John Toole - A Confederacy of Dunces

“Oh, Gloria, that’s beautiful,” Miss Trixie said sincerely. “Look at this, Gomez.”

“Isn’t that fine,” Mr. Gonzalez said, studying the cross with tired eyes.

“Now to the filing,” Ignatius said busily. “Then off to the factory. I cannot tolerate social injustice.”

“Yes, you must go to the factory while your valve is operating,” the office manager said.

Ignatius went behind the filing cabinets, picked up the accumulated and unfiled material, and threw it in the wastebasket. Noticing that the office manager was sitting at his desk with his hand over his eyes, Ignatius pulled out the first drawer of the files, and, turning it over, dumped its alphabetical contents into the wastebasket, too.

Then he lumbered off to the factory door, thundering past Miss Trixie, who had fallen to her knees again before the cross.

Patrolman Mancuso had tried a little moonlighting in his effort to apprehend someone, anyone for the sergeant. After dropping off his aunt from the bowling alley, he had stopped in the bar on his own to see what he could turn up. What had turned up was these three terrifying girls who had struck him. He touched the bandage on his head as he entered the precinct to see the sergeant, who had summoned him.

“What happened to you, Mancuso?” the sergeant screamed when he saw the bandage.

“I fell down.”

“That sounds like you. If you knew anything about your job, you’d be in bars tipping us off on people like those three girls we brought in last night.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I don’t know what whore give you the tip on this Night of Joy, but our boys have been in there almost every night and they haven’t turned up anything.”

“Well, I thought…”

“Shut up. You gave us a phony lead. You know what we do to people give us a phony lead?”

“No.”

“We put them in the rest room at the bus station.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You stay in the booths there eight hours a day until you bring somebody in.”

“Okay.”

“Don’t say ‘okay.’ Say ‘yes, sir.’ Now get outta here and go look in your locker. You’re a farmer today.”

Ignatius opened “The Journal of a Working Boy” to the first unused sheet of Blue Horse looseleaf filler, officiously snapping the point of his ballpoint pen forward. The point of the Levy Pants pen did not catch on the first snap and slipped back into the plastic cylinder. Ignatius snapped more vigorously, but again the point slid disobediently back out of sight. Cracking the pen furiously on the edge of his desk, Ignatius picked up one of the Venus Medalist pencils lying on the floor. He probed the wax in his ears with the pencil and began to concentrate, listening to the sounds of his mother’s preparations for an evening at the bowling alley. There were many staccato footfalls back and forth in the bathroom which meant, he knew, that his mother was attempting to accomplish several phases of her toilet at once. Then there were the noises that he had grown accustomed to over the years whenever his mother was preparing to leave the house: the plop of a hairbrush falling into the toilet bowl, the sound of a box of powder hitting the floor, the sudden exclamations of confusion and chaos.

“Ouch!” his mother cried at one point.

Ignatius found the subdued and solitary din in the bathroom annoying and wished that she would finish. At last he heard the light click off. She knocked at his door.

“Ignatius, honey, I’m going.”

“All right,” Ignatius replied icily.

“Open the door, babe, and come kiss me goodbye.”

“Mother, I am quite busy at the moment.”

“Don’t be like that, Ignatius. Open up.”

“Run off with your friends, please.”

“Aw, Ignatius.”

“Must you distract me at every level. I am working on something with wonderful movie possibilities. Highly commercial.”

Mrs. Reilly kicked at the door with her bowling shoes.

“Are you ruining that pair of absurd shoes that were bought with my hard-earned wages?”

“Huh? What’s that, precious?”

Ignatius extracted the pencil from his ear and opened the door. His mother’s maroon hair was fluffed high over her forehead; her cheekbones were red with rouge that had been spread nervously up to the eyeballs. One wild puff full of powder had whitened Mrs. Reilly’s face, the front of her dress, and a few loose maroon wisps.

“Oh, my God,” Ignatius said, “you have powder all over your dress, although that is probably one of Mrs. Battaglia’s beauty hints.”

“Why you always knocking Santa, Ignatius?”

“She appears to have been knocked a bit in her life already. Up rather than down. If she ever nears me, however, the direction will be reversed.”

“Ignatius!”

“She also brings to mind the vulgarism ‘knockers.’”

“Santa’s a grammaw. You oughta be ashamed.”

“Thank goodness Miss Annie’s coarse cries restored peace the other night. Never in my life have I seen so shameless an orgy. And right in my very own kitchen. If that man were any sort of law enforcement officer, he would have arrested that ‘aunt’ right there on the spot.”

“Don’t knock Angelo, neither. He’s got him a hard road, boy. Santa says he’s been in the bathroom at the bus station all day.”

“Oh, my God! Do I believe what I’m hearing? Please run along with your two cohorts from the Mafia and let me alone.”

“Don’t treat your poor momma like that.”

“Poor? Did I hear poor? When the dollars are literally flowing into this home from my labors? And flowing out even more rapidly.”

“Don’t start that again, Ignatius. I only got twenty dollars out of you this week, and I almost had to get down on my knees and beg for it. Look at all them thing-a-ma-jigs you been buying. Look at that movie camera you brung home today.”

“The movie camera will shortly be put to use. That harmonica was rather cheap.”

“We never gonna pay off that man at this rate.”

“That is hardly my problem. I don’t drive.”

“No, you don’t care. You never cared for nothing, boy.”

“I should have known that every time I open the door of my room I am literally opening a Pandora’s Box. Doesn’t Mrs. Battaglia want you to await her debauched nephew and her at the curb so that not one invaluable moment of bowling time will be lost?” Ignatius belched the gas of a dozen brownies trapped by his valve. “Grant me a little peace. Isn’t it enough that I am harried all day long at work? I thought that I had adequately described to you the horrors which I must face daily.”

“You know I appreciate you, babe,” Mrs. Reilly sniffed. “Come on and gimme a little goodbye kiss like a good boy.”

Ignatius bent down and lightly bussed her on the cheek.

“Oh, my God,” he said, spitting out powder. “Now my mouth will feel gritty all night.”

“I got too much powder on?”

“No, it’s just fine. Aren’t you an arthritic or something? How in the world can you bowl?”

“I think the exercise is helping me out. I’m feeling better.”

A horn honked out on the street.

“Apparently your friend has escaped the bathroom,” Ignatius snorted. “It’s just like him to hang around a bus station. He probably likes to watch those Scenicruiser horrors arrive and depart. In his worldview the bus is apparently a good thing. That shows how retarded he is.”

“I’ll be in early, honey,” Mrs. Reilly said, closing the miniature front door.

“I shall probably be misused by some intruder!” Ignatius screamed.

Bolting the door to his room, he grabbed an empty ink bottle and opened his shutters. He stuck his head out of the window and looked down the alley to where the little white Rambler was visible in the darkness at the curb. With all of his strength, he heaved the bottle and heard it hit the roof of the car with greater sound effects than he had expected it to.