A Confederacy of Dunces (32 page)

"That's right. Spend all your money on the horses. Let this human flounder."

"You'd better take those teeth out of her mouth before she bites off her tongue. Then she'll really be stuck."

"Speaking of tongue, you should have heard all that she told me about Gloria this morning." Mrs. Levy made a gesture that indicated acceptance of injustice and tragedy. "Gloria was the soul of kindness, the first person in years who took an interest in Miss Trixie. Then out of the blue you walk in and kick Gloria out of her life. I think it's given her a very bad trauma.

The girls would love to know about Gloria. They'd ask you some questions, believe me."

"I bet they would. You know, I think you're really going out of your mind. There is no Gloria. If you keep on talking to your little protege there, she's going to take you with her right into the twilight zone. When Susan and Sandra come home for Easter, they'll find you bouncing on that board with a paper bag full of rags in your arms."

"Oh, oh. I see. Mere guilt about this Gloria incident. Fighting, resentment. It's all going to end very badly, Gus. Please skip one of your tournaments and go see Lenny's doctor. The man works miracles, believe me."

"Then ask him to take Levy Pants off our hands. I talked to three realtors this week. Every one of them said it was the most unsalable property they'd ever seen."

"Gus, did I hear correctly? Did I hear you say something about selling your heritage?" Mrs. Levy screamed.

"Quiet!" Miss Trixie snarled. "I'll get you people. Wait and see. You'll get it. I'll get even."

"Oh, shut up," Mrs. Levy shouted at her and pressed her back to the couch, where she promptly dozed off.

"Well, one guy," Mr. Levy continued calmly, "this very aggressive-looking agent, gave me some hope. Like all the others, he said, 'Nobody wants a clothing factory today. The market's dead. Your place is outmoded. Thousands for repairs and modernization. It's got a railroad switch line, but light goods like clothes are going by truck today, and the place is badly located for trucks. Across town from the highways.

Southern garment business folding. Even the land's not worth much. The whole area is becoming a slum.' And on and on.

But this one agent said maybe he could interest some supermarket chain in buying the factory for a store. Well, that sounded good. Then the hitch came in. There's no parking area around Levy Pants, the neighborhood's living median or something is too low to support a big market, and on and on again. He said the only hope was renting it out as a warehouse, but again warehouse revenues are not high and the place is badly located for a warehouse. Something about highways again. So don't worry. Levy Pants is still ours, like a chamberpot we inherited."

"A chamberpot? Your father's sweat and blood is a chamberpot? I see your motive. Destroy the last monument to your father's accomplishments."

"Levy Pants is a monument?"

"Why I ever wanted to work there I'll never know," Miss Trixie said angrily from among the pillows where Mrs. Levy had her pinioned. "Thank goodness poor Gloria got out of there in time."

"Pardon me, ladies," Mr. Levy said, whistling through his teeth. "You two can discuss Gloria alone."

He got up and went into the whirlpool bath. While the water swirled and jetted around him, he wondered how he might somehow be able to dump Levy Pants in the lap of some poor buyer. It must have some uses. A skating rink? A gym? A Negro cathedral? Then he wondered what would happen if he carried Mrs. Levy's exercising table to the seawall and dumped it into the Gulf. He dried himself carefully, put on his terry-cloth robe, and went back into the rumpus room to get his dope sheet.

Miss Trixie was sitting up on the couch. Her face had been cleaned. Her mouth was an orange smear. Her weak eyes were accentuated by shadow. Mrs. Levy was adjusting a coiffed black wig over the old woman's thin hair.

"What in the world are you doing to me now?" Miss Trixie was wheezing at her benefactress. "You'll pay for this."

"Do you believe it?" Mrs. Levy asked her husband proudly, all traces of hostility gone from her voice. "Just look at that."

Mr. Levy couldn't believe it. Miss Trixie looked exactly like Mrs. Levy's mother.

In Mattie's Ramble Inn, Jones poured a glassful of beer ang1

sank his long teeth into the foam.

"That Lee woman ain't treatin you right, Jones," Mr. Watson was telling him. "One thing I don like to see a colored man make fun of hisself for bein colored. That what she be doin with you fix up like a plantation darky."

