A Circle of Celebrations: The Complete Edition, page 7
“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 got! 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 mind-blowing 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 Presbytère 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, and 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 a 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 jewelry 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 knew 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 grillade 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.
Irmani couldn’t get past the feeling that eyes were on her. Not only the Blue Dog’s annoying gaze, but everybody. She used her mind trick on the ones she could see, flinging the charm right and left so they would look away and not see her any more.
“I can’t stand it, Gib,” she said.
“This town don’t want us anymore,” he said. “We gotta leave. Our flight’s at eight, but we can sit in the airport for a few hours.”
There was nothing left in the hotel room that they wanted, and they had been planning to skip out on the bill anyway, so they hailed a taxi on Royal.
“Airport,” Gib said.
“Sure thing,” the driver said. He was an elderly African-American with a pale, gray-taupe complexion. “You be there before you know it.”
It seemed like every billboard they went by had a face on it. The eyes reproached her. She glanced under her jacket at her prized necklaces. They stared at her, too. Every bead had turned into an eye, but not human ones. Angel eyes. Or maybe God’s eyes.
They crossed over Rampart heading northward. Irmani felt a lurch, as though all her guts had been yanked out of her body. She leaned back, moaning. She couldn’t even close her eyes. When she did, she saw masks. Not even the colorful dominos with the curlicues and the feathers. Just the eyeholes. Empty eyeholes, swallowing her up, swallowing her soul. One mask in particular haunted her: the ivory domino from the glass case in the Presbytère. It reproached her. She was a thief. She didn’t need those necklaces to live. They weren’t hers. They belonged to Mardi Gras, and Mardi Gras was over. She couldn’t do her mind trick on the mask, because it wasn’t human. It was speaking for the unseen spirit that was New Orleans.
“What’s the matter, honey?” the taxi driver asked, his brown eyes on her from the rear view mirror. “You need me to pull over?”
She nodded, unable to speak. He jerked the car to the curb, waving the vehicles behind him to go around. All the other drivers looked at her as she staggered out and threw up in the gutter. She knew what they were all thinking, as they pierced her with their eyes: a tourist who had had too much partying, but that wasn’t it. The driver and Gib each took one of her arms and helped her to sit on the curb.
“Maybe you should give it a day, honey,” the driver said, sympathetically, patting her arm. “They won’t let you on the jet like that. Go on back. Maybe you can still get your room back. Everybody else’s leaving.”
“We gotta go back.” Irmani looked up at Gib. “God’s not letting me get away with it. I have to give it up for Lent.”
The image of the ivory mask stayed in her mind all the way back to Jackson Square. She almost crawled back into the Presbytère. The guards watched her with trepidation, but she felt as though her strength was coming back with every step she took back toward the glass case. It was locked, as she knew it would be. The only thing that stood between her and those empty eyeholes was getting those necklaces back into the display next to the tiara where they belonged.
The curator was talking to a fat and prosperous couple that Irmani would normally have marked for a bump and grab, but all she could think of was the keys in the dapper man’s pockets. She waited until he shook hands with the visitors and sent them on their way, then stepped forward.
“I found something that you want back,” Irmani said. She concentrated her talent on him as hard as she could. “I’m not responsible for taking them, you understand? I brought them back. That’s what counts. I brought them back. I gave them up.”
The curator looked bemused but pleased at the strands of gemstones and gold that lay across his palms, though later he could never say for the life of him where they had come from or who he had been talking to. He took the keys out of his pocket and locked them away on the purple velvet next to the Comus crown and the lorgnette mask.
Irmani felt as though iron bands had been unfastened from around her chest. She stood out in the nearly empty square in the bleak February sunshine and took deep breaths of damp, cool air.
“Thank God,” she said.
“What are you going to do now?” Gib asked. “We got four hours until our flight.”
Irmani looked up at the cloudy sky and sighed. “We might as well go to church.”
***
Passover
Surviving Traditions
Dr. Rachel Sternberg beckoned the rest of the xenologists into the dining hall.
“Hurry!” said the small, dark-haired woman, her eager smile framed by rosy round cheeks. “It’s almost sundown. I want to start the seder service.”
Dr. Carter Phillips, tall and broad with an amiable, weather-beaten face, glanced around the refectory. The big, rectangular, high-ceilinged room was the center of activity for the four-month-old exploration colony on the planet called Nong. The hall was attached to the north side of the gigantic greenhouse, a Lexan construct that was beginning to fill with burgeoning Terran plants. A couple of personal communication booths for recording messages to send home and a cabinet of board games were tucked in a corner behind the display cases full of the fruits of the settlers’ discoveries, like fossil formations; preserved leaves the size of umbrellas; eggs as large as watermelons; long, fragile bones; exotic plants; and a terrarium of bright blue-green insectoids that occasionally burrowed out of the peaty mass which approximated the swampy terrain outside to peer at the humans.
Usually, the thirty or so long tables that would seat the five hundred members of the Nongian exploration crew were set in three rows of ten tables each. Now all the furniture had been moved into concentric squares, leaving just enough room for the servers to wheel trays in between. Savory aromas came from the serving hatches in the wall that led from the cramped food preparation area where the robochefs worked. Carter slung his equipment bag against the wall and inhaled with deep appreciation, trying to identify the spices floating on the air.
“Are we really going to do this?” asked Debri Sultan, with a disapproving frown on her thin face. Her narrow frame towered above Rachel’s like a human exclamation point.
Rachel crossed her arms. “Yes, we are. After all, we agreed that human rights would be kept even in the reaches of space, otherwise, we’re not human any longer. Passover is an important day in my religion. We have respected yours. Now I ask you to respect mine. I hope it will help you understand our traditions better. There are so few of us humans out here. We’re all that we have.”
“We’re all scientists! These rituals have no relevance in the modern day. Why should superstitions be perpetrated beyond the orbit of Earth?”
“They’re stories and traditions,” Rachel said. Her eyes sparked and her cheeks flushed. Carter could tell that she controlled her temper with some difficulty. “The stories of our heritage. This is how we keep our history alive. I also want the Visitors to learn about as many facets of Earth traditions as possible, as I am sure you do. If you don’t want to be here, I suggest you take your dinner back to your quarters. I don’t mind if you help yourself to the food. I won’t see you go hungry just because you won’t participate in the community.”
Carter placed himself between the two women before Debri could retort.
“Where do you want me to sit?” he asked, keeping his voice pleasant.
