A Confederacy of Dunces (44 page)

"Welcome, ladies and genitals." It was so dreadful a beginning that Ignatius almost knocked over the table.

"You are pay me now," the woman was demanding, sticking her head under the table to find the face of her customer.

"Shut up, you slut," Ignatius hissed.

The band stumbled into a four-count version of Sophisticated Lady. The Nazi woman was screaming, "And now that pure Virgin-ny Belle, Miss Harlett O'Hara." An old man at one of the tables clapped feebly, and Ignatius peered over the rim of the stage and saw that the proprietress was gone. In her place stood a stand decorated with rings. What was Miss O'Hara up to?

Then Darlene swept onstage in a ball gown that trailed yards of nylon net. On her head was a monstrous picture hat and on her arm a monstrous bird. Someone else clapped.

"Mira, you are pay me now or else, cabron."

"There sure was plenty balls at that ball, but I still got my honor," Darlene said carefully to the bird.

"Oh, my God!" Ignatius bellowed, unable to remain silent any longer. "Is this cretin Harlett O'Hara?"

The cockatoo noticed him before Darlene did, for its beads of eyes had been focusing on Ignatius's hoop of a novelty earring ever since it had come onstage. When Ignatius bellowed, it flapped from Darlene's arm to the stage and squawking, hopping, dashed for Ignatius's head.

"Hey," Darlene cried. "It's the crazyman."

As Ignatius was about to dash from the club, the bird hopped from the stage to his shoulder. It sank its claws into his smock and snagged his earring with its beak.

"Good heavens!" Ignatius leaped up and beat at the bird with his itching paws. What avian menace had depraved Fortuna spun his way? The champagne bottles and the glasses shattered on the floor as he sprang and began staggering to the door.

"Come back here with my cockatoo," Darlene cried.

Lana Lee was on the stage now, screaming. The band had stopped. The few old male patrons moved out of the way of Ignatius, who was floundering around among the little tables making moose calls and beating at the mass of rose feathers welded to his ear and shoulder.

"How in the hell did that character get in here?" Lana Lee asked the confused septuagenarians in the audience. "Where's Jones? Somebody get me that Jones."

"Come here, you big crazyman," Darlene hollered. "On opening night. Why you hadda come here on opening night?"

"Good grief," Ignatius gasped, feeling for the door. In his wake he had left a trail of overturned tables. "How dare you fiends inflict a rabid bird upon your unsuspecting customers?

You may expect to be sued in the morning."

"Come! You are owe twenty-four dollar to me. You are pay right now."

Ignatius knocked over another table as he and the cockatoo lurched forward. Then he felt the earring loosening, and the cockatoo, the earring firmly in its beak, fell from his shoulder.

Terrorized, Ignatius bounced out of the door just ahead of the Latin woman, who was waving the check with great determination.

"Whoa! Hey!"

Ignatius stumbled past Jones, who had never expected the sabotage to assume such dramatic proportions. Gasping, clutching his cemented valve, Ignatius continued forward onto the street and into the path of an oncoming Desire bus. He first heard the people on the sidewalk screaming. Then he heard the pounding tires and the crying brakes, and when he glanced up he was blinded by headlights a few feet from his eyes. The headlights swam and faded from his sight as he fainted.

He would have fallen directly before the bus if Jones hadn't leaped into the street and pulled at the white smock with his two large hands. Ignatius instead fell backward, and the bus, exhaling diesel exhaust, rumbled past an inch or two from his desert boots.

"Is he dead?" Lana Lee asked hopefully, studying the mound of white material lying in the street.

"I am hope not. He is owe twenty-four dollar, the maricon."

"Hey, wake up, man," Jones said, blowing some smoke over the inert figure.

The man in the silk suit and homburg stepped from an alleyway, where he had hidden himself when he saw Ignatius enter the Night of Joy. Ignatius's departure from the club had been so violent and rapid that the man had been too startled to act until now.

"Let me take a look at him," the man in the homburg said, bending over and listening to Ignatius's heart. A kettledrum of a thump told him that life still breathed within the yards of white smock. He held Ignatius's wrist. The Mickey Mouse watch was smashed. "He's okay. He just passed out." The man cleared his throat and ordered weakly, "Everybody back. Give him air."

The street was filled with people and the bus had stopped a few yards down the street, blocking traffic. Suddenly it looked like Bourbon Street at Mardi Gras.

