8

   Come morning, McMurphy is up before I am, the first time anybody been up before me since Uncle Jules the Wallwalker was here. Jules was a shrewd old white-haired Negro with a theory the world was being tipped over on its side during the night by the black boys; he used to slip out in the early mornings, aiming to catch them tipping it. Like Jules, I’m up early in the mornings to watch what machinery they’re sneaking onto the ward or installing in the shaving room, and usually it’s just me and the black boys in the hall for fifteen minutes before the next patient is out of bed. But this morning I hear McMurphy out there in the latrine as I come out of the covers. Hear him singing! Singing so you’d think he didn’t have a worry in the world. His voice is clear and strong slapping up against the cement and steel.
   “ ‘Your horses are hungry, that’s what she did say.’ ” He’s enjoying the way the sound rings in the latrine. “ ‘Come sit down beside me, an’ feed them some hay.’ ” He gets a breath, and his voice jumps a key, gaining pitch and power till it’s joggling the wiring in all the walls. “ ‘My horses ain’t hungry, they won’t eat your hay-ay-aeee.’ ” He holds the note and plays with it, then swoops down with the rest of the verse to finish it off. “ ‘So fare-thee-well, darlin’, I’m gone on my way.’ ”
   Singing! Everybody’s thunderstruck. They haven’t heard such a thing in years, not on this ward. Most of the Acutes in the dorm are up on their elbows, blinking and listening. They look at one another and raise their eyebrows. How come the black boys haven’t hushed him up out there? They never let anybody raise that much racket before, did they? How come they treat this new guy different? He’s a man made outa skin and bone that’s due to get weak and pale and die, just like the rest of us. He lives under the same laws, gotta eat, bumps up against the same troubles; these things make him just as vulnerable to the Combine as anybody else, don’t they?
   But the new guy is different, and the Acutes can see it, different from anybody been coming on this ward for the past ten years, different from anybody they ever met outside. He’s just as vulnerable, maybe, but the Combine didn’t get him.
   “ ‘My wagons are loaded,’ ” he sings, “ ‘my whip’s in my hand…’ ”
   How’d he manage to slip the collar? Maybe, like old Pete, the Combine missed getting to him soon enough with controls. Maybe he growed up so wild all over the country, batting around from one place to another, never around one town longer’n a few months when he was a kid so a school never got much a hold on him, logging, gambling, running carnival wheels, traveling lightfooted and fast, keeping on the move so much that the Combine never had a chance to get anything installed. Maybe that’s it, he never gave the Combine a chance, just like he never gave the black boy a chance to get to him with the thermometer yesterday morning, because a moving target is hard to hit.
   No wife wanting new linoleum. No relatives pulling at him with watery old eyes. No one to care about, which is what makes him free enough to be a good con man. And maybe the reason the black boys don’t rush into that latrine and put a stop to his singing is because they know he’s out of control, and they remember that time with old Pete and what a man out of control can do. And they can see that McMurphy’s a lot bigger than old Pete; if it comes down to getting the best of him, it’s going to take all three of them and the Big Nurse waiting on the sidelines with a needle. The Acutes nod at one another; that’s the reason, they figure, that the black boys haven’t stopped his singing where they would stop any of the rest of us.
   I come out of the dorm into the hall just as McMurphy comes out of the latrine. He’s got his cap on and not much else, just a towel grabbed around his hips. He’s holding a toothbrush in his other hand. He stands in the hall, looking up and down, rocking up on his toes to keep off the cold tile as much as he can. Picks him out a black boy, the least one, and walks up to him and whaps him on the shoulder just like they’d been friends all their lives.
   “Hey there, old buddy, what’s my chance of gettin’ some toothpaste for brushin’ my grinders?”
   The black boy’s dwarf head swivels and comes nose to knuckle with that hand. He frowns at it, then takes a quick check where’s the other two black boys just in case, and tells McMurphy they don’t open the cabinet till six-forty-five. “It’s a policy,” he says.
   “Is that right? I mean, is that where they keep the toothpaste? In the cabinet?”
   “Tha’s right, locked in the cabinet.”
   The black boy tries to go back to polishing the baseboards, but that hand is still lopped over his shoulder like a big red clamp.
   “Locked in the cabinet, is it? Well well well, now why do you reckon they keep the toothpaste locked up? I mean, it ain’t like it’s dangerous, is it? You can’t poison a man with it, can you? You couldn’t brain some guy with the tube, could you? What reason you suppose they have for puttin’ something as harmless as a little tube of toothpaste under lock and key?”
   “It’s ward policy, Mr. McMurphy, tha’s the reason.” And when he sees that this last reason don’t affect McMurphy like it should, he frowns at that hand on his shoulder and adds, “What you s’pose it’d be like if evahbody was to brush their teeth whenever they took a notion to brush?”
   McMurphy turns loose the shoulder, tugs at that tuft of red wool at his neck, and thinks this over. “Uh-huh, uh-huh, I think I can see what you’re drivin’ at: ward policy is for those that can’t brush after every meal.”
   “My gaw, don’t you see?”
   “Yes, now, I do. You’re saying people’d be brushin’ their teeth whenever the spirit moved them.”
   “Tha’s right, tha’s why we—”
   “And, lordy, can you imagine? Teeth bein’ brushed at six-thirty, six-twenty—who can tell? maybe even six o’clock. Yeah, I can see your point.”
   He winks past the black boy at me standing against the wall.
   “I gotta get this baseboard cleaned, McMurphy.”
   “Oh. I didn’t mean to keep you from your job.” He starts to back away as the black boy bends to his work again. Then he comes forward and leans over to look in the can at the black boy’s side. “Well, look here; what do we have here?”
   The black boy peers down. “Look where?”
   “Look here in this old can, Sam. What is the stuff in this old can?”
   “Tha’s… soap powder.”
   “Well, I generally use paste, but”—McMurphy runs his toothbrush down in the powder and swishes it around and pulls it out and taps it on the side of the can—“but this will do fine for me. I thank you. We’ll look into that ward policy business later.”
   And he heads back to the latrine, where I can hear his singing garbled by the piston beat of his toothbrushing.
   That black boy’s standing there looking after him with his scrub rag hanging limp in his gray hand. After a minute he blinks and looks around and sees I been watching and comes over and drags me down the hall by the drawstring on my pajamas and pushes me to a place on the floor I just did yesterday.
   “There! Damn you, right there! That’s where I want you workin’, not gawkin’ around like some big useless cow! There! There!”
   And I lean over and go to mopping with my back to him so he won’t see me grin. I feel good, seeing McMurphy get that black boy’s goat like not many men could. Papa used to be able to do it—spraddle-legged, dead-panned, squinting up at the sky that first time the government men showed up to negotiate about buying off the treaty. “ Canada honkers up there,” Papa says, squinting up. Government men look, rattling papers. “What are you—? In July? There’s no—uh—geese this time of year. Uh, no geese.”
   They had been talking like tourists from the East who figure you’ve got to talk to Indians so they’ll understand. Papa didn’t seem to take any notice of the way they talked. He kept looking at the sky. “Geese up there, white man. You know it. Geese this year. And last year. And the year before and the year before.”
   The men looked at one another and cleared their throats. “Yes. Maybe true, Chief Bromden. Now. Forget geese. Pay attention to contract. What we offer could greatly benefit you—your people—change the lives of the red man.”
   Papa said, “…and the year before and the year before and the year before…”
   By the time it dawned on the government men that they were being poked fun at, all the council who’d been sitting on the porch of our shack, putting pipes in the pockets of their red and black plaid wool shirts and taking them back out again, grinning at one another and at Papa—they had all busted up laughing fit to kill. Uncle R & J Wolf was rolling on the ground, gasping with laughter and saying, “You know it, white man.”
   It sure did get their goat; they turned without saying a word and walked off toward the highway, red-necked, us laughing behind them. I forget sometimes what laughter can do.

   The Big Nurse’s key hits the lock, and the black boy is up to her soon as she’s in the door, shifting from foot to foot like a kid asking to pee. I’m close enough I hear McMurphy’s name come into his conversation a couple of times, so I know he’s telling her about McMurphy brushing his teeth, completely forgetting to tell her about the old Vegetable who died during the night. Waving his arms and trying to tell her what that fool redhead’s been up to already, so early in the morning—disrupting things, goin’ contrary to ward policy, can’t she do something?
   She glares at the black boy till he stops fidgeting, then looks up the hall to where McMurphy’s singing is booming out of the latrine door louder than ever. “ ‘Oh, your parents don’t like me, they say I’m too po-o-or; they say I’m not worthy to enter your door.’ ”
   Her face is puzzled at first; like the rest of us, it’s been so long since she’s heard singing it takes her a second to recognize what it is.
   “ ‘Hard livin’s my pleasure, my money’s my o-o-own, an’ them that don’t like me, they can leave me alone.’ ”
   She listens a minute more to make sure she isn’t hearing things; then she goes to puffing up. Her nostrils flare open, and every breath she draws she gets bigger, as big and tough-looking’s I seen her get over a patient since Taber was here. She works the hinges in her elbows and fingers. I hear a small squeak. She starts moving, and I get back against the wall, and when she rumbles past she’s already big as a truck, trailing that wicker bag behind in her exhaust like a semi behind a Jimmy Diesel. Her lips are parted, and her smile’s going out before her like a radiator grill. I can smell the hot oil and magneto spark when she goes past, and every step hits the floor she blows up a size bigger, blowing and puffing, roll down anything in her path! I’m scared to think what she’ll do.
   Then, just as she’s rolling along at her biggest and meanest, McMurphy steps out of the latrine door right in front of her, holding that towel around his hips—stops her dead! She shrinks to about head-high to where that towel covers him, and he’s grinning down on her. Her own grin is giving way, sagging at the edges.
   “Good morning, Miss Rat-shed! How’s things on the outside?”
   “You can’t run around here—in a towel!”
   “No?” He looks down at the part of the towel she’s eye to eye with, and it’s wet and skin tight. “Towels against ward policy too? Well, I guess there’s nothin’ to do exec—”
   “Stop! don’t you dare. You get back in that dorm and get your clothes on this instant!”

   She sounds like a teacher bawling out a student, so McMurphy hangs his head like a student and says in a voice sounds like he’s about to cry, “I can’t do that, ma’am. I’m afraid some thief in the night boosted my clothes whilst I slept. I sleep awful sound on the mattresses you have here.” “Somebody boosted…?”
   “Pinched. Jobbed. Swiped. Stole,” he says happily. “You know, man, like somebody boosted my threads.” Saying this tickles him so he goes into a little barefooted dance before her.
   “Stole your clothes?”
   “That looks like the whole of it.”
   “But—prison clothes? Why?”
   He stops jigging around and hangs his head again. “All I know is that they were there when I went to bed and gone when I got up. Gone slick as a whistle. Oh, I do know they were nothing but prison clothes, coarse and faded and uncouth, ma’am, well I know it—and prison clothes may not seem like much to those as has more. But to a nude man—”
   “That outfit,” she says, realizing, “was supposed to be picked up. You were issued a uniform of green convalescents this morning.”
   He shakes his head and sighs, but still don’t look up. “No. No, I’m afraid I wasn’t. Not a thing this morning but the cap that’s on my head and—”
   “Williams,” she hollers down to the black boy who’s still at the ward door like he might make a run for it. “Williams, can you come here a moment?”
   He crawls to her like a dog to a whipping.
   “Williams, why doesn’t this patient have an issue of convalescents?”
   The black boy is relieved. He straightens up and grins, raises that gray hand and points down the other end of the hall to one of the big ones. “Mistuh Washington over there is ‘signed to the laundry duty this mornin’. Not me. No.”
   “Mr. Washington!” She nails him with his mop poised over the bucket, freezes him there. “Will you come here a moment!” The mop slides without a sound back in the bucket, and with slow, careful movements he leans the handle against the wall. He turns around and looks down at McMurphy and the least black boy and the nurse. He looks then to his left and to his right, like she might be yelling at somebody else.
   “Come down here!”
   He puts his hands in his pockets and starts shuffling down the hall to her. He never walks very fast, and I can see how if he don’t get a move on she might freeze him and shatter him all to hell by just looking; all the hate and fury and frustration she was planning to use on McMurphy is beaming out down the hall at the black boy, and he can feel it blast against him like a blizzard wind, slowing him more than ever. He has to lean into it, pulling his arms around him. Frost forms in his hair and eyebrows. He leans farther forward, but his steps are getting slower; he’ll never make it.
   Then McMurphy takes to whistling “Sweet Georgia Brown,” and the nurse looks away from the black boy just in time. Now she’s madder and more frustrated than ever, madder’n I ever saw her get. Her doll smile is gone, stretched tight and thin as a red-hot wire. If some of the patients could be out to see her now, McMurphy could start collecting his bets.
   The black boy finally gets to her, and it took him two hours. She draws a long breath. “ Washington, why wasn’t this man issued a change of greens this morning? Couldn’t you see he had nothing on but a towel?”
   “And my cap,” McMurphy whispers, tapping the brim with his finger.
   “Mr. Washington?”
   The big black boy looks at the little one who pointed him out, and the little black boy commences to fidget again. The big boy looks at him a long time with those radio-tube eyes, plans to square things with him later; then the head turns and he looks McMurphy up and down, taking in the hard, heavy shoulders, the lopsided grin, the scar on the nose, the hand clamping the towel in place, and then he looks at the nurse.
   “I guess—” he starts out.
   “You guess! You’ll do more than guess! You’ll get him a uniform this instant, Mr. Washington, or spend the next two weeks working on Geriatrics Ward! Yes. You may need a month of bedpans and slab baths to refresh your appreciation of just how little work you aides have to do on this ward. If this was one of the other wards, who do you think would be scouring the hall all day? Mr. Bromden here? No, you know who it would be. We excuse you aides from most of your housekeeping duties to enable you to see to the patients. And that means seeing that they don’t parade around exposed. What do you think would have happened if one of the young nurses had come in early and found a patient running round the halls without a uniform? What do you think!”
   The big black boy isn’t too sure what, but he gets her drift and ambles off to the linen room to get McMurphy a set of greens—probably ten sizes too small—and ambles back and holds it out to him with a look of the clearest hate I ever saw. McMurphy just looks confused, like he don’t know how to take the outfit the black boy’s handing to him, what with one hand holding the toothbrush and the other hand holding up the towel. He finally winks at the nurse and shrugs and unwraps the towel, drapes it over her shoulder like she was a wooden rack.
   I see he had his shorts on under the towel all along.
   I think for a fact that she’d rather he’d of been stark naked under that towel than had on those shorts. She’s glaring at those big white whales leaping round on his shorts in pure wordless outrage. That’s more’n she can take. It’s a full minute before she can pull herself together enough to turn on the least black boy; her voice is shaking out of control, she’s so mad.
   “Williams… I believe… you were supposed to have the windows of the Nurses’ Station polished by the time I arrived this morning.” He scuttles off like a black and white bug. “And you, Washington—and you…” Washington shuffles back to his bucket in almost a trot. She looks around again, wondering who else she can light into. She spots me, but by this time some of the other patients are out of the dorm and wondering about the little clutch of us here in the hall. She closes her eyes and concentrates. She can’t have them see her face like this, white and warped with fury. She uses all the power of control that’s in her. Gradually the lips gather together again under the little white nose, run together, like the red-hot wire had got hot enough to melt, shimmer a second, then click solid as the molten metal sets, growing cold and strangely dull. Her lips part, and her tongue comes between them, a chunk of slag. Her eyes open again, and they have that strange dull and cold and flat look the lips have, but she goes into her good-morning routine like there was nothing different about her, figuring the patients’ll be too sleepy to notice.
   “Good morning, Mr. Sefelt, are your teeth any better? Good morning, Mr. Fredrickson, did you and Mr. Sefelt have a good night last night? You bed right next to each other, don’t you? Incidentally, it’s been brought to my attention that you two have made some arrangement with your medication—you are letting Bruce have your medication, aren’t you, Mr. Sefelt? We’ll discuss that later. Good morning, Billy; I saw your mother on the way in, and she told me to be sure to tell you she thought of you all the time and knew you wouldn’t disappoint her. Good morning, Mr. Harding—why, look, your fingertips are red and raw. Have you been chewing your fingernails again?”
   Before they could answer, even if there was some answer to make, she turns to McMurphy still standing there in his shorts. Harding looks at the shorts and whistles.
   “And you, Mr. McMurphy,” she says, smiling, sweet as sugar, “if you are finished showing off your manly physique and your gaudy underpants, I think you had better go back in the dorm and put on your greens.”
   He tips his cap to her and to the patients ogling and poking fun at his white-whale shorts, and goes to the dorm without a word. She turns and starts off in the other direction, her flat red smile going out before her; before she’s got the door closed on her glass station, his singing is rolling from the dorm door into the hall again.
   “ ‘She took me to her parlor, and coo-oo-ooled me with her fan’ ”—I can hear the whack as he slaps his bare belly—“ ‘whispered low in her mamma’s ear, I luh-uhvvv that gamblin’ man.’ ”

