Confederacy of Dunces, A - John Kennedy Toole [85]
After a few sentences Patrolman Mancuso’s mind began to wander. He looked out through the crack in the door of the booth, which he always left open an inch or two so that he could see who was using the urinals, the lavatories, and the paper-towel box. There at the lavatories was the same boy that Patrolman Mancuso had been seeing every day, it seemed. He watched the delicate boots moving back and forth from the lavatory to the paper-towel dispenser. The boy leaned against a lavatory and began drawing on the back of his hands with a ball-point pen. There might be something in this, Patrolman Mancuso thought.
He opened the booth and went up to the boy. Coughing, he tried to say pleasantly, “What’s that you’re writing on your hand, pal?”
George looked at the monocle and the beard at his elbow and said, “Get the hell away from me before I kick your nuts in.”
“Cawd the police,” Patrolman Mancuso taunted.
“No,” George answered. “Just get away. I ain’t making trouble.”
“You afred udda police?”
George wondered who this nut was. He was as bad as that hot dog vendor.
“Look, kookie, move it. I don’t want no trouble with the cops.”
“You dote?” Patrolman Mancuso asked happily.
“No, and neither does a screwball like you,” George said, looking at the watering eye behind the monocle and the moistness at the mouth of the beard.
“You udder arrest,” Patrolman Mancuso coughed.
“What? Boy, are you out of it.”
“Patrodeman Madcuso. Uddercover.” A badge flashed in front of George’s pimples. “Cubb alogg wid me.”
“What the hell are you arresting me for? I’m just standing here,” George protested nervously. “I ain’t done nothing. What is this?”
“You udder suspiciudd.”
“Suspicion of what?” George asked in panic.
“Aha!” Patrolman Mancuso slobbered. “You rilly afred.”
He reached out to grab George by the arm and handcuff him, but George snatched The Consolation of Philosophy from under Patrolman Mancuso’s arm and slammed it into the side of his head. Ignatius had bought a large, elegant, limited edition of the English translation, and all fifteen dollars of its price hit Patrolman Mancuso in the head with the force of a dictionary. Patrolman Mancuso bent over to pick up the monocle, which had fallen from his eye. When he straightened up again, he saw the boy scraping rapidly out of the door of the rest room with the book in his hand. He wanted to run after him, but his head was throbbing too badly. He returned to his booth to rest and grew even more depressed. What could he tell Mrs. Reilly about the book?
George opened the locker in the waiting room of the bus terminal as quickly as he could and took out the brown-paper packages he had stored. Without closing the locker door, he ran out onto Canal Street and jogged metallically toward the central business district, looking over his shoulder for the beard and monocle. There was no beard anywhere behind him.
This was really bad luck. That undercover agent would be prowling the bus station all afternoon looking for him. And what about tomorrow? The bus station was no longer safe; it was off-limits.
“Damn Miss Lee,” George said aloud, still walking as fast as he could. If she weren’t so tight, this wouldn’t have happened. She could have fired the jig, and he could have kept on picking up his packages at the old time, two o’clock. As it was, he had almost been arrested. And it was all because he had to go check the stuff in the bus station, all because he was stuck with the stuff now for two hours every afternoon. Where did you put stuff like that? You could get tired of carrying that stuff around all afternoon. Mother was home all the time, so you couldn’t go around there with it.
“Tight bitch,” George mumbled. He tucked the packages higher up under his arm and realized that he was also carrying the book he had taken from the undercover agent. Stealing