Through the darkness of his glasses Jones looked at the stranger. He looked familiar, like a well-dressed version of someone Jones had seen before. The weak eyes were most familiar. Jones remembered the same weak eyes on top of a red beard. Then he remembered the same eyes under a blue cap in the precinct on the day of the cashew nut incident. He said nothing. A policeman was a policeman. It was always best to ignore them unless they bothered you.

"Where he came from?" Darlene was asking the crowd. The rose cockatoo rested once again on her arm, the earring dangling from its beak like a golden worm. "What a opening night. What we gonna do, Lana?"

"Nothing," Lana said angrily. "Let that character lay there till the street sweeper comes around. Then let me get my hands on Jones."

"Whoa! Hey! That cat force his way in. We was fightin and grapplin, but that mother seem determine to get in the Night of Joy. I was ascare I be rippin this costume you rentin, you be havin to pay for it, Night of Joy be goin broke. Whoa!"

"Shut your smart mouth. I think I'm gonna have to call up all my pals at the precinct. You're fired. Darlene, too. I knew I shouldna let you get on my stage. Get that goddam bird off my sidewalk." Lana turned to the crowd. "Well, folks, now that you're all here, how's about coming into the Night of Joy? We got a class show,"

"Mira, Lee." The Latin woman inflicted a little halitosis on Lana Lee. "Who is pay the twenty-four dollar for champagne?"

"You're fired, too, you dumb spic." Lana smiled. "Come on in folks, and enjoy a good drink made by our expert mixologists to your exact specifications."

The crowd, however, was craning at the white mound, which was wheezing loudly, and declined the invitation to elegance.

Lana Lee was about to go over and kick the mound into consciousness and get it out of her gutter when the man in the homburg said politely, "I'd like to use your telephone. Maybe I'd better call a ambulance."

Lana looked at the silk suit, the hat, the weak, insecure eyes.

She could spot a safe one, a soft touch all right. A rich doctor?

A lawyer? She might be able to turn this little fiasco into a profit.

"Sure," she whispered. "Look, you don't wanna waste your evening messing with that character laying in the street. He's some kinda bum. You look like you could use you some fun."

She stepped around the white mountain of smock, which was wheezing and snorting volcanically. Somewhere in fantasyland Ignatius was dreaming of a terrified Myrna Minkoff being tried by a court of Taste and Decency and found wanting. A dreadful sentence was about to be pronounced, something guaranteeing physical injury to her person as penance for innumerable offenses. Lana Lee got close to the man and reached into her gold lame overalls. She squatted next to him and surreptitiously flashed the Boethian photograph cupped in her hand. "Take a look at this, baby.

How'd you like to spend the evening with that?"

The man in the homburg turned his eyes from Ignatius's whitened face and looked at the woman, the book, the globe, the chalk. He cleared his throat once more and said, "I'm Patrolman Mancuso. Undercover agent. You're under arrest for soliciting and for possession of pornography."

Just then the three members of the defunct ladies' auxiliary, Frieda, Betty, and Liz, stomped into the crowd surrounding Ignatius.

Thirteen

Ignatius opened his eyes and saw white floating above him. He had a headache and his ear was throbbing. Then his blue and yellow eyes focused slowly, and, through his headache, he realized that he was looking at a ceiling.

"So you finally woke up, boy," his mother's voice said near him. "Just take a look at this. Now we really ruined."

"Where am I?"

"Don't start acting smart with me, boy. Don't start with me, Ignatius. I'm warning you. I had enough. I mean it. How I'm gonna face people after this?"

Ignatius turned his head and looked about him. He was lying in a little cell formed by screens on either side. He saw a nurse pass by the foot of the bed.

"Good heavens! I'm in a hospital. Who is my doctor? I hope that you have been selfless enough to secure the services of a specialist. And a priest. Have one come. I'll see whether he's acceptable." Ignatius sprayed a little nervous saliva on the sheet that snowcapped the peak of his stomach. He touched his head and felt a bandage plastered over his headache. "Oh, my God! Don't be afraid to tell me, Mother. I can tell from the pain that it must be rather fatal."

"Shut up and take a look at this," Mrs. Reilly almost shouted, throwing a newspaper on Ignatius's bandage.

"Nurse!"

