“You pretty lucky them po-lice didn’t take you in, too, workin in that bar.”

  “That Patrolman Mancusa say he appreciate showin him that cabinet. He say, ‘Us mothers on the force need peoples like you, help us out.’ He say, ‘Peoples like you be helpin me get ahead.’ I say, ‘Whoa! Be sure and tell that to your frien at the precinc, they don star snatchin my ass for vagran.’ He say, ‘I sure will. Everybody at the precinc be appreciatin wha you done, man.’ Now them po-lice mothers appreciate me. Hey! Maybe I be gettin some kinda awar. Whoa!” Jones aimed some smoke over Mr. Watson’s tan head. “That Lee bastar really got her some snapshot of herself in the cabinet. Patrolman Mancusa starin at them pictures, his eyeballs about to fall out on the floor. He sayin, ‘Whoa! Hey! Wow!’ He sayin, ‘Boy, I really be gettin ahead now.’ I say to myself, ‘Maybe some peoples be gettin ahead. Some other peoples be turnin vagran again. Some peoples ain gonna be gainfully employ below the minimal wage after tonight. Some peoples be draggin they ass all aroun town somewheres, be buyin me air condition, color TV.’ Shit. Firs I’m a glorify broom expert, now I’m vagran.”

  “Things can always be worse off.”

  “Yeah. You can say that, man. You got you a little business, got you a son teachin school probly got him a bobby-cue set, Buick, air condition, TV. Whoa! I ain even got me a transmitter radio. Night of Joy salary keepin peoples below the air-condition level.” Jones formed a philosophical cloud. “But you right in a way there, Watson. Things maybe be worse off. Maybe I be that fat mother. Whoa! Whatever gonna happen to somebody like that? Hey!”

  *

  Mr. Levy settled into the yellow nylon couch and unfolded his paper, which was delivered to the coast every morning at a higher subscription rate. Having the couch all to himself was wonderful, but the disappearance of Miss Trixie was not enough to brighten his spirits. He had spent a sleepless night. Mrs. Levy was on her exercising board treating her plumpness to some early morning bouncing. She was silent, occupied with some plans for the Foundation which she was writing on a sheet of paper held against the undulating front section of the board. Putting her pencil down for a moment, she reached down to select a cookie from the box on the floor. And the cookies were why Mr. Levy had spent a wakeful night. He and Mrs. Levy had driven out through the pines to see Mr. Reilly at Mandeville and had not only found he was not there but had also been treated very rudely by an authority of the place who had taken them for pranksters. Mrs. Levy had looked something like a prankster with her golden-white hair, her sunglasses with the blue lenses, the aquamarine mascara that made a ring around the blue lenses like a halo. Sitting there in the sports car before the main building at Mandeville with the huge box of Dutch cookies on her lap, she must have made the authority a little suspicious, Mr. Levy thought. But she had taken it all very calmly. Finding Mr. Reilly did not seem to bother Mrs. Levy particularly, it seemed. Her husband was beginning to sense that she did not especially want him to find Reilly, that somewhere in some corner of her mind she was hoping that Abelman would win the libel suit so that she could flaunt their resulting poverty in the face of Susan and Sandra as their father’s ultimate failure. That woman had a devious mind that was only predictable when she scented an opportunity to vanquish her husband. Now he was beginning to wonder which side she was on, his or Abelman’s.

  He had asked Gonzalez to cancel his spring practice reservations. This Abelman case had to be cleared up. Mr. Levy straightened his newspaper and realized again that, were his digestive system able to take it, he should have given his time to supervising Levy Pants. Things like this would not happen; life could be peaceful. But just the name, just the three syllables of “Levy Pants,” caused acid complications in his chest. Perhaps he should have changed the name. Perhaps he should have changed Gonzalez. The office manager was so loyal, though. He loved his thankless, low-salaried job. You couldn’t just kick him out. Where would he find another job? Even more important, who would want to replace him? One good reason for keeping Levy Pants open was keeping Gonzalez employed. Mr. Levy tried, but he could think of no other reason for keeping the place open. Gonzalez might commit suicide if the factory were shut down. There was a human life to consider. Too, no one apparently wanted to buy the place.

