Confederacy of Dunces, A - John Kennedy Toole [50]
Miss Trixie nodded and began industriously on a second sandwich. But when she had at last eaten half, she slumped back in her chair.
“Oh, I’m full, Gloria. That was delicious.”
“Mr. Gonzalez, would you care for the bit of sandwich that Miss Trixie cannot eat?”
“No, thank you.”
“I wish that you would take it. Otherwise, the rats will storm us en masse.”
“Yes, Gomez, take this,” Miss Trixie said, dropping the soggy half of uneaten sandwich on top of the papers on the office manager’s desk.
“Now look what you’ve done, you old idiot!” Mr. Gonzalez screamed. “Damn Mrs. Levy. That’s the statement for the bank.”
“How dare you attack the spirit of the noble Mrs. Levy,” Ignatius thundered. “I shall report you, sir.”
“It took over an hour to prepare that statement. Look at what she’s done.”
“I want that Easter ham!” Miss Trixie snarled. “Where’s my Thanksgiving turkey? I quit a wonderful job as cashier in a nickelodeon to come to work for this company. Now I guess I’ll die in this office. I must say a worker gets shabby treatment around here. I’m retiring right now.”
“Why don’t you go wash your hands?” Mr. Gonzalez said to her.
“That’s a good idea, Gomez,” Miss Trixie said and tacked off to the ladies’ room.
Ignatius felt cheated. He had hoped for a scene. While the office manager began making a copy of the statement, Ignatius returned to the cross. First, however, he had to lift Miss Trixie, who had returned and was kneeling directly beneath it and praying in the spot where Ignatius had been standing to paint. Miss Trixie hovered about him, leaving only to seal some envelopes for Mr. Gonzalez, to visit the bathroom several times, and to catnap. The office manager made the only noise in the office with his typewriter and adding machine, both of which Ignatius found slightly distracting. By one-thirty the cross was almost finished. It lacked only the little gold leaf letters that spelled GOD AND COMMERCE which Ignatius had ready to apply across the bottom of the cross. After the motto was applied, Ignatius stood back and said to Miss Trixie, “It is complete.”
“Oh, Gloria, that’s beautiful,” Miss Trixie said sincerely. “Look at this, Gomez.”
“Isn’t that fine,” Mr. Gonzalez said, studying the cross with tired eyes.
“Now to the filing,” Ignatius said busily. “Then off to the factory. I cannot tolerate social injustice.”
“Yes, you must go to the factory while your valve is operating,” the office manager said.
Ignatius went behind the filing cabinets, picked up the accumulated and unfiled material, and threw it in the wastebasket. Noticing that the office manager was sitting at his desk with his hand over his eyes, Ignatius pulled out the first drawer of the files, and, turning it over, dumped its alphabetical contents into the wastebasket, too.
Then he lumbered off to the factory door, thundering past Miss Trixie, who had fallen to her knees again before the cross.
III
Patrolman Mancuso had tried a little moonlighting in his effort to apprehend someone, anyone for the sergeant. After dropping off his aunt from the bowling alley, he had stopped in the bar on his own to see what he could turn up. What had turned up was these three terrifying girls who had struck him. He touched the bandage on his head as he entered the precinct to see the sergeant, who had summoned him.
“What happened to you, Mancuso?” the sergeant screamed when he saw the bandage.
“I fell down.”
“That sounds like you. If you knew anything about your job, you’d be in bars tipping us off on people like those three girls we brought in last night.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I don’t know what whore give you the tip on this Night of Joy, but our boys have been in there almost every night and they haven’t turned up anything.”
“Well, I thought…”
“Shut up. You gave us a phony lead. You know what we do to people give us a phony lead?”
“No.”
“We put them in the rest room at the bus station.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You stay in the booths there eight hours a day until you bring somebody in.”
“Okay.”
“Don