gabriel looks to Jeremiah for help, but Jeremiah walks away, embarrassed to be associated with “a pervert.” Gabriel holds his ground and is surprised to discover that fear rather than hatred drives the men’s hostility: He wonders whether seeing him reminds them that they too can be feminine, and why femininity scares them.

A drunk and delirious Jeremiah feels he is being chased by a repulsive, drunk old woman. To escape her, he climbs onto a picnic table as she hisses at him to get down. She climbs next to him as if to devour him, wearing a crown and white fur coat. As her makeup begins to crack, Jeremiah realizes the woman is Amanda Clear Sky, there on her grandmother’s invitation.

Amanda’s house is filled with “drink-mad Ojibways” headed by her widower father Alodius Clear Sky (255). When Amanda tells her father “Jeremiah is the first Indian concert pianist in the history of the world” (255), Alodius urges Jeremiah to play the family’s old, battered piano. However, the crowd doesn’t have an ear for the “whiteman music” Jeremiah plays and asks Alodius to play some real music instead. The crowd’s reaction confirms Jeremiah’s hunch that his Cree heritage doesn’t mix with his passion for classical music. Meanwhile, Amanda shows him a passion of her own that she has been pursuing: acting in an Indigenous soap opera called Tender is My Heart.

Jeremiah and Amanda lie in bed together in a motel room, watching the cassette tapes of the soap opera. Amanda’s character, a housewife called Dorothy who is leaving her cheating husband Jake, speaks in a mixture of Cree and Ojibway to appeal to a broad audience. As Amanda and Jeremiah laugh over the scenes, Jeremiah wants to be intimate with Amanda but feels inhibited. It is only when they begin miming a scene where Jake is hitting Dorothy for trying to leave him that Jeremiah begins to make love to Amanda. He realizes that watching and thinking about misogynistic violence arouses him—a fact that makes him feel sick.