The captain and the cops and the loafers came tromping back down the steps to us. The doctor carried the fight to them by first off telling the cops they didn’t have any jurisdiction over us, as we were a legal, government-sponsored expedition, and if there was anyone to take the matter up with it would have to be a federal agency. Also, there might be some investigation into the number of life jackets that the boat held if the captain really planned to make trouble. Wasn’t there supposed to be a life jacket for every man on board, according to the law? When the captain didn’t say anything the cops took some names and left, mumbling and confused, and as soon as they were off the pier McMurphy and the captain went to arguing and shoving each other around. McMurphy was drunk enough he was still trying to rock with the roll of the boat and he slipped on the wet wood and fell in the ocean twice before he got his footing sufficient to hit the captain one up alongside of his bald head and settle the fuss. Everybody felt better that that was out of the way, and the captain and McMurphy both went to the bait shop to get more beer while the rest of us worked at hauling our fish out of the hold. The loafers stood on that upper dock, watching and smoking pipes they’d carved themselves. We were waiting for them to say something about the girl again, hoping for it, to tell the truth, but when one of them finally did say something it wasn’t about the girl but about our fish being the biggest halibut he’d ever seen brought in on the Oregon coast. All the rest nodded that that was sure the truth. They came edging down to look it over. They asked George where he learned to dock a boat that way, and we found out George’d not just run fishing boats but he’d also been captain of a PT boat in the Pacific and got the Navy Cross. “Shoulda gone into public office,” one of the loafers said. “Too dirty,” George told him.
   They could sense the change that most of us were only suspecting; these weren’t the same bunch of weak-knees from a nuthouse that they’d watched take their insults on the dock this morning. They didn’t exactly apologize to the girl for the things they’d said, but when they asked to see the fish she’d caught they were just as polite as pie. And when McMurphy and the captain came back out of the bait shop we all shared a beer together before we drove away.
   It was late when we got back to the hospital.
   The girl was sleeping against Billy’s chest, and when she raised up his arm’d gone dead holding her all that way in such an awkward position, and she rubbed it for him. He told her if he had any of his weekends free he’d ask her for a date, and she said she could come to visit in two weeks if he’d tell her what time, and Billy looked at McMurphy for an answer. McMurphy put his arms around both of their shoulders and said, “Let’s make it two o’clock on the nose.”
   “Saturday afternoon?” she asked.
   He winked at Billy and squeezed the girl’s head in the crook of his arm. “No. Two o’clock Saturday night. Slip up and knock on that same window you was at this morning. I’ll talk the night aide into letting you in.”
   She giggled and nodded. “You damned McMurphy,” she said.
   Some of the Acutes on the ward were still up, standing around the latrine to see if we’d been drowned or not. They watched us march into the hall, blood-speckled, sunburned, stinking of beer and fish, toting our salmon like we were conquering heroes. The doctor asked if they’d like to come out and look at his halibut in the back of his car, and we all started back out except McMurphy. He said he guessed he was pretty shot and thought he’d hit the hay. When he was gone one of the Acutes who hadn’t made the trip asked how come McMurphy looked so beat and worn out where the rest of us looked redcheeked and still full of excitement. Harding passed it off as nothing more than the loss of his suntan.
   “You’ll recall McMurphy came in full steam, from a rigorous life outdoors on a work farm, ruddy of face and abloom with physical health. We’ve simply been witness to the fading of his magnificent psychopathic suntan. That’s all. Today he did spend some exhausting hours—in the dimness of the boat cabin, incidentally—while we were out in the elements, soaking up the Vitamin D. Of course, that may have exhausted him to some extent, those rigors down below, but think of it, friends. As for myself, I believe I could have done with a little less Vitamin D and a little more of his kind of exhaustion. Especially with little Candy as a taskmaster. Am I wrong?”
   I didn’t say so, but I was wondering if maybe he wasn’t wrong. I’d noticed McMurphy’s exhaustion earlier, on the trip home, after he’d insisted on driving past the place where he’d lived once. We’d just shared the last beer and slung the empty can out the window at a stop sign and were just leaning back to get the feel of the day, swimming in that kind of tasty drowsiness that comes over you after a day of going hard at something you enjoy doing—half sunburned and half drunk and keeping awake only because you wanted to savor the taste as long as you could. I noticed vaguely that I was getting so’s I could see some good in the life around me. McMurphy was teaching me. I was feeling better than I’d remembered feeling since I was a kid, when everything was good and the land was still singing kids’ poetry to me.
   We’d drove back inland instead of the coast, to go through this town McMurphy’d lived in the most he’d ever lived in one place. Down the face of the Cascade hill, thinking we were lost till… we came to a town covered a space about twice the size of the hospital ground. A gritty wind had blown out the sun on the street where he stopped. He parked in some reeds and pointed across the road.
   “There. That’s the one. Looks like it’s propped up outta the weeds—my misspent youth’s humble abode.”
   Out along the dim six-o’clock street, I saw leafless trees standing, striking the sidewalk there like wooden lightning, concrete split apart where they hit, all in a fenced-in ring. An iron line of pickets stuck out of the ground along the front of a tangleweed yard, and on back was a big frame house with a porch, leaning a rickety shoulder hard into the wind so’s not to be sent tumbling away a couple of blocks like an empty cardboard grocery box. The wind was blowing a few drops of rain, and I saw the house had its eyes clenched shut and locks at the door banged on a chain.
   And on the porch, hanging, was one of those things the Japs make out of glass and hang on strings—rings and clangs in the least little blow—with only four pieces of glass left to go. These four swung and whipped and rung little chips off on the wooden porch floor.
   McMurphy put the car back in gear.
   “Once, I been here—since way the hell gone back in the year we were all gettin’ home from that Korea mess. For a visit. My old man and old lady were still alive. It was a good home.”
   He let out the clutch and started to drive, then stopped instead.
   “My God,” he said, “look over there, see a dress?” He pointed out back. “In the branch of that tree? A rag, yellow and black?”
   I was able to see a thing like a flag, flapping high in the branches over a shed.
   “The first girl ever drug me to bed wore that very same dress. I was about ten and she was probably less, and at the time a lay seemed like such a big deal I asked her if didn’t she think, feel, we oughta announce it some way? Like, say, tell our folks, ‘Mom, Judy and me got engaged today.’ And I meant what I said, I was that big a fool. I thought if you made it, man, you were legally wed, right there on the spot, whether it was something you wanted or not, and that there wasn’t any breaking the rule. But this little whore—at the most eight or nines—reached down and got her dress oft the floor and said it was mine, said, ‘You can hang this up someplace, I’ll go home in my drawers, announce it that way-they’ll get the idea.’ Jesus, nine years old,” he said, reached over and pinched Candy’s nose, “and knew a lot more than a good many pros.”
   She bit his hand, laughing, and he studied the mark.
   “So, anyhow, after she went home in her pants I waited till dark when I had the chance to throw that damned dress out in the night—but you feel that wind? Caught the dress like a kite and whipped it around the house outa sight and the next morning, by God, it was hung up in that tree for the whole town, was how I figured then, to turn out and see.”
   He sucked his hand, so woebegone that Candy laughed and gave it a kiss.
   “So my colors were flown, and from that day to this it seemed I might as well live up to my name—dedicated lover—and it’s the God’s truth: that little nine-year-old kid out of my youth’s the one who’s to blame.”
   The house drifted past. He yawned and winked. “Taught me to love, bless her sweet ass.”
   Then—as he was talking—a set of tail-lights going past lit up McMurphy’s face, and the windshield reflected an expression that was allowed only because he figured it’d be too dark for anybody in the car to see, dreadfully tired and strained and frantic, like there wasn’t enough time left for something he had to do…
   While his relaxed, good-natured voice doled out his life for us to live, a rollicking past full of kid fun and drinking buddies and loving women and barroom battles over meager honors—for all of us to dream ourselves into.

Part 4

26

   The Big Nurse had her next maneuver under way the day after the fishing trip. The idea had come to her when she was talking to McMurphy the day before about how much money he was making off the fishing trip and other little enterprises along that line. She bad worked the idea over that night, looking at it from every direction this time until she was dead sure it could not fail, and all the next day she fed hints around to start a rumor and have it breeding good before she actually said anything about it.
   She knew that people, being like they are, sooner or later are going to draw back a ways from somebody who seems to be giving a little more than ordinary, from Santa Clauses and missionaries and men donating funds to worthy causes, and begin to wonder: What’s in it for them? Grin out of the side of their mouths when the young lawyer, say, brings a sack of pecans to the kids in his district school—just before nominations for state senate, the sly devil—and say to one another, He’s nobody’s fool.