  Leon Levy could have named his monument “Levy Trousers.” That wasn’t too bad. Throughout his life, but especially when he was a child, Gus Levy had said, “Levy Pants,” and had always received a standard reply, “He does?” When he was about twenty, he had mentioned to his father that a change of title might help their business, and his father had moaned, “‘Levy Pants’ all of a sudden isn’t good enough for you? The food you’re eating is ‘Levy Pants.’ The car you’re driving is ‘Levy Pants.’ I am ‘Levy Pants.’ This is gratitude? This is a child’s devotion? Next I should change my name. Shut up, bum. Go play with the autos and the flappers. Already I got a Depression on my hands, I don’t need smart advice from you. Better you should give with the advice to Hoover. You should go tell him to change his name to Schlemiel. Out of my office! Shut up!”

  Gus Levy looked at the pictures and the article on the front page and whistled through his teeth, “Oh, boy.”

  “What is it, Gus? A problem? Are you having a problem? All night you were awake. I could hear the whirlpool bath going all night. You’re going to have a crackup. Please go to Lenny’s doctor before you become violent.”

  “I just found Mr. Reilly.”

  “I guess you’re happy.”

  “Aren’t you? Look, he’s in the papers.”

  “Really? Bring it over here. I’ve always wondered about that young idealist. I guess he’s received some civic award.”

  “Just the other day you were saying he was a psycho.”

  “If he was clever enough to send us over to Mandeville like two stooges, he’s not that psycho. Even somebody like the idealist can playa joke on you.”

  Mrs. Levy looked at the two women, the bird, the grinning doorman.

  “Where is he? I don’t see any idealist.” Mr. Levy indicated the stricken cow in the street. “That’s him? In the gutter? This is tragic. Carousing, drunken, hopeless, already a bloated derelict. Mark him down in your book next to Miss Trixie and me as another life you’ve wrecked.”

  “A bird bit him on the ear or something crazy. Here, look at the bunch of police characters in these pictures. I told you he had a police record. Those people are his buddies. Strippers and pimps and pornographers.”

  “Once he was dedicated to idealistic causes. Now look at him. Don’t worry. You’ll pay for all of this someday. In a few months, when Abelman has finished with you, you’ll be out on the streets again with a wagon like your father. You’ll learn what happens when you play games with somebody like Abelman, when you operate a business like a playboy. Susan and Sandra will go into shock when they find out they don’t have a penny to their name. Will they give you the big go-by. Gus Levy, ex-father.”

  “Well, I’m going into town right now to speak with this Reilly. I’ll get this crazy letter business straightened out.”

  “Ho ho. Gus Levy, detective. Don’t make me laugh. You probably wrote the letter one day after you won at the track and felt good. I knew it would end like this.”

  “You know, I think you’re actually looking forward to Abelman’s libel suit. You actually want to see me ruined, even if you go down with me.”

  Mrs. Levy yawned and said, “Can I fight what you’ve been leading up to all your life? This really proves to the girls that what I’ve said about you all along was right. The more I think about Abelman’s suit, the more I realize that the whole thing is inevitable, Gus. Thank goodness my mother has some money. I always knew I’d have to go back to her someday. She’ll probably have to give up San Juan, though. You can’t keep Susan and Sandra alive for peanuts.”

  “Oh, shut up.”

  “You’re telling me to shut up?” Mrs. Levy bounced up and down, up and down. “I’m supposed to watch your smashup in silence? I hav
e to make plans for myself and my daughters. I mean, life goes on, Gus. I can’t end up on skid row with you. We can only be grateful that your father has left us. If he had lived to see Levy Pants lost because of some practical joke, you’d really pay. Believe me. Leon Levy would have you run out of the country. That man had courage, determination. And whatever happens, the Leon Levy Foundation goes through. Even if Mother and I have to do without, I’m making those awards. I’m going to honor and reward people who have the kind of courage and bravery that I saw in your father. I won’t let you drag his name down with you on your journey to skid row. After Abelman’s finished, you’ll be lucky to get hired as a water boy on one of those teams you love so much. Boy, will you have to work then, running around with a bucket and a sponge like a bum. But don’t feel sorry for yourself. You had it coming.”

  Now Mr. Levy knew that his wife’s strange logic made it necessary for him to be ruined. She wanted to see Abelman victorious; she would see in the victory some peculiar justification. Since his wife had read the letter from Abelman, her mind must have been working over the matter from every angle. Every minute that she was pedaling the exercycle or bouncing on the board, her system of logic was probably telling her more and more convincingly that Abelman must win the suit. It would be not only Abelman’s victory, but hers, also. Every conversational and epistolary roadsign and guidepost that she had held up before the girls pointed to their father’s final, terrible failure. Mrs. Levy couldn’t afford to be disproved. She needed the $500 thousand libel suit. She wasn’t even interested in his speaking with Reilly. The Abelman case had passed from a purely material and physical plane to an ideological and spiritual one where universal and cosmic forces decreed that Gus Levy must lose, that a childless and desolate Gus Levy must wander endlessly with bucket and sponge.

