A Circle of Celebrations Read online

  “No, it’s all my fault,” Irmani assured him, putting a friendly hand on his shoulder. Gib nudged up behind him and lifted the wallet out of his pocket and that of the equally drunken friend who swayed and giggled beside him. “Hey, you all have a nice day, huh?”

  “We are, babe, we are!” At her mental nudge, they noticed another booth selling Hurricanes on the street and staggered toward it, holding out their towers of glasses. Too bad they weren’t going to be able to afford another one unless they left their ATM cards back at their hotel.

  With its ornamental painted tiles and fancy curlicue ironwork, the 300-year old French Quarter looked dressed up for Mardi Gras already. There was magic all around the place. Irmani felt it and loved it. Her own talents were shallow by comparison. The Jedi mind trick she pulled on the old lady in the church and the two drunken frat boys were about all she could do, but she was aware of the strong underpinnings of magic in the old city around her. Music was both a part of it and a result of it. She knew little about New Orleans before she got there, but Gib had insisted it would be fun to go to Mardi Gras, so they went.

  Irmani laughed at the girls who stood on the antique balconies and yanked up their shirts for strings of beads thrown up to them by shouting men down on the street. There was no way she’d make a public fool of herself for anything, particularly not plastic beads. She noticed that it was only the tourists who did it, not the locals. In fact, she noticed the locals watching her with suspicious eyes from the doorways of residences and shops as she went by, as if they could see the growing stash of purses and wallets in her tote bag. Did they know she wasn’t the innocent shopper she appeared to be?

  New Orleans was a strait-laced town, much more than she had expected from the come-as-you-are, anything-goes travel brochures. Sure, it was still more than half messed up since the hurricane, but it still had the feel of a place that knew its own mind. It was definitely a Catholic city, like Boston, where she’d spent one miserable week the summer before, but this had a real mind to it, like none of the others had. It possessed character. It didn’t really approve of all those drunk, happy people with money in their pockets, buying round after round of Hurricanes, collecting throws and hot sauce and t-shirts and masks, paying no attention to the condition of wallets or purses, or of her and Gib, either, but it behaved kind of like a maiden auntie. It would let them go on making their own mistakes. It was perfect for her. She had already cleaned up enough to pay for her expenses and still pay rent for two months. What with the Mardi Gras festivities cranking up to full, she might be able to get enough money so her basics were covered for the rest of the year. It’d be nice to take time off. Easier on the nerves.

  She and Gib followed the happy crowd down Bourbon Street, around the corner down St. Ann, into Jackson Square. The people were as jammed together and as colorful as jelly beans in a jar. Irmani nodded approval to Gib. This was a good place to start dropping the wallets that they had already emptied of cash. She could count on the press of people to ensure no one could tell who had lost them, just as she could count on human nature to ensure that most of what she dropped would be carried off by someone else who would never think of picking a pocket but would crow over their good fortune and someone else’s bad luck. Served them right if theirs was the next billfold to fall into her grasp.

  Irmani jumped as she caught two gigantic blue eyes gazing at her. Forcing her heart to slow down, she saw that they were in the massive face of a jester in gold, green and purple motley that loomed over the heads of the crowd. It was part of a parade float, parked in front of one of the 19th-century buildings on the square. If anything, the press of humanity was thicker around it than anywhere else.

  “What’s going on there?” Gib asked.

  “Don’t know,” Irmani said. “Sounds like opportunity knocking to me!”

  “Hear ye! Hear ye! Welcome to all the good subjects of Comus, King of Mardi Gras!” A thin-faced white man in a very fine gray-striped suit stood on a dais just inside the entrance to the Presbytere. “Be of good cheer! Welcome to all revelers! I am pleased to introduce to you the king and queen of the oldest Krewe in all of New Orleans, Comus and his queen!”

