Confederacy of Dunces, A - John Kennedy Toole [39]
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 by-word 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.