  “Well, I’m going after Reilly,” Mr. Levy said finally.

  “Such determination. I can hardly believe it. Don’t worry, you won’t be able to pin anything on the young idealist. He’s too clever. He’ll play another joke on you. Just watch. Another wild-goose chase. Back to Mandeville. This time they’ll keep you there, a middle-aged man driving a little toy of a collegian’s sports car.”

  “I’m going right to his house.”

  Mrs. Levy folded her Foundation notes and turned off her board, saying, “Well, if you’re going to town, take me with you. I’m worried about Miss Trixie since Gonzalez reported that she bit that gangster’s hand. I must see her. Her old hostility toward Levy Pants is out in the open again.”

  “Do you still want to play around with that senile bag? Haven’t you tormented her enough already?”

  “Even a little good deed you don’t want me to do. Your type isn’t even in the psychology books. You should at least go to Lenny’s doctor for his sake. Once your case was in the psychiatric journals, they’d be inviting him to Vienna to speak. You’d make him a famous man just like that crippled girl or whoever it was put Freud on the map.”

  While Mrs. Levy was blinding herself with layers of aquamarine eyeshadow in preparation for her errand of mercy, he got the sports car out of the monumental three-car garage, built like a substantial rustic carriage house, and sat looking over the calm, rippling bay. Little darts of heartburn pricked about in his chest. Reilly had to make some kind of confession. Abelman’s shysters could wipe him out; he couldn’t give his wife the satisfaction of seeing that happen. If Reilly would confess to writing the letter, if somehow he could come out of this all right, he would change. He would vow to become a new person. He might even give the company a little supervision. It was only sensible and practical to supervise that place. A neglected Levy Pants was like a neglected child: it could turn out to be a delinquent, something that created all sorts of problems that a little nurture, a little care and feeding could prevent. The more you stayed away from Levy Pants, the more it plagued you. Levy Pants was like a congenital defect, an inherited curse.

  “Everyone I know has a fine big sedan,” Mrs. Levy said as she got into the little car. “Not you. No. You have to own a kid’s car that costs more than a Cadillac and blows my hair all around.”

  To prove her point, a lacquered strand flew stiffly out in the breeze as they roared out onto the coast highway. Both were silent during the journey through the marshes. Mr. Levy nervously considered his future. Mrs. Levy contentedly considered hers, her aquamarine lashes flapping calmly in the wind. At last they roared into the city, Mr. Levy’s speed increasing as he felt himself getting closer to the Reilly kook. Hanging around with that crowd in the Quarter. Goodness only knew what Reilly’s personal life was like. One crazy incident after another, insanity upon insanity.

  “I think I’ve finally analyzed your problem,” Mrs. Levy said when they slowed down in the city traffic. “This wild driving was the clue. A light has dawned. Now I know why you’ve drifted, why you don’t have any ambition, why you’ve thrown a business down the drain.” Mrs. Levy paused for effect. “You have the death wish.”

  “For the last time today, shut up.”

  “Fighting, hostility, resentment,” Mrs. Levy said happily. “It will all end very badly, Gus.”

  Because it was Saturday, Levy Pants had ceased its assaults upon the concept of free enterprise for the weekend. The Levys drove past the factory, which, open or closed, looked equally moribund from the street. Weak smoke of the type produced by burning leaves rose from one of the antennae of smokestacks. Mr. Levy pondered the smoke. Some worker must have left one of the cutting tables sticking in a furnace on Friday evening. Someone might even be in there burning leaves. Stranger things had happened. Mrs. Levy herself, during a ceramics phase, had once commandeered one of the furnaces for a kiln.

  When they had passed the factory and Mrs. Levy had gazed at it and said, “Sad, sad,” they turned along the river and stopped before a dazed-looking wooden apartment building across from the Desire Street wharf. A trail of scraps beckoned the passerby to climb the unpainted front steps toward some goal within the building.

  “Don’t take too long,” Mrs. Levy said while she was going through the heaving and lifting process that was necessary to remove one’s body from the sports car. She took with her the sampled box of Dutch cookies that had originally been intended for the patient at Mandeville. “I’ve just about had it with this project. Maybe she’ll keep busy with the cookies and I won’t have to try to make much conversation.” She smiled at her husband. “Good luck with the idealist. Don’t let him play another trick on you.”

