A Confederacy of Dunces (12 page)

"I don't believe that my particular body structure is easily adaptable to that type of device," Ignatius observed, a gimlet eye fixed upon the rusting stool. Ignatius had always had a poor sense of balance, and ever since his obese childhood, he had suffered a tendency to fall, trip, and stumble. Until he was five years old and had finally managed to walk in an almost normal manner, he had been a mass of bruises and hickeys.

"However, for the sake of Levy Pants, I shall try."

Ignatius squatted lower and lower until his great buttocks touched the stool, his knees reaching almost to his shoulders.

When he was at last nestled upon his perch, he looked like an eggplant balanced atop a thumb tack.

"This will never do. I feel quite uncomfortable."

"Give it a try," Mr. Gonzalez said brightly.

Propelling himself with his feet, Ignatius traveled anxiously along the side of the files until one of the miniature wheels lodged in a crack. The stool tipped slightly and then turned over, dumping Ignatius heavily to the floor.

"Oh, my God!" he bellowed. "I think I've broken my back."

"Here," Mr. Gonzalez cried in his terrorized tenor.

"I'll help you up."

"No! You must never move a person with a broken back unless you have a stretcher. I won't be paralyzed through your incompetence."

"Please try to get up, Mr. Reilly." Mr. Gonzalez looked at the mound at his feet. His heart sank. "I'll help you. I don't think you're badly injured."

"Let me alone," Ignatius screamed. "You fool. I refuse to spend the remainder of my life in a wheel chair."

Mr. Gonzalez felt his feet turn cold and numb.

The thud of Ignatius's fall had attracted Miss Trixie from the ladies' room; she came around the files and tripped on the mountain of supine flesh.

"Oh, dear," she said feebly. "Is Gloria dying, Gomez?"

"No," Mr. Gonzalez said sharply.

"Well, I'm certainly glad of that," Miss Trixie said, stepping onto one of Ignatius's outstretched hands.

"Good grief!" Ignatius thundered and sprang into a sitting position. "The bones in my hand are crushed. I'll never be able to use it again."

"Miss Trixie is very light," the office manager told Ignatius. "I don't think she could have hurt you much."

"Has she ever stepped on you, you idiot? How would you know?"

Ignatius sat at the feet of his co-workers and studied his hand.

"I suspect that I won't be able to use this hand again today. I had better go home immediately and bathe it."

"But the filing has to be done. Look how behind you are already."

"Are you talking about filing at a time like this? I am prepared to contact my attorneys and have them sue you for making me get on that obscene stool."

"We'll help you up, Gloria." Miss Trixie assumed what was apparently a hoisting position. She spread her sneakers far apart, toes pointing outward, and squatted like a Balinese dancer.

"Get up," Mr. Gonzalez snapped at her. "You're going to fall over."

"No," she answered through tight, withered lips. "I'm going to help Gloria. Get down on that side, Gomez. We'll just grab Gloria by the elbows."

Ignatius watched passively while Mr. Gonzalez squatted on his other side.

"You are distributing your weight incorrectly," he told them didactically. "If you are going to attempt to raise me, that position offers you no leverage. I suspect that the three of us will be injured. I suggest that you try a standing position. In that way you can easily bend over and hoist me."

"Don't be nervous, Gloria," Miss Trixie said, rocking back and forth on her haunches. Then she fell forward onto Ignatius, throwing him on his back once again. The edge of her celluloid visor hit him in. the throat.

"Oof," gurgled from somewhere in the depths of Ignatius's throat. "Braah."

"Gloria!" Miss Trixie wheezed. She looked into the full face directly beneath hers. "Gomez, call a doctor."

"Miss Trixie, get off Mr. Reilly," the office manager hissed from where he squatted beside his two underlings.

"Braah."

"What are you people doing down there on the floor?" a man asked from the door. Mr. Gonzalez's chipper face hardened into a mask of horror, and he squeaked, "Good morning, Mr.

Levy. We're so glad to see you."

"I just came in to see if I had any personal mail. I'm driving back to the coast right away. What's this big sign over here for? Somebody's going to get his eye knocked out on that thing."

"Is that Mr. Levy?" Ignatius called from the floor. He could not see the man over the row of filing cabinets. "Braah. I have been wanting to meet him."