  He stood aside, clapping his hands. Up onto the dais stepped two of the most fantastic costumes that Irmani had ever seen. She didn’t care about the people wearing them, but the outfits had life of their own. Acres of white silk satin had been sewn with thousands of pearls, rhinestones and sequins into patterns like lace. Velvet cloaks swung from their shoulders, clasped with bejeweled knobs of gold that Irmani swore even from the back of the room were real, as were the necklaces, tiaras, bracelets and rings. The glorious painted masks that covered the upper part of their faces weren’t leather or plastic. Could they be ivory? So much wealth in one place took her breath away. A heavy hand dropped on her shoulder.

  “Easy, girl,” Gib whispered. “Not for you.”

  “I know it,” she whispered back, peevishly. It didn’t do any harm to dream.

  The king was speaking. “… As of the earliest members of our sacred order, we want to enrich our mutual heritage. As a token, we are bestowing upon the Presbytere and the Louisiana State Museum these fine artifacts that, according to the documents that we have recently discovered, were worn by my many-times predecessor and that of his queen in 1902.” He patted the top of a glass display case that was just visible at his left hand. “That makes these older by eight years than the parure already on display here. I hope you will enjoy them and the spirit of Mardi Gras. Laissez les bon temps roulez!”

  Irmani waited impatiently in the long line.

  “This had better be worth it,” she said to Gib for the nineteenth time. There was no opportunity to increase their personal wealth in the meantime. Gib had pointed out the security cameras aimed down at them from six different spots on the ceiling. She might have been able to fool the minds of the guards, but video tape was out of her reach.

  The line took them through a forest of gorgeous costumes. Each was arranged on a life-sized mannequin that wore a wig and a mask. Looking into the empty eye holes gave Irmani the creeps, so she concentrated on the dresses and tunics, and read the posters on the walls.

  Properly speaking, the big party going on outside was Carnival. Mardi Gras was only one day, the last blowout. Fat Tuesday, the last day of Carnival, preceded Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent. Irmani had memories of meatless days and fish on Fridays.

  “Did you ever have to give stuff up for Lent?” Gib asked, as if reading her mind.

  “Never paid much attention to it, except when I was in Catholic school,” Irmani said, dismissively. “The nuns made us do it. We never had to give up anything necessary, only pleasures and vanities, but it was hard. I hated it.”

  “We had to write ours down,” Gib said. “I made it up most times, but my mom wouldn’t make dessert all the way through Lent. I mean, is it really giving anything up if you don’t get to make the choice? It’s supposed to be free will, giving up stuff for God.”

  “He doesn’t care,” Irmani said. “If he did, would He have blown this place up with a hurricane?”

  Gib shrugged his shoulders.

  Finally, it was their turn to pass by the glass case. On a lining of folded purple velvet was a collection of jewelery, the parure, as the King of Comus said. The tiara intimidated her, with its rose-cut diamonds, and the ivory domino on a lorgnette was too fussy for her taste, but she couldn’t stop looking at the strings of filigree gold beads interspersed with colored gemstones. She knew at once that they were the real thing. Fantastic. She felt her fingers curling into her tingling palms.

  “I gotta have that,” Irmani breathed.

  “Uh-uh,” Gib said. “We don’t take anything but money. Just money. We don’t want anything that hard to fence.”

  “I don’t want to fence them,” Irmani said. “I just want them. They are gorgeous!”

  “You don’t need them, baby,” Gib argued. “Look how many throws you’ve g
ot! Dozens!”

  “But they aren’t real,” Irmani said. “These are real.”

  Gib knew there was no arguing with her once she’d made a decision. The two of them went back out into Jackson Square for the afternoon. Irmani had to drag her mind back over and over so as not to get caught when they did a little business among the steadily increasing crowd.

  Just before closing time at five o’clock, they wandered casually in, as if for the first time. Irmani followed the man in the suit, the curator. She sidled up as he was about to lock the cases and gave him a mindblowing smile. He returned it a little uncertainly, then went back to his task, never realizing there was a gap in his memory as to how many items were in the display after the pretty girl with café au lait skin had gone away.

  Irmani grabbed Gib, who was hanging out among the mannequins, and dragged him out to the street.