   She knew it wouldn’t take too much to get the guys to wondering just what it was, now that you mention it, that made McMurphy spend so much time and energy organizing fishing trips to the coast and arranging Bingo parties and coaching basketball teams. What pushed him to keep up a full head of steam when everybody else on the ward had always been content to drift along playing pinochle and reading last year’s magazines? How come this one guy, this Irish rowdy from a work farm where he’d been serving time for gambling and battery, would loop a kerchief around his head, coo like a teenager, and spend two solid hours having every Acute on the ward hoorahing him while he played the girl trying to teach Billy Bibbit to dance? Or how come a seasoned con like this—an old pro, a carnival artist, a dedicated odds-watcher gambling man—would risk doubling his stay in the nuthouse by making more and more an enemy out of the woman who had the say—so as to who got discharged and who didn’t?
   The nurse got the wondering started by pasting up a statement of the patients’ financial doings over the last few months; it must have taken her hours of work digging into records. It showed a steady drain out of the funds of all the Acutes, except one. His funds had risen since the day he came in.
   The Acutes took to joking with McMurphy about bow it looked like he was taking them down the line, and he was never one to deny it. Not the least bit. In fact, he bragged that if he stayed on at this hospital a year or so he just might be discharged out of it into financial independence, retire to Florida for the rest of his life. They all laughed about that when he was around, but when be was off the ward at ET or OT or PT, or when he was in the Nurses’ Station getting bawled out about something, matching her fixed plastic smile with his big ornery grin, they weren’t exactly laughing.
   They began asking one another why he’d been such a busy bee lately, hustling things for the patients like getting the rule lifted that the men had to be together in therapeutic groups of eight whenever they went somewhere (“Billy here has been talkin’ about slicin’ his wrists again,” he said in a meeting when he was arguing against the group-of-eight rule. “So is there seven of you guys who’d like to join him and make it therapeutic?”), and like the way he maneuvered the doctor, who was much closer to the patients since the fishing trip, into ordering subscriptions to Playboy and Nugget and Man and getting rid of all the old McCall’s that bloated-face Public Relation had been bringing from home and leaving in a pile on the ward, articles he thought we might be particularly interested in checked with a green-ink pen. McMurphy even had a petition in the mail to somebody back in Washington, asking that they look into the lobotomies and electro-shock that were still going on in government hospitals. I just wonder, the guys were beginning to ask, what’s in it for ol’ Mack?
   After the thought had been going around he ward a week or so, the Big Nurse tried to make her play in group meeting; the first time she tried, McMurphy was there at the meeting and he beat her before she got good and started (she started by telling the group that she was shocked and dismayed by the pathetic state the ward had allowed itself to fall into: Look around, for heaven sakes; actual pornography clipped from those smut books and pinned on the walls—she was planning, incidentally, to see to it that the Main Building made an investigation of the dirt that had been brought into this hospital. She sat back in her chair, getting ready to go on and point out who was to blame and why, sitting on that couple seconds of silence that followed her threat like sitting on a throne, when McMurphy broke her spell into whoops of laughter by telling her to be sure, now, an’ remind the Main Building to bring their leetle hand mirrors when they came for the investigation)—so the next time she made her play she made sure he wasn’t at the meeting.
   He had a long-distance phone call from Portland and was down in the phone lobby with one of the black boys, waiting for the party to call again. When one o’clock came around and we went to moving things, getting the day room ready, the least black boy asked if she wanted him to go down and get McMurphy and Washington for the meeting, but she said no, it was all right, let him stay—besides, some of the men here might like a chance to discuss our Mr. Randle Patrick McMurphy in the absence of his dominating presence.
   They started the meeting telling funny stories about him and what he’d done, and talked for a while about what a great guy he was, and she kept still, waiting till they all talked this out of their systems. Then the other questions started coming up. What about McMurphy? What made him go on like he was, do the things he did? Some of the guys wondered if maybe that tale of him faking fights at the work farm to get sent here wasn’t just more of his spoofing, and that maybe he was crazier than people thought. The Big Nurse smiled at this and raised her hand.
   “Crazy like a fox,” she said. “I believe that is what you’re trying to say about Mr. McMurphy.”
   “What do you m-m-mean?” Billy asked. McMurphy was his special friend and hero, and he wasn’t too sure he was pleased with the way she’d laced that compliment with things she didn’t say out loud. “What do you m-m-mean, ‘like a fox’?”
   “It’s a simple observation, Billy,” the nurse answered pleasantly. “Let’s see if some of the other men could tell you what it means. What about you, Mr. Scanlon?”
   “She means, Billy, that Mack’s nobody’s fool.”
   “Nobody said he wuh-wuh-wuh-was!” Billy hit the arm of the chair with his fist to get out the last word. “But Miss Ratched was im-implying—”
   “No, Billy, I wasn’t implying anything. I was simply observing that Mr. McMurphy isn’t one to run a risk without a reason. You would agree to that, wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t all of you agree to that?”
   Nobody said anything.
   “And yet,” she went on, “he seems to do things without thinking of himself at all, as if he were a martyr or a saint. Would anyone venture that Mr. McMurphy was a saint?”
   She knew she was safe to smile around the room, waiting for an answer.
   “No, not a saint or a martyr. Here. Shall we examine a cross-section of this man’s philanthropy?” She took a sheet of yellow paper out of her basket. “Look at some of these gifts, as devoted fans of his might call them. First, there was the gift of the tub room. Was that actually his to give? Did he lose anything by acquiring it as a gambling casino? On the other hand, how much do you suppose he made in the short time he was croupier of his little Monte Carlo here on the ward? How much did you lose, Bruce? Mr. Sefelt? Mr. Scanlon? I think you all have some idea what your personal losses were, but do you know what his total winnings came to, according to deposits he has made at Funds? Almost three hundred dollars.”
   Scanlon gave a low whistle, but no one else said anything.
   “I have various other bets he made listed here, if any of you care to look, including something to do with deliberately trying to upset the staff. And all of this gambling was, is, completely against ward policy and every one of you who dealt with him knew it.”
   She looked at the paper again, then put it back in the basket.
   “And this recent fishing trip? What do you suppose Mr. McMurphy’s profit was on this venture? As I see it, he was provided with a car of the doctor’s, even with money from the doctor for gasoline, and, I am told, quite a few other benefits—without having paid a nickel. Quite like a fox, I must say.”
   She held up her hand to stop Billy from interrupting.
   “Please, Billy, understand me: I’m not criticizing this sort of activity as such; I just thought it would be better if we didn’t have any delusions about the man’s motives. But, at any rate, perhaps it isn’t fair to make these accusations without the presence of the man we are speaking of. Let’s return to the problem we were discussing yesterday—what was it?” She went leafing through her basket. “What was it, do you remember, Doctor Spivey?”
   The doctor’s head jerked up. “No… wait… I think…”
   She pulled a paper from a folder. “Here it is. Mr. Scanlon; his feelings about explosives. Fine. We’ll go into that now, and at some other time when Mr. McMurphy is present we’ll return to him. I do think, however, that you might give what was said today some thought. Now, Mr. Scanlon…”
   Later that day there were eight or ten of us grouped together at the canteen door, waiting till the black boy was finished shoplifting hair oil, and some of the guys brought it up again. They said they didn’t agree with what the Big Nurse had been saying, but, hell, the old girl had some good points. And yet, damn it, Mack’s still a good guy… really.
   Harding finally brought the conversation into the open.
   “My friends, thou protest too much to believe the protesting. You are all believing deep inside your stingy little hearts that our Miss Angel of Mercy Ratched is absolutely correct in every assumption she made today about McMurphy. You know she was, and so do I. But why deny it? Let’s be honest and give this man his due instead of secretly criticizing his capitalistic talent. What’s wrong with him making a little profit? We’ve all certainly got our money’s worth every time he fleeced us, haven’t we? He’s a shrewd character with an eye out for a quick dollar. He doesn’t make any pretense about his motives, does he? Why should we? He has a healthy and honest attitude about his chicanery, and I’m all for him, just as I’m for the dear old capitalistic system of free individual enterprise, comrades, for him and his downright bullheaded gall and the American flag, bless it, and the Lincoln Memorial and the whole bit. Remember the Maine, P. T. Barnum and the Fourth of July. I feel compelled to defend my friend’s honor as a good old red, white, and blue hundred-per-cent American con man. Good guy, my foot. McMurphy would be embarrassed to absolute tears if he were aware of some of the simon-pure motives people had been claiming were behind some of his dealings. He would take it as a direct effrontery to his craft.”
   He dipped into his pocket for his cigarettes; when he couldn’t find any he borrowed one from Fredrickson, lit it with a stagey sweep of his match, and went on.