Shedding Miss Trixie, who slumped to the floor, Ignatius struggled to his feet and saw a sportily dressed middle-aged man holding the handle of the office door so that he could flee as rapidly as he had entered.

"Hello there," Mr. Levy said casually. "New worker, Gonzalez?"

"Oh, yes sir. Mr. Levy, this is Mr. Reilly. He's very efficient.

A whiz. As a matter of fact, he's made it possible for us to do away with several other workers."

"Braah."

"Oh, yeah, the name on this sign." Mr. Levy gave Ignatius a strange look.

"I have taken an unusual interest in your firm," Ignatius said to Mr. Levy. "The sign which you noticed upon entering is only the first of several innovations which I plan. Braah. I will change your mind about this firm, sir. Mark my word."

"You don't say?" Mr. Levy studied Ignatius with certain curiosity. "What about the mail, Gonzalez?"

"There's not much. You received your new credit cards.

Transglobal Airlines sent you a certificate making you an honorary pilot for flying one hundred hours with them." Mr.

Gonzalez opened his desk and gave Mr. Levy the mail.

"There's also a brochure from a hotel in Miami."

"You'd better start making my spring practice reservations. I gave you my itinerary of practice camps, didn't I?"

"Yes, sir. By the way, I have some letters for you to sign. I had to write a letter to Abelman's Dry Goods. We always have trouble with them."

"I know. What do those crooks want now?"

"Abelman claims that the last lot of trousers we shipped him were only two feet long in the leg. I'm trying to straighten out the matter."

"Yeah? Well, stranger things have happened around this place," Mr. Levy said quickly. The office was already beginning to depress him. He had to get out. "Better check with that foreman in the factory. What's his name? Look, suppose you sign those letters like always. I have to go." Mr.

Levy pulled the door open. "Don't work these kids too hard, Gonzalez. So long, Miss Trixie. My wife asked about you."

Miss Trixie was sitting on the floor relacing one of her sneakers.

"Miss Trixie," Mr. Gonzalez screamed. "Mr. Levy is talking to you."

"Who?" Miss Trixie snarled. "I thought you said he was dead."

"I hope that you will see some vast changes the next time that you drop in on us," Ignatius said. "We are going to revitalize, as it were, your business."

"Okay. Take it easy," Mr. Levy said and slammed the door.

"He's a wonderful man," Mr. Gonzalez told Ignatius fervently.

From a window the two watched Mr. Levy get into his sports car. The motor roared, and Mr. Levy sped away within a few seconds, leaving a settling cloud of blue exhaust.

"Perhaps I shall get to the filing," Ignatius said when he found himself staring out the window at only an empty street. "Will you please sign that correspondence so that I can file the carbon copies. It should now be safe to approach what that rodent has left of the Abelman folder."

Ignatius spied while Mr. Gonzalez, painstaking, forged Gus Levy to the letters.

"Mr. Reilly," Mr. Gonzalez said, carefully screwing the top onto his two-dollar pen, "I am going into the factory to speak with the foreman. Please keep an eye on things."

By things, Ignatius imagined that Mr. Gonzalez meant Miss Trixie, who was snoring loudly on the floor in front of the file cabinet.

"Seguro," Ignatius said and smiled. "A little Spanish in honor of your noble heritage."

As soon as the office manager went through the door, Ignatius rolled a sheet of Levy stationery into Mr. Gonzalez's high black typewriter. If Levy Pants was to succeed, the first step would be imposing a heavy hand upon its detractors. Levy Pants must become more militant and authoritarian in order to survive in the jungle of modern commercialism. Ignatius began to type the first step:

Abelman's Dry Goods Kansas City, Missouri U.S.A.

Mr. I. Abelman, Mongoloid, Esq.:

We have received via post your absurd comments about our trousers, the comments revealing, as they did, your total lack of contact with reality. Were you more aware, you would know or realize by now that the offending trousers were dispatched to you with our full knowledge that they were inadequate so far as length was concerned.

"Why? Why?" you are in your incomprehensible babble, unable to assimilate stimulating concepts of commerce into your retarded and blighted worldview.