   Sweeping the dorm soon’s it’s empty, I’m after dust mice under his bed when I get a smell of something that makes me realize for the first time since I been in the hospital that this big dorm full of beds, sleeps forty grown men, has always been sticky with a thousand other smells—smells of germicide, zinc ointment, and foot powder, smell of piss and sour old-man manure, of Pablum and eyewash, of musty shorts and socks musty even when they’re fresh back from the laundry, the stiff odor of starch in the linen, the acid stench of morning mouths, the banana smell of machine oil, and sometimes the smell of singed hair—but never before now, before he came in, the man smell of dust and dirt from the open fields, and sweat, and work.

9

   All through breakfast McMurphy’s talking and laughing a mile a minute. After this morning he thinks the Big Nurse is going to be a snap. He don’t know he just caught her off guard and, if anything, made her strengthen herself.
   He’s being the clown, working at getting some of the guys to laugh. It bothers him that the best they can do is grin weakly and snigger sometimes. He prods at Billy Bibbit, sitting across the table from him, says in a secret voice, “Hey, Billy boy, you remember that time in Seattle you and me picked up those two twitches? One of the best rolls I ever had.”
   Billy’s eyes bob up from his plate. He opens his mouth but can’t say a thing. McMurphy turns to Harding.
   “We’d never have brought it off, neither, picking them up on the spur of the moment that way, except that they’d heard tell of Billy Bibbit. Billy ‘Club’ Bibbit, he was known as in them days. Those girls were about to take off when one looked at him and says ‘Are you the renowned Billy Club Bibbit? Of the famous fourteen inches?’ And Billy ducked his head and blushed—like he’s doin’ now—and we were a shoo-in. And I remember, when we got them up to the hotel, there was this woman’s voice from over near Billy’s bed, says, ‘Mister Bibbit, I’m disappointed in you; I heard that you had four—four—for goodness sakes!’ ”
   And whoops and slaps his leg and gooses Billy with his thumb till I think Billy will fall in a dead faint from blushing and grinning.
   McMurphy says that as a matter of fact a couple of sweet twitches like those two is the only thing this hospital does lack. The bed they give a man here, finest he’s ever slept in, and what a fine table they do spread. He can’t figure why everybody’s so glum about being locked up here.
   “Look at me now,” he tells the guys and lifts a glass to the light, “getting my first glass of orange juice in six months. Hooee, that’s good. I ask you, what did I get for breakfast at that work farm? What was I served? Well, I can describe what it looked like, but I sure couldn’t hang a name on it; morning noon and night it was burnt black and had potatoes in it and looked like roofing glue. I know one thing; it wasn’t orange juice. Look at me now: bacon, toast, butter, eggs—coffee the little honey in the kitchen even asks me if I like it black or white thank you—and a great! big! cold glass of orange juice. Why, you couldn’t pay me to leave this place!”
   He gets seconds on everything and makes a date with the girl pours coffee in the kitchen for when he gets discharged, and he compliments the Negro cook on sunnysiding the best eggs he ever ate. There’s bananas for the corn flakes, and he gets a handful, tells the black boy that he’ll filch him one ‘cause he looks so starved, and the black boy shifts his eyes to look down the hall to where the nurse is sitting in her glass case, and says it ain’t allowed for the help to eat with the patients.
   “Against ward policy?”
   “Tha’s right.”
   “Tough luck”—and peels three bananas right under the black boy’s nose and eats one after the other, tells the boy that any time you want one snuck outa the mess hall for you, Sam, you just give the word.
   When McMurphy finishes his last banana he slaps his belly and gets up and heads for the door, and the big black boy blocks the door and tells him the rule that patients sit in the mess hall till they all leave at seven-thirty. McMurphy stares at him like he can’t believe he’s hearing right, then turns and looks at Harding. Harding nods his head, so McMurphy shrugs and goes back to his chair. “I sure don’t want to go against that goddamned policy.”
   The clock at the end of the mess hall shows it’s a quarter after seven, lies about how we only been sitting here fifteen minutes when you can tell it’s been at least an hour. Everybody is finished eating and leaned back, watching the big hand to move to seven-thirty. The black boys take away the Vegetables’ splattered trays and wheel the two old men down to get hosed off. In the mess hall about half the guys lay their heads on their arms, figuring to get a little sleep before the black boys get back. There’s nothing else to do, with no cards or magazines or picture puzzles. Just sleep or watch the clock.
   But McMurphy can’t keep still for that; he’s got to be up to something. After about two minutes of pushing food scraps around his plate with his spoon, he’s ready for more excitement. He hooks his thumbs in his pockets and tips back and one-eyes that clock up on the wall. Then he rubs his nose.
   “You know—that old clock up there puts me in mind of the targets at the target range at Fort Riley. That’s where I got my first medal, a sharpshooter medal. Dead-Eye McMurphy. Who wants to lay me a pore little dollar that I can’t put this dab of butter square in the center of the face of that clock up there, or at least on the face?”
   He gets three bets and takes up his butter pat and puts it on his knife, gives it a flip. It sticks a good six inches or so to the left of the clock, and everybody kids him about it until he pays his bets. They’re still riding him about did he mean Dead-Eye or Dead-Eyes when the least black boy gets back from hosing Vegetables and everybody looks into his plate and keeps quiet. The black boy senses something is in the air, but he can’t see what. And he probably never would of known except old Colonel Matterson is gazing around, and he sees the butter stuck up on the wall and this causes him to point up at it and go into one of his lessons, explaining to us all in his patient, rumbling voice, just like what he said made sense.
   “The but-ter… is the Re-pub-li-can party…”
   The black boy looks where the colonel is pointing, and there that butter is, easing down the wall like a yellow snail. He blinks at it but he doesn’t say a word, doesn’t even bother looking around to make certain who flipped it up there.
   McMurphy is whispering and nudging the Acutes sitting around him, and in a minute they all nod, and he lays three dollars on the table and leans back. Everybody turns in his chair and watches that butter sneak on down the wall, starting, hanging still, shooting ahead and leaving a shiny trail behind it on the paint. Nobody says a word. They look at the butter, then at the clock, then back at the butter. The clock’s moving now.
   The butter makes it down to the floor about a half a minute before seven-thirty, and McMurphy gets back all the money he lost.
   The black boy wakes up and turns away from the greasy stripe on the wall and says we can go, and McMurphy walks out of the mess hall, folding his money in his pocket. He puts his arms around the black boy’s shoulders and half walks, half carries him, down the hall toward the day room. “The day’s half gone, Sam, of buddy, an’ I’m just barely breaking even. I’ll have to hustle to catch up. How about breaking out that deck of cards you got locked securely in that cabinet, and I’ll see if I can make myself heard over that loudspeaker.”

