A Confederacy of Dunces (4 page)

"So soon?"

"It's been perfectly delightful meeting you."

"Take care out in the cold and wet."

The young man smiled, placed the hat carefully beneath his trench coat, and left the bar.

"The radar patrol," Ignatius was telling Darlene, "is obviously rather foolproof. It seems that the cab driver and I were making small dots on their screen all the way from Baton Rouge."

"You was on radar," Darlene yawned. "Just think of that."

"Ignatius, we gotta go now," Mrs. Reilly said. "I'm hungry."

She turned toward him and knocked her beer bottle to the floor where it broke into a spray of brown, jagged glass.

"Mother, are you making a scene?" Ignatius asked irritably.

"Can't you see that Miss Darlene and I are speaking? You have some cakes with you. Eat those. You're always complaining that you never go anywhere. I would have imagined that you would be enjoying your night on the town."

Ignatius was back on radar, so Mrs. Reilly reached in her boxes and ate a brownie.

"Like one?" she asked the bartender. "They nice. I got some nice wine cakes, too."

The bartender pretended to be looking for something on his shelves.

"I smell wine cakes," Darlene cried, looking past Ignatius.

"Have one, honey," Mrs. Reilly said.

"I think that I shall have one, too," Ignatius said. "I imagine that they taste rather good with brandy."

Mrs. Reilly spread the box out on the bar. Even the man with the racing form agreed to take a macaroon.

"Where you bought these nice wine cakes, lady?" Darlene asked Mrs. Reilly. "They're nice and juicy."

"Over by Holmes, sugar. They got a good selection. Plenty variety."

"They are rather tasty," Ignatius conceded, sending out his flabby pink tongue over his moustache to hunt for crumbs. "I think that I shall have a macaroon or two. I have always found coconut to be good roughage."

He picked around in the box purposefully.

"Me, I always like some good cake after I finish eating," Mrs.

Reilly told the bartender, who turned his back on her.

"I bet you cook good, huh?" Darlene asked.

"Mother doesn't cook," Ignatius said dogmatically. "She burns."

"I used to cook too when I was married," Darlene told them. "I sort of used a lot of that canned stuff, though. I like that Spanish rice they got and that spaghetti with the tomato gravy."

"Canned food is a perversion," Ignatius said. "I suspect that it is ultimately very damaging to the soul."

"Lord, my elbow's starting up again," Mrs. Reilly sighed.

"Please, I am speaking," her son told her. "I never eat canned food. I did once, and I could feel my intestines starting to atrophy."

"You got a good education," Darlene said.

"Ignatius graduated from college. Then he stuck around there for four more years to get him a master's degree. Ignatius graduated smart."

" 'Graduated smart,' " Ignatius repeated with some pique.

"Please define your terms. Exactly what do you mean by

'graduated smart.' "

"Don't talk to your momma like that," Darlene said.

"Oh, he treats me bad sometimes," Mrs. Reilly said loudly and began to cry. "You just don't know. When I think of all I done for that boy . . ."

"Mother, what are you saying?"

"You don't appreciate me."

"Stop that right now. I'm afraid that you've had too much beer."

"You treat me like garbage. I been good," Mrs. Reilly sobbed.

She turned to Darlene. "I spent all his poor Grammaw Reilly's insurance money to keep him in college for eight years, and since then all he's done is lay around the house watching television."

"You oughta be ashamed," Darlene said to Ignatius. "A big man like you. Look at your poor momma."

Mrs. Reilly had collapsed sobbing, on the bar, one hand clenched around her beer glass.

"This is ridiculous. Mother, stop that."

"If I knew you was so crool, mister, I wouldna listened to your crazy story about that Greyhound bus."

"Get up, Mother."

"You look like a big crazyman anyway," Darlene said. "I shoulda known. Just look how that poor woman's crying."

Darlene tried to push Ignatius from his stool but sent him crashing into his mother, who suddenly stopped crying and gasped, "My elbow!"

"What's going on here?" a woman asked from the padded chartreuse leatherette door of the bar. She was a statuesque woman nearing middle age, her fine body covered with a black leather overcoat that glistened with mist. "I'leave this place for a few hours to go shopping and look what happens. I gotta be here every minute, I guess, to watch out you people don't ruin my investment."

"Just two drunks," the bartender said. "I've been giving them the cold shoulder since they come in, but they've been sticking like flies."

"But you, Darlene," the woman said. "You're big friends with them, huh? Playing games on the stools with these two characters?"

