A Confederacy of Dunces Read online

  “Oh, my God!” Ignatius said, watching the wan little policeman try to control the old man. “Now my nerves are totally frayed.”

  “Help!” the old man appealed to the crowd. “It’s a takeover. It’s a violation of the Constitution!”

  “He’s crazy, Ignatius,” Mrs. Reilly said. “We better get outta here, baby.” She turned to the crowd. “Run, folks. He might kill us all. Personally, I think maybe he’s the communiss.”

  “You don’t have to overdo it, Mother,” Ignatius said as they pushed through the dispersing crowd and started walking rapidly down Canal Street. He looked back and saw the old man and the bantam policeman grappling beneath the department store clock. “Will you please slow down a bit? I think I’m having a heart murmur.”

  “Oh, shut up. How you think I feel? I shouldn’t haveta be running like this at my age.”

  “The heart is important at any age, I’m afraid.”

  “They’s nothing wrong with your heart.”

  “There will be if we don’t go a little slower.” The tweed trousers billowed around Ignatius’s gargantuan rump as he rolled forward. “Do you have my lute string?”

  Mrs. Reilly pulled him around the corner onto Bourbon Street, and they started walking down into the French Quarter.

  “How come that policeman was after you, boy?”

  “I shall never know. But he will probably be coming after us in a few moments, as soon as he has subdued that aged fascist.”

  “You think so?” Mrs. Reilly asked nervously.

  “I would imagine so. He seemed determined to arrest me. He must have some sort of quota or something. I seriously doubt that he will permit me to elude him so easily.”

  “Wouldn’t that be awful! You’d be all over the papers, Ignatius. The disgrace! You musta done something while you was waiting for me, Ignatius. I know you, boy.”

  “If anyone was ever minding his business, it was I,” Ignatius breathed. “Please. We must stop. I think I’m going to have a hemorrhage.”

  “Okay.” Mrs. Reilly looked at her son’s reddening face and realized that he would very happily collapse at her feet just to prove his point. He had done it before. The last time that she had forced him to accompany her to mass on Sunday he had collapsed twice on the way to the church and had collapsed once again during the sermon about sloth, reeling out of the pew and creating an embarrassing disturbance. “Let’s go in here and sit down.”

  She pushed him through the door of the Night of Joy bar with one of the cake boxes. In the darkness that smelled of bourbon and cigarette butts they climbed onto two stools. While Mrs. Reilly arranged her cake boxes on the bar, Ignatius spread his expansive nostrils and said, “My God, Mother, it smells awful. My stomach is beginning to churn.”

  “You wanna go back on the street? You want that policeman to take you in?”

  Ignatius did not answer; he was sniffing loudly and making faces. A bartender, who had been observing the two, asked quizzically from the shadows, “Yes?”

  “I shall have a coffee,” Ignatius said grandly. “Chicory coffee with boiled milk.”

  “Only instant,” the bartender said.

  “I can’t possibly drink that,” Ignatius told his mother. “It’s an abomination.”

  “Well, get a beer, Ignatius. It won’t kill you.”

  “I may bloat.”

  “I’ll take a Dixie 45,” Mrs. Reilly said to the bartender.

  “And the gentleman?” the bartender asked in a rich, assumed voice. “What is his pleasure?”

  “Give him a Dixie, too.”

  “I may not drink it,” Ignatius said as the bartender went off to open the beers.

  “We can’t sit in here for free, Ignatius.”

  “I don’t see why not. We’re the only customers. They should be glad to have us.”

  “They got strippers in here at night, huh?” Mrs. Reilly nudged her son.

  “I would imagine so,” Ignatius said coldly. He looked quite pained. “We might have stopped somewhere else. I suspect that the police will raid this place momentarily anyway.” He snorted loudly and cleared his throat. “Thank God my moustache filters out some of the stench. My olfactories are already beginning to send out distress signals.”

  After what seemed a long time during which there was much tinkling of glass and closing of coolers somewhere in the shadows, the bartender appeared again and set the beers before them, pretending to knock Ignatius’s beer into his lap. The Reillys were getting the Night of Joy’s worst service, the treatment given unwanted customers.