   Spends most of that morning hustling to catch up by dealing more blackjack, playing for IOUs now instead of cigarettes. He moves the blackjack table two or three times to try to get out from under the speaker. You can tell it’s getting on his nerves. Finally he goes to the Nurses’ Station and raps on a pane of glass till the Big Nurse swivels in her chair and opens the door, and he asks her how about turning that infernal noise off for a while. She’s calmer than ever now, back in her seat behind her pane of glass; there’s no heathen running around half-naked to unbalance her. Her smile is settled and solid. She closes her eyes and shakes her head and tells McMurphy very pleasantly, No.
   “Can’t you even ease down on the volume? It ain’t like the whole state of Oregon needed to hear Lawrence Welk play ‘Tea for Two’ three times every hour, all day long! If it was soft enough to hear a man shout his bets across the table I might get a game of poker going—”
   “You’ve been told, Mr. McMurphy, that it’s against the policy to gamble for money on the ward.”
   “Okay, then down soft enough to gamble for matches, for fly buttons—just turn the damn thing down!”
   “Mr. McMurphy”—she waits and lets her calm schoolteacher tone sink in before she goes on; she knows every Acute on the ward is listening to them—”do you want to know what I think? I think you are being very selfish. Haven’t you noticed there are others in this hospital besides yourself? There are old men here who couldn’t hear the radio at all if it were lower, old fellows who simply aren’t capable of reading, or working puzzles—or playing cards to win other men’s cigarettes. Old fellows like Matterson and Kittling, that music coming from the loudspeaker is all they have. And you want to take that away from them. We like to hear suggestions and requests whenever we can, but I should think you might at least give some thought to others before you make your requests.”
   He turns and looks over at the Chronic side and sees there’s something to what she says. He takes off his cap and runs his hand in his hair, finally turns back to her. He knows as well as she does that all the Acutes are listening to everything they say.
   “Okay—I never thought about that.”
   “I thought you hadn’t.”
   He tugs at that little tuft of red showing out of the neck of his greens, then says. “Well, hey; what do you say to us taking the card game someplace else? Some other room? Like, say, that room you people put the tables in during that meeting. There’s nothing in there all the rest of the day. You could unlock that room and let the card-players go in there, and leave the old men out here with their radio—a good deal all around.”
   She smiles and closes her eyes again and shakes her head gently. “Of course, you may take the suggestion up with the rest of the staff at some time, but I’m afraid everyone’s feelings will correspond with mine: we do not have adequate coverage for two day rooms. There isn’t enough personnel. And I wish you wouldn’t lean against the glass there, please; your hands are oily and staining the window. That means extra work for some of the other men.”
   He jerks his hand away, and I see he starts to say something and then stops, realizing she didn’t leave him anything else to say, unless he wants to start cussing at her. His face and neck are red. He draws a long breath and concentrates on his will power, the way she did this morning, and tells her that he is very sorry to have bothered her, and goes back to the card table.
   Everybody on the ward can feel that it’s started.
   At eleven o’clock the doctor comes to the day-room door and calls over to McMurphy that he’d like to have him come down to his office for an interview. “I interview all new admissions on the second day.”
   McMurphy lays down his cards and stands up and walks over to the doctor. The doctor asks him how his night was, but McMurphy just mumbles an answer.
   “You look deep in thought today, Mr. McMurphy.”
   “Oh, I’m a thinker all right,” McMurphy says, and they walk off together down the hall. When they come back what seems like days later, they’re both grinning and talking and happy about something. The doctor is wiping tears off his glasses and looks like he’s actually been laughing, and McMurphy is back as loud and full of brass and swagger as ever. He’s that way all through lunch, and at one o’clock he’s the first one in his seat for the meeting, his eyes blue and ornery from his place in the corner.
   The Big Nurse comes into the day room with her covey of student nurses and her basket of notes. She picks the log book up from the table and frowns into it a minute (nobody’s informed on anybody all day long), then goes to her seat beside the door. She picks up some folders from the basket on her lap and riffles through them till she finds the one on Harding.
   “As I recall, we were making quite a bit of headway yesterday with Mr. Harding’s problem—”
   “Ah—before we go into that,” the doctor says, “I’d like to interrupt a moment, if I might. Concerning a talk Mr. McMurphy and I had in my office this morning. Reminiscing, actually. Talking over old times. You see Mr. McMurphy and I find we have something in common—we went to the same high school.”
   The nurses look at one another and wonder what’s got into this man. The patients glance at McMurphy grinning from his corner and wait for the doctor to go on. He nods his head.
   “Yes, the same high school. And in the course of our reminiscing we happened to bring up the carnivals the school used to sponsor—marvelous, noisy, gala occasions. Decorations, crepe streamers, booths, games—it was always one of the prime events of the year. I—as I mentioned to McMurphy—was the chairman of the high-school carnival both my junior and senior years—wonderful carefree years…”
   It’s got real quiet in the day room. The doctor raises his head, peers around to see if he’s making a fool of himself. The Big Nurse is giving him a look that shouldn’t leave any doubts about it, but he doesn’t have on his glasses and the look misses him.
   “Anyway—to put an end to this maudlin display of nostalgia—in the course of our conversation McMurphy and I wondered what would be the attitude of some of the men toward a carnival here on the ward?”
   He puts on his glasses and peers around again. Nobody’s jumping up and down at the idea. Some of us can remember Taber trying to engineer a carnival a few years back, and what happened to it. As the doctor waits, a silence rears up from out of the nurse and looms over everybody, daring anybody to challenge it. I know McMurphy can’t because he was in on the planning of the carnival, and just as I’m thinking that nobody will be fool enough to break that silence, Cheswick, who sits right next to McMurphy, gives a grunt and is on his feet, rubbing his ribs, before he knows what happened.
   “Uh—I personally believe, see”—he looks down at McMurphy’s fist on the chair arm beside him, with that big stiff thumb sticking straight up out of it like a cow prod—“that a carnival is a real good idea. Something to break the monotony.”
   “That’s right, Charley,” the doctor says, appreciating Cheswick’s support, “and not altogether without therapeutic value.”
   “Certainly not,” Cheswick says, looking happier now. “No. Lots of therapeutics in a carnival. You bet.”
   “It would b-b-be fun,” Billy Bibbit says.
   “Yeah, that too,” Cheswick says. “We could do it, Doctor Spivey, sure we could. Scanlon can do his human bomb act, and I can make a ring toss in Occupational Therapy.”
   “I’ll tell fortunes,” Martini says and squints at a spot above his head.
   “I’m rather good at diagnosing pathologies from palm reading, myself,” Harding says.
   “Good, good,” Cheswick says and claps his hands. He’s never had anybody support anything he said before.
   “Myself,” McMurphy drawls, “I’d be honored to work a skillo wheel. Had a little experience…”
   “Oh, there are numerous possibilities,” the doctor says, sitting up straight in his chair and really warming to it. “Why, I’ve got a million ideas…”
   He talks full steam ahead for another five minutes. You can tell a lot of the ideas are ideas he’s already talked over with McMurphy. He describes games, booths, talks of selling tickets, then stops as suddenly as though the Nurse’s look had hit him right between the eyes. He blinks at her and asks, “What do you think of the idea, Miss Ratched? Of a carnival? Here, on the ward?”
   “I agree that it may have a number of therapeutic possibilities,” she says, and waits. She lets that silence rear up from her again. When she’s sure nobody’s going to challenge it, she goes on. “But I also believe that an idea like this should be discussed in staff meeting before a decision is reached. Wasn’t that your idea, Doctor?”
   “Of course. I merely thought, understand, I would feel out some of the men first. But certainly, a staff meeting first. Then we’ll continue our plans.”
   Everybody knows that’s all there is to the carnival.
   The Big Nurse starts to bring things back into hand by rattling the folio she’s holding. “Fine. Then if there is no other new business—and if Mr. Cheswick will be seated—I think we might go right on into the discussion. We have”—she takes her watch from the basket and looks at it—“forty-eight minutes left. So, as I—”
   “Oh. Hey, wait. I remember there is some other new business.” McMurphy has his hand up, fingers snapping. She looks at the hand for a long time before she says anything.
   “Yes, Mr. McMurphy?”
   “Not me, Doctor Spivey has. Doc, tell ‘em what you come up with about the hard-of-hearing guys and the radio.”
   The nurse’s head gives one little jerk, barely enough to see, but my heart is suddenly roaring. She puts the folio back in the basket, turns to the doctor.
   “Yes,” says the doctor. “I very nearly forgot.” He leans back and crosses his legs and puts his fingertips together; I can see he’s still in good spirits about his carnival. “You see, McMurphy and I were talking about that age-old problem we have on this ward: the mixed population, the young and the old together. It’s not the most ideal surroundings for our Therapeutic Community, but Administration says there’s no helping it with the Geriatric Building overloaded the way it is. I’ll be the first to admit it’s not an absolutely pleasant situation for anyone concerned. In our talk, however, McMurphy and I did happen to come up with an idea which might make things more pleasant for both age groups. McMurphy mentioned that he had noticed some of the old fellows seemed to have difficulty hearing the radio. He suggested the speaker might be turned up louder so the Chronics with auditory weaknesses could hear it. A very humane suggestion, I think.”
   McMurphy gives a modest wave of his hand, and the doctor nods at him and goes on.
   “But I told him I had received previous complaints from some of the younger men that the radio is already so loud it hinders conversation and reading. McMurphy said he hadn’t thought of this, but mentioned that it did seem a shame that those who wished to read couldn’t get off by themselves where it was quiet and leave the radio for those who wished to listen. I agreed with him that it did seem a shame and was ready to drop the matter when I happened to think of the old tub room where we store the tables during the ward meeting. We don’t use the room at all otherwise; there’s no longer a need for the hydrotherapy it was designed for, now that we have the new drugs. So how would the group like to have that room as a sort of second day room, a game room, shall we say?”
   The group isn’t saying. They know whose play it is next. She folds Harding’s folio back up and puts it on her lap and crosses her hands over it, looking around the room just like somebody might dare have something to say. When it’s clear nobody’s going to talk till she does, her head turns again to the doctor. “It sounds like a fine plan, Doctor Spivey, and I appreciate Mr. McMurphy’s interest in the other patients, but I’m terribly afraid we don’t have the personnel to cover a second day room.”
   And is so certain that this should be the end of it she starts to open the folio again. But the doctor has thought this through more than she figured.
   “I thought of that too, Miss Ratched. But since it will be largely the Chronic patients who remain here in the day room with the speaker—most of whom are restricted to lounges or wheel chairs—one aide and one nurse in here should easily be able to put down any riots or uprisings that might occur, don’t you think?”
   She doesn’t answer, and she doesn’t care much for his joking about riots and uprisings either, but her face doesn’t change. The smile stays.
   “So the other two aides and nurses can cover the men in the tub room, perhaps even better than here in a larger area. What do you think, men? Is it a workable idea? I’m rather enthused about it myself, and I say we give it a try, see what it’s like for a few days. If it doesn’t work, well, we’ve still got the key to lock it back up, haven’t we?”
   “Right!” Cheswick says, socks his fist into his palm. He’s still standing, like he’s afraid to get near that thumb of McMurphy’s again. “Right, Doctor Spivey, if it don’t work, we’ve still got the key to lock it back up. You bet.”
   The doctor looks around the room and sees all the other Acutes nodding and smiling and looking so pleased with what he takes to be him and his idea that he blushes like Billy Bibbit and has to polish his glasses a time or two before he can go on. It tickles me to see the little man so happy with himself. He looks at all the guys nodding, and nods himself and says, “Fine, fine,” and settles his hands on his knees. “Very good. Now. If that’s decided—I seem to have forgotten what we were planning to talk about this morning?”
   The nurse’s head gives that one little jerk again, and she bends over her basket, picks up a folio. She fumbles with the papers, and it looks like her hands are shaking. She draws out a paper, but once more, before she can start reading out of-it, McMurphy is standing and holding up his hand and shifting from foot to foot, giving a long, thoughtful, “Saaaay,” and her fumbling stops, freezes as though the sound of his voice froze her just like her voice froze that black boy this morning. I get that giddy feeling inside me again when she freezes. I watch her close while McMurphy talks.
   “Saaaaay, Doctor, what I been dyin’ to know is what did this dream I dreamt the other night mean? You see, it was like I was me, in the dream, and then again kind of like I wasn’t me—like I was somebody else that looked like me—like—like my daddy! Yeah, that’s who it was. It was my daddy because sometimes when I saw me—him—I saw there was this iron bolt through the jawbone like daddy used to have—”
   “Your father has an iron bolt through his jawbone?”
   “Well, not any more, but he did once when I was a kid. He went around for about ten months with this big metal bolt going in here and coming out here! God, he was a regular Frankenstein. He’d been clipped on the jaw with a pole ax when he got into some kinda hassle with this pond man at the logging mill—Hey! Let me tell you how that incident came about…”
   Her face is still calm, as though sbe had a cast made and painted to just the look she wants. Confident, patient, and unruffled. No more little jerk, just that terrible cold face, a calm smile stamped out of red plastic; a clean, smooth forehead, not a line in it to show weakness or worry; flat, wide, painted-on green eyes, painted on with an expression that says I can wait, I might lose a yard now and then but I can wait, and be patient and calm and confident, because I know there’s no real losing for me.
   I thought for a minute there I saw her whipped. Maybe I did. But I see now that it don’t make any difference. One by one the patients are sneaking looks at her to see how she’s taking the way McMurphy is dominating the meeting, and they see the same thing. She’s too big to be beaten. She covers one whole side of the room like a Jap statue. There’s no moving her and no help against her. She’s lost a little battle here today, but it’s a minor battle in a big war that she’s been winning and that she’ll go on winning. We mustn’t let McMurphy get our hopes up any different, lure us into making some kind of dumb play. She’ll go on winning, just like the Combine, because she has all the power of the Combine behind her. She don’t lose on her losses, but she wins on ours. To beat her you don’t have to whip her two out of three or three out of five, but every time you meet. As soon as you let down your guard, as soon as you lose once, she’s won for good. And eventually we all got to lose. Nobody can help that.
   Right now, she’s got the fog machine switched on, and it’s rolling in so fast I can’t see a thing but her face, rolling in thicker and thicker, and I feel as hopeless and dead as I felt happy a minute ago, when she gave that little jerk—even more hopeless than ever before, on account of I know now there is no real help against her or her Combine. McMurphy can’t help any more than I could. Nobody can help. And the more I think about how nothing can be helped, the faster the fog rolls in.
   And I’m glad when it gets thick enough you’re lost in it and can let go, and be safe again.

10

   There’s a Monopoly game going on in the day room. They’ve been at it for three days, houses and hotels everywhere, two tables pushed together to take care of all the deeds and stacks of play money. McMurphy talked them into making the game interesting by paying a penny for every play dollar the bank issues them; the monopoly box is loaded with change.
   “It’s your roll, Cheswick.”
   “Hold it a minute before he rolls. What’s a man need to buy thum hotels?”
   “You need four houses on every lot of the same color, Martini. Now let’s go, for Christsakes.”
   “Hold it a minute.”
   There’s a flurry of money from that side of the table, red and green and yellow bills blowing in every direction.
   “You buying a hotel or you playing happy new year, for Christsakes?”
   “It’s your dirty roll, Cheswick.”
   “Snake eyes! Hoooeee, Cheswicker, where does that put you? That don’t put you on my Marvin Gardens by any chance? That don’t mean you have to pay me, let’s see, three hundred and fifty dollars?”
   “Boogered.”
   “What’s thum other things? Hold it a minute. What’s thum other things all over the board?”
   “Martini, you been seeing them other things all over the board for two days. No wonder I’m losing my ass. McMurphy, I don’t see how you can concentrate with Martini sitting there hallucinating a mile a minute.”
   “Cheswick, you never mind about Martini. He’s doing real good. You just come on with that three fifty, and Martini will take care of himself; don’t we get rent from him every time one of his ‘things’ lands on our property?”
   “Hold it a minute. There’s so many of thum.”
   “That’s okay, Mart. You just keep us posted whose property they land on. You’re still the man with the dice, Cheswick. You rolled a double, so you roll again. Atta boy. Faw! a big six.”
   “Takes me to… Chance: ‘You Have Been Elected Chairman of the Board; Pay Every Player—’ Boogered and double boogered!”
   “Whose hotel is this here for Christsakes on the Reading Railroad?”
   “My friend, that, as anyone can see, is not a hotel; it’s a depot.”
   “Now hold it a minute—”
   McMurphy surrounds his end of the table, moving cards, rearranging money, evening up his hotels. There’s a hundred. dollar bill sticking out of the brim of his cap like a press card; mad money, he calls it.
   “Scanlon? I believe it’s your turn, buddy.”
   “Gimme those dice. I’ll blow this board to pieces. Here we go. Lebenty Leben, count me over eleven, Martini.”
   “Why, all right.”
   “Not that one, you crazy bastard; that’s not my piece, that’s my house.”
   “It’s the same color.”
   “What’s this little house doing on the Electric Company?”
   “That’s a power station.”
   “Martini, those ain’t the dice you’re shaking—”
   “Let him be; what’s the difference?”
   “Those are a couple of houses!”
   “Faw. And Martini rolls a big, let me see, a big nineteen. Good goin’, Mart; that puts you—Where’s your piece, buddy?”
   “Eh? Why here it is.”
   “He had it in his mouth, McMurphy. Excellent. That’s two moves over the second and third bicuspid, four moves to the board, which takes you on to—to Baltic Avenue, Martini. Your own and only property. How fortunate can a man get, friends? Martini has been playing three days and lit on his property practically every time.”
   “Shut up and roll, Harding. It’s your turn.”
   Harding gathers the dice up with his long fingers, feeling the smooth surfaces with his thumb as if he was blind. The fingers are the same color as the dice and look like they were carved by his other hand. The dice rattle in his hand as he shakes it. They tumble to a stop in front of McMurphy.
   “Faw. Five, six, seven. Tough luck, buddy. That’s another o’ my vast holdin’s. You owe me—oh, two hundred dollars should about cover it.”
   Pity.
   The game goes round and round, to the rattle of dice and the shuffle of play money.