   “I’ll admit I was confused by his actions at first. That window-breaking—Lord, I thought, here’s a man that seems to actually want to stay in this hospital, stick with his buddies and all that sort of thing, until I realized that McMurphy was doing it because he didn’t want to lose a good thing. He’s making the most of his time in here. Don’t ever be misled by his back-woodsy ways; he’s a very sharp operator, level-headed as they come. You watch; everything he’s done was done with reason.”
   Billy wasn’t about to give in so easy. “Yeah. What about him teaching me to d-dance?” He was clenching his fists at his side; and on the backs of his hands I saw that the cigarette burns had all but healed, and in their place were tattoos he’d drawn by licking an indelible pencil. “What about that, Harding? Where is he making muh-muh-money out of teaching me to dance?”
   “Don’t get upset, William,” Harding said. “But don’t get impatient, either. Let’s just sit easy and wait—and see how he works it.”
   It seemed like Billy and I were the only two left who believed in McMurphy. And that very night Billy swung over to Harding’s way of looking at things when McMurphy came back from making another phone call and told Billy that the date with Candy was on for certain and added, writing an address down for him, that it might be a good idea to send her a little bread for the trip.
   “Bread? Muh-money? How muh-muh-much?” He looked over to where Harding was grinning at him.
   “Oh, you know, man—maybe ten bucks for her and ten—”
   “Twenty bucks! It doesn’t cost that muh-muh-much for bus fare down here.”
   McMurphy looked up from under his hatbrim, gave Billy a slow grin, then rubbed his throat with his hand, running out a dusty tongue. “Boy, oh boy, but I’m terrible dry. Figure to be even drier by a week come Saturday. You wouldn’t begrudge her bringin’ me a little swallow, would you, Billy Boy?”
   And gave Billy such an innocent look Billy had to laugh and shake his head, no, and go off to a corner to excitedly talk over the next Saturday’s plans with the man he probably considered a pimp.
   I still had my own notions—how McMurphy was a giant come out of the sky to save us from the Combine that was networking the land with copper wire and crystal, how he was too big to be bothered with something as measly as money—but even I came halfway to thinking like the others. What happened was this: He’d helped carry the tables into the tub room before one of the group meetings and was looking at me standing beside the control panel.
   “By God, Chief,” he said, “it appears to me you grooved ten inches since that fishing trip. And lordamighty, look at the size of that foot of yours; big as a flatcar!”
   I looked down and saw how my foot was bigger than I’d ever remembered it, like McMurphy’s just saying it had blowed it twice its size.
   “And that arm! That’s the arm of an ex-football-playing Indian if I ever saw one. You know what I think? I think you oughta give this here panel a leetle heft, just to test how you’re comin’.”
   I shook my head and told him no, but he said we’d made a deal and I was obligated to give it a try to see how his growth system was working. I didn’t see any way out of it so I went to the panel just to show him I couldn’t do it. I bent down and took it by the levers.
   “That’s the baby, Chief. Now just straighten up. Get those legs under your butt, there… yeah, yeah. Easy now… just straighten up. Hooeee! Now ease ‘er back to the deck.”
   I thought he’d be real disappointed, but when I stepped back he was all grins and pointing to where the panel was off its mooring by half a foot. “Better set her back where she came from, buddy, so nobody’ll know. Mustn’t let anybody know yet.”
   Then, after the meeting, loafing around the pinochle games, he worked the talk around to strength and gut-power and to the control panel in the tub room. I thought he was going to tell them how he’d helped me get my size back; that would prove he didn’t do everything for money.
   But he didn’t mention me. He talked until Harding asked him if he was ready to have another try at lifting it and he said no, but just because he couldn’t lift it was no sign it couldn’t be done. Scanlon said maybe it could be done with a crane, but no man could lift that thing by himself, and McMurphy nodded and said maybe so, maybe so, but you never can tell about such things.
   I watched the way he played them, got them to come around to him and say, No, by Jesus, not a man alive could lift it—finally even suggest the bet themselves. I watched how reluctant he looked to bet. He let the odds stack up, sucked them in deeper and deeper till he had five to one on a sure thing from every man of them, some of them betting up to twenty dollars. He never said a thing about seeing me lift it already.
   All night I hoped he wouldn’t go through with it. And during the meeting the next day, when the nurse said all the men who participated in the fishing trip would have to take special showers because they were suspected of vermin, I kept hoping she’d fix it somehow, make us take our showers right away or something—anything to keep me from having to lift it.
   But when the meeting was over he led me and the rest of the guys into the tub room before the black boys could lock it up, and had me take the panel by the levers and lift. I didn’t want to, but I couldn’t help it. I felt like I’d helped him cheat them out of their money. They were all friendly with him as they paid their bets, but I knew how they were feeling inside, how something had been kicked out from under them. As soon as I got the panel back in place, I ran out of the tub room without even looking at McMurphy and went into the latrine. I wanted to be by myself. I caught a look at myself in the mirror. He’d done what he said; my arms were big again, big as they were back in high school, back at the village, and my chest and shoulders were broad and hard. I was standing there looking when he came in. He held out a five-dollar bill.
   “Here you go, Chief, chewin’-gum money.”
   I shook my head and started to walk out of the latrine. He caught me by the arm.
   “Chief, I just offered you a token of my appreciation. If you figure you got a bigger cut comin’—”
   “No! Keep your money, I won’t have it.”
   He stepped back and put his thumbs in his pockets and tipped his head up at me. He looked me over for a while.
   “Okay,” he said. “Now what’s the story? What’s everybody in this place giving me the cold nose about?”
   I didn’t answer him.
   “Didn’t I do what I said I would? Make you man-sized again? What’s wrong with me around here all of a sudden? You birds act like I’m a traitor to my country.”
   “You’re always… winning things!”
   “Winning things! You damned moose, what are you accusW me of? All I do is hold up my end of the deal. Now what’s so all-fired—”
   “We thought it wasn’t to be winning things…”
   I could feel my chin jerking up and down the way it does before I start crying, but I didn’t start crying. I stood there in front of him with my chin jerking. He opened his mouth to say something, and then stopped. He took his thumbs out of his pockets and reached up and grabbed the bridge of his nose between his thumb and finger, like you see people do whose glasses are too tight between the lenses, and he closed his eyes.
   “Winning, for Christsakes,” he said with his eyes closed. ‘‘Hoo boy, winning.”

   So I figure what happened in the shower room that afternoon was more my fault than anybody else’s. And that’s why the only way I could make any kind of amends was by doing what I did, without thinking about being cagey or safe or what would happen to me—and not worrying about anything else for once but the thing that needed to be done and the doing of it.
   Just after we left the latrine the three black boys came around, gathering the bunch of us for our special shower. The least black boy, scrambling along the baseboard with a black, crooked hand cold as a crowbar, prying guys loose leaning there, said it was what the Big Nurse called a cautionary cleansing. In view of the company we’d had on our trip we should get cleaned before we spread anything through the rest of the hospital.
   We lined up nude against the tile, and here one black boy came, a black plastic tube in his hand, squirting a stinking salve thick and sticky as egg white. In the hair first, then turn around an’ bend over an’ spread your cheeks!
   The guys complained and kidded and joked about it, trying not to look at one another or those floating slate masks working down the line behind the tubes, like nightmare faces in negative, sighting down soft, squeezy nightmare gunbarrels. They kidded the black boys by saying things like “He, Washington, what do you fellas do for fun the other sixteen hours?” “Hey, Williams, can you tell me what I had for breakfast?”
   Everybody laughed. The black boys clenched their jaws and didn’t answer; this wasn’t the way things used to be before that damned redhead came around.
   When Fredrickson spread his cheeks there was such a sound I thought the least black boy’d be blown clear off his feet.
   “Hark!” Harding said, cupping his hand to his ear. “The lovely voice of an angel.”
   Everyone was roaring, laughing and kidding one another, until the black boy moved on and stopped in front of the next man, and the room was suddenly absolutely quiet. The next man was George. And in that one second, with the laughing and kidding and complaining stopped, with Fredrickson there next to George straightening up and turning around and a big black boy about to ask George to lean his head down for a squirt of that stinking salve—right at that time all of us had a good idea about everything that was going to happen, and why it had to happen, and why we’d all been wrong about McMurphy.
   George never used soap when he showered. He wouldn’t even let somebody hand him a towel to dry himself with. The black boys on the evening shift who supervised the usual Tuesday and Thursday evening showers had learned it was easier to leave it go like this, and they didn’t force him to do any different. That was the way it’d been for a long time. All the black boys knew it. But now everybody knew—even George, leaning backward, shaking his head, covering himself with big oakleaf hands—that this black boy, with his nose busted and his insides soured and his two buddies standing behind him waiting to see what he would do, couldn’t afford to pass up the chance.