  “I got them,” she gasped, pulling him around the ironwork fence that blocked off the looming façade of the Presbytere from her sight. Leaning into the branches and leaves that poked through and provided a natural screen, she picked three strands out of the thick rope of sparkling beads that hung around her neck. Gib gawked.

  “Look at them,” she said. Her eyes, her brain and heart, felt as if they were filling up with the energy from the glowing jewels interspersed between gold beads. Amethysts, emeralds and rubies, like pieces of a stained glass window twinkled in her fingers, more real than anything around them.

  “We’re gonna get in big trouble,” Gib said. “Someone’s gonna see them.”

  “So, what if they do? Watch.” When she let them go, they disappeared into the jungle of plastic, metal-toned strands, blending in with the cut facets like tigers lurking amid hanging vines. “These are the most perfect things I have ever seen!”

  “I dunno, someone must have seen.”

  “No one did,” she said confidently.

  “Well, God saw,” he said. “I mean, there’s a cathedral right there!”

  “Oh, come on!” She leaned up and gave him a kiss. “Forget about it. Let’s do a little more work, then we can party. We deserve it.”

  Maybe Gib was right. It was hard to ignore God in New Orleans. God was as omnipresent as the drunks and the mold. She had never been anywhere with so many churches, and everything named Saint this or Saint that. She started to feel eyes on her, but most of them belonged to Blue Dog. She was creeped out by the ever-present paintings of Blue Dogs, whose haunted eyes followed her from numerous shop windows like a bad conscience. She tried not to let them bother her. They were there to have some fun, but to make some serious money.

  She consoled herself with the fact that they weren’t the only professionals working that crowd. She all but stepped on a tiny woman with wrinkled tan skin in the headscarf who daubed passersby with mustard or hot sauce. When one of her victims turned to exclaim over the ‘accident,’ her confederate, a husky young man with straight black hair and black eyes, would loom up and relieve the unlucky tourist of wallet or purse. The little woman apologized over and over in a lilting accent, while the man melted back into the crowd. Irmani had crossed paths with people like them before. They were South Americans. She tried to stay away from them. They didn’t like anyone else on their claimed turf.

  “Let’s just party tonight, huh, baby?” Gib asked, after he had dumped the last few empty billfolds in the men’s room of the Café du Monde on Monday night.

  “Why not?” Irmani said. She felt full of good will toward her fellow beings. She kept the Comus jewelery around her neck, camouflaged underneath a dozen or so cheap strands. It made her feel precious and special to have them there.

  They jammed themselves into the crowd along Bourbon Street to watch a parade. Everyone screamed and laughed with excitement as each float loomed up in the dimness. Faces the size of a car smiled or menaced the revelers. Every parade had its own theme, kept a deep, dark secret until the day of the parade. This one, sponsored by the Mistick Krewe of Bacchus, was the Seven Deadly Sins. The girls on board ‘Lust’ were fully clad, but wearing such sexy costumes that Gib nearly got run over leaning out into the street to stare at them. They laughed at him and threw tons of beads at him. Sheepishly, he gathered them up and gave them to Irmani, just in time for ‘Greed’ to roll into view. Irmani grinned up at the costumed men tossing beads. They rewarded her smile with dozens of fancy beads. She gathered up handfuls. Greed had always been her patron saint.

  Now that they were off duty, as she considered it, the two of them joined the throng dancing and laughing along Bourbon Street. The noise was so loud that it felt solid enough to walk on. She let it carry her. The masked and costumed figures on the floats threw her more and more beads. She danced with Gib to the raucous jazz played by live musicians on the floats, banging out of loud-speakers, and blaring out of the doors of the clubs all along the parade route.

  “I never want this to end,” she said, whirling Gib in a circle until the beads rattled like falling rain. “This is the best time of my life.”

  But end it always did.

  On Mardi Gras Tuesday itself, the tourists began partying early, knowing it was their last chance. Irmani and Gib lifted a few wallets, and noticed they were thinner than the ones they had picked up over the weekend. Everyone was close to having spent all their holiday cash. That was okay. The two of them were done after that night. They could go home and pay off their outstanding bills, maybe get ahead a little bit while Gib looked for a job and she went back to college.