11

   There’s long spells—three days, years—when you can’t see a thing, know where you are only by the speaker sounding overhead like a bell buoy clanging in the fog. When I can see, the guys are usually moving around as unconcerned as though they didn’t notice so much as a mist in the air. I believe the fog affects their memory some way it doesn’t affect mine.
   Even McMurphy doesn’t seem to know he’s been fogged in. If he does, he makes sure not to let on that he’s bothered by it. He’s making sure none of the staff sees him bothered by anything; he knows that there’s no better way in the world to aggravate somebody who’s trying to make it hard for you than by acting like you’re not bothered.
   He keeps up his high-class manners around the nurses and the black boys in spite of anything they might say to him, in spite of every trick they pull to get him to lose his temper. A couple of times some stupid rule gets him mad, but he just makes himself act more polite and mannerly than ever till he begins to see how funny the whole thing is—the rules, the disapproving looks they use to enforce the rules, the ways of talking to you like you’re nothing but a three-year-old—and when he sees how funny it is he goes to laughing, and this aggravates them no end. He’s safe as long as he can laugh, he thinks, and it works pretty fair. Just once he loses control and shows he’s mad, and then it’s not because of the black boys or the Big Nurse and something they did, but it’s because of the patients, and something they didn’t do.
   It happened at one of the group meetings. He got mad at the guys for acting too cagey—too chicken-shit, he called it. He’d been taking bets from all of them on the World Series coming up Friday. He’d had it in mind that they would get to watch the games on TV, even though they didn’t come on during regulation TV time. During the meeting a few days before he asks if it wouldn’t be okay if they did the cleaning work at night, during TV time, and watched the games during the afternoon. The nurse tells him no, which is about what he expected. She tells him how the schedule has been set up for a delicately balanced reason that would be thrown into turmoil by the switch of routines.
   This doesn’t surprise him, coming from the nurse; what does surprise him is how the Acutes act when he asks them what they think of the idea. Nobody says a thing. They’re all sunk back out of sight in little pockets of fog. I can barely see them.
   “Now look here,” he tells them, but they don’t look. He’s been waiting for somebody to say something, answer his question. Nobody acts like they’ve heard it. “Look here, damn it,” he says when nobody moves, “there’s at least twelve of you guys I know of myself got a leetle personal interest who wins these games. Don’t you guys care to watch them?”
   “I don’t know, Mack,” Scanlon finally says, “I’m pretty used to seeing that six-o’clock news. And if switching times would really mess up the schedule as bad as Miss Ratched says—”
   “The hell with the schedule. You can get back to the bloody schedule next week, when the Series is over. What do you say, buddies? Let’s take a vote on watching the TV during the afternoon instead of at night. All those in favor?”
   “Ay,” Cheswick calls out and gets to his feet.
   “I mean all those in favor raise their hands. Okay, all those in favor?”
   Cheswick’s hand comes up. Some of the other guys look around to see if there’s any other fools. McMurphy can’t believe it.
   “Come on now, what is this crap? I thought you guys could vote on policy and that sort of thing. Isn’t that the way it is, Doc?”
   The doctor nods without looking up.
   “Okay then; now who wants to watch those games?”
   Cheswick shoves his hand higher and glares around. Scanlon shakes his head and then raises his hand, keeping his elbow on the arm of the chair. And nobody else. McMurphy can’t say a word.
   “If that’s settled, then,” the nurse says, “perhaps we should get on with the meeting.”
   “Yeah,” he says, slides down in his chair till the brim of his cap nearly touches his chest. “Yeah, perhaps we should get on with the sonofabitchin’ meeting at that.”
   “Yeah,” Cheswick says, giving all the guys a hard look and sitting down, “yeah, get on with the godblessed meeting.” He nods stiffly, then settles his chin down on his chest, scowling. He’s pleased to be sitting next to McMurphy, feeling brave like this. It’s the first time Cheswick ever had somebody along with him on his lost causes.
   After the meeting McMurphy won’t say a word to any of them, he’s so mad and disgusted. It’s Billy Bibbit who goes up to him.
   “Some of us have b-been here for fi-fi-five years, Randle,” Billy says. He’s got a magazine rolled up and is twisting at it with his hands; you can see the cigarette burns on the backs of his hands. “And some of us will b-be here maybe th-that muh-muh-much longer, long after you’re g-g-gone, long after this Wo-world Series is over. And… don’t you see…” He throws down the magazine and walks away. “Oh, what’s the use of it anyway.”
   McMurphy stares after him, that puzzled frown knotting his bleached eyebrows together again.
   He argues for the rest of the day with some of the other guys about why they didn’t vote, but they don’t want to talk about it, so he seems to give up, doesn’t say anything about it again till the day before the Series starts. “Here it is Thursday,” he says, sadly shaking his head.
   He’s sitting on one of the tables in the tub room with his feet on a chair, trying to spin his cap around one finger. Other Acutes mope around the room and try not to pay any attention to him. Nobody’ll play poker or blackjack with him for money any more—after the patients wouldn’t vote he got mad and skinned them so bad at cards that they’re all so in debt they’re scared to go any deeper—and they can’t play for cigarettes because the nurse has started making the men keep their cartons on the desk in the Nurses’ Station, where she doles them out one pack a day, says it’s for their health, but everybody knows it’s to keep McMurphy from winning them all at cards. With no poker or blackjack, it’s quiet in the tub room, just the sound of the speaker drifting in from the day room. It’s so quiet you can hear that guy upstairs in Disturbed climbing the wall, giving out an occasional signal, loo loo looo, a bored, uninterested sound, like a baby yells to yell itself to sleep.
   “Thursday,” McMurphy says again.
   “Looooo,” yells that guy upstairs.
   “That’s Rawler,” Scanlon says, looking up at the ceiling. He don’t want to pay any attention to McMurphy. “Rawler the Squawler. He came through this ward a few years back. Wouldn’t keep still to suit Miss Ratched, you remember, Billy? Loo loo loo all the time till I thought I’d go nuts. What they should do with that whole bunch of dingbats up there is toss a couple of grenades in the dorm. They’re no use to anybody—”
   “And tomorrow is Friday,” McMurphy says. He won’t let Scanlon change the subject.
   “Yeah,” Cheswick says, scowling around the room, “tomorrow is Friday.”
   Harding turns a page of his magazine. “And that will make nearly a week our friend McMurphy has been with us without succeeding in throwing over the government, is that what you’re saying, Cheswickle? Lord, to think of the chasm of apathy in which we have fallen—a shame, a pitiful shame.”
   “The hell with that,” McMurphy says. “What Cheswick means is that the first Series game is gonna be played on TV tomorrow, and what are we gonna be doin’? Mopping up this damned nursery again.”
   “Yeah,” Cheswick says. “Ol’ Mother Ratched’s Therapeutic Nursery.”
   Against the wall of the tub room I get a feeling like a spy; the mop handle in my hands is made of metal instead of wood (metal’s a better conductor) and it’s hollow; there’s plenty of room inside it to hide a miniature microphone. If the Big Nurse is hearing this, she’ll really get Cheswick. I take a hard ball of gum from my pocket and pick some fuzz off it and hold it in my mouth till it softens.
   “Let me see again,” McMurphy says. “How many of you birds will vote with me if I bring up that time switch again?”
   About half the Acutes nod yes, a lot more than would really vote. He puts his hat back on his head and leans his chin in his hands.
   “I tell ya, I can’t figure it out. Harding, what’s wrong with you, for crying out loud? You afraid if you raise your hand that old buzzard’ll cut it off.”
   Harding lifts one thin eyebrow. “Perhaps I am; perhaps I am afraid she’ll cut it off if I raise it.”
   “What about you, Billy? Is that what you’re scared of?” “No. I don’t think she’d d-d-do anything, but”—he shrugs and sighs and climbs up on the big panel that controls the nozzles on the shower, perches up there like a monkey”—but I just don’t think a vote wu-wu-would do any good. Not in the l-long run. It’s just no use, M-Mack.”
   “Do any good? Hooee! It’d do you birds some good just to get the exercise lifting that arm.”
   “It’s still a risk, my friend. She always has the capacity to make things worse for us. A baseball game isn’t worth the risk,” Harding says.
   “Who the hell says so? Jesus, I haven’t missed a World Series in years. Even when I was in the cooler one September they let us bring in a TV and watch the Series, they’d of had a riot on their hands if they hadn’t. I just may have to kick that damned door down and walk to some bar downtown to see the game, just me and my buddy Cheswick.”
   “Now there’s a suggestion with a lot of merit,” Harding says, tossing down his magazine. “Why not bring that up for vote in group meeting tomorrow? ‘Miss Ratched, I’d like to move that the ward be transported en masse to the Idle Hour for beer and television.’ ”
   “I’d second the motion,” Cheswick says. “Damn right.”
   “The hell with that in mass business,” McMurphy says. “I’m tired of looking at you bunch of old ladies; when me and Cheswick bust outta here I think by God I’m gonna nail the door shut behind me. You guys better stay behind; your mamma probably wouldn’t let you cross the street.”
   “Yeah? Is that it?” Fredrickson has come up behind McMurphy. “You’re just going to raise one of those big he-man boots of yours and kick down the door? A real tough guy.”
   McMurphy don’t hardly look at Fredrickson; he’s learned that Fredrickson might act hard-boiled now and then, but it’s an act that folds under the slightest scare.
   “What about it, he-man,” Fredrickson keeps on, “are you going to kick down that door and show us how tough you are?”
   “No, Fred, I guess not I wouldn’t want to scuff up my boot”
   “Yeah? Okay, you been talking so big, just how would you go about busting out of here?”
   McMurphy takes a look around him. “Well, I guess I could knock the mesh outa one of these windows with a chair when and if I took a notion…”
   “Yeah? You could, could you? Knock it right out? Okay, let’s see you try. Come on, he-man, I’ll bet you ten dollars you can’t do it.”
   “Don’t bother trying, Mack,” Cheswick says. “Fredrickson knows you’ll just break a chair and end up on Disturbed. The first day we arrived over here we were given a demonstration about these screens. They’re specially made. A technician picked up a chair just like that one you’ve got your feet on and beat the screen till the chair was no more than kindling wood. Didn’t hardly dent the screen.”
   “Okay then,” McMurphy says, taking a look around him. I can see he’s getting more interested. I hope the Big Nurse isn’t hearing this; he’ll be up on Disturbed in an hour. “We need something heavier. How about a table?”
   “Same as the chair. Same wood, same weight.”
   “All right, by God, let’s just figure out what I’d have to toss through that screen to bust out. And if you birds don’t think I’d do it if I ever got the urge, then you got another think coming. Okay—something bigger’n a table or a chair… Well, if it was night I might throw that fat coon through it; he’s heavy enough.”
   “Much too soft,” Harding says. “He’d hit the screen and it would dice him like an eggplant.”
   “How about one of the beds?”
   “A bed is too big even if you could lift it. It wouldn’t go through the window.”
   “I could lift it all right. Well, hell, right over there you are: that thing Billy’s sittin’ on. That big control panel with all the handles and cranks. That’s hard enough, ain’t it? And it damn well should be heavy enough.”
   “Sure,” Fredrickson says. “That’s the same as you kicking your foot through the steel door at the front.”
   “What would be wrong with using the panel? It don’t look nailed down.”
   “No, it’s not bolted—there’s probably nothing holding it but a few wires—but look at it, for Christsakes.”
   Everybody looks. The panel is steel and cement, half the size of one of the tables, probably weighs four hundred pounds.
   “Okay, I’m looking at it. It don’t look any bigger than hay bales I’ve bucked up onto truck beds.”
   “I’m afraid, my friend, that this contrivance will weigh a bit more than your bales of hay.”
   “About a quarter-ton more, I’d bet,” Fredrickson says.
   “He’s right, Mack,” Cheswick says. “It’d be awful heavy.”
   “Hell, are you birds telling me I can’t lift that dinky little gizmo?”
   “My friend, I don’t recall anything about psychopaths being able to move mountains in addition to their other noteworthy assets.”
   “Okay, you say I can’t lift it. Well by God…”
   McMurphy hops off the table and goes to peeling off his green jacket; the tattoos sticking half out of his T-shirt jump around the muscles on his arms.
   “Then who’s willing to lay five bucks? Nobody’s gonna convince me I can’t do something till I try it. Five bucks…”
   “McMurphy, this is as foolhardy as your bet about the nurse.”
   “Who’s got five bucks they want to lose? You hit or you sit…”
   The guys all go to signing liens at once; he’s beat them so many times at poker and blackjack they can’t wait to get back at him, and this is a certain sure thing. I don’t know what he’s driving at; broad and big as he is, it’d take three of him to move that panel, and he knows it. He can just look at it and see he probably couldn’t even tip it, let alone lift it. It’d take a giant to lift it off the ground. But when the Acutes all get their IOUs signed, he steps up to the panel and lifts Billy Bibbit down off it and spits in his big callused palms and slaps them together, rolls his shoulders.
   “Okay, stand outa the way. Sometimes when I go to exertin’ myself I use up all the air nearby and grown men faint from suffocation. Stand back. There’s liable to be crackin’ cement and flying steel. Get the women and kids someplace safe. Stand back…”
   “By golly, he might do it,” Cheswick mutters.
   “Sure, maybe he’ll talk it off the floor,” Fredrickson says.
   “More likely he’ll acquire a beautiful hernia,” Harding says. “Come now, McMurphy, quit acting like a fool; there’s no man can lift that thing.”
   “Stand back, sissies, you’re using my oxygen.”
   McMurphy shifts his feet a few times to get a good stance, and wipes his hands on his thighs again, then leans down and gets hold of the levers on each side of the panel. When he goes to straining, the guys go to hooting and kidding him. He turns loose and straightens up and shifts his feet around again.
   “Giving up?” Fredrickson grins.
   “Just limbering up. Here goes the real effort”—and grabs those levers again.
   And suddenly nobody’s hooting at him any more. His arms commence to swell, and the veins squeeze up to the surface. He clinches his eyes, and his lips draw away from his teeth. His head leans back, and tendons stand out like coiled ropes running from his heaving neck down both arms to his hands. His whole body shakes with the strain as he tries to lift something he knows he can’t lift, something everybody knows he can’t lift.
   But, for just a second, when we hear the cement grind at our feet, we think, by golly, he might do it.
   Then his breath explodes out of him, and he falls back limp against the wall. There’s blood on the levers where he tore his hands. He pants for a minute against the wall with his eyes shut. There’s no sound but his scraping breath; nobody’s saying a thing.
   He opens his eyes and looks around at us. One by one he looks at the guys—even at me—then he fishes in his pockets for all the IOUs he won the last few days at poker. He bends over the table and tries to sort them, but his hands are froze into red claws, and he can’t work the fingers.
   Finally he throws the whole bundle on the floor—probably forty or fifty dollars’ worth from each man—and turns to walk out of the tub room. He stops at the door and looks back at everybody standing around.
   “But I tried, though,” he says. “Goddammit, I sure as hell did that much, now, didn’t I?”
   And walks out and leaves those stained pieces of paper on the floor for whoever wants to sort through them.