"Whoa! Color cats got it har enough without peoples bustin out laughin cause they color. Shit. I make my mistake when I tell that Lee mother a po-lice tell me to get a job. I shoulda tell her them fair employ-men peoples sendin me over, scare that gal a little."

"You better go to the po-lice and tell them you quittin at that place but you gonna fin you another job."

"Hey! I ain walkin in no precinc and flappin my mouth at no po-lice. Them po-lice take one look at me, throw my ass in jail. Whoa! Color peoples cain fin no job, but they sure can fin a openin in jail. Coin in jail the bes way you get you somethin to eat regular. But I rather starve outside. I rather mop a whore floor than go to jail and be makin plenny license plate and rug and leather belt and shit. I jus was stupor enough to get my ass snatch up in a trap at that Night of Joy. I gotta figure this thing out myself."

"I still say you go to the po-lice and tell them you be between job a little while."

"Yeah. And maybe I be between job about fifdy year. I ain seen no peoples screamin for unskill color cats. Ooo-wee.

Somebody like that Lee bastar know plenny po-lice. Otherwise that B-drinker, knockout drop cathouse be close down long ago. I ain takin no Ochance going to no Lee frien in the po-lice and sayin, 'Hey, man, I jus be vagran a little while.' He say,

'Okay, boy, you be servin jus a little while, too." Whoa!"

"Well, how the sabotage comin along?"

"Pretty poor. Lee make me work overtime on the floor the other day, she see the crap gettin a little thicker so pretty soon her poor, stupor customer be up to they ankle in dus. Shit. I tol you I wrote a address on one of her orphan package, so if she still distributin for the United Fun maybe we be gettin some answer on that. I sure like to see wha that address bringin in.

Maybe it'll be bringin in a po-lice. Whoa!"

"It pretty clear you not gettin nowhere. Go talk to the po-lice, man. They understand your story."

"I scare of the po-lice, Watson. Ooo-wee. You be scare, too, if you was jus standin in Woolsworth and some po-lice drag you off. Especially when Lee probly goin roun the whirl with half the po-lice on the force. Whoa!" Jones sent up what looked like a cloud, a radioactive one which gradually sent some fallout down onto the bar and the cooler filled with pickled meat.

"Say, whatever happen to that dumb mother was in here that day, the one workin for Levy Pant? You ever seen him aroun again?"

"The man talking about demonstratin?"

"Yeah, the cat got him that fat white freak for a leader, the one tellin them poor color peoples they suppose to drop a nucular bum on top they factory, kill theirselves and get what's left of their ass throwed in jail."

"I ain't seen him since."

"Shit. I like to fin out where that fat freak hidin out. Maybe I call up Levy Pant and ax for him. I like to drop him in the Night of Joy like a nucular bum. Seem like he the kin make that Lee mother shit in her drawer. Whoa! If I gonna be a doorman, I gonna be the mos sabotagin doorman ever guarded a plantation. Ooo-wee. The cotton fiel be burn to the groun before I'm through."

"Watch out, Jones. Don be gettin yourself in no trouble."

"Whoa!"

Ignatius was beginning to feel worse and worse. His valve seemed to be glued, and no amount of bouncing was opening it. Great belches ripped out of the gas pockets of his stomach and tore through his digestive tract. Some escaped noisily.

Others, weaning belches, lodged in his chest and caused massive heartburn.

The physical cause for this health decline was, he knew, the too strenuous consuming of Paradise products. But there were other, subtler reasons. His mother was becoming increasingly bold and overtly antagonistic; it was becoming impossible to control her. Perhaps she had joined some fringe group of the far right wing that was making her belligerent and hostile. At any rate, she certainly had been carrying on a witch-hunt in the brown kitchen recently, asking him all sorts of questions concerning his political philosophy. Which was strange. His mother had always been notably apolitical, voting only for candidates who seemed to have been kind to their mothers.

Mrs. Reilly had been solidly behind Franklin Roosevelt for four terms not because of the New Deal, but because his mother, Mrs. Sara Roosevelt, seemed to have been respected and well treated by her son. Mrs. Reilly had also voted for the Truman woman standing before her Victorian house in Independence, Missouri, and not specifically for Harry Truman. To Mrs. Reilly, Nixon and Kennedy had meant Hannah and Rose. Motherless candidates confused her, and in motherless elections she stayed at home. Ignatius could not understand her sudden, clumsy effort to protect the American Way against her son.