The trousers were sent to you (1) as a means of testing your initiative (A clever, wide-awake business concern should be able to make three-quarter length trousers a byword of masculine fashion. Your advertising and merchandising programs are obviously faulty.) and (2) as a means of testing your ability to meet the standards requisite in a distributor of our quality product. (Our loyal and dependable outlets can vend any trouser bearing the Levy label no matter how abominable their design and construction. You are apparently a faithless people.)

We do not wish to be bothered in the future by such tedious complaints. Please confine your correspondence to orders only. We are a busy and dynamic organization whose mission needless effrontery and harassment can only hinder. If you molest us again, sir, you may feel the sting of the lash across your pitiful shoulders.

Yours in anger, Gus Levy, Pres.

Happily pondering the thought that the world understood only strength and force, Ignatius copied the Levy signature onto the letter with the office manager's pen, tore up Mr. Gonzalez's letter to Abelman, and slipped his own into the correspondence Outgoing box. Then he tiptoed carefully around the little inert figure of Miss Trixie, returned to the filing department, picked up the stack of still unfiled material, and threw it into the wastebasket.

************

"No, thank God. It's characters like that ruin your investment."

"When your little orphan frien comin here again? Whoa! I like to fin out what goin on with them orphan. I bet they be the firs orphan the po-lice be in-teress in ever."

"I told you I send the orphans things. A little charity never hurt nobody. It makes you feel good."

"That really soun like Night of Joy chariddy when them orphan payin in a lotta money for whatever they gettin."

"Stop worrying about the orphans and start worrying about my floor. I got enough problems already. Darlene wants to dance.

You want a raise. And I got worse problems on top of that."

Lana thought of the plainclothesmen who had suddenly started to appear in the club late at night. "Business stinks."

"Yeah. I can tell that. I starvin to death in this cathouse."

"Say, Jones, you been over to the precinct lately?" Lana asked cautiously, wondering whether there was an outside chance that Jones might be leading the cops to the place. This Jones was turning out to be a headache, in spite of the low salary.

"No, I ain been visitin all my po-lice frien. I waitin till I get some good evidence." Jones shot out a nimbus formation. "I waitin for a break in the orphan case. Ooo-wee!"

Lana twisted up her coral lips and tried to imagine who had tipped off the police.

Mrs. Reilly could not believe that it had really happened to her. There was no television. There were no complaints. The bathroom was empty. Even the roaches seemed to have pulled up stakes. She sat at the kitchen table sipping a little muscatel and blew away the one baby roach that was starting to cross the table. The tiny body flew off the table and disappeared, and Mrs. Reilly said, "So long, darling." She poured another inch of wine, realizing for the first time that the house smelled different, too. It smelled as close as it ever did, but her son's curious personal odor, which always reminded her of the scent of old tea bags, seemed to have lifted. She lifted her glass and wondered whether Levy Pants was beginning to reek a little of used pekoe.

Suddenly Mrs. Reilly remembered the horrible night that she and Mr. Reilly had gone to the Prytania to see Clark Gable and Jean Harlow in Red Dust. In the heat and confusion that had followed their return home, nice Mr. Reilly had tried one of his indirect approaches, and Ignatius was conceived. Poor Mr.

Reilly. He had never gone to another movie as long as he lived.

Mrs. Reilly sighed and looked at the floor to see whether the baby roach was still around and functioning. She was in too pleasant a mood to harm anything. While she was studying the linoleum, the telephone rang in the narrow hall. Mrs. Reilly corked her bottle and put it in the cold oven.

"Hello," she said into the telephone.

"Hey, Irene?" a woman's hoarse voice asked. "What you doing, babe? It's Santa Battaglia."

"How you making, honey?"

"I'm beat. I just finished opening four dozen ersters out in the backyard," Santa said in her rocky baritone. "That's hard work, believe me, banging that erster knife on them bricks."

"I wouldn't try nothing like that," Mrs. Reilly said honestly.

"I don't mind. When I was a little girl I use to open ersters up for my momma. She had her a little seafood stand outside the Lautenschlaeger Market. Poor momma. Right off the boat.

Couldn't speak a word of English hardly. There I was just a little thing breaking them ersters open. I didn't go to no school.

Not me, babe. I was right there with them ersters banging away on the banquette. Every now and then momma start banging away on me for something. We always had a lotta commotion around our stand, us."