  “You don’t by any chance have a cold Dr. Nut, do you?” Ignatius asked.

  “No.”

  “My son loves Dr. Nut,” Mrs. Reilly explained. “I gotta buy it by the case. Sometimes he sits himself down and drinks two, three Dr. Nuts at one time.”

  “I am sure that this man is not particularly interested,” Ignatius said.

  “Like to take that cap off?” the bartender asked.

  “No, I wouldn’t!” Ignatius thundered. “There’s a chill in here.”

  “Suit yourself,” the bartender said and drifted off into the shadows at the other end of the bar.

  “Really!”

  “Calm down,” his mother said.

  Ignatius raised the earflap on the side next to his mother.

  “Well, I will lift this so that you won’t have to strain your voice. What did the doctor tell you about your elbow or whatever it is?”

  “It’s gotta be massaged.”

  “I hope you don’t want me to do that. You know how I feel about touching other people.”

  “He told me to stay out the cold as much as possible.”

  “If I could drive, I would be able to help you more, I imagine.”

  “Aw, that’s okay, honey.”

  “Actually, even riding in a car affects me enough. Of course, the worst thing is riding on top in one of those Greyhound Scenicruisers. So high up. Do you remember the time that I went to Baton Rouge in one of those? I vomited several times. The driver had to stop the bus somewhere in the swamps to let me get off and walk around for a while. The other passengers were rather angry. They must have had stomachs of iron to ride in that awful machine. Leaving New Orleans also frightened me considerably. Outside of the city limits the heart of darkness, the true wasteland begins.”

  “I remember that, Ignatius,” Mrs. Reilly said absently, drinking her beer in gulps. “You was really sick when you got back home.”

  “I felt better then. The worst moment was my arrival in Baton Rouge. I realized that I had a round-trip ticket and would have to return on the bus.”

  “You told me that, babe.”

  “The taxi back to New Orleans cost me forty dollars, but at least I wasn’t violently ill during the taxi ride, although I felt myself beginning to gag several times. I made the driver go very slowly, which was unfortunate for him. The state police stopped him twice for being below the minimum highway speed limit. On the third time that they stopped him they took away his chauffeur’s license. You see, they had been watching us on the radar all along.”

  Mrs. Reilly’s attention wavered between her son and the beer. She had been listening to the story for three years.

  “Of course,” Ignatius continued, mistaking his mother’s rapt look for interest, “that was the only time that I had ever been out of New Orleans in my life. I think that perhaps it was the lack of a center of orientation that might have upset me. Speeding along in that bus was like hurtling into the abyss. By the time we had left the swamps and reached those rolling hills near Baton Rouge, I was getting afraid that some rural red-necks might toss bombs at the bus. They love to attack vehicles, which are a symbol of progress, I guess.”

  “Well, I’m glad you didn’t take the job,” Mrs. Reilly said automatically, taking guess as her cue.

  “I couldn’t possibly take the job. When I saw the chairman of the Medieval Culture Department, my hands began breaking out in small white bumps. He was a t
otally soulless man. Then he made a comment about my not wearing a tie and made some smirky remark about the lumber jacket. I was appalled that so meaningless a person would dare such effrontery. That lumber jacket was one of the few creature comforts to which I’ve ever been really attached, and if I ever find the lunatic who stole it, I shall report him to the proper authorities.”

  Mrs. Reilly saw again the horrible, coffee-stained lumber jacket that she had always secretly wanted to give to the Volunteers of America along with several other pieces of Ignatius’s favorite clothing.

  “You see, I was so overwhelmed by the complete grossness of that spurious ‘chairman’ that I ran from his office in the middle of one of his cretinous ramblings and rushed to the nearest bathroom, which turned out to be the one for ‘Faculty Men.’ At any rate, I was seated in one of the booths, having rested the lumber jacket on top of the door of the booth. Suddenly I saw the jacket being whisked over the door. I heard footsteps. Then the door of the restroom closed. At the moment, I was unable to pursue the shameless thief, so I began to scream. Someone entered the bathroom and knocked at the door of the booth. It turned out to be a member of the campus security force, or so he said. Through the door I explained what had just happened. He promised to find the jacket and went away. Actually, as I have mentioned to you before, I have always suspected that he and the ‘chairman’ were the same person. Their voices sounded somewhat similar.”