"This guy's been mistreating his momma," Darlene explained.

"Mothers? We got mothers in here now? Business already stinks."

"I beg your pardon," Ignatius said.

The woman ignored him and looked at the broken and empty cake box on the bar, saying, "Somebody's been having a picnic in here. Goddamit. I already told you people about ants and rats."

"I beg your pardon," Ignatius said again. "My mother is present."

"It's just my luck to have this crap broken all over here just when I'm looking for a janitor." The woman looked at the bartender. "Get these two out."

"Yes, Miss Lee."

"Don't you worry," Mrs. Reilly said. "We're leaving."

"We certainly are," Ignatius added, lumbering toward the door, leaving his mother behind to climb off her stool. "Hurry along, Mother. This woman looks like a Nazi commandant. She may strike us."

"Wait!" Miss Lee screamed, grabbing Ignatius's sleeve. "How much these characters owe?"

"Eight dollars," the bartender said.

"This is highway robbery!" Ignatius thundered. "You will hear from our attorneys."

Mrs. Reilly paid with two of the bills the young man had given her and, as she swayed past Miss Lee, she said, "We know when we not wanted. We can take our trade elsewheres."

"Good," Miss Lee answered. "Beat it. Trade from people like you is the kiss of death."

After the padded door had closed behind the Reillys, Miss Lee said, "I never liked mothers. Not even my own."

"My mother was a whore," the man with the racing form said, not looking up from his paper.

"Mothers are full of shit," Miss Lee observed and took off her leather coat. "Now let's you and me have a little talk, Darlene."

Outside, Mrs. Reilly took her son's arm for support, but, as much as they tried, they moved forward very slowly, although they seemed to move sideward more easily. Their walking had developed a pattern: three quick steps to the left, pause, three quick steps to the right, pause.

"That was a terrible woman," Mrs. Reilly said.

"A negation of all human qualities," Ignatius added. "By the way, how far is the car? I'm very tired."

"On St. Ann, honey. Just a few blocks."

"You left your hat in the bar."

"Oh, I sold it to that young man."

"You sold it? Why? Did you ask me whether I wanted it to be sold? I was very attached to that hat."

"I'm sorry, Ignatius. I didn't know you liked it so much. You never said nothing about it."

"I had an unspoken attachment to it. It was a contact with my childhood, a link with the past."

"But he gave me fifteen dollars, Ignatius."

"Please. Don't talk about it anymore. The whole business is sacrilegious. Goodness knows what degenerate uses he will find for that hat. Do you have the fifteen dollars on you?"

"I still got seven left."

"Then why don't we stop and eat something?" Ignatius pointed to the cart at the corner. It was shaped like a hot dog on wheels. "I believe that they vend foot-long hot dogs."

"Hot dogs? Honey, in all this rain and cold we gonna stand outside and eat weenies?"

"It's a thought."

"No," Mrs. Reilly said with somewhat beery courage. "Let's get home. I wouldn't eat nothing outta one of them dirty wagons anyway. They all operated by a bunch of bums."

"If you insist," Ignatius said, pouting. "Although I am rather hungry, and you have, after all, just sold a memento of my childhood for thirty pieces of silver, so to speak."

They continued their little pattern of steps along the wet flagstones of Bourbon Street. On St. Ann they found the old Plymouth easily. Its high roof stood above all the other cars, its best feature. The Plymouth was always easy to find in supermarket parking lots. Mrs. Reilly climbed the curb twice trying to force the car out of the parking place and left the impression of a 1946 Plymouth bumper in the hood of the Volkswagen in the rear.

"My nerves!" Ignatius said. He was slumped down in the seat so that just the top of his green hunting cap appeared in the window, looking like the tip of a promising watermelon. From the rear, where he always sat, having read somewhere that the seat next to the driver was the most dangerous, he watched his mother's wild and inexpert shifting with disapproval. "I suspect that you have effectively demolished the small car that someone innocently parked behind this bus. You had better succeed in getting out of this spot before its owner happens along."

"Shut up, Ignatius. You making me nervous," Mrs. Reilly said, looking at the hunting cap in the rearview mirror.

Ignatius got up on the seat and looked out of the rear window.

"That car is a total wreck. Your driver's license, if you do indeed have one, will doubtlessly be revoked. I certainly wouldn't blame them."

"Lay down there and take a nap," his mother said as the car jerked back again.

"Do you think that I could sleep now? I'm afraid for my life.

Are you sure that you're turning the wheel the right way?"