12

   A visiting doctor covered with gray cobwebs on his yellow skull is addressing the resident boys in the staff room.
   I come sweeping past him. “Oh, and what’s this here.” He gives me a look like I’m some kind of bug. One of the residents points at his ears, signal that I’m deaf, and the visiting doctor goes on.
   I push my broom up face to face with a big picture Public Relation brought in one time when it was fogged so thick I didn’t see him. The picture is a guy fly-fishing somewhere in the mountains, looks like the Ochocos near Paineville—snow on the peaks showing over the pines, long white aspen trunks lining the stream, sheep sorrel growing in sour green patches. The guy is flicking his fly in a pool behind a rock. It’s no place for a fly, it’s a place for a single egg on a number-six hook—he’d do better to drift the fly over those riffles downstream.
   There’s a path running down through the aspen, and I push my broom down the path a ways and sit down on a rock and look back out through the frame at that visiting doctor talking with the residents. I can see him stabbing some point in the palm of his hand with his finger, but I can’t hear what he says because of the crash of the cold, frothy stream coming down out of the rocks. I can smell the snow in the wind where it blows down off the peaks. I can see mole burrows humping along under the grass and buffalo weed. It’s a real nice place to stretch your legs and take it easy.
   You forget—if you don’t sit down and make the effort to think back—forget how it was at the old hospital. They didn’t have nice places like this on the walls for you to climb into. They didn’t have TV or swimming pools or chicken twice a month. They didn’t have nothing but walls and chairs, confinement jackets it took you hours of hard work to get out of. They’ve learned a lot since then. “Come a long way,” says fat-faced Public Relation. They’ve made life look very pleasant with paint and decorations and chrome bathroom fixtures. “A man that would want to run away from a place as nice as this,” says fat-faced Public Relation, “why, there’d be something wrong with him.”
   Out in the staff room the visiting authority is hugging his elbows and shivering like he’s cold while he answers questions the resident boys ask him. He’s thin and meatless, and his clothes flap around his bones. He stands there, hugging his elbows and shivering. Maybe he feels the cold snow wind off the peaks too.

13

   It’s getting hard to locate my bed at night, have to crawl around on my hands and knees feeling underneath the springs till I find my gobs of gum stuck there: Nobody complains about all the fog. I know why, now: as bad as it is, you can slip back in it and feel safe. That’s what McMurphy can’t understand, us wanting to be safe. He keeps trying to drag us out of the fog, out in the open where we’d be easy to get at.

14

   There’s a shipment of frozen parts come Tin downstairs—hearts and kidneys and brains and the like. I can hear them rumble into cold storage down the coal chute. A guy sitting in the room someplace I can’t see is talking about a guy up on Disturbed killing himself. Old Rawler. Cut both nuts off and bled to death, sitting right on the can in the latrine, half a dozen people in there with him didn’t know it till he fell off to the floor, dead.
   What makes people so impatient is what I can’t figure; all the guy had to do was wait.

15

   I know how they work it, the fog machine. We had a whole platoon used to operate fog machines around airfields overseas. Whenever intelligence figured there might be a bombing attack, or if the generals had something secret they wanted to pull-out of sight, hid so good that even the spies on the base couldn’t see what went on—they fogged the field.
   It’s a simple rig: you got an ordinary compressor sucks water out of one tank and a special oil out of another tank, and compresses them together, and from the black stem at the end of the machine blooms a white cloud of fog that can cover a whole airfield in ninety seconds. The first thing I saw when I landed in Europe was the fog those machines make. There were some interceptors close after our transport, and soon as it hit ground the fog crew started up the machines. We could look out the transport’s round, scratched windows and watch the jeeps draw the machines up close to the plane and watch the fog boil out till it rolled across the field and stuck against the windows like wet cotton.
   You found your way off the plane by following a little referees’ horn the lieutenant kept blowing, sounded like a goose honking. Soon as you were out of the hatch you couldn’t see no more than maybe three feet in any direction. You felt like you were out on that airfield all by yourself. You were safe from the enemy, but you were awfully alone. Sounds died and dissolved after a few yards, and you couldn’t hear any of the rest of your crew, nothing but that little horn squeaking and honking out of a soft furry whiteness so thick that your body just faded into white below the belt; other than that brown shirt and brass buckle, you couldn’t see nothing but white, like from the waist down you were being dissolved by the fog too.
   And then some guy wandering as lost as you would all of a sudden be right before your eyes, his face bigger and clearer than you ever saw a man’s face before in your life. Your eyes were working so hard to see in that fog that when something did come in sight every detail was ten times as clear as usual, so clear both of you had to look away. When a man showed up you didn’t want to look at his face and he didn’t want to look at yours, because it’s painful to see somebody so clear that it’s like looking inside him, but then neither did you want to look away and lose him completely. You had a choice: you could either strain and look at things that appeared in front of you in the fog, painful as it might be, or you could relax and lose yourself.
   When they first used that fog machine on the ward, one they bought from Army Surplus and hid in the vents in the new place before we moved in, I kept looking at anything that appeared out of the fog as long and hard as I could, to keep track of it, just like I used to do when they fogged the airfields in Europe. Nobody’d be blowing a horn to show the way, there was no rope to hold to, so fixing my eyes on something was the only way I kept from getting lost. Sometimes I got lost in it anyway, got in too deep, trying to hide, and every time I did, it seemed like I always turned up at that same place, at that same metal door with the row of rivets like eyes and no number, just like the room behind that door drew me to it, no matter how hard I tried to stay away, just like the current generated by the fiends in that room was conducted in a beam along the fog and pulled me back along it like a robot. I’d wander for days in the fog, scared I’d never see another thing, then there’d be that door, opening to show me the mattress padding on the other side to stop out the sounds, the men standing in a line like zombies among shiny copper wires and tubes pulsing light, and the bright scrape of arcing electricity. I’d take my place in the line and wait my turn at the table. The table shaped like а cross, with shadows of a thousand murdered men printed on it, silhouette wrists and ankles running under leather straps sweated green with use, a silhouette neck and head running up to a silver band goes across the forehead. And a technician at the controls beside the table looking up from his dials and down the line and pointing at me with a rubber glove. “Wait, I know that big bastard there—better rabbit-punch him or call for some more help or something. He’s an awful case for thrashing around.”
   So I used to try not to get in too deep, for fear I’d get lost and turn up at the Shock Shop door. I looked hard at anything that came into sight and hung on like a man in a blizzard hangs on a fence rail. But they kept making the fog thicker and thicker, and it seemed to me that, no matter how hard I tried, two or three times a month I found myself with that door opening in front of me to the acid smell of sparks and ozone. In spite of all I could do, it was getting tough to keep from getting lost.
   Then I discovered something: I don’t have to end up at that door if I stay still when the fog comes over me and just keep quiet. The trouble was I’d been finding that door my own self because I got scared of being lost so long and went to hollering so they could track me. In a way, I was hollering for them to track me; I had figured that anything was better’n being lost for good, even the Shock Shop. Now, I don’t know. Being lost isn’t so bad.
   All this morning I been waiting for them to fog us in again. The last few days they been doing it more and more. It’s my idea they’re doing it on account of McMurphy. They haven’t got him fixed with controls yet, and they’re trying to catch him off guard. They can see he’s due to be a problem; a half a dozen times already he’s roused Cheswick and Harding and some of the others to where it looked like they might actually stand up to one of the black boys—but always, just the time it looked like the patient might be helped, the fog would start, like it’s starting now.
   I heard the compressor start pumping in the grill a few minutes back, just as the guys went to moving tables out of the day room for the therapeutic meeting, and already the mist is oozing across the floor so thick my pants legs are wet. I’m cleaning the windows in the door of the glass station, and I hear the Big Nurse pick up the phone and call the doctor to tell him we’re just about ready for the meeting, and tell him perhaps he’d best keep an hour free this afternoon for a staff meeting. “The reason being,” she tells him, “I think it is past time to have a discussion of the subject of Patient Randle McMurphy and whether he should be on this ward or not.” She listens a minute, then tells him, “I don’t think it’s wise to let him go on upsetting the patients the way he has the last few days.”
   That’s why she’s fogging the ward for the meeting. She don’t usually do that. But now she’s going to do something with McMurphy today, probably ship him to Disturbed. I put down my window rag and go to my chair at the end of the line of Chronics, barely able to see the guys getting into their chairs and the doctor coming through the door wiping his glasses like he thinks the blurred look comes from his steamed lenses instead of the fog.
   It’s rolling in thicker than I ever seen it before.
   I can hear them out there, trying to go on with the meeting, talking some nonsense about Billy Bibbit’s stutter and how it came about. The words come to me like through water, it’s so thick. In fact it’s so much like water it floats me right up out of my chair and I don’t know which end is up for a while. Floating makes me a little sick to the stomach at first. I can’t see a thing. I never had it so thick it floated me like this.
   The words get dim and loud, off and on, as I float around, but as loud as they get, loud enough sometimes I know I’m right next to the guy that’s talking, I still can’t see a thing.
   I recognize Billy’s voice, stuttering worse than ever because he’s nervous. “…fuh-fuh-flunked out of college be-be-cause I quit ROTC. I c-c-couldn’t take it. Wh-wh-wh-whenever the officer in charge of class would call roll, call ‘Bibbit,’ I couldn’t answer. You were s-s-supposed to say heh—heh—heh… He’s choking on the word, like it’s a bone in his throat. I hear him swallow and start again. “You were supposed to say, ‘Here sir,’ and I never c-c-could get it out.”
   His voice gets dim; then the Big Nurse’s voice comes cutting from the left. “Can you recall, Billy, when you first had speech trouble? When did you first stutter, do you remember?”
   I can’t tell is he laughing or what. “Fir-first stutter? First stutter? The first word I said I st-stut-tered: m-m-m-m-mamma.”
   Then the talking fades out altogether: I never knew that to happen before. Maybe Billy’s hid himself in the fog too. Maybe all the guys finally and forever crowded back into the fog.
   A chair and me float past each other. It’s the first thing I’ve seen. It comes sifting out of the fog off to my right, and for a few seconds it’s right beside my face, just out of my reach. I been accustomed of late to just let things alone when they appear in the fog, sit still and not try to hang on. But this time I’m scared, the way I used to be scared. I try with all I got to pull myself over to the chair and get hold of it, but there’s nothing to brace against and all I can do is thrash the air, all I can do is watch the chair come clear, clearer than ever before to where I can even make out the fingerprint where a worker touched the varnish before it was dry, looming out for a few seconds, then fading on off again. I never seen it where things floated around this way. I never seen it this thick before, thick to where I can’t get down to the floor and get on my feet if I wanted to and walk around. That’s why I’m so scared; I feel I’m going to float off someplace for good this time.
   I see a Chronic float into sight a little below me. It’s old Colonel Matterson, reading from the wrinkled scripture of that long yellow hand. I look close at him because I figure it’s the last time I’ll ever see him. His face is enormous, almost more than I can bear. Every hair and wrinkle of him is big, as though I was looking at him with one of those microscopes. I see him so clear I see his whole life. The face is sixty years of southwest Army camps, rutted by iron-rimmed caisson wheels, worn to the bone by thousands of feet on two-day marches.
   He holds out that long hand and brings it up in front of his eyes and squints into it, brings up his other hand and underlines the words with a finger wooden and varnished the color of a gunstock by nicotine. His voice as deep and slow and patient, and I see the words come out dark and heavy over his brittle lips when he reads.
   “No… The flag is… Ah-mer-ica. America is… the plum. The peach. The wah-ter-mel-on. America is… the gumdrop. The pump-kin seed. America is… tell-ah-vision.”
   It’s true. It’s all wrote down on that yellow hand. I can read it along with him myself.
   “Now… The cross is… Mex-i-co.” He looks up to see if I’m paying attention, and when he sees I am he smiles at me and goes on. “ Mexico is… the wal-nut. The hazelnut. The ay-corn. Mexico is… the rain-bow. The rain-bow is… wooden. Mexico is… woo-den.”
   I can see what he’s driving at. He’s been saying this sort of thing for the whole six years he’s been here, but I never paid him any mind, figured he was no more than a talking statue, a thing made out of bone and arthritis, rambling on and on with these goofy definitions of his that didn’t make a lick of sense. Now, at last, I see what he’s saying. I’m trying to hold him for one last look to remember him, and that’s what makes me look hard enough to understand. He pauses and peers up at me again to make sure I’m getting it, and I want to yell out to him Yes, I see: Mexico is like the walnut; it’s brown and hard and you feel it with your eye and it feels like the walnut! You’re making sense, old man, a sense of your own. You’re not crazy the way they think. Yes… I see…
   But the fog’s clogged my throat to where I can’t make a sound. As he sifts away I see him bend back over that hand.
   “Now… The green sheep is… Can-a-da. Canada is… the fir tree. The wheat field. The cal-en-dar…”
   I strain to see him drifting away. I strain so hard my eyes ache and I have to close them, and when I open them again the colonel is gone. I’m floating by myself again, more lost than ever.
   This is the time, I tell myself. I’m going for good.
   There’s old Pete, face like a searchlight. He’s fifty yards off to my left, but I can see him plain as though there wasn’t any fog at all. Or maybe he’s up right close and real small, I can’t be sure. He tells me once about how tired he is, and just his saying it makes me see his whole life on the railroad, see him working to figure out how to read a watch, breaking a sweat while he tries to get the right button in the right hole of his railroad overalls, doing his absolute damnedest to keep up with a job that comes so easy to the others they can sit back in a chair padded with cardboard and read mystery stories and girlie books. Not that he ever really figured to keep up—he knew from the start he couldn’t do that—but he had to try to keep up, just to keep them in sight. So for forty years he was able to live, if not right in the world of men, at least on the edge of it.
   I can see all that, and be hurt by it, the way I was hurt by seeing things in the Army, in the war. The way I was hurt by seeing what happened to Papa and the tribe. I thought I’d got over seeing those things and fretting over them. There’s no sense in it. There’s nothing to be done.
   “I’m tired,” is what he says.
   “I know you’re tired, Pete, but I can’t do you no good fretting about it. You know I can’t.”
   Pete floats on the way of the old colonel.
   Here comes Billy Bibbit, the way Pete come by. They’re all filing by for a last look. I know Billy can’t be more’n a few feet away, but he’s so tiny he looks like he’s a mile off. His face is out to me like the face of a beggar, needing so much more’n anybody can give. His mouth works like a little doll’s mouth.
   “And even when I pr-proposed, I flubbed it. I said ‘Huh-honey, will you muh-muh-muh-muh-muh…’ till the girl broke out l-laughing.”
   Nurse’s voice, I can’t see where it comes from: “Your mother has spoken to me about this girl, Billy. Apparently she was quite a bit beneath you. What would you speculate it was about her that frightened you so, Billy?”
   “I was in luh-love with her.”
   I can’t do nothing for you either, Billy. You know that. None of us can. You got to understand that as soon as a man goes to help somebody, he leaves himself wide open. He has to be cagey, Billy, you should know that as well as anyone. What could I do? I can’t fix your stuttering. I can’t wipe the razorblade scars off your wrists or the cigarette burns off the back of your hands. I can’t give you a new mother. And as far as the nurse riding you like this, rubbing your nose in your weakness till what little dignity you got left is gone and you shrink up to nothing from humiliation, I can’t do anything about that, either. At Anzio, I saw a buddy of mine tied to a tree fifty yards from me, screaming for water, his face blistered in the sun. They wanted me to try to go out and help him. They’d of cut me in half from that farmhouse over there.
   Put your face away, Billy.
   They keep filing past.
   It’s like each face was a sign like one of those “I’m Blind” signs the dago accordion players in Portland hung around their necks, only these signs say “I’m tired” or “I’m scared” or “I’m dying of a bum liver” or “I’m all bound up with machinery and people pushing me alla time.” I can read all the signs, it don’t make any difference how little the print gets. Some of the faces are looking around at one another and could read the other fellow’s if they would, but what’s the sense? The faces blow past in the fog like confetti.
   I’m further off than I’ve ever been. This is what it’s like to be dead. I guess this is what it’s like to be a Vegetable; you lose yourself in the fog. You don’t move. They feed your body till it finally stops eating; then they burn it. It’s not so bad. There’s no pain. I don’t feel much of anything other than a touch of chill I figure will pass in time.
   I see my commanding officer pinning notices on the bulletin board, what we’re to wear today. I see the US Department of Interior bearing down on our little tribe with a gravel-crushing machine.
   I see Papa come loping out of a draw and slow up to try and take aim at a big six-point buck springing off through the cedars. Shot after shot puffs out of the barrel, knocking dust all around the buck. I come out of the draw behind Papa and bring the buck down with my second shot just as it starts climbing the rimrock. I grin at Papa.
   I never knew you to miss a shot like that before, Papa. Eye’s gone, boy. Can’t hold a bead. Sights on my gun just now was shakin’ like a dog shittin’ peach pits.
   Papa, I’m telling you: that cactus moon of Sid’s is gonna make you old before your time.
   A man drinks that cactus moon of Sid’s boy, he’s already old before his time. Let’s go gut that animal out before the flies blow him.
   That’s not even happening now. You see? There’s nothing you can do about a happening out of the past like that.
   Look there, my man…
   I hear whispers, black boys.
   Look there, that old fool Broom, slipped off to sleep.
   Tha’s right, Chief Broom, tha’s right. You sleep an’ keep outta trouble. Yasss.
   I’m not cold any more. I think I’ve about made it. I’m off to where the cold can’t reach me. I can stay off here for good. I’m not scared any more. They can’t reach me. Just the words reach me, and those’re fading.
   Well… in as much as Billy has decided to walk out on the discussion, does anyone else have a problem to bring before the group?
   As a matter of fact, ma’am, there does happen to be something…
   That’s that McMurphy. He’s far away. He’s still trying to pull people out of the fog. Why don’t he leave me be?
   “…remember that vote we had a day or so back-about the TV time? Well, today’s Friday and I thought I might just bring it up again, just to see if anybody else has picked up a little guts.”
   “Mr. McMurphy, the purpose of this meeting is therapy, group therapy, and I’m not certain these petty grievances—”
   “Yeah, yeah, the hell with that, we’ve heard it before. Me and some of the rest of the guys decided—”
   “One moment, Mr. McMurphy, let me pose a question to the group: do any of you feel that Mr. McMurphy is perhaps imposing his personal desires on some of you too much? I’ve been thinking you might be happier if he were moved to a different ward.”
   Nobody says anything for a minute. Then someone says, “Let him vote, why dontcha? Why ya want to ship him to Disturbed just for bringing up a vote? What’s so wrong with changing time?”
   “Why, Mr. Scanlon, as I recall, you refused to eat for three days until we allowed you to turn the set on at six instead of six-thirty.”
   “A man needs to see the world news, don’t he? God, they coulda bombed Washington and it’d been a week before we’d of heard.”
   “Yes? And how do you feel about relinquishing your world news to watch a bunch of men play baseball?”
   “We can’t have both, huh? No, I suppose not. Well, what the dickens—I don’t guess they’ll bomb us this week.” “Let’s let him have the vote, Miss Ratched.”
   “Very well. But I think this is ample evidence of how much he is upsetting some of you patients. What is it you are proposing, Mr. McMurphy?”
   “I’m proposing a revote on watching the TV in the afternoon.”
   “You’re certain one more vote will satisfy you? We have more important things—”
   “It’ll satisfy me. I just’d kind of like to see which of these birds has any guts and which doesn’t.”
   “It’s that kind of talk, Doctor Spivey, that makes me wonder if the patients wouldn’t be more content if Mr. McMurphy were moved.”
   “Let him call the vote, why dontcha?”
   “Certainly, Mr. Cheswick. A vote is now before the group. Will a show of hands be adequate, Mr. McMurphy, or are you going to insist on a secret ballot?”
   “I want to see the hands. I want to see the hands that don’t go up, too.”
   “Everyone in favor of changing the television time to the afternoon, raise his hand.”
   The first hand that comes up, I can tell, is McMurphy’s, because of the bandage where that control panel cut into him when he tried to lift it. And then off down the slope I see them, other hands coming up out of the fog. It’s like… that big red hand of McMurphy’s is reaching into the fog and dropping down and dragging the men up by their hands, dragging them blinking into the open. First one, then another, then the next. Right on down the line of Acutes, dragging them out of the fog till there they stand, all twenty of them, raising not just for watching TV, but against the Big Nurse, against her trying to send McMurphy to Disturbed, against the way she’s talked and acted and beat them down for years.
   Nobody says anything. I can feel how stunned everybody is, the patients as well as the staff. The nurse can’t figure what happened; yesterday, before he tried lifting that panel, there wasn’t but four or five men might of voted. But when she talks she don’t let it show in her voice how surprised she is.
   “I count only twenty, Mr. McMurphy.”
   “Twenty? Well, why not? Twenty is all of us there—” His voice hangs as he realizes what she means. “Now hold on just a goddamned minute, lady—”
   “I’m afraid the vote is defeated.”
   “Hold on just one goddamned minute!”
   “There are forty patients on the ward, Mr. McMurphy. Forty patients, and only twenty voted. You must have a majority to change the ward policy. I’m afraid the vote is closed.”
   The hands are coming down across the room. The guys know they’re whipped, are trying to slip back into the safety of the fog. McMurphy is on his feet.
   “Well, I’ll be a sonofabitch. You mean to tell me that’s how you’re gonna pull it? Count the votes of those old birds over there too?”
   “Didn’t you explain the voting procedure to him, Doctor?”
   “I’m afraid—a majority is called for, McMurphy. She’s right, she’s right.”
   “A majority, Mr. McMurphy; it’s in the ward constitution.” “And I suppose the way to change the damned constitution is with a majority vote. Sure. Of all the chicken-shit things I’ve ever seen, this by God takes the cake!”
   “I’m sorry, Mr. McMurphy, but you’ll find it written in the policy if you’d care for me to—”
   “So this’s how you work this democratic bullshit—hell’s bells!”
   “You seem upset, Mr. McMurphy. Doesn’t he seem upset, Doctor? I want you to note this.”
   “Don’t give me that noise, lady. When a guy’s getting screwed he’s got a right to holler. And we’ve been damn well screwed.”
   “Perhaps, Doctor, in view of the patient’s condition, we should bring this meeting to a close early today—”
   “Wait! Wait a minute, let me talk to some of those old guys.”
   “The vote is closed, Mr. McMurphy.”
   “Let me talk to ‘em.”
   He’s coming across the day room at us. He gets bigger and bigger, and he’s burning red in the face. He reaches into the fog and tries to drag Ruckly to the surface because Ruckly’s the youngest.
   “What about you, buddy? You want to watch the World Series? Baseball? Baseball games? Just raise that hand up there—”
   “Fffffffuck da wife.”
   “All right, forget it. You, partner, how about you? What was your name—Ellis? What do you say, Ellis, to watching a ball game on TV? Just raise your hand…”
   Ellis’s hands are nailed to the wall, can’t be counted as a vote.
   “I said the voting is closed, Mr. McMurphy. You’re just making a spectacle of yourself.”
   He don’t pay any attention to her. He comes on down the line of Chronics. “C’mon, c’mon, just one vote from you birds, just raise a hand. Show her you can still do it.”
   “I’m tired,” says Pete and wags his head.
   “The night is… the Pacific Ocean.” The Colonel is reading off his hand, can’t be bothered with voting.
   “One of you guys, for cryin’ out loud! This is where you get the edge, don’t you see that? We have to do this—or we’re whipped! Don’t a one of you clucks know what I’m talking about enough to give us a hand? You, Gabriel? George? No? You, Chief, what about you?
   He’s standing over me in the mist. Why won’t he leave me be?
   “Chief, you’re our last bet.”
   The Big Nurse is folding her papers; the other nurses are standing up around her. She finally gets to her feet.
   “The meeting is adjourned, then, I hear her say. “And I’d like to see the staff down in the staff room in about an hour. So, if there is nothing el—”
   It’s too late to stop it now. McMurphy did something to it that first day, put some kind of hex on it with his hand so it won’t act like I order it. There’s no sense in it, any fool can see; I wouldn’t do it on my own. Just by the way the nurse is staring at me with her mouth empty of words I can see I’m in for trouble, but I can’t stop it. McMurphy’s got hidden wires hooked to it, lifting it slow just to get me out of the fog and into the open where I’m fair game. He’s doing it, wires…
   No. That’s not the truth. I lifted it myself.
   McMurphy whoops and drags me standing, pounding my back.
   “Twenty-one! The Chief’s vote makes it twenty-one! And by God if that ain’t a majority I’ll eat my hat!”
   “Yippee,” Cheswick yells. The other Acutes are coming across toward me.
   “The meeting was closed,” she says. Her smile is still there, but the back of her neck as she walks out of the day room and into the Nurses’ Station, is red and swelling like she’ll blow apart any second.

