1
On a misty Thursday night in New Orleans, Officer Maureen Coughlin stood in the middle of St. Charles Avenue, surrounded by fire.
Flames danced around her, throwing their fluid light against the steady darkness, igniting wavy golden glows on the hundreds of damp and screaming faces surrounding her and on the fluttering leaves of the ancient trees forming the canopy that yawned above her. The heat of the passing flames reddened her cheeks. She felt their warmth on her bare throat, and found it soothing. She breathed in the black smoke. A light sweat broke out across her hairline under her knit NOPD cap. She’d been cold for so long before the fire came that she sniffled despite the heat, and the tang of burning fuel stung her nostrils. She felt, for a moment, transported into a ghost story, one where she was the ghost, a blue specter floating weightless in a haunted Victorian parlor, with shades, spirits, and banshees suspended in the night air everywhere around her like the smoke from the fires, drifting to her like the heavy vapor of spilled propane.
Despite the march of the flames, she stayed unmoving in the street, her hands clasped behind her back, her feet spread on the pavement. She curled her toes, gripping the soles of her shoes, grounding herself on the avenue. Masked men danced around her on all sides. They carried the fire. They wore their knit hats and ball caps pulled low. Bandannas and towels covered their faces, only their glowing eyes and shining cheeks exposed. They waved and spun their burning torches in the night air above their heads, strutting, leaping, dancing, dipping their hips, arching their backs as they broke around her, a fluid, flaming wave breaking against a dark, damp rock. Thick drops of fire, like huge burning tears, tumbled from the torches, falling to the damp street, where they sputtered and died.
The people lining the street tossed sprays of coins at the fire-bearers, the flying money flickering like sparks in the light of the flames, the coins pinging and banging off the metal guards of the torches like baby gunshots. The men with the torches dipped and whirled, peeling the coins off the street with the long fingers of one hand, twirling their torches in the other.
They did this, these men, Maureen thought, for miles. She searched her brain for what they were called. One word, a French word, a New Orleans word one of her fellow cops had taught her as the other officers in the Sixth District tried to educate her in time for working her first Mardi Gras.
She found it. Flambeaux. That was it; that’s the word. The men who marched with fire to light the parade were called the flambeaux. This was her first night parade that used them. The flambeaux were a superfluous, beloved tradition held over from the holiday’s nineteenth-century roots, from when mule-drawn carts pulled the parade floats through the gas-lit streets. She was proud of herself for remembering this detail. She had plenty left to learn, that was for sure, but she was making progress. A tricky city, New Orleans, and she made you earn access to her intimacies.
The flambeaux moved on. The cold returned and thunder came to her now, tremors rolling down the avenue. She could feel the rumbling under her feet. A marching band powering her way, the drum corps beating out a heavy cadence to keep the marchers stepping in time. Those drums. She loved those drums. They were her new favorite thing about Mardi Gras. Even at a distance, now that was power. She would remain at her station in the street for them, too, and let the sound of the thunder envelop her like she had the warmth of the fire. The huge bass drums, carried high on the torsos of the teenage musicians who played them, would surround her after the rest of the band’s sections had passed around her. The thick, pounding notes of the drums would vibrate deep in her chest, reaching all the way down to her heart, shaking her skeleton as if her ribs were the prongs of a tuning fork.
* * *
A few weeks ago, a fellow officer in her New Orleans police district, Louis Cordts, had tried framing what awaited them during the final days of Mardi Gras in terms that Maureen, a native New Yorker and rookie patrol officer working her first Mardi Gras season, might more easily understand:
“Well, imagine, like, a dozen Times Squares in NYC on New Year’s Eve all lined up in a row, stacked like boxes one after the other. Okay? But instead of that happening for one night, that party lasts for six days. Now, imagine running big parades through the middle of that crowd every night. Huge parades with hundreds of riders that stretch for miles and take hours to roll. Except for the weekends, when the parades run all day, too. And remember drinking in the street is legal here. And barbecues and crawfish boils on the neutral ground, where the streetcars usually run. And beer kegs. They’re okay, too. And tents. And couches. And remember that the riders on the floats throw things for the crowd to catch. Strands of plastic beads. Sometimes they light up. And toys. Stuffed animals, water guns, little Frisbees, it depends … Oh, and plastic go-cups, and these metal doubloons … Yeah, some of these floats, when we get to the big parades, like Muses, can have a hundred riders each. And then there’s the kids in the crowd, yeah, they sit on top of these ladders with seats on them that their parents put on wheels, and then, oh, speaking of wheels … have you seen the Rolling Elvii? The Elvis impersonators on motor scooters? They’ll come toward the beginning of the parades, them or maybe the Laissez Boys, the guys in the smoking jackets that drive the motorized armchairs. They all usually come before the flambeaux … the flambeaux? The guys carrying the propane-powered torches? Yeah, like fire torches. Nobody told you about them? What about the Pink Pussyfooters? You heard about the Marching One Hundred, though, right? No? The Purple Knights? Greatest marching band in the world? You sure you’ve been here almost a whole year?”