  “You sure can’t trust nobody nowadays, honey.”

  “As soon as I could, I fled from the bathroom, eager only to get away from that horrible place. Of course, I was almost frozen standing on that desolate campus trying to hail a taxi. I finally got one that agreed to take me to New Orleans for forty dollars, and the driver was selfless enough to lend me his jacket. By the time we arrived here, however, he was quite depressed about losing his license and had grown rather surly. He also appeared to be developing a bad cold, judging by the frequency of his sneezes. After all, we were on the highway for almost two hours.”

  “I think I could drink me another beer, Ignatius.”

  “Mother! In this forsaken place?”

  “Just one, baby. Come on, I want another.”

  “We’re probably catching something from these glasses. However, if you’re quite determined about the thing, get me a brandy, will you?”

  Mrs. Reilly signaled to the bartender, who came out of the shadows and asked, “Now what happened to you on that bus, bud? I didn’t get the end of the story.”

  “Will you kindly tend the bar properly?” Ignatius asked furiously. “It is your duty to silently serve when we call upon you. If we had wished to include you in our conversation, we would have indicated it by now. As a matter of fact, we are discussing rather urgent personal matters.”

  “The man’s just trying to be nice, Ignatius. Shame on you.”

  “That in itself is a contradiction in terms. No one could possibly be nice in a den like this.”

  “We want two more beers.”

  “One beer and one brandy,” Ignatius corrected.

  “No more clean glasses,” the bartender said.

  “Ain’t that a shame,” Mrs. Reilly said. “Well, we can use the ones we got.”

  The bartender shrugged and went off into the shadows.

  II

  In the precinct the old man sat on a bench with the others, mostly shoplifters, who composed the late afternoon haul. He had neatly arranged along his thigh his Social Security card, his membership card in the St. Odo of Cluny Holy Name Society, a Golden Age Club badge, and a slip of paper identifying him as a member of the American Legion. A young black man, eyeless behind spaceage sunglasses, studied the little dossier on the thigh next to his.

  “Whoa!” he said, grinning. “Say, you mus belong to everthin.”

  The old man rearranged his cards meticulously and said nothing.

  “How come they draggin in somebody like you?” The sunglasses blew smoke all over the old man’s cards. “Them po-lice mus be gettin desperate.”

  “I’m here in violation of my constitutional rights,” the old man said with sudden anger.

  “Well, they not gonna believe that. You better think up somethin else.” A dark hand reached for one of the cards. “Hey, wha this mean, ‘Colder Age’?”

  The old man snatched the card and put it back on his thigh.

  “Them little card not gonna do you no good. They throw you in jail anyway. They throw everbody in jail.”

  “You think so?” the old man asked the cloud of smoke.

  “Sure.” A new cloud floated up. “How come you here, man?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don know? Whoa! That crazy. You gotta be here for somethin. Plenty time they pickin up color peoples for nothing, but, mister, you gotta be here for somethin.”

  “I really don’t know,” the old man said glumly. “I was just standing in a crowd in front of D. H. Holmes.”

  “And you lif somebody wallet.”

  “No, I called a policeman a name.”

  “Like wha you callin him?”

  “Communiss.”

  “Cawmniss! Ooo-woo. If I call a po-lice a cawmniss, my ass be in Angola right now for sure. I like to call one of them mother a cawmniss, though. Like this afternoon I standin aroun in Woolsworth and some cat steal a bag of cashew nuts out the ‘Nut House’ star screaming like she been stab. Hey! The nex thing, a flo’walk grabbin me, and then a po-lice mother draggin me off. A man ain got a chance. Whoa!” His lips sucked at the cigarette. “Nobody findin them cashews on me, but that po-lice still draggin me off. I think that flo’walk a cawmniss. Mean motherfucker.”

  The old man cleared his throat and played with his cards.