Mrs. Reilly tore the newspaper from his face and slapped her hand over his moustache.

"Now shut up, crazy, and take a look at this here paper." Her voice was cracking. "We ruined."

Under the headline that said, WILD INCIDENT ON

BOURBON STREET, Ignatius saw three photographs lined up together. On the right Darlene with her ball gown was holding the cockatoo and smiling a starlet's smile. On the left Lana Lee covered her face with her hands as she climbed into the rear seat of a squad car already filled with the three cropped heads of the members of the ladies' auxiliary of the Peace Party. Patrolman Mancuso, in a torn suit and a hat with a bent rim, purposefully held open the door of the car. In the center the doped Negro was grinning at what looked like a dead cow lying in the street. Ignatius scrutinized the center photograph through slitted eyes.

"Just look at that," he thundered. "What sort of clods does that newspaper employ on its photographic staff? My features are barely distinguishable."

"Read what it says underneath the pictures, boy." Mrs. Reilly stuck a finger into the newspaper as if she meant to lance the photograph. "Just read it, Ignatius. What you think people are saying on Constantinople Street? Go on, read that out loud to me, boy. A big brawl out on the street, dirty pictures, ladies of the evening. It's all there. Read it, boy."

"I'd rather not. It's probably full of falsification and smear. The yellow journalists doubtlessly suggested all sorts of lip-smacking innuendoes." Nevertheless, Ignatius treated the story to a desultory reading. "Do you mean to tell me that they claim that that wayward bus did not hit me?" he asked angrily. "The very first comment is a lie. Contact Public Service. We must sue."

"Shut up. Read the whole thing." A stripper's bird had attacked a hot dog vendor wearing a costume. A. Mancuso, undercover, had arrested Lana Lee for soliciting and for possession of and posing for pornography. Burma Jones, porter, had led A.

Mancuso to a cabinet under the bar where pornographic materials were discovered. A. Mancuso told reporters that he had been working on the case for some time, that he had already contacted one of the Lee woman's agents. Police suspect that the arrest of the Lee woman broke a citywide high school pornography distribution syndicate. Police found a list of schools in the bar. A. Mancuso said that the agent would be sought. While A. Mancuso was performing the arrest, three women, Club, Steele, and Bumper, emerged from the large crowd before the club and assaulted him. They were also booked. Ignatius Jacques Reilly, thirty, was removed to a hospital to be treated for shock.

"It's our bad luck they had a photographer hanging around doing nothing they could send out to take a picture of you laying in the street like a drunk bum." Mrs. Reilly began to sniffle. "I shoulda known something like this was gonna happen with your dirty pictures and running off dressed up like a Mardi Gras."

"I ran off into the most dismal night of my life," Ignatius sighed. "Fortuna was really spinning drunkenly last night. I doubt whether I can go much farther down." He belched. "May I ask what that cretin nemesis of a policeman was doing on the scene?"

"Last night after you run off I rung up Santa and told her to get Angelo at the precinct and for him to go see what you was doing down on St. Peter Street. I heard you give a address to that taxi man."

"How clever."

"I thought you was going to a meeting with a buncha communiss. Was I wrong. Angelo says you was hanging around with some funny people."

"In other words, you were having me trailed," Ignatius screamed. "My own mother!"

"Attacked by a bird," Mrs. Reilly wept. "That hadda happen to you, Ignatius. Nobody never gets attacked by a bird."

"Where is that bus driver? He must be indicted immediately."

"You just fainted, stupid."

"Then why this bandage? I don't feel at all well. I must have damaged some vital part when I fell to the street."

"You just scraped your head a little. They's nothing wrong with you. They took Xrays."

"Have people been fooling with my body while I was unconscious? You might have had the good taste to stop them.

Heaven knows where these salacious medical people have been probing." Ignatius now realized that in addition to the head and ear, an erection had been bothering him ever since he had awakened. It was demanding attention. "Would you mind leaving my booth for a moment while I inspect myself to see whether I've been mishandled? Five minutes should be sufficient."

"Look, Ignatius." Mrs. Reilly rose from the chair and grabbed Ignatius by the collar of the clownlike dotted pajamas that had been put on him. "Don't act smart with me or I'll slap your face off. Angelo told me all about it. A boy with your education bumming around with funny people down in the Quarter, going into a barroom to look for a lady of the evening." Mrs.