Maureen had finally thrown her hands up in surrender. “I get it. I get it,” she’d said, though she hadn’t. She didn’t want to tell Cordts he was only scaring her with every bizarre ritual he described.
“What I want to know is, what’s our job during all this?” Maureen had asked. “Generally speaking.”
“Generally speaking?” Cordts had said. He’d thought for a moment. “On the uptown part of the route where we’ll be? Blood and bullets are what we worry about.”
Maureen had laughed. “A bit dramatic, that. Don’t you think?”
“Simply put,” Cordts had continued, “we need to put an end to anything that can result in either of those two things. Preventive measures are best. A good night is when we see neither of those things.”
“Oh, that’s it?” Maureen had said, grinning at Cordts’s attempt to impress her. “Just avoid bullets and blood? Yeah, what could possibly go wrong?”
“The shit you need to respond to,” Cordts said, “it’s like jazz or porn, trust me, you’ll know it when you see it.”
Though she’d always considered herself a woman of ample imagination, especially when it came to decadence, she hadn’t realized how poorly she’d anticipated what she’d be dealing with until she had witnessed the rolling pageant of elaborately themed floats and costumed walking crews and proud and thunderous marching bands and more for the first time herself on a sunny Saturday afternoon.
Thousands of partying parade-goers jammed the wide, live-oak-lined blocks of St. Charles Avenue, which was the city’s primary artery for Mardi Gras parades. The crowd stretched for miles in both directions, all of them revved up for Babylon, Chaos, and Muses, the Thursday-night trifecta of Mardi Gras parades kicking off the six-day bacchanal that was the run-up to Fat Tuesday. She’d worked the previous weekend’s daytime parades, smaller and gentler undertakings compared with the rolling behemoths that were the super krewes, the first of which was this night’s final parade, the Krewe of Muses.
After the first week of parades, she’d learned that when she worked the route sometimes she felt transported and romantic, as she had minutes ago amid the flambeaux or as she did awash in the drums; other times, like when she actually had to get somewhere or accomplish something in the middle of a rolling parade, she felt as if someone had filled the Superdome with people, poured in a million gallons of liquor, shaken the mix up good like a martini in a cocktail shaker, and dumped the contents into the streets of New Orleans. And then done it again ten more times.
* * *
Now, tonight, the heat of the torches gone by, in the pissing, noncommittal rain made worse by a spring cold snap, half a dozen parades under her belt, her feet and her back already sore, Maureen wasn’t sure she understood the phenomenon any better. But at least she could work without her mouth hanging open like a tourist at the spectacle.
Her radio crackled over the sound of the band as the marchers flowed around her. She could only hear bits and pieces of the announcement over the music. She caught something about a disturbance in the crowd along the back of the parade route. She rose up on her toes trying to see the problem, peering as best she could over the heads of the crowd. Nothing yet that she could see. She settled back on her feet and rolled her shoulders, correcting her posture. She had a long night of standing ahead of her. She’d pay attention to the crowd and wait for whatever happened next. No reason to move just yet. If the trouble came to her, then she’d react …
She glanced at Cordts, one of the two other cops she was stationed with on this part of the route. Cordts, who’d stepped aside to the curb for the passing of the flambeaux, grinned and shrugged at her from a few feet away. He did a lot of that. He hadn’t heard the full report either. Their third, Officer Wilburn, had wandered out of sight. He did that every now and again during the parades; he knew a lot of people in the neighborhood, and since he was a police officer, most of them fed him. He didn’t like to share. But if they needed him, he probably wasn’t too far away.
Maureen reached for her radio mic, thought about asking for more information or a repeat of the report, but the drums only got closer and louder, and the horns exploded into a song and the crowd roared at the rush of music. She clipped her mic back on her shoulder.
She would know the trouble, she figured, when it got to her. It wasn’t like her to miss it, and it wasn’t very often that trouble passed her by. Didn’t take long for it to find her, either. Like beads tossed from a float, she always seemed to catch it as it went flying by, sometimes without even really trying.
Copyright © 2017 by Beats Working, LLC