  The church bells began to chime. Irmani looked up from her drink as the bonging drowned out the blasting zydeco music in the bar where she and Gib were drinking. The bands put down their instruments. Lights went out all up and down the street. Midnight. Mardi Gras was over. Lent had begun.

  She knew better than to go out on the street. Police on horseback herded the crowds off Bourbon Street. For the ones who didn’t get the hint, they were blasted off the pavement by the water cannons that followed a few minutes later to clear up the fallen detritus. Irmani watched a cluster of purple, gold and green throws glitter as it turned helplessly in the flow. It was swept away. She lost sight of it by the time it passed the first streetlight.

  “All gone,” she said, toasting the street with her glass. “Empty. Gone. What fills this place up when Mardi Gras is over?”

  “God, maybe,” Gib said, solemnly.

  “Will you stop saying that?” she asked.

  They put money down and staggered out of the bar. The bartender and his busboy looked as though they were glad to see everyone go. Irmani took a deep breath and marched resolutely up Bourbon.

  “Where are you going?” Gib asked, catching up with her. He spun her around. “Hotel’s this way.

  “Right.”

  Irmani felt an overwhelming urge to go the other way, but Gib was right. She fought the urge. Something had its hand on her shoulder. It kept trying to get her to turn back, like an uncle steering her back to the shop where she’d stolen candy.

  She had trouble sleeping. Even though she had some of it underneath her pillow, she spent the night dreaming of the rest of the Comus treasure. She didn’t want it, but couldn’t stop thinking about it. She mentioned it to Gib the next morning over café latte.

  “Gotta give it up for Lent,” Gib said, then giggled uncomfortably.

  Irmani touched the gorgeous necklaces that lay hidden underneath her zipped up jacket. “No way. They’re mine.”

  “It’s vanity.”

  “I don’t care.”

  Irmani couldn’t wear the gorgeous necklaces outwardly any more. Mardi Gras was over. There were still throws and masks for sale in the stores, but only a few tourists bought anything. The festival was over. Everything was dead, warn out, done. The gaiety had gone like a balloon that had been popped. Until the pin hit it at the stroke of midnight it was gorgeous. Now it was a sad rag of rubber that people couldn’t wait to throw away. She wanted to get that feeling back, but it just wasn’t there to get. Now she k
new why blues music made her sad. It expressed the longing for something you desperately wanted and couldn’t have.

  As they wandered around, she started to notice people on the street with a dab of black on their foreheads. They’d been to church for Ash Wednesday mass.

  “Well, they’re buying into the superstition,” she declared.

  Gib looked shocked. So, she admitted, was her twelve-year-old soul, who had gone through confirmation and first communion. But nothing had ever stopped her from doing what she wanted, so where was God, really?

  They didn’t have to leave until late that evening. Irmani decided that even if the pickings were slim she might as well do a little business before they went. She and Gib staked out a tourist who still had that air of prosperity. He came out of a shop with a bag full of hot sauce and t-shirts, tucking his wallet back into his hip pocket. Irmani got up close behind him. When he stopped to look into a shop window, she edged nearer as if she was admiring the same display.

  A hard hand grabbed her wrist and twisted it up. She cried out and dropped the wallet.

  “I’m gonna call the police in just one minute,” said the big, dark-skinned man to the shocked tourist. “You pick that up and tell me if anything’s missing.”

  “I didn’t do anything,” Irmani said, pushing the Jedi mind trick with all the force she could muster. “It’s all a mistake. I was handing it back to him.”

  The tourist looked bemused, then grateful. “That’s nice of you, miss.”

  The bouncer didn’t look so sure, but he could no longer remember why he was holding on to her. He let go. Irmani backed away and hurried off. She thought he was still staring after her suspiciously as she walked away.

  “Let’s get some lunch,” Gib said, soothingly. He knew how she hated it when she blew a grab.

  Nothing went just right. The steak she got with her grits at lunch was solid gristle, and so was the second one the tut-tutting waitress brought to replace it. She gagged down just enough food to keep her stomach from twisting with hunger.