   But she don’t blow up, not right off, not until about an hour later. Behind the glass her smile is twisted and queer, like we’ve never seen before. She just sits. I can see her shoulders rise and fall as she breathes.
   McMurphy looks up at the clock and he says it’s time for the game. He’s over by the drinking fountain with some of the other Acutes, down on his knees scouring off the baseboard. I’m sweeping out the broom closet for the tenth time that day. Scanlon and Harding, they got the buffer going up and down the hall, polishing the new wax into shining figure eights. McMurphy says again that he guesses it must be game time and he stands up, leaves the scouring rag where it lies. Nobody else stops work. McMurphy walks past the window where she’s glaring out at him and grins at her like he knows he’s got her whipped now. When he tips his head back and winks at her she gives that little sideways jerk of her head.
   Everybody keeps on at what he’s doing, but they all watch out of the corners of their eyes while he drags his armchair out to in front of the TV set, then switches on the set and sits down. A picture swirls onto the screen of a parrot out on the baseball field singing razor-blade songs. McMurphy gets up and turns up the sound to drown out the music coming down from the speaker in the ceiling, and he drags another chair in front of him and sits down and crosses his feet on the chair and leans back and lights a cigarette. He scratches his belly and yawns.
   “Hoo-weee! Man, all I need me now is a can of beer and a red-hot.”
   We can see the nurse’s face get red and her mouth work as she stares at him. She looks around for a second and sees everybody’s watching what she’s going to do—even the black boys and the little nurses sneaking looks at her, and the residents beginning to drift in for the staff meeting, they’re watching. Her mouth clamps shut. She looks back at McMurphy and waits till the razor-blade song is finished; then she gets up and goes to the steel door where the controls are, and she flips a switch and the TV picture swirls back into the gray. Nothing is left on the screen but a little eye of light beading right down on McMurphy sitting there.
   That eye don’t faze him a bit. To tell the truth, he don’t even let on he knows the picture is turned off; he puts his cigarette between his teeth and pushes his cap forward in his red hair till he has to lean back to see out from under the brim.
   And sits that way, with his hands crossed behind his head and his feet stuck out in a chair, a smoking cigarette sticking out from under his hatbrim—watching the TV screen.
   The nurse stands this as long as she can; then she comes to the door of the Nurses’ Station and calls across to him he’d better help the men with the housework. He ignores her.
   “I said, Mr. McMurphy, that you are supposed to be working during these hours.” Her voice has a tight whine like an electric saw ripping through pine. “Mr. McMurphy, I’m warning you!”
   Everybody’s stopped what he was doing. She looks around her, then takes a step out of the Nurses’ Station toward McMurphy.
   “You’re committed, you realize. You are… under the jurisdiction of me… the staff.” She’s holding up a fist, all those red-orange fingernails burning into her palm. “Under jurisdiction and control–”
   Harding shuts off the buffer, and leaves it in the hall, and goes pulls him a chair up alongside McMurphy and sits down and lights him a cigarette too.
   “Mr. Harding! You return to your scheduled duties!”
   I think how her voice sounds like it hit a nail, and this strikes me so funny I almost laugh.
   “Mr. Har-ding!”
   Then Cheswick goes and gets him a chair, and then Billy Bibbit goes, and then Scanlon and then Fredrickson and Sefelt, and then we all put down our mops and brooms and scouring rags and we all go pull us chairs up.
   “You men–Stop this. Stop!”
   And we’re all sitting there lined up in front of that blanked-out TV set, watching the gray screen just like we could see the baseball game clear as day, and she’s ranting and screaming behind us.
   If somebody’d of come in and took a look, men watching a blank TV, a fifty-year-old woman hollering and squealing at the back of their heads about discipline and order and recriminations, they’d of thought the whole bunch was crazy as loons.

