“I am not dancing!” Ignatius barked. “I have never danced, and I certainly am not going to begin with some drunken deviate.”

“Oh, don’t be so straight,” Timmy sighed.

“I have always had a rather substandard sense of balance,” Ignatius explained. “We will plunge to the floor in a broken heap. This deranged mariner will be crippled or worse.”

“Tubby looks like a troublemaker,” Frieda said to her friends. “Right?”

With a wink from Frieda, the three girls attacked Ignatius. One wrapped a square leg around his; the other kicked him in the back of the knee; the third pushed him backward onto the cowboy, who was whirling in the vicinity. Ignatius steadied himself by grabbing the cowboy, who broke from Dorian’s horrified grasp and toppled to the floor. As the cowboy landed, the needle jumped from the record and the music stopped. But in its place there began a chorus of shrieking and screaming from the guests.

“Oh, Dorian, get him out!” an elegant shrieked in panic.

There was a metallic crash of rings, bracelets, and cuff links as some of the guests pressed together in a corner.

“Hey, you knocked that bitch of a cowboy over like a tenpin,” Frieda screamed admiringly at Ignatius, who was still flailing his arms to regain his balance.

“Nice work, Fats,” Liz said.

“Let’s aim him at somebody else,” Betty said to her companions.

“What have you done, you huge beastly thing?” Dorian cried at Ignatius.

“This is an outrage,” Ignatius was shouting. “I have not only been ignored and vilified at this gathering. I have been viciously attacked within the walls of your cobweb of a home. I hope that you carry liability insurance. If not, you may well lose this flamboyant property once my legal advisors have attended to you.”

Dorian was down on his knees, fanning the cowboy, whose lids were beginning to flutter.

“Make him leave, Dorian,” the cowboy sobbed. “He almost killed me.”

“I had thought you might be different and funny,” Dorian hissed at Ignatius. “As it is, you have proved to be the most awful thing that has ever been in my house. From the moment that you broke the door, I should have realized that it would end like this. What did you do to this dear boy?”

“My trousers are filthy,” the cowboy shrieked.

“I was savagely attacked and pushed onto that coxcomb cowpoke.”

“Don’t try to lie, Fats,” Frieda said. “We saw the whole thing. He was jealous, Dorian. He wanted to dance with you.”

“Awful.” “Make him go.” “Ruining the party.” “So monstrous.” “Dangerous.” “Total loss.”

“Get out!” Dorian cried.

“We’ll handle him,” Frieda said.

“All right,” Ignatius said grandly as the three girls sank their stubby hands into his smock and started propelling him toward the door. “You have made your choice. Live in a world of war and bloodshed. When the bomb drops, do not come to me. I shall be in my shelter!”

“Can it,” Betty said.

The three girls hustled Ignatius through the door and down the carriageway.

“Thank Fortuna I’m dissociating myself from this movement,” Ignatius thundered. The girls had knocked the scarf down over one eye and he was having trouble seeing where he was going. “You distempered people hardly have voter appeal.”

They pushed him through the gate and onto the sidewalk. The Spanish dagger plants at the gate pricked his calves painfully and he stumbled forward.

“Okay, buster,” Frieda called through the gate as she closed it. “We’re giving you a ten minutes headstart. Then we start combing the Quarter.”

“We better not find your fat ass,” Liz said.

“Shove off, Tubby,” Betty added. “We haven’t had a good fight in a long time. We’re ready for one.”

“Your movement is doomed,” Ignatius slobbered after the girls, who were pushing one another down the carriageway. “Do you hear me? D-o-o-m-e-d. You know nothing about politics and voter persuasion. You will not carry a single ward in the nation. You won’t even carry the Quarter!”

The door slammed and the girls were back in the party, which seemed to have regained its momentum. The music had started again, and Ignatius heard the squealing and shrieking growing louder than before. He knocked on the black shutters with his cutlass, screaming, “You will lose!” The tap and slide of many dancing feet answered his cry.

A man wearing a silk suit and a homburg came out of the shadow of an adjoining doorway for a moment to see whether the girls had gone. Then the man slipped back into the darkness, watching Ignatius, who was waddling back and forth before the building furiously.

Ignatius’s valve responded to his emotions by plopping closed. His hands sympathized by sprouting a rich growth of tiny white bumps that itched maddeningly. What could he tell Myrna about the movement for peace now? Now, like the abortive Crusade for Moorish Dignity, he had another debacle on his itching hands. Fortuna, that vicious slut. The evening had hardly begun; he couldn’t return to Constantinople Street and a variety of assaults from his mother, not now that his emotions had been stimulated toward a climax that had been snatched from his grasp. For almost a week he had been preoccupied with the kickoff rally, and now, ejected from the political arena by three dubious girls, he stood frustrated and furious on the damp flagstones of St. Peter Street.

Looking at his Mickey Mouse wristwatch which was, as usual, moribund, he wondered what time it was. Perhaps it was still early enough to see the first show at the Night of Joy. Perhaps Miss O’Hara had opened. If he and Myrna were not destined to joust on the field of political action, then it would have to be the field of sex. What a lance Miss O’Hara could be to hurl right between Myrna’s offensive eyes. Ignatius looked at the photograph once more, salivating slightly. What kind of pet? The evening could still be wrenched from the jaws of failure.

Scratching one paw with the other, he decided that safety at least dictated his moving along. Those three savage girls might make good their threat. He billowed off down St. Peter toward Bourbon. The man in the silk suit and homburg came out of the shadow of the doorway and followed him. At Bourbon, Ignatius turned and began walking up toward Canal through the night’s parade of tourists and Quarterites, among whom he did not look particularly strange. He shoved through the crowd on the narrow sidewalk, his hips swinging each way free and slamming people aside. When Myrna read of Miss O’Hara, she would spew espresso all over the letter in consternation.

As he crossed onto the Night of Joy’s block, he heard the doped Negro calling, “Whoa! Come in, see Miss Harla O’Horror dancin with her pet. Guarantee one hunner percent real plantation dancin. Ever motherfuckin drink got a guarantee knockout drop. Whoa! Everybody guarantee to catch them some clap off they glass. Hey! Nobody never see nothin like Miss Harla O’Horror Old South pet dancin. Opening night tonight, maybe this be your one and only chance to catch this act. Ooo-wee.”

Ignatius saw him through the crowd that was hurrying past the Night of Joy. Apparently no one was heeding the barker’s plea. The barker himself had paused in his calling to emit a nimbus formation of smoke. He was wearing tails and a stovepipe hat that rested at an angle above his dark glasses, smiling through the smoke at the people who resisted his appeals.

“Hey! All you peoples draggin along here. Stop and come stick your ass on a Night of Joy stool,” he started again. “Night of Joy got genuine color peoples workin below the minimal wage. Whoa! Guarantee plantation atmosphere, got cotton growin right on the stage right in front your eyeball, got a civil right worker gettin his ass beat up between show. Hey!”

“Is Miss O’Hara on yet?” Ignatius slobbered at the barker’s elbow.

“Oo-wee!” The fat mother had arrived. In person. “Hey, man, how come you still warin that earrin and scarve? What you suppose to be anyway?”