Suddenly the car leaped out of the parking spot and skidded across the wet street into a post supporting a wrought-iron balcony. The post fell away to one side, and the Plymouth crunched against the building.

"Oh, my God!" Ignatius screamed from the rear. "What have you done now?"

"Call a priest!"

"I don't think that we're injured, Mother. However, you have just mined my stomach for the next few days." Ignatius rolled down one of the rear windows and studied the fender that was pressed against the wall. "We shall need a new headlight on this side, I imagine."

"What we gonna do?"

"If I were driving, I would put the auto in reverse and back gracefully away from the scene. Someone will certainly press charges. The people who own this wreck of a building have been waiting for an opportunity like this for years. They probably spread grease on the street after nightfall hoping that motorists like you will spin toward their hovel." He belched.

"My digestion has been destroyed. I think that I am beginning to bloat!"

Mrs. Reilly shifted the worn gears and inched slowly backward. As the car moved, the splintering of wood sounded over their heads, a splintering that changed into splitting of boards and scraping of metal. Then the balcony was falling in large sections, thundering on the roof of the car with the dull, heavy thud of grenades. The car, like a stoned human, stopped moving, and a piece of wrought-iron decoration shattered a rear window.

"Honey, are you okay?" Mrs. Reilly asked wildly after what seemed to be the final bombardment.

Ignatius made a gagging sound. The blue and yellow eyes were watering.

"Say something, Ignatius," his mother pleaded, turning round just in time to see Ignatius stick his head out of a window and vomit down the side of the dented car.

Patrolman Mancuso was walking slowly down Chartres Street dressed in ballet tights and a yellow sweater, a costume which the sergeant said would enable him to bring in genuine, bona fide suspicious characters instead of grandfathers and boys waiting for their mothers. The costume was the sergeant's punishment. He had told Mancuso that from now on he would be strictly responsible for bringing in suspicious characters, that police headquarters had a costume wardrobe that would permit Mancuso to be a new character every day. Forlornly, Patrolman Mancuso had put on the tights before the sergeant, who had pushed him out of the precinct and told him to shape up or get off the force.

In the two hours that he had been cruising the French Quarter, he had captured no one. Twice things had looked hopeful. He had stopped a man wearing a beret and asked for a cigarette, but the man had threatened to have him arrested. Then he accosted a young man in a trench coat who was wearing a lady's hat, but the young man had slapped him across the face and dashed away.

As Patrolman Mancuso walked down Chartres rubbing his cheek, which still smarted from the slap, he heard what seemed to be an explosion. Hoping that a suspicious character had just thrown a bomb or shot himself, he ran around the corner onto St. Ann and saw the green hunting cap emitting vomit among the ruins.

Two

"With the breakdown of the Medieval system, the gods of Chaos, Lunacy, and Bad Taste gained ascendancy." Ignatius was writing in one of his Big Chief tablets.

After a period in which the western world had enjoyed order, tranquility, unity, and oneness with its True God and Trinity, there appeared winds of change which spelled evil days ahead.

An ill wind blows no one good. The luminous years of Abelard, Thomas a Becket, and Everyman dimmed into dross; Fortuna's wheel had turned on humanity, crushing its collarbone, smashing its skull, twisting its torso, puncturing its pelvis, sorrowing its soul. Having once been so high, humanity fell so low. What had once been dedicated to the soul was now dedicated to the sale.

"That is rather fine," Ignatius said to himself and continued his hurried writing.

Merchants and charlatans gained control of Europe, calling their insidious gospel "The Enlightenment." The day of the locust was at hand, but from the ashes of humanity there arose no Phoenix. The humble and pious peasant, Piers Plowman, went to town to sell his children to the lords of the New Order for purposes that we may call questionable at best. (See Reilly, Ignatius J., Blood on Their Hands: The Crime of It All, A study of some selected abuses in sixteenth century Europe, a Monograph, 2 pages, 1950, Rare Book Room, Left Corridor, Third Floor, Howard-Tilton Memorial Library, Tulane University, New Orleans 18, Louisiana. Note: I mailed this singular monograph to the library as a gift; however, I am not really certain that it was ever accepted. It may well have been thrown out because it was only written in pencil on tablet paper.) The gyre had widened; The Great Chain of Being had snapped like so many paper clips strung together by some drooling idiot; death, destruction, anarchy, progress, ambition, and self-improvement were to be Piers' new fate. And a vicious fate it was to be: now he was faced with the perversion of having to GO TO WORK.