John Toole - A Confederacy of Dunces

“You’re the one who introduced my innocent being to that den of a bar. Actually, it’s all the fault of that dreadful girl, Myrna. She must be punished for her misdeeds.”

“Myrna?” Mrs. Reilly sobbed. “She ain’t even in town. I heard enough of your crazy stories already about how she got you fired outta Levy Pants. You can’t do this to me no more. You’re crazy, Ignatius. Even if I gotta say it, my own child’s out his mind.”

“You look rather haggard. Why don’t you push someone aside and crawl into one of the beds around here and take a nap. Call again in about an hour.”

“I been up all night. When Angelo rang me up and said you was in the hospital, I almost took a stroke. I almost fell down on the kitchen floor right on my head. I coulda split my skull wide open. Then I run into my room to get dressed and I sprain my ankle. I almost got in a wreck driving over here.”

“Not another wreck,” Ignatius gasped. “I would have to go to work in the salt mines this time.”

“Here, stupid. Angelo says to give this to you.”

Mrs. Reilly reached down next to her chair and picked from the floor the large volume of The Consolation of Philosophy. She aimed one of its corners at Ignatius’s stomach.

“Awff,” Ignatius gurgled.

“Angelo found it in that barroom last night,” Mrs. Reilly said boldly. “Somebody stole it off him in the toilet.”

“Oh, my God! This has all been arranged,” Ignatius screamed, rattling the huge edition in his paws. “I see it all now. I told you long ago that that mongoloid Mancuso was our nemesis. Now he has struck his final blow. How innocent I was to lend him this book. How I’ve been duped.” He closed his bloodshot eyes and slobbered incoherently for a moment. “Taken in by a Third Reich strumpet hiding her depraved face behind my very own book, the very basis of my worldview. Oh, Mother, if only you knew how cruelly I’ve been tricked by a conspiracy of subhumans. Ironically, the book of Fortuna is itself bad luck. Oh, Fortuna, you degenerate wanton!”

“Shut up,” Mrs. Reilly shouted, her powdered face lined by anger. “You want the whole recovery ward coming in here? What you think Miss Annie’s gonna say now? How I’m gonna face people, you stupid, crazy Ignatius? Now this hospital wants twenty dollars before I can take you outta here. The ambulance driver couldn’t take you to the Charity like a nice man. No. He has to come dump you here in a pay hospital. Where you think I got twenty dollars? I gotta meet a note on your trumpet tomorrow. I gotta pay that man for his building.”

“That is outrageous. You will certainly not pay twenty dollars. It is highway robbery. Now run along home and leave me here. It’s rather peaceful. I may recover eventually. It’s exactly what my psyche needs at the moment. When you have a chance, bring me some pencils and the looseleaf folder you’ll find on my desk. I must record this trauma while it’s still fresh in my mind. You have my permission to enter my room. Now, if you’ll pardon me, I must rest.”

“Rest? And pay another twenty dollars for another day? Get up out that bed. I called up Claude. He’s coming down here and pay your bill.”

“Claude? Who in the world is Claude.”

“A man I know.”

“What has become of you?” Ignatius gasped. “Well, understand one thing right now. No strange man is going to pay my hospital bill. I shall stay here until honest money buys my freedom.”

“Get up out that bed,” Mrs. Reilly hollered. She snatched at the pajamas, but the body was sunken into the mattress like a meteor. “Get up before I smack your fat face off.”

When he saw his mother’s purse rising over his head, he sat up.

“Oh, my God! You’re wearing your bowling shoes.” Ignatius cast a pink and blue and yellow eye over the side of the bed down past his mother’s hanging slip and drooping cotton stockings. “Only you would wear bowling shoes to your child’s sickbed.”

But his mother did not rise to the challenge. She had the determination, the superiority that comes with intense anger. Her eyes were steely, her lips thin and firm.

Everything was going wrong.

Mr. Clyde looked at the morning paper and fired Reilly. The big ape’s career as a vendor was finished. Why was that baboon wearing his outfit when he was off duty? One ape like Reilly could demolish ten years of trying to build up a decent commercial name. Hot dog vendors had an image problem already without one of them passing out in the street by a whorehouse.

Mr. Clyde and the cauldron bubbled and boiled. If Reilly tried to show up at Paradise Vendors, Incorporated, again, he would really get it in the throat with the fork. But there were those smocks and that pirate gear. Reilly must have smuggled the pirate gimmicks out of the garage the afternoon before. He would have to contact the big ape after all, if only to tell him not to come around. You really couldn’t expect to get your uniforms back from an animal like Reilly.

Mr. Clyde telephoned the number on Constantinople Street several times and got no answer. Maybe they had put him away somewhere. The big ape’s mother must be dead drunk on the floor somewhere. Christ only knew what she was like. It must be quite a family.

Dr. Talc had been having a miserable week. Somehow the students had found one of those threats that that psychotic graduate student had flooded him with a few years before. How it got into their hands he didn’t know. The results were already awful. An underground of rumors about the note was slowly spreading; he was becoming the butt of the campus. At a cocktail party one of his colleagues had finally explained to him the reason for the laughter and whispering that were disrupting his previously respectful classes.

That business in the note about “misleading and perverting the young” had been badly misunderstood and misinterpreted. He wondered if he might have to explain to the administration eventually. And that phrase “underdeveloped testicles.” Dr. Talc cringed. Bringing the whole matter into the open might be the best plan, but that would mean trying to find that former student, who was the sort who would deny all responsibility anyway. Perhaps he should simply try to describe what Mr. Reilly had been like. Dr. Talc saw again Mr. Reilly with his massive muffler and that awful girl anarchist with the valise who traveled around with Mr. Reilly and littered the campus with leaflets. Fortunately she hadn’t stayed at the college too long, although that Reilly seemed as if he were planning to make himself a fixture on the campus like the palm trees and the benches.

Dr. Talc had had them both in separate classes one grim semester, during which they had disrupted his lectures with strange noises and impertinent, venomous questions that no one, aside from God, could possibly have answered. He shuddered. In spite of everything, he must reach Reilly and extract an explanation and confession. One look at Mr. Reilly and the students would understand that the note was the meaningless fantasy of a sick mind. He could even let the administration look at Mr. Reilly. The solution was, after all, really a physical one: producing Mr. Reilly in the abundant flesh.

Dr. Talc sipped the vodka and V-8 juice that he always had after a night of heavy social drinking and looked at his newspaper. At least the people in the Quarter were having rowdy fun. He sipped his drink and remembered the incident of Mr. Reilly’s dumping all of those examination papers on the heads of that freshman demonstration beneath the windows of the faculty office building. The administration would remember it, too. He smiled complacently and looked at the paper again. The three photographs were hilarious. Common, bawdy people—at a distance—had always amused him. He read the article and choked, spitting liquid onto his smoking jacket.