   “Ahhhh, bend you head down here, Geo’ge…”
   The guys were already looking to where McMurphy stood a couple of men down the line.
   “Ahhhh, c’mon, Geo’ge…”
   Martini and Sefelt were standing in the shower, not moving. The drain at their feet kept choking short little gulps of air and soapy water. George looked at the drain a second, as if it were speaking to him. He watched it gurgle and choke. He looked back at the tube in the black hand before him, slow mucus running out of the little hole at the top of the tube down over the pig-iron knuckles. The black boy moved the tube forward a few inches, and George listed farther back, shaking his head.
   “No—none that stoof.”
   “You gonna have to do it, Rub-a-dub,” the black boy said, sounding almost sorry. “You gonna have to. We can’t have the place crawlin’ with bugs, now, can we? For all I know you got bugs on you a good inch deep!”
   “No!” George said.
   ‘Ahhh, Geo’ge, you jes’ don’t have no idea. These bugs, they very, very teeny—no bigger’n a pinpoint. An’, man, what they do is get you by the short hair an’ hang on, an’ drill, down inside you, Geo’ge.”
   “No bugs!” George said.
   “Ahhh, let me tell you, Geo’ge: I seen cases where these awful bugs achually—”
   “Okay, Washington,” McMurphy said.
   The scar where the black boy’s nose had been broken was a twist of neon. The black boy knew who’d spoken to him, but he didn’t turn around; the only way we knew he’d even heard was by the way he stopped talking and reached up a long gray finger and drew it across the scar he’d got in that basketball game. He rubbed his nose a second, then shoved his hand out in front of George’s face, scrabbling the fingers around. “A crab, Geo’ge, see? See here? Now you know what a crab look like, don’t you? Sure now, you get crabs on that fishin’ boat. We can’t have crabs drillin’ down into you, can we, Geo’ge?”
   “No crabs!” George yelled. “No!” He stood straight and his brow lifted enough so we could see his eyes. The black boy stepped back a ways. The other two laughed at him. “Somethin’ the matter, Washington, my man?” the big one asked. “Somethin’ holding up this end of the pro-ceedure, my man?”
   He stepped back in close. “Geo’ge, I’m tellin’ you: bend down! You either bend down and take this stuff—or I lay my hand on you!” He held it up again; it was big and black as a swamp. “Put this black! filthy! stinkin’! hand all over you!”
   “No hand!” George said and lifted a fist above his head as if he would crash the slate skull to bits, splatter cogs and nuts and bolts all over the floor. But the black boy just ran the tube up against George’s belly-button and squeezed, and George doubled over with a suck of air. The black boy squirted a load in his whispy white hair, then rubbed it in with his hand, smearing black from his hand all over George’s head. George wrapped both arms around his belly and screamed.
   “No! No!”
   “Now turn around, Geo’ge—”
   “I said that’s enough, buddy.” This time the way his voice sounded made the black boy turn and face him. I saw the black boy was smiling, looking at McMurphy’s nakedness—no hat or boots or pockets to hook his thumbs into. The black boy grinned up and down him.
   “McMurphy,” he said, shaking his head. “Y’know, I was beginnin’ to think we might never get down to it.”
   “You goddamned coon,” McMurphy said, somehow sounding more tired than mad. The black boy didn’t say anything. McMurphy raised his voice. “Goddamned motherfucking nigger!”
   The black boy shook his head and giggled at his two buddies. “What you think Mr. McMurphy is drivin’ at with that kind of talk, man? You think he wants me to take the initiative? Heeheehee. Don’t he know we trained to take such awful-soundin’ insults from these crazies?”
   “Cocksucker! Washington, you’re nothing but a—”
   Washington bad turned his back on him, turning to George again. George was still bent over, gasping from the blow of that salve in his belly. The black boy grabbed his arm and swung ‘him facing the wall.
   “Tha’s right, Geo’ge, now spread those cheeks.”
   “No-o-o!”
   “ Washington,” McMurphy said. He took a deep breath and stepped across to the black boy, shoving him away from George. “ Washington, all right, all right…”
   Everybody could hear the helpless, cornered despair in McMurphy’s voice.
   “McMurphy, you forcing me to protect myself. Ain’t he forcing me, men?” The other two nodded. He carefully laid down the tube on the bench beside George, came back up with his fist swinging all in the same motion and busting McMurphy across the cheek by surprise. McMurphy nearly fell. He staggered backward into the naked line of men, and the guys caught him and pushed him back toward the smiling slate face. He got hit again, in the neck, before he gave up to the idea that it had started, at last, and there wasn’t anything now but get what he could out of it. He caught the next swing blacksnaking at him, and held him by the wrist while he shook his head clear.
   They swayed a second that way, panting along with the panting drain; then McMurphy shoved the black boy away and went into a crouch, rolling the big shoulders up to guard his chin, his fists on each side of his head, circling the man in front of him.
   And that neat, silent line of nude men changed into a yelling circle, limbs and bodies knitting in a ring of flesh.
   The black arms stabbed in at the lowered red head and bull neck, chipped blood off the brow and the cheek. The black boy danced away. Taller, arms longer than McMurphy’s thick red arms, punches faster and sharper, he was able to chisel at the shoulders and the head without getting in close. McMurphy kept walking forward—trudging, flatfooted steps, face down and squinting up between those tattooed fists on each side of his head—till he got the black boy against the ring of nude men and drove a fist square in the center of the white, starched chest. That slate face cracked pink, ran a tongue the color of strawberry ice cream over the lips. He ducked away from McMurphy’s tank charge and got in another couple of licks before that fist laid him another good one. The mouth flew open wider this time, a blotch of sick color.
   McMurphy had red marks on the head and shoulders, but he didn’t seem to be hurt. He kept coming, taking ten blows for one. It kept on this way, back and forth in the shower room, till the black boy was panting and staggering and working mainly at keeping out of the way of those clubbing red arms. The guys were yelling for McMurphy to lay him out. McMurphy didn’t act in any hurry.
   The black boy spun away from a blow on his shoulder and looked quick to where the other two were watching. “Williams… Warren… damn you!” The other big one pulled the crowd apart and grabbed McMurphy around the arms from behind. McMurphy shook him off like a bull shaking off a monkey, but he was right back.
   So I picked him off and threw him in the shower. He was full of tubes; he didn’t weigh more’n ten or fifteen pounds.
   The least black boy swung his head from side to side, turned, and ran for the door. While I was watching him go, the other one came out of the shower and put a wrestling hold on me—arms up under mine from behind and hands locked behind my neck—and I had to run backward into the shower and mash him against the tile, and while I was lying there in the water trying to watch McMurphy bust some more of Washington’s ribs, the one behind me with the wrestling hold went to biting my neck and I had to break the hold. He laid still then, the starch washing from the uniform down the choking drain.
   And by the time the least black boy came running back in with straps and cuffs and blankets and four more aides from Disturbed, everybody was getting dressed and shaking my hand and McMurphy’s hand and saying they had it coming and what a rip-snorter of a fight it had been, what a tremendous big victory. They kept talking like that, to cheer us up and make us feel better, about what a fight, what a victory—as the Big Nurse helped the aides from Disturbed adjust those soft leather cuffs to fit our arms.

27

   Up on Disturbed there’s an everlasting high-pitched machine-room clatter, a prison mill stamping out license plates. And time is measured out by the di-dock, di-dock of a Ping-pong table. Men pacing their personal runways get to a wall and dip a shoulder and turn and pace back to another wall, dip a shoulder and turn and back again, fast short steps, wearing crisscrossing ruts in the tile floor, with a look of caged thirst. There’s a singed smell of men scared berserk and out of control, and in the corners and under the Ping-pong table there’s things crouched gnashing their teeth that the doctors and nurses can’t see and the aides can’t kill with disinfectant. When the ward door opened I smelled that singed smell and heard that gnash of teeth.
   A tall bony old guy, dangling from a wire screwed in between his shoulder blades, met McMurphy and me at the door when the aides brought us in. He looked us over with yellow, scaled eyes and shook his head. “I wash my hands of the whole deal,” he told one of the colored aides, and the wire drug him off down the hall.
   We followed him down to the day room, and McMurphy stopped at the door and spread his feet and tipped his head back to look things over: he tried to put his thumbs in his pockets, but the cuffs were too tight. “It’s a scene,” he said out of the side of his mouth. I nodded my head. I’d seen it all before.