  Mr. Levy sped off uptown. At a stoplight he looked at Reilly’s address in the morning newspaper folded and stored in the well between the bucket seats. He followed the river on Tchoupitoulas and turned at Constantinople, bouncing along in Constantinople’s potholes until he found the miniature house. Could the huge kook live in such a dollhouse? How did he get in and out of the front door?

  Mr. Levy climbed the steps and read the “Peace at Any Price” sign tacked to one of the porch posts and the “Peace to Men of Good Will” sign tacked to the front of the house. This was the place all right. Inside a telephone was ringing.

  “They not home!” a woman screamed from behind a shutter next door. “They telephone’s been ringing all morning.”

  The front shutters of the adjoining house opened and a harried-looking woman came out on the porch and rested her red elbows on her porch rail.

  “Do you know where Mr. Reilly is?” Mr. Levy asked her.

  “All I know is he’s all over this morning’s paper. Where he oughta be is in a asylum. My nerves is shot to hell. When I moved next door to them people, I was signing my death warrant.”

  “Does he live here alone? A woman answered the phone once when I called.”

  “That musta been his momma. Her nerves is shot, too. She musta went to get him out the hospital or wherever they got him.”

  “Do you know Mr. Reilly well?”

  “Ever since he was a kid. His momma was sure proud of him. All the sisters at school loved
him he was so precious. Look how he ended up, laying in a gutter. Well, they better start thinking about moving off my block. I can’t take it no more. They’ll really be arguing now.”

  “Let me ask you something. You know Mr. Reilly well. Do you think he’s very irresponsible or maybe even dangerous?”

  “What you want with him?” Miss Annie’s bleary eyes narrowed. “He’s in some other kinda trouble?”

  “I’m Gus Levy. He used to work for me.”

  “Yeah? You don’t say. That crazy Ignatius was sure proud of that job he had at that place. I useta hear him telling his momma how he was really making good. Yeah, he made good. A few weeks and he was fired. Well, if he worked for you, you really know him good.”

  Had that poor Reilly kook really been proud of Levy Pants? He had always said that he was. That was one good sign of his insanity.

  “Tell me. Hasn’t he been in trouble with the police? Doesn’t he have some kind of police record?”

  “His momma had a policeman coming around her. A regular undercover agent. But not that Ignatius. For one thing his momma likes her little nip. I don’t see her drunk much lately, but for a while there she was really going good. One day I look out in the back yard and she had herself all tangled up in a wet sheet hanging off the line. Mister, it’s already took ten years off my life living next to them people. Noise! Banjos and trumpets and screaming and hollering and the TV. Them Reillys oughta go move out in the country somewheres on a farm. Every day I gotta take six, seven aspirin.” Miss Annie reached inside the neckline of her housedress to find some strap that had slipped from her shoulder. “Lemme tell you something. I gotta be fair. That Ignatius was okay until that big dog of his died. He had this big dog useta bark right under my window. That’s when my nerves first started to go. Then the dog dies. Well, I think, now maybe I’ll get me some peace and quiet. But no. Ignatius is got the dog laid out in his momma’s front parlor with some flowers stuck in its paw. That’s when him and his momma first started all that fighting. To tell you the truth, I think that’s when she started drinking. So Ignatius goes over to the priest and ax him to come say something over the dog. Ignatius was planning on some kinda funeral. You know? The priest says no, of course, and I think that’s when Ignatius left the Church. So big Ignatius puts on his own funeral. A big fat high school boy oughta know better. You see that cross?” Mr. Levy looked hopelessly at the rotting Celtic cross in the front yard. “That where it all happened. He had about two dozen little kids standing around in that yard watching him. And Ignatius had on a big cape like Superman and they was candles burning all over. The whole time his momma was screaming out the front door for him to throw the dog in the garbage can and get in the house. Well, that’s when things started going bad around here. Then Ignatius was at college for about ten years. His momma almost went broke. She even hadda sell the piana they had. Well, I didn’t mind that. You oughta seen this girl he picks up at college. I says to myself, ‘Well, good. Maybe that Ignatius is gonna get married and move out.’ Was I wrong. All they done is sit in his room. It seem like every night she and him was putting on a regular hootenanny. The things I useta hear through my window! ‘Put down that skirt.’ and ‘Get off my bed.’ And ‘How dare you? I’m a virgin.’ It was awful. I went on aspirins twenty-four hours a day. Well, that girl done left. I can’t blame her. She musta been funny to hang around with him anyways.” Miss Annie reached in the opposite direction for another strap. “Of all the houses in the city, how come I hadda move in here? Tell me that.”