Then there was Myrna, who had been appearing to him in a series of dreams that was taking the form of the old Batman serials that he had seen at the Prytania as a child. One chapter followed the other. In one gruesome chapter, he had been standing on a subway platform, reincarnated as St. James, the Less, who was martyred by the Jews. Myrna appeared through a turnstile carrying a NON-VIOLENT CONGRESS FOR THE

SEXUALLY NEEDY placard and began heckling him. "Jesus will come to the fore, skins or not," Ignatius-St. James prophesied grandly. But Myrna, sneering, pushed him with the placard onto the tracks before the speeding subway train. He had awakened just as the train was about to crush him. The M.

Minkoff dreams were getting worse than the old, terrifying Scenicruiser dreams in which Ignatius, magnificent on the upper deck, had ridden doomed buses over the rails of bridges and into collisions with jets taxiing along airport runways.

By night he was plagued by dreams and by day by the impossible route that Mr. Clyde had given him. No one in the French Quarter, it seemed, was interested in hot dogs. So his take-home pay was getting smaller, and his mother, in turn, was getting surlier. When and how would this vicious cycle end?

He had read in the morning paper that a ladies' art guild was having a hanging of its paintings in Pirate's Alley. Imagining that the paintings would be offensive enough to interest him for a while, he pushed his wagon up onto the flagstones of the Alley toward the variety of artwork dangling from the iron pickets of the fence behind the Cathedral. On the prow of the wagon, in an attempt to attract business among the Quarterites, Ignatius taped a sheet of Big Chief paper on which he had printed in crayon: TWELVE INCHES (12") OF PARADISE.

So far no one had responded to its message.

The Alley was filled with well-dressed ladies in large hats.

Ignatius pointed the prow of the wagon into the throng and pushed forward. A woman read the Big Chief statement and screamed, summoning her companions to draw aside from the ghastly apparition that had appeared at their art show.

"Hot dogs, ladies?" Ignatius asked pleasantly.

The ladies' eyes studied the sign, the earring, the scarf, the cutlass, and pleaded for him to move along. Rain for their hanging would have been bad enough. But this.

"Hot dogs, hot dogs," Ignatius said a little angrily. "Savories from the hygienic Paradise kitchens."

He belched violently during the silence that followed. The ladies pretended to study the sky and the little garden behind the Cathedral.

Ignatius lumbered over to the picket fence, abandoning the hopeless cause espoused by the wagon, and viewed the oil paintings and pastels and watercolors strung there. Although the style of each varied in crudity, the subjects of the paintings were relatively similar: camellias floating in bowls of water, azaleas tortured into ambitious flower arrangements, magnolias that looked like white windmills. Ignatius scrutinized the offerings furiously for a while all by himself, for the ladies had stepped back from the fence and had formed what looked like a protective little grouping. The wagon, too, stood forlorn on the flagstones, several feet from the newest member of the art guild.

"Oh, my God!" Ignatius bellowed after he had promenaded up and down along the fence. "How dare you present such abortions to the public."

"Please move along, sir," a bold lady said.

"Magnolias don't look like that," Ignatius said, thrusting his cutlass at the offending pastel magnolia. "You ladies need a course in botany. And perhaps geometry, too."

"You don't have to look at our work," an offended voice said from the group, the voice of the lady who had drawn the magnolia in question.

"Yes, I do!" Ignatius screamed. "You ladies need a critic with some taste and decency. Good heavens! Which one of you did this camellia? Speak up. The water in this bowl looks like motor oil."

"Let us alone," a shrill voice said.

"You women had better stop giving teas and brunches and settle down to the business of learning how to draw," Ignatius thundered. "First, you must learn how to handle a brush. I would suggest that you all get together and paint someone's house for a start."

"Go away."

"Had you 'artists' had a part in the decoration of the Sistine Chapel, it would have ended up looking like a particularly vulgar train terminal," Ignatius snorted.

"We don't intend to be insulted by a coarse vendor," a spokeswoman for the band of large hats said haughtily.

"I see!" Ignatius screamed. "So it is you people who slander the reputation of the hot dog vendor."

"He's mad."

"He's so common."

"So coarse."

"Don't encourage him."

"We don't want you here," the spokeswoman said tartly and simply.

"I should imagine not!" Ignatius was breathing heavily.