   A couple of the guys pacing stopped to look at us, and the old bony man came dragging by again, washing his hands of the whole deal. Nobody paid us much mind at first. The aides went off to the Nurses’ Station, leaving us standing in the dayroom door. Murphy’s eye was puffed to give him a steady wink, and I could tell it hurt his lips to grin. He raised his cuffed hands and stood looking at the clatter of movement and took a deep breath.
   “McMurphy’s the name, pardners,” he said in his drawling cowboy actor’s voice, “an’ the thing I want to know is who’s the peckerwood runs the poker game in this establishment?”
   The Ping-pong clock died down in a rapid ticking on the floor.
   “I don’t deal blackjack so good, hobbled like this, but I maintain I’m a fire-eater in a stud game.”
   He yawned, hitched a shoulder, bent down and cleared his throat, and spat something at a wastepaper can five feet away; it rattled in with a ting and he straightened up again, grinned, and licked his tongue at the bloody gap in his teeth.
   “Had a run-in downstairs. Me an’ the Chief here locked horns with two greasemonkeys.”
   All the stamp-mill racket had stopped by this time, and everybody was looking toward the two of us at the door. McMurphy drew eyes to him like a sideshow barker. Beside him, I found that I was obliged to be looked at too, and with people staring at me I felt I had to stand up straight and tall as I could. That made my back hurt where I’d fallen in the shower with the black boy on me, but I didn’t let on. One hungry looker with a head of shaggy black hair came up and held his hand like he figured I had something for him. I tried to ignore him, but he kept running around in front of whichever way I turned, like a little kid, holding that empty hand cupped out to me.
   McMurphy talked a while about the fight, and my back got to hurting more and more.. I’d hunkered in my chair in the corner for so long that it was hard to stand straight very long. I was glad when a little lap nurse came to take us into the Nurses’ Station and I got a chance to sit and rest.
   She asked if we were calm enough for her to take off the cuffs, and McMurphy nodded. He had slumped over with his head hung and his elbows between his knees and looked completely exhausted—it hadn’t occurred to me that it was just as hard for him to stand straight as it was for me.
   The nurse—about as big as the small end of nothing whittled to a fine point, as McMurphy put it later—undid our cuffs and gave McMurphy a cigarette and gave me a stick of gum. She said she remembered that I chewed gum. I didn’t remember her at all. McMurphy smoked while she dipped her little hand full of pink birthday candles into a jar of salve and worked over his cuts, flinching every time he flinched and telling him she was sorry. She picked up one of his hands in both of hers and turned it over and salved his knuckles. “Who was it?” she asked, looking at the knuckles. “Was it Washington or Warren?”
   McMurphy looked up at her. “ Washington,” he said and grinned. “The Chief here took care of Warren.”
   She put his hand down and turned to me. I could see the little bird bones in her face. “Are you hurt anywhere?” I shook my head.
   “What about Warren and Williams?”
   McMurphy told her he thought they might be sporting some plaster the next time she saw them. She nodded and looked at her feet. “It’s not all like her ward,” she said. “A lot of it is, but not all. Army nurses, trying to run an Army hospital. They are a little sick themselves. 1 sometimes think all single nurses should be fired after they reach thirty-five.”
   “At least all single Army nurses,” McMurphy added. He asked how long we could expect to have the pleasure of her hospitality.
   “Not very long, I’m afraid.”
   “Not very long, you’re afraid?” McMurphy asked her.
   “Yes. I’d like to keep men here sometimes instead of sending them back, but she has seniority. No, you probably won’t be very long—I mean—like you are now.”
   The beds on Disturbed are all out of tune, too taut or too loose. We were assigned beds next to each other. They didn’t tie a sheet across me, though they left a little dim light on near the bed. Halfway through the night somebody screamed, “I’m starting to spin, Indian! Look me, look me!” I opened my eyes and saw a set of long yellow teeth glowing right in front of my face. It was the hungry-looking guy. “I’m starting to spin! Please look me!”
   The aides got him from behind, two of them, dragged him laughing and yelling out of the dorm; “I’m starting to spin, Indian!”—then just laugh. He kept saying it and laughing all the way down the hall till the dorm was quiet again, and I could hear that one other guy saying, “Well… I wash my hands of the whole deal.”
   “You had you a buddy for a second there, Chief,” McMurphy whispered and rolled over to sleep. I couldn’t sleep much the rest of the night and I kept seeing those yellow teeth and that guy’s hungry face, asking to Look me! Look me! Or, finally, as I did get to sleep, just asking. That face, just a yellow, starved need, come looming out of the dark in front of me, wanting things… asking things. I wondered how McMurphy slept, plagued by a hundred faces like that, or two hundred, or a thousand.
   They’ve got an alarm on Disturbed to wake the patients. They don’t just turn on the lights like downstairs. This alarm sounds like a gigantic pencil-sharpener grinding up something awful. McMurphy and I both sat bolt upright when we heard it and were about to lie back down when a loudspeaker called for the two of us to come to the Nurses’ Station. I got out of bed, and my back had stiffened up overnight to where I could just barely bend; I could tell by the way McMurphy gimped around that he was as stiff as I was.
   “What they got on the program for us now, Chief?” he asked. “The boot? The rack? I hope nothing too strenuous, because, man, am I stove up bad!”
   I told him it wasn’t strenuous, but I didn’t tell him anything else, because I wasn’t sure myself till I got to the Nurses’ Station, and the nurse, a different one, said, “Mr. McMurphy and Mr. Bromden?” then handed us each a little paper cup.
   I looked in mine, and there are three of those red capsules. This tsing whirs in any head I can’t stop.
   “Hold on,” McMurphy says. “These are those knockout pills, aren’t they?”
   The nurse nods, twists her head to check behind her; there’s two guys waiting with ice tongs, hunching forward with their elbows linked.
   McMurphy hands back the cup, says, “No sir, ma’am, but I’ll forgo the blindfold. Could use a cigarette, though.”
   I hand mine back too, and she says she must phone and she slips the glass door across between us, is at the phone before anybody can say anything else.
   “I’m sorry if I got you into something, Chief,” McMurphy says, and I barely can hear him over the noise of the phone wires whistling in the walls. I can feel the scared downhill rush of thoughts in my head.
   We’re sitting in the day room, those faces around us in a circle, when in the door comes the Big Nurse herself, the two big black boys on each side, a step behind her. I try to shrink down in my chair, away from her, but it’s too late. Too many people looking at me; sticky eyes hold me where I sit.
   “Good morning,” she says, got her old smile back now. McMurphy says good morning, and I keep quiet even though she says good morning to me too, out loud. I’m watching the black boys; one has tape on his nose and his arm in a sling, gray hand dribbling out of the cloth like a drowned spider, and the other one is moving like he’s got some kind of cast around his ribs. They are both grinning a little. Probably could of stayed home with their hurts, but wouldn’t miss this for nothing. I grin back just to show them.
   The Big Nurse talks to McMurphy, soft and patient, about the irresponsible thing he did, the childish thing, throwing a tantrum like a little boy—aren’t you ashamed? He says he guesses not and tells her to get on with it.
   She talks to him about how they, the patients downstairs on our ward, at a special group meeting yesterday afternoon, agreed with the staff that it might be beneficial that he receive some shock therapy—unless he realizes his mistakes. All he has to do is admit he was wrong, to indicate, demonstrate rational contact, and the treatment would be canceled this time.
   That circle of faces waits and watches. The nurse says it’s up to him.
   “Yeah?” he says. “You got a paper I can sign?”
   “Well, no, but if you feel it nec—”
   “And why don’t you add some other things while you’re at it and get them out of the way—things like, oh, me being part of a plot to overthrow the government and like how I think life on your ward is the sweetest goddamned life this side of Hawaii—you know, that sort of crap.”
   “I don’t believe that would—”
   “Then, after I sign, you bring me a blanket and a package of Red Cross cigarettes. Hooee, those Chinese Commies could have learned a few things from you, lady.”
   “Randle, we are trying to help you.”
   But he’s on his feet, scratching at his belly, walking on past her and the black boys rearing back, toward the card tables. “O-kay, well well well, where’s this poker table, buddies…?”
   The nurse stares after him a moment, then walks into the Nurses’ Station to use the phone.
   Two colored aides and a white aide with curly blond hair walk us over to the Main Building. McMurphy talks with the white aide on the way over, just like he isn’t worried about a thing.
   There’s frost thick on the grass, and the two colored aides in front trail puffs of breath like locomotives. The sun wedges apart some of the clouds and lights up the frost till the grounds are scattered with sparks. Sparrows fluffed out against the cold, scratching among the sparks for seeds. We cut across the crackling grass, past the digger squirrel holes where I saw the dog. Cold sparks. Frost down the holes, clear out of sight.
