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

nice cup of coffee."
    The kitchen was a large, high-ceilinged room, the largest in the house, and it smelled of coffee and old newspapers. Like every room in the house, it was dark; the greasy wallpaper and brown wooden moldings would have transformed any light into gloom, and from the alley very little light filtered in anyway. Although the interiors of homes did not interest Patrolman Mancuso, still he did notice, as anyone would have, the antique stove with the high oven and the refrigerator with the cylindrical motor on top. Thinking of the electric fryers, gas driers, mechanical mixers and beaters, waffle plates, and motorized rotisseries that seemed to be always whirring, grinding, beating, cooling, hissing, and broiling in the lunar kitchen of his wife, Rita, he wondered what Mrs. Reilly did in this sparse room. Whenever a new appliance was advertised on television, Mrs. Mancuso bought it no matter how obscure its uses were.
    "Now tell me what the man said." Mrs. Reilly began boiling a pot of milk on her Edwardian gas stove. "How much I gotta pay? You told him I was a poor widow with a child to support, huh?"
    "Yeah, I told him that," Patrolman Mancuso said, sitting erectly in his chair and looking hopefully at the kitchen table covered with oilcloth. "Do you mind if I put my beard on the table? It's kinda hot in here and it's sticking my face."
    "Sure, go ahead, babe. Here. Have a nice jelly doughnut. I just bought them fresh this morning over by Magazine Street.
    Ignatius says to me this morning, 'Momma, I sure feel like a jelly doughnut.' You know? So I went over by the German and bought him two dozen. Look, they got a few left."
    She offered Patrolman Mancuso a torn and oily cake box that looked as if it had been subjected to unusual abuse during someone's attempt to take all of the doughnuts at once. At the bottom of the box Patrolman Mancuso found two withered pieces of doughnut out of which, judging by their moist edges, the jelly had been sucked.
    "Thank you anyway, Miss Reilly. I had me a big lunch."
    "Aw, ain't that a shame." She filled two cups half full with thick cold coffee and poured the boiling milk in up to the rim.
    "Ignatius loves his doughnuts. He says to me, 'Momma, I love my doughnuts.' " Mrs. Reilly slurped a bit at the rim of her cup. "He's out in the parlor right now looking at TV. Every afternoon as right as rain, he looks at that show where them kids dance." In the kitchen the music was somewhat fainter than it had been on the porch. Patrolman Mancuso pictured the green hunting cap bathed in the blue-white glow of the television screen. "He don't like the show at all, but he won't miss it. You oughta hear what he says about them poor kids."
    "I spoke with the man this morning," Patrolman Mancuso said, hoping that Mrs. Reilly had exhausted the subject of her son.
    "Yeah?" She put three spoons of sugar in her coffee and, holding the spoon in the cup with her thumb so that the handle threatened to puncture her eyeball, she slurped a bit more.
    "What he said, honey?"
    "I told him I investigated the accident and that you just skidded on a wet street."
    "That sounds good. So what he said then, babe?"
    "He said he don't want to go to court. He wants a settlement now."
    "Oh, my God!" Ignatius bellowed from the front of the house.
    "What an egregious insult to good taste."
    "Don't pay him no mind," Mrs. Reilly advised the startled policeman. "He does that all the time he looks at the TV. A
    'settlement.' That means he wants some money, huh?"
    "He even got a contractor to appraise the damage. Here, this is the estimate."
    Mrs. Reilly took the sheet of paper and read the typed column of itemized figures beneath the contractor's letterhead.
    "Lord! A thousand and twenty dollars. This is terrible. How I'm gonna pay that?" She dropped the estimate on the oilcloth.
    "You sure that is right?"
    "Yes, ma'm. He's got a lawyer working on it, too. It's all on the up and up."
    "Where I'm gonna get a thousand