Confederacy of Dunces, A - John Kennedy Toole [100]
He did not want to sabotage his discovery by taking anything from the cabinet. Lana Lee, with her hawk eyes and bloodhound nose, would notice that right away. He thought for a moment, then he took the pencil from the cash register and, running his hand down the side of the stacked packages, wrote as minutely as possible on the side of each package the address of the Night of Joy. Like a note in a bottle, the address might bring some reply, perhaps from a legitimate and a professional saboteur. An address on a package wrapped in plain brown paper was as damaging as a fingerprint on a gun, Jones thought. It was something that shouldn’t be there. He stacked the packages back carefully, straightening the pile to its original symmetry. Then he placed the pencil on the cash register and finished his water. He studied the door of the cabinet and decided that it was open at about the same angle at which he had found it.
He came from behind the bar and resumed his desultory sweeping just as Lana, Darlene, and the bird, looking like a small unruly mob, burst in from the alley. Darlene’s orchid was hanging, and the bird’s few feathers were ruffled. Lana Lee, though, was still well groomed and looked as though some cyclone had miraculously missed only her.
“Okay now, Darlene,” Lana said, grabbing Darlene by the shoulders. “What the hell are you supposed to say?”
“Whoa! You sure a understandin director. If you be makin big movies, half the peoples in it be dead.”
“Shut up and get on my floor,” Lana said to Jones and shook Darlene a little. “Now say it right, stupid.”
Darlene sighed hopelessly and said, “There sure was plenty bones at that ball, honey, but I still got my honor.”
III
Patrolman Mancuso leaned against the sergeant’s desk and wheezed, “You gotta tage me oud thad badroom. I can breed no more.”
“What?” The sergeant looked at the wan figure before him, at the watery pink eyes behind the bifocals, at the dry lips through the white goatee. “What’s wrong with you, Mancuso? Why can’t you stand up like a man? Getting a cold. Men on the force don’t catch cold. Men on the force are strong.”
Patrolman Mancuso coughed wetly into the goatee.
“You haven’t picked up nobody out that bus station. Remember what I told you? You stay there until you bring me somebody.”
“I’b getting pneumodia.”
“Take some cold tablets. Get outta here and bring me somebody.”
“My at says if I stay iddat badroom, I’b gudda die.”
“Your aunt? A grown man like you’s gotta listen to his aunt? Jesus. What kinda people you know, Mancuso? Old ladies who go sit in strip joints all alone, aunts. You probly belong to a ladies’ sodality or something. Stand up straight.” The sergeant studied the miserable figure that was shaking with the aftereffects of a dangerous cough. He didn’t want to be responsible for a death. It would be better to give Mancuso a probationary period and kick him off the force. “Okay. Don’t go back to the bus station. Get out on the streets again and get some sunshine. But listen here. I’m giving you two weeks. If you don’t bring in nobody by then, you’re off the force. You understand me, Mancuso?”
Patrolman Mancuso nodded, sniffling.
“I’b gudda try. I’b gudda brig you subbody.”
“Stop leaning over me,” the sergeant screamed. “I don’t wanna catch your cold. Stand up. Get outta here. Go take some pills and orange juice. Jesus.”
“I’b gudda brig you subbody,” Patrolman Mancuso wheezed again, this time even more unconvincingly than the first. Then he drifted off in his novel costume, the sergeant’s ultimate practical joke on him. He was wearing a baseball cap and a Santa Claus outfit.
IV
Ignatius ignored his mother’s pounding on his door and crying in the hall about the fifty cents in wages that he had brought home for the day’s work. Sweeping the Big Chief tablets, yo-yo, and rubber glove from his desk, he opened the Journal