   I feel that frost in my belly.
   We get up to that door, and there’s a sound behind like bees stirred up. Two men in front of us, reeling under the red capsules, one bawling like a baby, saying, “It’s my cross, thank you Lord, it’s all I got, thank you Lord…”
   The other guy waiting is saying, “Guts ball, guts ball.” He’s the lifeguard from the pool. And he’s crying a little too.
   I won’t cry or yell. Not with McMurphy here.
   The technician asks us to take off our shoes, and McMurphy asks him if we get our pants slit and our heads shaved too. The technician says no such luck.
   The metal door looks out with its rivet eyes.
   The door opens, sucks the first man inside. The lifeguard won’t budge. A beam like neon smoke comes out of the black panel in the room, fastens on his cleat-marked forehead and drags him in like a dog on a leash. The beam spins him around three times before the door closes, and his face is scrambled fear. “Hut one,” he grunts. “Hut two! Hut three!”
   I hear them in there pry up his forehead like a manhole cover, clash and snarl of jammed cogs.
   Smoke blows the door open, and a Gurney comes out with the first man on it, and he rakes me with his eyes. That face. The Gurney goes back in and brings the lifeguard out. I can hear the yell-leaders spelling out his name.
   The technician says, “Next group.”
   The floor’s cold, frosted, crackling. Up above the light whines, tube long and white and icy. Can smell the graphite salve, like the smell in a garage. Can smell acid of fear. There’s one window, up high, small, and outside I see those puffy sparrows strung up on a wire like brown beads. Their heads sunk in the feathers against the cold. Something goes to blowing wind over my hollow bones, higher and higher, air raid! air raid!
   “Don’t holler, Chief…”
   Air raid!
   “Take ‘er easy. I’ll go first. My skull’s too thick for them to hurt me. And if they can’t hurt me they can’t hurt you.”
   Climbs on the table without any help and spreads his arms out to fit the shadow. A switch snaps the clasps on his wrists, ankles, clamping him into the shadow. A hand takes off his wristwatch, won it from Scanion, drops it near the panel, it springs open, cogs and wheels and the long dribbling spiral of spring jumping against the side of the panel and sticking fast.
   He don’t look a bit scared. He keeps grinning at me.
   They put the graphite salve on his temples. “What is it?” he says. “Conductant,” the technician says. “Anointest my head with conductant. Do I get a crown of thorns?”
   They smear it on. He’s singing to them, makes their hands shake.
   “ ‘Get Wildroot Cream Oil, Cholly…’ ”
   Put on those things like headphones, crown of silver thorns over the graphite at his temples. They try to hush his singing with a piece of rubber hose for him to bite on.
   “ ‘Mage with thoothing lan-o-lin.’ ”
   Twist some dials, and the machine trembles, two robot arms pick up soldering irons and hunch down on him. He gives me the wink and speaks to me, muffled, tells me something, says something to me around that rubber hose just as those irons get close enough to the silver on his temples—light arcs across, stiffens him, bridges him up off the table till nothing is down but his wrists and ankles and out around that crimped black rubber hose a sound like hooeee! and he’s frosted over completely with sparks.
   And out the window the sparrows drop smoking off the wire.
   They roll him out on a Gurney, still jerking, face frosted white. Corrosion. Battery acid. The technician turns to me.
   Watch that other moose. I know him. Hold him!
   It’s not a will-power thing any more.
   Hold him! Damn. No more of these boys without Seconal.
   The clamps bite my wrists and ankles.
   The graphite salve has iron filings in it, temples scratching.
   He said something when he winked. Told me something.
   Man bends over, brings two irons toward the ring on my head.
   The machine hunches on me.
   AIR RAID.
   Hit at a lope, running already down the slope. Can’t get back, can’t go ahead, look down the barrel an’ you dead dead dead.
   We come up outa the bullreeds run beside the railroad track. I lay an ear to the track, and it burns my cheek.
   “Nothin’ either way,” I say, “a hundred miles…”
   “Hump,” Papa says.
   “Didn’t we used to listen for buffalo by stickin’ a knife in the ground, catch the handle in our teeth, hear a herd way off?”
   “Hump,” he says again, but he’s tickled. Out across the other side of the track a fencerow of wheat chats from last winter. Mice under that stuff, the dog says.
   “Do we go up the track or down the track, boy?”
   “We go across, is what the ol’ dog says.”
   “That dog don’t heel.”
   “He’ll do. There’s birds over there is what the of dog says.”
   “Better hunting up the track bank is what your ol’ man says.”
   “Best right across in the chats of wheat, the dog tells me.”
   Across—next thing I know there’s people all over the track, blasting away at pheasants like anything. Seems our dog got too far out ahead and run all the birds outa the chats to the track.
   Dog got three mice.
   …man, Man, MAN, MAN… broad and big with a wink like a star.
   Ants again oh Jesus and I got ‘em bad this time, prickle-footed bastards. Remember the time we found those ants tasted like dill pickles? Hee? You said it wasn’t dill pickles and I said it was, and your mama kicked the living tar outa me when she heard: Teachin’ a kid to eat bugs!
   Ugh. Good Injun boy should know how to survive on anything he can eat that won’t eat him first.
   We ain’t Indians. We’re civilized and you remember it.
   You told me Papa. When I die pin me up against the sky.
   Mama’s name was Bromden. Still is Bromden. Papa said he was born with only one name, born smack into it the way a calf drops out in a spread blanket when the cow insists on standing up. Tee Ah Millatoona, the Pine-That-Stands-Tallest-on-the-Mountain, and I’m the biggest by God Injun in the state of Oregon and probly California and Idaho. Born right into it.
   You’re the biggest by God fool if you think that a good Christian woman takes on a name like Tee Ah Millatoona. You were born into a name, so okay, I’m born into a name. Bromden. Mary Louise Bromden.
   And when we move into town, Papa says, that name makes gettin’ that Social Security card a lot easier.
   Guy’s after somebody with a riveter’s hammer, get him too, if he keeps at it. I see those lightning flashes again, colors striking.
   Ting. Tingle, tingle, tremble toes, she’s a good fisherman, catches hens, puts ‘em inna pens… wire blier, limber lock, three geese inna flock… one flew east, one flew west, one flew over the cuckoo’s nest… O-U-T spells out… goose swoops down and plucks you out.
   My old grandma chanted this, a game we played by the hours, sitting by the fish racks scaring flies. A game called Tingle Tingle Tangle Toes. Counting each finger on my two outspread hands, one finger to a syllable as she chants.
   Tingle, ting-le, tang-le toes (seven fingers) she’s a good fisherman, catches hens (sixteen fingers, tapping a finger on each beat with her black crab hand, each of my fingernails looking up at her like a little face asking to be the you that the goose swoops down and plucks out).
   I like the game and I like Grandma. I don’t like Mrs. Tingle Tangle Toes, catching hens. I don’t like her. I do like that goose flying over the cuckoo’s nest. I like him, and I like Grandma, dust in her wrinkles.
   Next time I saw her she was stone cold dead, right in the middle of The Dalles on the sidewalk, colored shirts standing around, some Indians, some cattlemen, some wheatmen. They cart her down to the city burying ground, roll red clay into her eyes.
   I remember hot, still electric-storm afternoons when jackrabbits ran under Diesel truck wheels.
   Joey Fish-in-a-Barrel has twenty thousand dollars and three Cadillacs since the contract. And he can’t drive none of ‘em.
   I see a dice.
   I see it from the inside, me at the bottom. I’m the weight, loading the dice to throw that number one up there above me. They got the dice loaded to throw a snake eyes, and I’m the load, six lumps around me like white pillows is the other side of the dice, the number six that will always be down when he throws. What’s the other dice loaded for? I bet it’s loaded to throw one too. Snake eyes. They’re shooting with crookies against him, and I’m the load.
   Look out, here comes a toss. Ay, lady, the smokehouse is empty and baby needs a new pair of opera pumps. Comin’ at ya. Faw!
   Crapped out.
   Water. I’m lying in a puddle.
   Snake eyes. Caught him again. I see that number one up above me: he can’t whip frozen dice behind the feedstore in an alley—in Portland.
   The alley is a tunnel it’s cold because the sun is late afternoon. Let me… go see Grandma. Please, Mama.
   What was it he said when he winked?
   One flew east one flew west.
   Don’t stand in my way.
   Damn it, nurse, don’t stand in my way Way WAY!
   My roll. Faw. Damn. Twisted again. Snake eyes.
   The schoolteacher tell me you got a good head, boy, be something…
   Be what, Papa? A rug-weaver like Uncle R & J Wolf? A basket-weaver? Or another drunken Indian?
