John Toole - A Confederacy of Dunces

“Halt!” Ignatius screamed. “Someone come help me off this table.”

“Stop!” Ignatius called frantically, watching the last of the battalion file through the door. “Come back in here immediately.”

The door swung closed. He got down on his hands and knees and crawled to the edge of the table. Then he swung around and, after a long while spent in maneuvering his extremities, managed to sit on the edge of the table. Noticing that his feet were swinging only a few inches from the floor, he decided to risk the jump. As he pushed himself free of the table and landed on the floor, the camera slid from his shoulder and hit the cement with a hollow, cracking sound. Disemboweled, its film entrails spilled onto the floor. Ignatius picked it up and flipped the switch that was supposed to set it in motion, but nothing happened.

“What are those maniacs singing?” Ignatius asked the empty factory while he tried to stuff foot upon foot of film into his pocket.

Ignatius, trailing unwound film, hustled to the door and entered the office. The two women were stonily displaying the back of the stained sheet to a confused Mr. Gonzalez. Their eyes closed, the choir members were chanting compulsively, lost in their melody. Ignatius pushed through the battalion loitering benignly on the fringes of the scene toward the desk of the office manager.

Miss Trixie saw him and asked, “What’s happening, Gloria? What are all the factory people doing in here?”

“Run while you’re able, Miss Trixie,” he told her with great seriousness.

“I can’t hear you,” Miss Trixie cried, grabbing his arm. “Is this a minstrel show?”

“Go dangle your withered parts over the toilet!” Ignatius screamed savagely.

Miss Trixie shuffled away.

“Well?” Ignatius asked Mr. Gonzalez, rearranging the two ladies so that the office manager could see the lettering on the other side of the sheet.

“What does this mean?” Mr. Gonzalez asked, reading the banner.

“Do you refuse to help these people?”

“Help them?” the office manager asked in a frightened voice. “What are you talking about, Mr. Reilly?”

“I am talking about the sin against society of which you are guilty.”

“What?” Mr. Gonzalez’s lower lip quivered.

“Attack!” Ignatius cried to the battalion. “This man is totally without charity.”

“You ain give him a chance to say nothin,” observed one of the discontented women holding the sheet. “You let Mr. Gonzalez talk.”

“Attack! Attack!” Ignatius cried again, even more furiously. His blue and yellow eyes protruded and flashed.

Someone halfheartedly whizzed a bicycle chain over the top of the file cabinets and knocked the bean plants to the floor.

“Now look what you’ve done,” Ignatius said. “Who told you to knock those plants over?”

“You say, ‘Attagg,’” the owner of the bicycle chain answered.

“Stop that at once,” Ignatius bellowed at a man who was apathetically making a vertical slash in the DEPARTMENT OF RESEARCH AND REFERENCE—I. REILLY, CUSTODIAN sign with a pen knife. “What do you people think you’re doing?”

“Hey, you say, ‘Attagg,’” several voices answered.

“Stop that awful song,” Ignatius shouted at the choir. “Never has such egregious blasphemy fallen upon my ears.”

The choir ceased its singing and looked hurt.

“I don’t understand what you’re doing,” the office manager said to Ignatius.

“Oh, shut up your little pussymouth, you mongoloid.”

“We goin back to the factory,” the spokesman for the choir, the intense lady, said angrily to Ignatius. “You a bad man. I believe a po-lice looking for you.”

“Yeah,” several voices agreed.

“Now wait a moment,” Ignatius begged. “Someone must attack Gonzalez.” He surveyed the warriors’ battalion. “The man with the brick, come over here at once and knock him a bit about the head.”

“I ain’t hittin nobody with this,” the man with the brick said. “You probly got a po-lice record a mile long.”

The two women dropped the sheet disgustedly on the floor and followed the choir, which was already beginning to file through the door.

“Where do you people think you’re going?” Ignatius cried, his voice choked with saliva and fury.

The warriors said nothing and began to follow the choir and the two standard bearers out of the office. Ignatius waddled swiftly behind the warriors straggling in the rear and grabbed one of them by the arm, but the man swatted at him as if he were a mosquito and said, “We got enough trouble without gettin throwed in jail.”

“Come back in here! We’re not finished. You can get Miss Trixie if you want,” Ignatius cried frantically to the disappearing battalion, but the procession continued to move silently and determinedly farther down the stairs into the factory. Finally, the door swung closed on the last of the crusaders for Moorish dignity.

Patrolman Mancuso looked at his watch. He had been in the rest room a full eight hours. It was time to check his costume in at the precinct and go home. He had arrested no one all day and, in addition, he seemed to be catching a cold. It was chilly and damp in that booth. He sneezed and tried to open the door, but it wouldn’t give. He shook it, fumbled with the lock, which appeared to be stuck. After a minute or so of rattling and pushing, he called, “Help!”

“Ignatius! So you got yourself fired.”

“Please, Mother, I am near the breaking point.” Ignatius stuck the bottle of Dr. Nut under his moustache and drank noisily, making great sounds of sucking and gurgling. “If you are planning now to be a harpy, I shall certainly be pushed over the brink.”

“A little job in a office and you can’t hold it down. With all your education.”

“I was hated and resented,” Ignatius said, casting a hurt expression at the brown walls of the kitchen. He pulled his tongue from the mouth of the bottle with a thump and belched some Dr .Nut. “Ultimately it was all Myrna Minkoff’s fault. You know how she makes trouble.”

“Myrna Minkoff? Don’t gimme that foolishness, Ignatius. That girl’s in New York. I know you, boy. You musta really pulled some boo-boos at that Levy Pants.”

“My excellence confused them.”

“Gimme that paper, Ignatius. We gonna take a look at them want ads.”

“Is that true?” Ignatius thundered. “Am I going to be thrown out again into the abyss? Apparently you have bowled all the charity out of your soul. I must have at least a week in bed, with service, before I shall again be whole.”

“Speaking of bed, what happened to your sheet, boy?”

“I certainly wouldn’t know. Perhaps it was stolen. I have warned you about intruders.”

“You mean somebody broke into this house just to take one of your dirty sheets?”