Ignatius pulled his flannel nightshirt up and looked at his bloated stomach. He often bloated while lying in bed in the morning contemplating the unfortunate turn that events had taken since the Reformation. Doris Day and Greyhound Scenicruisers, whenever they came to mind, created an even more rapid expansion of his central region. But since the attempted arrest and the accident, he had been bloating for almost no reason at all, his pyloric valve snapping shut indiscriminately and filling his stomach with trapped gas, gas which had character and being and resented its confinement. He wondered whether his pyloric valve might be trying, Cassandralike, to tell him something. As a medievalist Ignatius believed in the rota Fortunae, or wheel of fortune, a central concept in De Consolatione Philosophiae, the philosophical work which had laid the foundation for medieval thought. Boethius, the late Roman who had written the Consolatione while unjustly imprisoned by the emperor, had said that a blind goddess spins us on a wheel, that our luck comes in cycles. Was the ludicrous attempt to arrest him the beginning of a bad cycle? Was his wheel rapidly spinning downward? The accident was also a bad sign. Ignatius was worried. For all his philosophy, Boethius had still been tortured and killed. Then Ignatius’s valve closed again, and he rolled over on his left side to press the valve open.

“Oh, Fortuna, blind, heedless goddess, I am strapped to your wheel,” Ignatius belched. “Do not crush me beneath your spokes. Raise me on high, divinity.”

“What you mumbling about in there, boy?” his mother asked through the closed door.

“I am praying,” Ignatius answered angrily.

“Patrolman Mancuso’s coming today to see me about the accident. You better say a little Hail Mary for me, honey.”

“Oh, my God,” Ignatius muttered.

“I think it’s wonderful you praying, babe. I been wondering what you do locked up in there all the time.”

“Please go away!” Ignatius screamed. “You’re shattering my religious ecstasy.”

Bouncing up and down on his side vigorously, Ignatius sensed a belch rising in his throat, but when he expectantly opened his mouth he emitted only a small burp. Still, the bouncing had some physiological effect. Ignatius touched the small erection that was pointing downward into the sheet, held it, and lay still trying to decide what to do. In this position, with the red flannel nightshirt around his chest and his massive stomach sagging into the mattress, he thought somewhat sadly that after eighteen years with his hobby it had become merely a mechanical physical act stripped of the flights of fancy and invention that he had once been able to bring to it. At one time he had almost developed it into an art form, practicing the hobby with the skill and fervor of an artist and philosopher, a scholar and gentleman. There were still hidden in his room several accessories which he had once used, a rubber glove, a piece of fabric from a silk umbrella, a jar of Noxema. Putting them away again after it was all over had eventually grown too depressing.

Ignatius manipulated and concentrated. At last a vision appeared, the familiar figure of the large and devoted collie that had been his pet when he was in high school. “Woof!” Ignatius almost heard Rex say once again. “Woof! Woof! Arf!” Rex looked so lifelike. One ear drooped. He panted. The apparition jumped over a fence and chased a stick that somehow landed in the middle of Ignatius’s quilt. As the tan and white fur grew closer, Ignatius’s eyes dilated, crossed, and closed, and he lay wanly back among his four pillows, hoping that he had some Kleenex in his room.

“I come about that porter job you got advertise in the paper.”

“Yeah?” Lana Lee looked at the sunglasses. “You got any references?”

“A po-lice gimme a reference. He tell me I better get my ass gainfully employ,” Jones said and shot a jet of smoke out into the empty bar.

“Sorry. No police characters. Not in a business like this. I got an investment to watch.”

“I ain exactly a character yet, but I can tell they gonna star that vagran no visible means of support stuff on me. They told me.” Jones withdrew into a forming cloud. “I thought maybe the Night of Joy like to help somebody become a member of the community, help keep a poor color boy outta jail. I keep the picket off, give the Night of Joy a good civil right ratin.”

“Cut out the crap.”

“Hey! Whoa!”

“You got any experience as a porter?”

“Wha? Sweepin and moppin and all that nigger shit?”

“Watch your mouth, boy. I got a clean business.”

“Hell, anybody do that, especially color peoples.”

“I’ve been looking,” Lana Lee said, becoming a grave personnel manager, “for the right boy for this job for several days.” She put her hands in the pockets of her leather overcoat and looked into the sunglasses. This was really a deal, like a present left on her doorstep. A colored guy who would get arrested for vagrancy if he didn’t work. She would have a captive porter whom she could work for almost nothing. It was beautiful. Lana felt good for the first time since she had come upon those two characters messing up her bar. “The pay is twenty dollars week.”

“Hey! No wonder the right man ain show up. Ooo-wee. Say, whatever happen to the minimal wage?”

“You need a job, right? I need a porter. Business stinks. Take it from there!”

“The las person workin in here musta starve to death.”

“You work six days a week from ten to three. If you come in regular, who knows? You might get a little raise.”

“Don worry. I come in regular, anything keep my ass away from a po-lice for a few hour,” Jones said, blowing some smoke on Lana Lee. “Where you keep them mutherfuckin broom?”

“One thing we gotta understand is keeping our mouth clean around here.”

“Yes, ma’m. I sure don wanna make a bad impressia in a fine place like the Night of Joy. Whoa!”

The door opened and Darlene came in wearing a satin cocktail dress and a flowered hat, flouncing her skirt gracefully as she walked.

“How come you’re so late?” Lana screamed at her. “I told you to be here at one today.”

“My cockatoo come down with a cold last night, Lana. It was awful. The whole night he was up coughing right in my ear.”

“Where do you think up excuses like that?”

“Well, it’s true,” Darlene answered in an injured voice. She put her huge hat on the bar and climbed on a stool up into a cloud that Jones had blown. “I hadda take him to the vet’s this morning to get a vitamin shot. I don’t want that poor bird coughing all over my furniture.”

“What got into your head that made you encourage those two characters last night? Every day, every day, Darlene, I try to explain to you the kind of clientele we want in here. Then I walk in and find you eating crap off my bar with some old lady and a fat turd. You trying to close down my business? People look in the door, see a combination like that, they walk off to another bar. What I have to do to make you understand, Darlene? How does a human being get through to a mind like yours?”

“I already told you I felt sorry for that poor woman, Lana. You oughta seen how her son treated her. You oughta heard the story he told me about a Greyhound bus. And all the time that sweet old lady sitting there paying for his drinks. I had to take one of her cakes to make her feel good.”

“Well, the next time I find you encouraging people like that and ruining my investment, I’m gonna kick you out on your behind. Is that clear?”

“Yes, ma’m.”

“You sure you got what I said?”

“Yes, ma’m.”

“Okay. Now show this boy where we keep our brooms and crap and get that bottle that old lady broke cleaned up. You’re in charge of getting this whole goddam place as clean as a pin for what you did me last night. I’m going shopping.” Lana got to the door and turned around. “I don’t want nobody fooling with that cabinet under the bar.”