   I say, attendant, you’re an Indian, aren’t you?
   Yeah, that’s right.
   Well, I must say, you speak the language quite well.
   Yeah.
   Well… three dollars of regular.
   They wouldn’t be so cocky if they knew what me and the moon have going. No damned regular Indian… He who—what was it?—walks out of step, hears another drum.
   Snake eyes again. Hoo boy, these dice are cold.
   After Grandma’s funeral me and Papa and Uncle Runningand-Jumping Wolf dug her up. Mama wouldn’t go with us; she never heard of such a thing. Hanging a corpse in a tree! It’s enough to make a person sick.
   Uncle R & J Wolf and Papa spent twenty days in the drunk tank at The Dalles jail, playing rummy, for Violation of the Dead.
   But she’s our goddanged mother!
   It doesn’t make the slightest difference, boys. You shoulda left her buried. I don’t know when you blamed Indians will learn. Now, where is she? you’d better tell.
   Ah go fuck yourself, paleface, Uncle R & J said, rolling himself a cigarette. I’ll never tell.
   High high high in the hills, high in a pine tree bed, she’s tracing the wind with that old hand, counting the clouds with that old chant:… three geese in a flock…
   What did you say to me when you winked?
   Band playing. Look—the sky, it’s the Fourth of July.
   Dice at rest.
   They got to me with the machine again… I wonder…
   What did he say?
   …wonder how McMurphy made me big again.
   He said Guts ball.
   They’re out there. Black boys in white suits peeing under the door on me, come in later and accuse me of soaking all six these pillows I’m lying on! Number six. I thought the room was a dice. The number one, the snake eye up there, the circle, the white light in the ceiling… is what I’ve been seeing… in this little square room… means it’s after dark. How many hours have I been out? It’s fogging a little, but I won’t slip off and hide in it. No… never again…
   I stand, stood up slowly, feeling numb between the shoulders. The white pillows on the floor of the Seclusion Room were soaked from me peeing on them while I was out. I couldn’t remember all of it yet, but I rubbed my eyes with the heels of my hands and tried to clear my head. I worked at it. I’d never worked at coming out of it before.
   I staggered toward the little round chicken-wired window in the door of the room and tapped it with my knuckles. I saw an aide coming up the hall with a tray for me and knew this time I had them beat.

28

   There had been times when I’d wandered around in a daze for as long as two weeks after a shock treatment, living in that foggy, jumbled blur which is a whole lot like the ragged edge of sleep, that gray zone between light and dark, or between sleeping and waking or living and dying, where you know you’re not unconscious any more but don’t know yet what day it is or who you are or what’s the use of coming back at all—for two weeks. If you don’t have a reason to wake up you can loaf around in that gray zone for a long, fuzzy time, or if you want to bad enough I found you can come fighting right out of it. This time I came fighting out of it in less than a day, less time than ever.
   And when the fog was finally swept from my head it seemed like I’d just come up after a long, deep dive, breaking the surface after being under water a hundred years. It was the last treatment they gave me.
   They gave McMurphy three more treatments that week. As quick as he started coming out of one, getting the click back in his wink, Miss Ratched would arrive with the doctor and they would ask him if he felt like he was ready to come around and face up to his problem and come back to the ward for a cure. And he’d swell up, aware that every one of those faces on Disturbed had turned toward him and was waiting, and he’d tell the nurse he regretted that he had but one life to give for his country and she could kiss his rosy red ass before he’d give up the goddam ship. Yeh!
   Then stand up and take a couple of bows to those guys grinning at him while the nurse led the doctor into the station to phone over to the Main Building and authorize another treatment.
   Once, as she turned to walk away, he got hold of her through the back of her uniform, gave her a pinch that turned her face red as his hair. I think if the doctor hadn’t been there, hiding a grin himself, she would’ve slapped McMurphy’s face.
   I tried to talk him into playing along with her so’s to get out of the treatments, but he just laughed and told me Hell, all they was doin’ was chargin’ his battery for him, free for nothing. “When I get out of here the first woman that takes on ol’ Red McMurphy the ten-thousand-watt psychopath, she’s gonna light up like a pinball machine and pay off in silver dollars! No, I ain’t scared of their little battery-charger.”
   He insisted it wasn’t hurting him. He wouldn’t even take his capsules. But every time that loudspeaker called for him to forgo breakfast and prepare to walk to Building One, the muscles in his jaw went taut and his whole face drained of color, looking thin and scared—the face I had seen reflected in the windshield on the trip back from the coast.
   I left Disturbed at the end of the week and went back to the ward. I had a lot of things I wanted to say to him before I went, but he’d just come back from a treatment and was sitting following the ping-pong ball with his eyes like he was wired to it. The colored aide and the blond one took me downstairs and let me onto our ward and locked the door behind me. The ward seemed awful quiet after Disturbed. I walked to our day room and for some reason stopped at the door; everybody’s face turned up to me with a different look than they’d ever given me before. Their faces lighted up as if they were looking into the glare of a sideshow platform. “Here, in fronta your very eyes,” Harding spiels, “is the Wild man who broke the arm… of the black boy! Hey-ha, lookee, lookee.” I grinned back at them, realizing how McMurphy must’ve felt these months with these faces screaming up at him.
   All the guys came over and wanted me to tell them everything that had happened: how was he acting up there? What was he doing? Was it true, what was being rumored over at the gym, that they’d been hitting him every day with EST and he was shrugging it off like water, makin’ book with the technicians on how long he could keep his eyes open after the poles touched.
   I told them all I could, and nobody seemed to think a thing about me all of a sudden talking with people—a guy who’d been considered deaf and dumb as far back as they’d known him, talking, listening, just like anybody. I told them everything that they’d heard was true, and tossed in a few stories of my own. They laughed so hard about some of the things he’d said to the nurse that the two Vegetables under their wet sheets on the Chronics’ side grinned and snorted along with the laughter, just like they understood.
   When the nurse herself brought the problem of Patient McMurphy up in group the next day, said that for some unusual reason he did not seem to be responding to EST at all and that more drastic means might be required to make contact with him, Harding said, “Now, that is possible, Miss Ratched, yes—but from what I hear about your dealings upstairs with McMurphy, he hasn’t had any difficulty making contact with you.”
   She was thrown off balance and flustered so bad with everybody in the room laughing at her, that she didn’t bring it up again.
   She saw that McMurphy was growing bigger than ever while he was upstairs where the guys couldn’t see the dent she was making on him, growing almost into a legend. A man out of sight can’t be made to look weak, she decided, and started making plans to bring him back down to our ward. She figured the guys could see for themselves then that he could be as vulnerable as the next man. He couldn’t continue in his hero role if he was sitting around the day room all the time in a shock stupor.
   The guys anticipated this, and that as long as he was on the ward for them to see she would be giving him shock every time he came out of it. So Harding and Scanlon and Fredrickson and I talked over how we could convince him that the best thing for everybody concerned would be his escaping the ward. And by the Saturday when he was brought back to the ward—footworking into the day room like a boxer into a ring, clasping his hands over his head and announcing the champ was back—we had our plan all worked out. We’d wait until dark, set a mattress on fire, and when the firemen came we’d rush him out the door. It seemed such a fine plan we couldn’t see how he could refuse.
   But we didn’t think about its being the day he’d made a date to have the girl, Candy, sneak onto the ward for Billy.
   They brought him back to the ward about ten in the morning—“Fulla piss an’ vinegar, buddies; they checked my plugs and cleaned my points, and I got a glow on like a Model T spark coil. Ever use one of those coils around Halloween time? Zam! Good clean fun.” And he batted around the ward bigger than ever, spilled a bucket of mop water under the Nurses’ Station door, laid a pat of butter square on the toe of the least black boy’s white suede shoes without the black boy noticing, and smothered giggles all through lunch while it melted to show a color Harding referred to as a “most suggestive yellow,”—bigger than ever, and each time he brushed close by a student nurse she gave a yip and rolled her eyes and pitter-patted off down the hall, rubbing her flank.
   We told him of our plan for his escape, and he told us there was no hurry and reminded us of Billy’s date. “We can’t disappoint Billy Boy, can we, buddies? Not when he’s about to cash in his cherry. And it should be a nice little party tonight if we can pull it off; let’s say maybe it’s my going-away party.”
   It was the Big Nurse’s weekend to work—she didn’t want to miss his return—and she decided we’d better have us a meeting to get something settled. At the meeting she tried once more to bring up her suggestion for a more drastic measure, insisting that the doctor consider such action “before it is too late to help the patient.” But McMurphy was such a whirligig of winks and yawns and belches while she talked, she finally hushed, and when she did, he gave the doctor and all the patients fits by agreeing with everything she said.
