A Confederacy of Dunces (45 page)

Reilly cried anew. "We just lucky the whole thing's not in the paper. We'd have to move outta town."

"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 world-view. 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."

"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 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.

How had Reilly ever sunk so low? He had been eccentric as a student, but now. . . . How much worse the rumors would be if it were discovered that the note had been written by a hot dog vendor. Reilly was the sort who would come to the campus with his wagon and try to sell hot dogs right before the Social Studies Building. He would deliberately turn the affair into a three-ring circus. It would be a disgraceful farce in which he, Talc, would become the clown.

Dr. Talc put down his paper and his glass and covered his face with his hands. He would have to live with that note. He would deny everything.

Miss Annie looked at her morning newspaper and turned red.

She had been wondering why it was so quiet over at the Reilly household this morning. Well, this was the last straw. Now the neighborhood was getting a bad name. She couldn't take it anymore.

Those people had to move. She'd get the neighbors to sign a petition.

Patrolman Mancuso looked at the newspaper again. Then he held it to his chest and the flashbulb popped. He had brought his own Brownie Holiday camera to the precinct and asked the sergeant to photograph him against certain official backdrops: the sergeant's desk, the steps of the precinct, a squad car, a traffic patrolwoman whose specialty was school zone speeders.

When there was only one exposure left, Patrolman Mancuso decided to combine two of the props for a dramatic finale.

While the traffic patrolwoman, pretending to be Lana Lee, climbed into the rear of the squad car grimacing and shaking a vengeful fist, Patrolman Mancuso faced the camera with his newspaper and frowned sternly.

"Okay, Angelo, is that all?" the patrolwoman asked, eager to get to a nearby school before the morning speed zone hours ended.

"Thank you very much, Gladys," Patrolman Mancuso said.

"My kids wanted to get some more pictures to show to they little friends."

"Well, sure," Gladys called, hurrying out of the precinct yard, her shoulder bag bursting with black speeding tickets. "I guess they got a right to be proud of they poppa. I'm glad I could help you out, honey. Anytime you want to take you some more pictures, just gimme the word."

The sergeant tossed the last flashbulb into a trash can and clamped his hand on Patrolman Mancuso's vertical shoulder.

"Single-handed you break up the city's most active high school pornography racket." He slapped his hand on the incline of Patrolman Mancuso's shoulder blade. "Mancuso, of all people, brings in a woman even our best plainclothesmen couldn't fool. Mancuso, I find out, has been working on this case on the q.t. Mancuso can identify one of her agents. Who's the person really been going out on his own all the time looking for characters like those three girls and trying to bring them in?

Mancuso, that's who."

Patrolman Mancuso's olive skin flushed slightly, except in limited areas scratched by the Peace Party auxiliary. There it was simply red.

"Just luck," Patrolman Mancuso offered, clearing his throat of some invisible phlegm. "Somebody gimme a lead to the place.

Then that Burma Jones told me to look in that cabinet under the bar."

"You staged a one-man raid, Angelo."

Angelo? He turned a spectrum of shades between orange and violet.

"I wouldn't be surprised if you was to get a promotion for this," the sergeant said. "You been a patrolman a pretty long time. And just a couple days ago I was thinking you was a horse's ass. How's about that? What do you say to that, Mancuso?"

Patrolman Mancuso cleared his throat very violently.

"Can I have my camera back?" he asked almost incoherently when his larynx was at last clear.

Santa Battaglia held the newspaper up to her mother's picture and said, "How you like that, babe? How you like the way your grandson Angelo made good? You like that, darling?"

She pointed to another photograph. "How you like poor Irene's crazy boy laying there in the gutter like a washed-up whale?

Ain't that sad? That girl's gotta get that boy put away this time.

You think any man's gonna marry Irene with that big bum laying around the house? Of course not."

Santa snatched at her mother's picture and gave it a moist smack. "Take it easy, babe. I'm praying for you."

Claude Robichaux looked at the newspaper with a heavy heart as he rode the streetcar to the hospital. How could that big boy disgrace a fine, sweet woman like Irene? Already she was pale and tired from worrying about her son. Santa was right: that son of Irene's had to be treated before he brought any more disgrace to his wonderful mother.

This time it was only twenty dollars. Next time it might be much more. Even with a nice pension and some properties, a person couldn't afford a stepson like that.

But worst of all was the disgrace.

George was pasting the article in the Junior Achievement scrapbook that was one of his mementos from his last semester at school. He pasted it on an empty page between his biology drawing of the aorta of a duck and his civics project on the history of the Constitution. He had to give it to that Mancuso guy: he was really on the ball. George wondered if his name was on that list the cops had found in the cabinet. If it was, it might be a good idea to go visit his uncle who lived on the coast. Even then, they'd have his name. He really didn't have enough money to go anywhere. The best thing was to stay at home for a while. That Mancuso might spot him if he went downtown.

George's mother, vacuuming on the other side of the living room, hopefully watched her son work on his school scrapbook. Maybe he was getting interested in school again.

She and his father didn't seem to be able to do anything with him. What chance did a boy without a high school education have nowadays? What could he do?

She turned off the vacuum cleaner and answered the doorbell.

George was studying the photographs and wondering what that vendor had been doing at the Night of Joy. He couldn't have been some kind of police agent. Anyway, George hadn't told him where the pictures came from. There was something funny about the whole business.

"The police?" George heard his mother asking at the door.

"You must have the wrong apartment."

George started for the kitchen before he realized that there was nowhere to go. The apartments in the housing project had only one door.

Lana Lee tore the newspaper into shreds and then tore the shreds into smaller shreds. When the matron stopped by the cell to tell her to clean it up, the members of the ladies'