Part 2

16

   Just at the edge of my vision I can see that white enamel face in the Nurses’ Station, teetering over the desk, see it warp and flow as it tries to pull back into shape. The rest of the guys are watching too, though they’re trying to act like they aren’t. They’re trying to act like they still got their eyes on nothing but that blank TV in front of us, but anyone can see they’re all sneaking looks at the Big Nurse behind her glass there, just the same as I am. For the first time she’s on the other side of the glass and getting a taste of how it feels to be watched when you wish more than anything else to be able to pull a green shade between your face and all the eyes that you can’t get away from.
   The residents, the black boys, all the little nurses, they’re watching her too, waiting for her to go down the hall where it’s time for the meeting she herself called, and waiting to see how she’ll act now that it’s known she can be made to lose control. She knows they’re watching, but she don’t move. Not even when they start strolling down to the staff room without her. I notice all the machinery in the wall is quiet, like it’s still waiting for her to move.
   There’s no more fog any place.
   All of a sudden I remember I’m supposed to clean the staff room. I always go down and clean the staff room during these meetings they have, been doing it for years. But now I’m too scared to get out of my chair. The staff always let me clean the room because they didn’t think I could hear, but now that they saw me lift my hand when McMurphy told me to, won’t they know I can hear? Won’t they figure I been hearing all these years, listening to secrets meant only for their ears? What’ll they do to me in that staff room if they know that?
   Still, they expect me to be in there. If I’m not, they’ll know for sure that I can hear, be way ahead of me, thinking, You see? He isn’t in here cleaning, don’t that prove it? It’s obvious what’s to be done…
   I’m just getting the full force of the dangers we let ourselves in for when we let McMurphy lure us out of the fog.
   There’s a black boy leaning against the wall near the door, arms crossed, pink tongue tip darting back and forth over his lips, watching us sitting in front of the TV set. His eyes dart back and forth like his tongue and stop on me, and I see his leather eyelids raise a little. He watches me for a long time, and I know he’s wondering about the way I acted in the group meeting. Then he comes off the wall with a lurch, breaking contact, and goes to the broom closet and brings back a bucket of soapy water and a sponge, drags my arms up and hangs the bucket bale over it, like hanging a kettle on a fireplace boom.
   “Le’s go, Chief,” he says. “Le’s get up and get to your duties.”
   I don’t move. The bucket rocks on my arm. I don’t make a sign I heard. He’s trying to trick me. He asks me again to get up, and when I don’t move he rolls his eyes up to the ceiling and sighs, reaches down and takes my collar, and tugs a little, and I stand up. He stuffs the sponge in my pocket and points up the hall where the staff room is, and I go.
   And while I’m walking up the hall with the bucket, zoom, the Big Nurse comes past me with all her old calm speed and power and turns into the door. That makes me wonder.
   Out in the hall all by myself, I notice how clear it is—no fog any place. It’s a little cold where the nurse just went past, and the white tubes in the ceiling circulate frozen light like rods of glowing ice, like frosted refrigerator coils rigged up to glow white. The rods stretch down to the staff-room door where the nurse just turned in at the end of the hall—a heavy steel door like the door of the Shock Shop in Building One, except there are numbers printed on this one, and this one has a little glass peephole up head-high to let the staff peek out at who’s knocking. As I get closer I see there’s light seeping out this peephole, green light, bitter as bile. The staff meeting is about to start in there, is why there’s this green seepage; it’ll be all over the walls and windows by the time the meeting is halfway through, for me to sponge off and squeeze in my bucket, use the water later to clear the drains in the latrine.
   Cleaning the staff room is always bad. The things I’ve had to clean up in these meetings nobody’d believe; horrible things, poisons manufactured right out of skin pores and acids in the air strong enough to melt a man. I’ve seen it.
   I been in some meetings where the table legs strained and contorted and the chairs knotted and the walls gritted against one another till you could of wrung sweat out the room. 1 been in meetings where they kept talking about a patient so long that the patient materialized in the flesh, nude on the coffee table in front of them, vulnerable to any fiendish notion they took; they’d have him smeared around in an awful mess before they were finished.
   That’s why they have me at the staff meetings, because they can be such a messy affair and somebody has to clean up, and since the staff room is open only during the meetings it’s got to be somebody they think won’t be able to spread the word what’s going on. That’s me. I been at it so long, sponging and dusting and mopping this staff room and the old wooden one at the other place, that the staff usually don’t even notice me; I move around in my chores, and they see right through me like I wasn’t there—the only thing they’d miss if I didn’t show up would be the sponge and the water bucket floating around.
   But this time when I tap at the door and the Big Nurse looks through the peephole she looks dead at me, and she takes longer than ordinary unlocking that door to let me in. Her face has come back into shape, strong as ever, it seems to me. Everybody else goes ahead spooning sugar in their coffee and borrowing cigarettes, the way they do before every meeting, but there’s a tenseness in the air. I think it’s because of me at first. Then I notice that the Big Nurse hasn’t even sat down, hasn’t even bothered to get herself a cup of coffee.
   She lets me slip through the door and stabs me again with both eyes as I go past her, closes that door when I’m in and locks it, and pivots around and glares at me some more. I know she’s suspicious. I thought she might be too upset by the way McMurphy defied her to pay any attention to me, but she don’t look shook at all. She’s clear-headed and wondering now just how did Mr. Bromden hear that Acute McMurphy asking him to raise his hand on that vote? She’s wondering how did he know to lay down his mop and go sit with the Acutes in front of that TV set? None of the other Chronics did that. She’s wondering if it isn’t time we did some checking on our Mr. Chief Bromden.
   I put my back to her and dig into the corner with my sponge. I lift the sponge up above my head so everybody in the room can see how it’s covered with green slime and how hard I’m working; then I bend over and rub harder than ever. But hard as I work and hard as I try to act like I’m not aware of her back there, I can still feel her standing at the door and drilling into my skull till in a minute she’s going to break through, till I’m just about to give up and yell and tell them everything if she don’t take those eyes off me.
   Then she realizes that she’s being stared at too—by all the rest of the staff. Just like she’s wondering about me, they are wondering about her and what she’s planning to do about that redhead back down there in the day room. They’re watching to see what she’ll say about him, and they don’t care anything about some fool Indian on his hands and knees in the corner. They’re waiting for her so she quits looking at me and goes and draws a cup of coffee and sits down, stirs sugar in it so careful the spoon never touches the side of the cup.
   It’s the doctor who starts things off. “Now, people, if we can get things rolling?”
   He smiles around at the residents sipping coffee. He’s trying not to look at the Big Nurse. She’s sitting there so silent it makes him nervous and fidgety. He grabs out his glasses and puts them on for a look at his watch, goes to winding it while he talks.
   “Fifteen after. It’s past time we started. Now. Miss Ratched, as most of you know, called this get-together. She phoned me before the Therapeutic Community meeting and said that in her opinion McMurphy was due to constitute a disturbance on the ward. Ever so intuitive, considering what went on a few minutes ago, don’t you think?”
   He stops winding his watch on account of it’s tight enough another twist is going to spray it all over the place, and he sits there smiling at it, drumming the back of his hand with pink little fingers, waiting. Usually at about this point in the meeting she’ll take over, but she doesn’t say anything.
   “After today,” the doctor goes on, “no one can say that this is an ordinary man we’re dealing with. No, certainly not. And he is a disturbing factor, that’s obvious. So—ah—as I see it, our course in this discussion is to decide what action to take in dealing with him. I believe the nurse called this meeting—correct me if I’m off base here, Miss Ratched—to talk the situation out and unify the staff’s opinion of what should be done about Mr. McMurphy?”
   He gives her a pleading look, but she still doesn’t say anything. She’s lifted her face toward the ceiling, checking for dirt most likely, and doesn’t appear to have heard a thing he’s been saying.
   The doctor turns to the line of residents across the room; all of them got the same leg crossed and coffee cup on the same knee. “You fellows,” the doctor says, “I realize you haven’t had adequate time to arrive at a proper diagnosis of the patient, but you have had a chance at observing him in action. What do you think?”
   The question pops their heads up. Cleverly, he’s put them on the carpet too. They all look from him to the Big Nurse. Some way she has regained all her old power in a few short minutes. Just sitting there, smiling up at the ceiling and not saying anything, she has taken control again and made everyone aware that she’s the force in here to be dealt with. If these boys don’t play it just right they’re liable to finish their training up in Portland at the alky hospital. They begin to fidget around like the doctor.
   “He’s quite a disturbing influence, all right.” The first boy plays it safe.
   They all sip their coffee and think about that. Then the next one says, “And he could constitute an actual danger.”
   “That’s true, that’s true,” the doctor says.
   The boy thinks he may have found the key and goes on. “Quite a danger, in fact,” he says and moves forward in his chair. “Keep in mind that this man performed violent acts for the sole purpose of getting away from the work farm and into the comparative luxury of this hospital.”
   “Planned violent acts,” the first boy says.
   And the third boy mutters, “Of course, the very nature of this plan could indicate that he is simply a shrewd con man, and not mentally ill at all.”
   He glances around to see how this strikes her and sees she still hasn’t moved or given any sign. But the rest of the staff sits there glaring at him like he’s said some awful vulgar thing. He sees how he’s stepped way out of bounds and tries to bring it off as a joke by giggling and adding, “You know, like ‘He Who Marches Out Of Step Hears Another Drum’ ”—but it’s too late. The first resident turns on him after setting down his cup of coffee and reaching in his pocket for a pipe big as your fist.
   “Frankly, Alvin,” he says to the third boy, “I’m disappointed in you. Even if one hadn’t read his history all one should need to do is pay attention to his behavior on the ward to realize how absurd the suggestion is. This man is not only very very sick, but I believe he is definitely a Potential Assaultive. I think that is what Miss Ratched was suspecting when she called this meeting. Don’t you recognize the arch type of psychopath? I’ve never heard of a clearer case. This man is a Napoleon, a Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun.”
   Another one joins in. He remembers the nurse’s comments about Disturbed. “Robert’s right, Alvin. Didn’t you see the way the man acted out there today? When one of his schemes was thwarted he was up out of his chair, on the verge of violence. You tell us, Doctor Spivey, what do his records say about violence?”
   “There is a marked disregard for discipline and authority,” the doctor says.
   “Right. His history shows, Alvin, that time and again he has acted out his hostilities against authority figures—in school, in the service, in jail! And I think that his performance after the voting furor today is as conclusive an indication as we can have of what to expect in the future.” He stops and frowns into his pipe, puts it back in his mouth, and strikes a match and sucks the flame into the bowl with a loud popping sound. When it’s lit he sneaks a look up through the yellow cloud of smoke at the Big Nurse; he must take her silence as agreement because he goes on, more enthusiastic and certain than before.
   “Pause for a minute and imagine, Alvin,” he says, his words cottony with smoke, “imagine what will happen to one of us when we’re alone in Individual Therapy with Mr. McMurphy. Imagine you are approaching a particularly painful breakthrough and he decides he’s just had all he can take of your—how would he put it?—your ‘damn fool collitch-kid pryin’!’ You tell him he mustn’t get hostile and he says ‘to hell with that,’ and tell him to calm down, in an authoritarian voice, of course, and here he comes, all two hundred and ten red-headed psychopathic Irishman pounds of him, right across the interviewing table at you. Are you—are any of us, for that matter—prepared to deal with Mr. McMurphy when these moments arise?”
   He puts his size-ten pipe back in the corner of his mouth and spreads his hands on his knees and waits. Everybody’s thinking about McMurphy’s thick red arms and scarred hands and how his neck comes out of his T-shirt like a rusty wedge. The resident named Alvin has turned pale at the thought, like that yellow pipe smoke his buddy was blowing at him had stained his face.
   “So you believe it would be wise,” the doctor asks, “to send him up to Disturbed?”
   “I believe it would be at the very least safe,” the guy with the pipe answers, closing his eyes.
   “I’m afraid I’ll have to withdraw my suggestion and go along with Robert,” Alvin tells them all, “if only for my own protection.”
   They all laugh. They’re all more relaxed now, certain they’ve come round to the plan she was wanting. They all have a sip of coffee on it except the guy with the pipe, and he has a big to-do with the thing going out all the time, goes through a lot of matches and sucking and puffing and popping of his lips. It finally smokes up again to suit him, and he says, a little proudly, “Yes, Disturbed Ward for ol’ Red McMurphy, I’m afraid. You know what I think, observing him these few days?”
   “Schizophrenic reaction?” Alvin asks.
   Pipe shakes his head.
   “Latent Homosexual with Reaction Formation?” the third one says.
   Pipe shakes his head again and shuts his eyes. “No,” he says and smiles round the room, “Negative Oedipal.”
   They all congratulate him.
   “Yes, I think there is a lot pointing to it,” he says. “But whatever the final diagnosis is, we must keep one thing in mind: we’re not dealing with an ordinary man.”
   “You—are very, very wrong, Mr. Gideon.” It’s the Big Nurse.
   Everybody’s head jerks toward her—mine too, but I check myself and pass the motion off like I’m trying to scrub a speck I just discovered on the wall above my head. Everybody’s confused all to hell for sure now. They figured they were proposing just what she’d want, just what she was planning to propose in the meeting herself. I thought so too. I’ve seen her send men half the size of McMurphy up to Disturbed for no more reason than there was a chance they might spit on somebody; now she’s got this bull of a man who’s bucked her and everybody else on the staff, a guy she all but said was on his way off the ward earlier this afternoon, and she says no.
   “No. I don’t agree. Not at all.” She smiles around at all of them. “I don’t agree that he should be sent up to Disturbed, which would simply be an easy way of passing our problem on to another ward, and I don’t agree that he is some kind of extraordinary being—some kind of ‘super’ psychopath.”
   She waits but nobody is about to disagree. For the first time she takes a sip of her coffee; the cup comes away from her mouth with that red-orange color on it. I stare at the rim of the cup in spite of myself; she couldn’t be wearing lipstick that color. That color on the rim of the cup must be from heat, touch of her lips set it smoldering.
   “I’ll admit that my first thought when I began to recognize Mr. McMurphy for the disturbing force that he is was that he should most definitely be sent up to Disturbed. But now I believe.it is too late. Would removing him undo the harm that he has done to our ward? I don’t believe it would, not after this afternoon. I believe if he were sent to Disturbed now it would be exactly what the patients would expect. He would be a martyr to them. They would never be given the opportunity to see that this man is not an—as you put it, Mr. Gideon—‘extraordinary person.’ ”
   She takes another sip and sets the cup on the table; the whack of it sounds like a gavel; all three residents sit bold upright.
   “No. He isn’t extraordinary. He is simply a man and no more, and is subject to all the fears and all the cowardice and all the timidity that any other man is subject to. Given a few more days, I have a very strong feeling that he will prove this, to us as well as the rest of the patients. If we keep him on the ward I am certain his brashness will subside, his self-made rebellion will dwindle to nothing, and”—she smiles, knowing something nobody else does—“that our redheaded hero will cut himself down to something the patients will all recognize and lose respect for: a braggart and a blowhard of the type who may climb up on a soapbox and shout for a following, the way we’ve all seen Mr. Cheswick do, then back down the moment there is any real danger to him personally.”
   “Patient McMurphy”—the boy with the pipe feels he should try to defend his position and save face just a little bit “does not strike me as a coward.”
   I expect her to get mad, but she doesn’t; she just gives him that let’s-wait-and-see look and says, “I didn’t say he was exactly a coward, Mr. Gideon; oh, no. He’s simply very fond of someone. As a psychopath, he’s much too fond of a Mr. Randle Patrick McMurphy to subject him to any needless danger.” She gives the boy a smile that puts his pipe out for sure this time. “If we just wait for a while, our hero will—what is it you college boys say?—give up his bit? Yes?”
   “But that may take weeks—” the boy starts.
   “We have weeks,” she says. She stands up, looking more pleased with herself than I’ve seen her look since McMurphy came to trouble her a week ago. “We have weeks, or months, or even years if need be. Keep in mind that Mr. McMurphy is committed. The length of time he spends in this hospital is entirely up to us. Now, if there is nothing else…”