  “They probly let you go,” the sunglasses said. “Me, they probly gimma a little talk think it scare me, even though they know I ain got them cashews. They probly try to prove I got them nuts. They probly buy a bag, slip it in my pocket. Woolsworth probly try to send me up for life.”

  The Negro seemed quite resigned and blew out a new cloud of blue smoke that enveloped him and the old man and the little cards. Then he said to himself, “I wonder who lif them nuts. Probly that flo’walk hisself.”

  A policeman summoned the old man up to the desk in the center of the room where a sergeant was seated. The patrolman who had arrested him was standing there.

  “What’s your name?” the sergeant asked the old man.

  “Claude Robichaux,” he answered and put his little cards on the desk before the sergeant.

  The sergeant looked over the cards and said, “Patrolman Mancuso here says you resisted arrest and called him a communiss.”

  “I didn’t mean it,” the old man said sadly, noticing how fiercely the sergeant was handling the little cards.

  “Mancuso says you says all policemen are communiss.”

  “Oo-wee,” the Negro said across the room.

  “Will you shut up, Jones?” the sergeant called out.

  “Okay,” Jones answered.

  “I’ll get to you next.”

  “Say, I didn call nobody no cawmniss,” Jones said. “I been frame by that flo’walk in Woolsworth. I don even like cashews.”

  “Shut your mouth up.”

  “Okay,” Jones said brightly and blew a great thundercloud of smoke.

  “I didn’t mean anything I said,” Mr. Robichaux told the sergeant. “I just got nervous. I got carried away. This policeman was trying to arress a poor boy waiting for his momma by Holmes.”

  “What?” the sergeant turned to the wan little policeman. “What were you trying to do?”

  “He wasn’t a boy,” Mancuso said. “He was a big fat man dressed funny. He looked like a suspicious character. I was just trying to make a routine check and he started to resist. To tell you the truth, he looked like a big prevert.”

  “A pervert, huh?” the sergeant asked greedily.

  “Yes,” Mancuso said with new confidence. “A great big prevert.”

 
“How big?”

  “The biggest I ever saw in my whole life,” Mancuso said, stretching his arms as if he were describing a fishing catch. The sergeant’s eyes shone. “The first thing I spotted was this green hunting cap he was wearing.”

  Jones listened in attentive detachment somewhere within his cloud.

  “Well, what happened, Mancuso? How come he’s not standing here before me?”

  “He got away. This woman came out the store and got everything mixed up, and she and him run around the corner into the Quarter.”

  “Oh, two Quarter characters,” the sergeant said, suddenly enlightened.

  “No, sir,” the old man interrupted. “She was really his momma. A nice, pretty lady. I seen them downtown before. This policeman frightened her.”

  “Oh, listen, Mancuso,” the sergeant screamed. “You’re the only guy on the force who’d try to arrest somebody away from his mother. And why did you bring in grampaw here? Ring up his family and tell them to come get him.”

  “Please,” Mr. Robichaux pleaded. “Don’t do that. My daughter’s busy with her kids. I never been arrested in my whole life. She can’t come get me. What are my granchirren gonna think? They’re all studying with the sisters.”

  “Get his daughter’s number, Mancuso. That’ll teach him to call us communiss!”

  “Please!” Mr. Robichaux was in tears. “My granchirren respect me.”

  “Jesus Christ!” the sergeant said. “Trying to arrest a kid with his momma, bringing in somebody’s grampaw. Get the hell outta here, Mancuso, and take grampaw with you. You wanna arrest suspicious characters? We’ll fix you up.”

  “Yes, sir,” Mancuso said weakly, leading the weeping old man away.

  “Ooo-wee!” Jones said from the secrecy of his cloud.

  III

  Twilight was settling around the Night of Joy bar. Outside, Bourbon Street was beginning to light up. Neon signs flashed off and on, reflecting in the streets dampened by the light mist that had been falling steadily for some time. The taxis bringing the evening’s first customers, midwestern tourists and conventioneers, made slight splashing sounds in the cold dusk.

  A few other customers were in the Night of Joy, a man who ran his finger along a racing form, a depressed blonde who seemed connected with the bar in some capacity, and an elegantly dressed young man who chainsmoked Salems and drank frozen daiquiris in gulps.