A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole Read Free Book Online Page A

impromptu apartment buildings, their porches converted into additional rooms. In some of the front yards there were aluminum carports, and bright aluminum awnings had been installed on one or two of the buildings. It was a neighborhood that had degenerated from Victorian to nothing in particular, a block that had moved into the twentieth century carelessly and uncaringly-and with very limited funds.
    The address that Patrolman Mancuso was looking for was the tiniest structure on the block, aside from the carports, a Lilliput of the eighties. A frozen banana tree, brown and stricken, languished against the front of the porch, the tree preparing to collapse as the iron fence had done long ago.
    Near the dead tree there was a slight mound of earth and a leaning Celtic cross cut from plywood. The 1946 Plymouth was parked in the front yard, its bumper pressed against the porch, its taillights blocking the brick sidewalk. But, except for the Plymouth and the weathered cross and the mummified banana tree, the tiny yard was completely bare. There were no shrubs. There was no grass. And no birds sang.
    Patrolman Mancuso looked at the Plymouth and saw the deep crease in its roof and the fender, filled with concave circles, that was separated from the body by three or four inches of space. VAN CAMP'S PORK AND BEANS was printed on the piece of cardboard taped across the hole that had been the rear window. Stopping by the grave, he read REX in faded letters on the cross. Then he climbed the worn brick steps and heard through the closed shutters a booming chant.
    Big girls don't cry.
    Big girls don't cry.
    Big girls, they don't cry-yi-yi.
    They don't cry.
    Big girls, they don't cry . . . yi.
    While he was waiting for someone to answer the bell, he read the faded sticker on the crystal of the door, "A slip of the lip can sink a ship." Below a WAVE held her finger to lips that had turned tan.
    Along the block some people were out on their porches looking at him and the motorcycle. The shutters across the street that slowly flipped up and down to get the proper focus indicated that he also had a considerable unseen audience, for a police motorcycle in the block was an event, especially if its driver wore shorts and a red beard. The block was poor, certainly, but honest. Suddenly self-conscious, Patrolman Mancuso rang the bell again and assumed what he considered his erect, official posture. He gave his audience his Mediterranean profile, but the audience saw only a small and sallow figure whose shorts hung clumsily in the crotch, whose spindly legs looked too naked in comparison to the formal garters and nylon socks that hung near the ankles. The audience remained curious, but unimpressed; a few were not even especially curious, the few who had expected some such vision to visit that miniature house eventually.
    Big girls don't cry. Big girls don't cry.
    Patrolman Mancuso knocked savagely at the shutters.
    Big girls don't cry. Big girls don't cry.
    "They home!" a woman screamed through the shutters of the house next door, an architect's vision of Jay Gould domestic.
    "Miss Reilly's prolly in the kitchen. Go around the back. What are you, mister? A cop?"
    "Patrolman Mancuso. Undercover," he answered sternly.
    "Yeah?" There was a moment of silence. "Which one you want, the boy or the mother?"
    "The mother."
    "Well, that's good. You'd never get a hold of him. He's watching the TV. You hear that? It's driving me nuts. My nerves is shot."
    Patrolman Mancuso thanked the woman's voice and walked into the dank alley. In the back yard he found Mrs. Reilly hanging a spotted and yellowed sheet on a line that ran through the bare fig trees.
    "Oh, it's you," Mrs. Reilly said after a moment. She had almost started to scream when she saw the man with the red beard appear in her yard. "How you doing, Mr. Mancuso? What them people said?" She stepped cautiously over the broken brick paving in her brown felt moccasins. "Come on in the house and we'll have us a