17

   The way the Big Nurse acted so confident in that staff meeting, that worried me for a while, but it didn’t make any difference to McMurphy. All weekend, and the next week, he was just as hard on her and her black boys as he ever was, and the patients were loving it. He’d won his bet; he’d got the nurse’s goat the way he said he would, and had collected on it, but that didn’t stop him from going right ahead and acting like he always had, hollering up and down the hall, laughing at the black boys, frustrating the whole staff, even going so far as to step up to the Big Nurse in the hall one time and ask her, if she didn’t mind tellin’, just what was the actual inch-by-inch measurement on them great big of breasts that she did her best to conceal but never could. She walked right on past, ignoring him just like she chose to ignore the way nature had tagged her with those outsized badges of femininity, just like she was above him, and sex, and everything else that’s weak and of the flesh.
   When she posted work assignments on the bulletin board, and he read that she’d given him latrine duty, he went to her office and knocked on that window of hers and personally thanked her for the honor, and told her he’d think of her every time he swabbed out a urinal. She told him that wasn’t necessary; just do his work and that would be sufficient, thank you.
   The most work he did on them was to run a brush around the bowls once or twice apiece, singing some song as loud as he could in time to the swishing brush; then he’d splash in some Clorox and he’d be through. “That’s clean enough,” he’d tell the black boy who got after him for the way he hurried through his job, “maybe not clean enough for some people, but myself I plan to piss in ‘em, not eat lunch out of ‘em.” And when the Big Nurse gave in to the black boy’s frustrated pleading and came in to check McMurphy’s cleaning assignment personally, she brought a little compact mirror and she held it under the rim of the bowls. She walked along shaking her head and saying, “Why, this is an outrage… an outrage…” at every bowl. McMurphy sidled right along beside her, winking down his nose and saying in answer, “No; that’s a toilet bowl… a toilet bowl.”
   But she didn’t lose control again, or even act at all like she might. She would get after him about the toilets, using that same terrible, slow, patient pressure she used on everybody, as he stood there in front of her, looking like a little kid getting a bawling out, hanging his head, and the toe of one boot on top of the other, saying, “I try and try, ma’am, but I’m afraid I’ll never make my mark as head man of the crappers.”
   Once he wrote something on a slip of paper, strange writing that looked like a foreign alphabet, and stuck it up under one of those toilet bowl rims with a wad of gum; when she came to that toilet with her mirror she gave a short gasp at what she read reflected and dropped her mirror in the toilet. But she didn’t lose control. That doll’s face and that doll’s smile were ‘ forged in confidence. She stood up from the toilet bowl and gave him a look that would peel paint and told him it was his job to make the latrine cleaner, not dirtier.
   Actually, there wasn’t much cleaning of any kind getting done on the ward. As soon as it came time in the afternoon when the schedule called for house duties, it was also time for the baseball games to be on TV, and everybody went and lined the chairs up in front of the set and they didn’t move out of them until dinner. It didn’t make any difference that the power was shut off in the Nurses’ Station and we couldn’t see a thing but that blank gray screen, because McMurphy’d entertain us for hours, sit and talk and tell all kinds of stories, like how he made a thousand dollars in one month driving truck for a gyppo outfit and then lost every penny of it to some Canadian in an ax-throwing contest, or how he and a buddy slick-tongued a guy into riding a brahma bull at a rodeo in Albany, into riding him while he wore a blindfold: “Not the bull, I mean, the guy had on the blindfold.” They told the guy that the blindfold would keep him from getting dizzy when the bull went to spinning; then, when they got a bandanna wrapped around his eyes to where he couldn’t see, they set him on that bull backward. McMurphy told it a couple of times and slapped his thigh with his hat and laughed everytime he remembered it. “Blindfolded and backwards… And I’m a sonofagun if he didn’t stay the limit and won the purse. And I was second; if he’d been throwed I’d of took first and a neat little purse. I swear the next time I pull a stunt like that I’ll blindfold the damn bull instead.”
   Whack his leg and throw back his head and laugh and laugh, digging his thumb into the ribs of whoever was sitting next to him, trying to get him to laugh too.
   There was times that week when I’d hear that full-throttled laugh, watch him scratching his belly and stretching and yawning and leaning back to wink at whoever he was joking with, everything coming to him just as natural as drawing breath, and I’d quit worrying about the Big Nurse and the Combine behind her. I’d think he was strong enough being his own self that he would never back down the way she was hoping he would. I’d think, maybe he truly is something extraordinary. He’s what he is, that’s it. Maybe that makes him strong enough, being what he is. The Combine hasn’t got to him in all these years; what makes that nurse think she’s gonna be able to do it in a few weeks? He’s not gonna let them twist him and manufacture him.
   And later, hiding in the latrine from the black boys, I’d take a look at my own self in the mirror and wonder how it was possible that anybody could manage such an enormous thing as being what he was. There’d be my face in the mirror, dark and hard with big, high cheekbones like the cheek underneath them had been hacked out with a hatchet, eyes all black and hard and mean-looking, just like Papa’s eyes or the eyes of all those tough, mean-looking Indians you see on TV, and I’d think, That ain’t me, that ain’t my face. It wasn’t even me when I was trying to be that face. I wasn’t even really me then; I was just being the way I looked, the way people wanted. It don’t seem like I ever have been me. How can McMurphy be what he is?
   I was seeing him different than when he first came in; I was seeing more to him than just big hands and red sideburns and a broken-nosed grin. I’d see him do things that didn’t fit with his face or hands, things like painting a picture at OT with real paints on a blank paper with no lines or numbers anywhere on it to tell him where to paint, or like writing letters to somebody in a beautiful flowing hand. How could a man who looked like him paint pictures or write letters to people, or be upset and worried like I saw him once when he got a letter back? These were the kind of things you expected from Billy Bibbit or Harding. Harding had hands that looked like they should have done paintings, though they never did; Harding trapped his hands and forced them to work sawing planks for doghouses. McMurphy wasn’t like that. He hadn’t let what he looked like run his life one way or the other, any more than he’d let the Combine mill him into fitting where they wanted him to fit.
   I was seeing lots of things different. I figured the fog machine had broke down in the walls when they turned it up too high for that meeting on Friday, so now they weren’t able to circulate fog and gas and foul up the way things looked. For the first time in years 1 was seeing people with none of that black outline they used to have, and one night I was even able to see out the windows.
   Like I explained, most nights before they ran me to bed they gave me this pill, knocked me out and kept me out. Or if something went haywire with the dose and I woke up, my eyes were all crusted over and the dorm was full of smoke, wires in the walls loaded to the limit, twisting and sparking death and hate in the air—all too much for me to take so I’d ram my head under the pillow and try to get back to sleep. Every time I peeked back out there would be the smell of burning hair and a sound like sidemeat on a hot griddle.
   But this one night, a few nights after the big meeting, I woke up and the dorm was clean and silent; except for the soft breathing of the men and the stuff rattling around loose under the brittle ribs of the two old Vegetables, it was dead quiet. A window was up, and the air in the dorm was clear and had a taste to it made me feel kind of giddy and drunk, gave me this sudden yen to get up out of bed and do something.
   I slid from between the sheets and walked barefoot across the cold tile between the beds. I felt the tile with my feet and wondered how many times, how many thousand times, had I run a mop over this same tile floor and never felt it at all. That mopping seemed like a dream to me, like I couldn’t exactly believe all those years of it had really happened. Only that cold linoleum under my feet was real right then, only that moment.
   I walked among the guys heaped in long white rows like snowbanks, careful not to bump into somebody, till I came to the wall with the windows. I walked down the windows to one where the shade popped softly in and out with the breeze, and I pressed my forehead up against the mesh. The wire was cold and sharp, and I rolled my head against it from side to side to feel it with my cheeks, and I smelled the breeze. It’s fall coming, I thought, I can smell that sour-molasses smell of silage, clanging the air like a bell—smell somebody’s been burning oak leaves, left them to smolder overnight because they’re too green.
   It’s fall coming, I kept thinking, fall coming; just like that was the strangest thing ever happened. Fall. Right outside here it was spring a while back, then it was summer, and now it’s fall—that’s sure a curious idea.
   I realized I still had my eyes shut. I had shut them when I put my face to the screen, like I was scared to look outside. Now I had to open them. I looked out the window and saw for the first time how the hospital was out in the country. The moon was ‘low in the sky over the pastureland; the face of it was scarred and scuffed where it had just torn up out of the snarl of scrub oak and madrone trees on the horizon. The stars up close to the moon were pale; they got brighter and braver the farther they got out of the circle of light ruled by the giant moon. It called to mind how I noticed the exact same thing when I was off on a hunt with Papa and the uncles and I lay rolled in blankets Grandma had woven, lying off a piece from where the men hunkered around the fire as they passed a quart jar of cactus liquor in a silent circle. I watched that big Oregon prairie moon above me put all the stars around it to shame. I kept awake watching, to see if the moon ever got dimmer or if the stars got brighter, till the dew commenced to drift onto my cheeks and I had to pull a blanket over my head.
   Something moved on the grounds down beneath my window—cast a long spider of shadow out across the grass as it ran out of sight behind a hedge. When it ran back to where I could get a better look, I saw it was a dog, a young, gangly mongrel slipped off from home to find out about things went on after dark. He was sniffing digger squirrel holes, not with a notion to go digging after one but just to get an idea what they were up to at this hour. He’d run his muzzle down a hole, butt up in the air and tail going, then dash off to another. The moon glistened around him on the wet grass, and when he ran he left tracks like dabs of dark paint spattered across the blue shine of the lawn. Galloping from one particularly interesting hole to the next, he became so took with what was coming off—the moon up there, the night, the breeze full of smells so wild makes a young dog drunk—that he had to lie down on his back and roll. He twisted and thrashed around like a fish, back bowed and belly up, and when he got to his feet and shook himself a spray came off him in the moon like silver scales.
   He sniffed all the holes over again one quick one, to get the smells down good, then suddenly froze still with one paw lifted and his head tilted, listening. I listened too, but I couldn’t hear anything except the popping of the window shade. I listened for a long time. Then, from a long way off, I heard a high, laughing gabble, faint and coming closer. Canada honkers going south for the winter. I remembered all the hunting and belly-crawling I’d ever done trying to kill a honker, and that I never got one.
   I tried to look where the dog was looking to see if I could find the flock, but it was too dark. The honking came closer and closer till it seemed like they must be flying right through the dorm, right over my head. Then they crossed the moon—a black, weaving necklace, drawn into a V by that lead goose. For an instant that lead goose was right in the center of that circle, bigger than the others, a black cross opening and closing, then he pulled his V out of sight into the sky once more.
   I listened to them fade away till all I could hear was my memory of the sound. The dog could still hear them a long time after me. He was still standing with his paw up; he hadn’t moved or barked when they flew over. When he couldn’t hear them any more either, he commenced to lope off in the direction they had gone, toward the highway, loping steady and solemn like he had an appointment. I held my breath and I could hear the flap of his big paws on the grass as he loped; then I could hear a car speed up out of a turn. The headlights loomed over the rise and peered ahead down the highway. I watched the dog and the car making for the same spot of pavement.
   The dog was almost to the rail fence at the edge of the grounds when I felt somebody slip up behind me. Two people. I didn’t turn, but I knew it was the black boy named Geever and the nurse with the birthmark and the crucifix. I heard a whir of fear start up in my head. The black boy took my arm and pulled me around. “I’ll get ‘im,” he says.
   “It’s chilly at the window there, Mr. Bromden,” the nurse tells me. “Don’t you think we’d better climb back into our nice toasty bed?”
   “He cain’t hear,” the black boy tells her. “I’ll take him. He’s always untying his sheet and roaming ‘round.”
   And I move and she draws back a step and says, “Yes, please do,” to the black boy. She’s fiddling with the chain runs down her neck. At home she locks herself in the bathroom out of sight, strips down, and rubs that crucifix all over that stain running from the corner of her mouth in a thin line down across her shoulders and breasts. She rubs and rubs and hails Mary to beat thunder, but the stain stays. She looks in the mirror, sees it’s darker’n ever. Finally takes a wire brush used to take paint off boats and scrubs the stain away, puts a nightgown on over the raw, oozing hide, and crawls in bed.
   But she’s too full of the stuff. While she’s asleep it rises in her throat and into her mouth, drains out of that corner of her mouth like purple spit and down her throat, over her body. In the morning she sees how she’s stained again and somehow she figures it’s not really from inside her—how could it be? a good Catholic girl like her?—and she figures it’s on account of working evenings among a whole wardful of people like me. It’s all our fault, and she’s going to get us for it if it’s the last thing she does. I wish McMurphy’d wake up and help me.
   “You get him tied in bed, Mr. Geever, and I’ll prepare a medication.”