Confederacy of Dunces, A - John Kennedy Toole [146]
“We’ll handle him,” Frieda said.
“All right,” Ignatius said grandly as the three girls sank their stubby hands into his smock and started propelling him toward the door. “You have made your choice. Live in a world of war and bloodshed. When the bomb drops, do not come to me. I shall be in my shelter!”
“Can it,” Betty said.
The three girls hustled Ignatius through the door and down the carriageway.
“Thank Fortuna I’m dissociating myself from this movement,” Ignatius thundered. The girls had knocked the scarf down over one eye and he was having trouble seeing where he was going. “You distempered people hardly have voter appeal.”
They pushed him through the gate and onto the sidewalk. The Spanish dagger plants at the gate pricked his calves painfully and he stumbled forward.
“Okay, buster,” Frieda called through the gate as she closed it. “We’re giving you a ten minutes headstart. Then we start combing the Quarter.”
“We better not find your fat ass,” Liz said.
“Shove off, Tubby,” Betty added. “We haven’t had a good fight in a long time. We’re ready for one.”
“Your movement is doomed,” Ignatius slobbered after the girls, who were pushing one another down the carriageway. “Do you hear me? D-o-o-m-e-d. You know nothing about politics and voter persuasion. You will not carry a single ward in the nation. You won’t even carry the Quarter!”
The door slammed and the girls were back in the party, which seemed to have regained its momentum. The music had started again, and Ignatius heard the squealing and shrieking growing louder than before. He knocked on the black shutters with his cutlass, screaming, “You will lose!” The tap and slide of many dancing feet answered his cry.
A man wearing a silk suit and a homburg came out of the shadow of an adjoining doorway for a moment to see whether the girls had gone. Then the man slipped back into the darkness, watching Ignatius, who was waddling back and forth before the building furiously.
Ignatius’s valve responded to his emotions by plopping closed. His hands sympathized by sprouting a rich growth of tiny white bumps that itched maddeningly. What could he tell Myrna about the movement for peace now? Now, like the abortive Crusade for Moorish Dignity, he had another debacle on his itching hands. Fortuna, that vicious slut. The evening had hardly begun; he couldn’t return to Constantinople Street and a variety of assaults from his mother, not now that his emotions had been stimulated toward a climax that had been snatched from his grasp. For almost a week he had been preoccupied with the kickoff rally, and now, ejected from the political arena by three dubious girls, he stood frustrated and furious on the damp flagstones of St. Peter Street.
Looking at his Mickey Mouse wristwatch which was, as usual, moribund, he wondered what time it was. Perhaps it was still early enough to see the first show at the Night of Joy. Perhaps Miss O’Hara had opened. If he and Myrna were not destined to joust on the field of political action, then it would have to be the field of sex. What a lance Miss O’Hara could be to hurl right between Myrna’s offensive eyes. Ignatius looked at the photograph once more, salivating slightly. What kind of pet? The evening could still be wrenched from the jaws of failure.
Scratching one paw with the other, he decided that safety at least dictated his moving along. Those three savage girls might make good their threat. He billowed off down St. Peter toward Bourbon. The man in the silk suit and homburg came out of the shadow of the doorway and followed him. At Bourbon, Ignatius turned and began walking up toward Canal through the night’s parade of tourists and Quarterites, among whom he did not look particularly strange. He shoved through the crowd on the narrow sidewalk, his hips swinging each way free and slamming people aside. When Myrna read of Miss O’Hara, she would spew espresso all over the letter in consternation.
As he crossed onto the Night of Joy’s block, he heard the doped Negro calling, “Whoa! Come in, see Miss Harla O’Horror dancin