   “Y’know, she might be right, Doc; look at the good that few measly volts have done me. Maybe if we doubled the charge I could pick up channel eight, like Martini; I’m tired of layin’ in bed hallucinatin’ nothing but channel four with the news and weather.”
   The nurse cleared her throat, trying to regain control of her meeting. “I wasn’t suggesting that we consider more shock, Mr. McMurphy—”
   “Ma’am?”
   “I was suggesting—that we consider an operation. Very simple, really. And we’ve had a history of past successes eliminating aggressive tendencies in certain hostile cases—”
   “Hostile? Ma’am, I’m friendly as a pup. I haven’t kicked the tar out of an aide in nearly two weeks. There’s been no cause to do any cuttin’, now, has there?”
   She held out her smile, begging him to see how sympathetic she was. “Randle, there’s no cutting involve—”
   “Besides,” he went on, “it wouldn’t be any use to lop ‘em off; I got another pair in my nightstand.”
   “Another—pair?”
   “One about as big as a baseball, Doc.”
   “Mr. McMurphy!” Her smile broke like glass when she realized she was being made fun of.
   “But the other one is big enough to be considered normal.”
   He went on like this clear up to the time we were ready for bed. By then there was a festive, county-fair feeling on the ward as the men whispered of the possibility of having a party if the girl came with drinks. All the guys were trying to catch Billy’s eye and grinning and winking at him every time he looked. And when we lined up for medication McMurphy came by and asked the little nurse with the crucifix and the birthmark if he could have a couple of vitamins. She looked surprised and said she didn’t see that there was any reason why not and gave him some pills the size of birds’ eggs. He put them in his pocket.
   “Aren’t you going to swallow them?” she asked.
   “Me? Lord no, I don’t need vitamins. I was just gettin’ them for Billy Boy here. He seems to me to have a peaked look of late—tired blood, most likely.”
   “Then—why don’t you give them to Billy?”
   “I will, honey, I will, but I thought I’d wait till about midnight when he’d have the most need for them”—and walked to the dorm with his arm crooked around Billy’s flushing neck, giving Harding a wink and me a goose in the side with his big thumb as he passed us, and left that nurse pop-eyed behind him in the Nurses’ Station, pouring water on her foot.
   You have to know about Billy Bibbit: in spite of him having wrinkles in his face and specks of gray in his hair, he still looked like a kid—like a jug-eared and freckled-faced and buck-toothed kid whistling barefoot across one of those calendars, with a string of bullheads dragging behind him in the dust—and yet he was nothing like this. You were always surprised to find when he stood up next to one of the other men he was just as tall as anyone, and that he wasn’t jug-eared or freckled or buck-toothed at all under a closer look, and was, in fact, thirty-some years old.
   I heard him give his age only one time, overheard him, to tell the truth, when he was talking to his mother down in the lobby. She was receptionist down there, a solid, well-packed lady with hair revolving from blond to blue to black and back to blond again every few months, a neighbor of the Big Nurse’s, from what I’d heard, and a dear personal friend. Whenever we’d go on some activity Billy would always be obliged to stop and lean a scarlet cheek over that desk for her to dab a kiss on. It embarrassed the rest of us as much as it did Billy, and for that reason nobody ever teased him about it, not even McMurphy.
   One afternoon, I don’t recall how long back, we stopped on our way to activities and sat around the lobby on the big plastic sofas or outside in the two-o’clock sun while one of the black boys used the phone to call his bookmaker, and Billy’s mother took the opportunity to leave her work and come out from behind her desk and take her boy by the hand and lead him outside to sit near where I was on the grass. She sat stiff there on the grass, tight at the bend with her short round legs out in front of her in stockings, reminding me of the color of bologna skins, and Billy lay beside her and put his head in her lap and let her tease at his ear with a dandelion fluff. Billy was talking about looking for a wife and going to college someday. His mother tickled him with the fluff and laughed at such foolishness.
   “Sweetheart, you still have scads of time for things like that. Your whole life is ahead of you.”
   “Mother, I’m th-th-thirty-one years old!”
   She laughed and twiddled his ear with the weed. “Sweet heart, do I look like the mother of a middle-aged man?”
   She wrinkled her nose and opened her lips at him and made a kind of wet kissing sound in the air with her tongue, and I had to admit she didn’t look like a mother of any kind. I didn’t believe myself that he could be thirty-one years old till later when I edged up close enough to act a look at the birth date on his wristband.
   At midnight, when Geever and the other black boy and the nurse went off duty, and the old colored fellow, Mr. Turkle, came on for his shift, McMurphy and Billy were already up, taking vitamins, I imagined. I got out of bed and put on a robe and walked out to the day room, where they were talking with Mr. Turkle. Harding and Scanlon and Sefelt and some of the other guys came out too. McMurphy was telling Mr. Turkle what to expect if the girl did come,—reminding him, actually, because it looked like they’d talked it all over beforehand a couple of weeks back. McMurphy said that the thing to do was let the girl in the window, instead of risking having her come through the lobby, where the night supervisor might be. And to unlock the Seclusion Room then. Yeah, won’t that make a fine honeymoon shack for the lovers? Mighty secluded. (“Ahh, McM-Murphy,” Billy kept trying to say.) And to keep the lights out. So the supervisor couldn’t see in. And close the dorm doors and not wake up every slobbering Chronic in the place. And to keep quiet; we don’t want to disturb them.
   “Ah, come on, M-M-Mack,” Billy said.
   Mr. Turkle kept nodding and bobbing his head, appearing to fall half asleep. When McMurphy said, “I guess that pretty well covers things,” Mr. Turkle said, “No—not en-tiuhly,” and sat there grinning in his white suit with his bald yellow head floating at the end of his neck like a balloon on a stick.
   “Come on, Turkle. It’ll be worth your while. She should be bringin’ a couple of bottles.”
   “You gettin’ closer,” Mr. Turkle said. His head lolled and bobbled. He acted like he was barely able to keep awake. I’d heard he worked another job during the day, at a race track. McMurphy turned to Billy.
   “Turkle is holdin’ out for a bigger contract, Billy Boy. How much is it worth to you to lose your ol’ cherry?”
   Before Billy could stop stuttering and answer, Mr. Turkle shook his head. “It ain’ that. Not money. She bringin’ more than the bottle with her, though, ain’t she, this sweet thing? You people be sharing more’n a bottle, won’t you.” He grinned around at the faces.
   Billy nearly burst, trying to stutter something about not Candy, not his girl! McMurphy took him aside and told him not to worry about his girl’s chastity—Turkle’d likely be so drunk and sleepy by the time Billy was finished that the old coon couldn’t put a carrot in a washtub.
   The girl was late again. We sat out in the day room in our robes, listening to McMurphy and Mr. Turkle tell Army stories while they passed one of Mr. Turkle’s cigarettes back and forth, smoking it a funny way, holding the smoke in when they inhaled till their eyes bugged. Once Harding asked what manner of cigarette they were smoking that smelled so provocative, and Mr. Turkle said in a high, breath-holding voice, “Jus’ a plain old cigarette. Hee hoe, yes. You want a toke?”
   Billy got more and more nervous, afraid the girl might not show up, afraid she might. He kept asking why didn’t we all go to bed, instead off sitting out here in the cold dark like hounds waiting at the kitchen for table scraps, and we just grinned at him. None of us felt like going to bed; it wasn’t cold at all, and it was pleasant to relax in the half-light and listen to McMurphy and Mr. Turkle tell tales. Nobody acted sleepy, or not even very worried that it was after two o’clock and the girl hadn’t showed up yet. Turkle suggested maybe she was late because the ward was so dark she couldn’t see to tell which one to come to, and McMurphy said that was the obvious truth, so the two of them ran up and down the halls, turning on every light in the place, were even about to turn on the big overhead wake-up lights in the dorm when Harding told them this would just get all the other men out of bed to share things with. They agreed and settled for all the lights in the doctor’s office instead.
   No sooner did they have the ward lit up like full daylight than there came a tapping at the window. McMurphy ran to the window and put his face to it, cupping his hands on, each side so he could see. He drew back and grinned at us.
   “She walks like beauty, in the night,” he said. He took Billy by the wrist and dragged him to the window. “Let her in, Turkle. Let this mad stud at her.”
   “Look, McM-M-M-Murphy, wait.” Billy was balking like a mule.
   “Don’t you mamamamurphy me, Billy Boy. It’s too late to back out now. You’ll pull through. I’ll tell you what: I got five dollars here says you burn that woman down; all right? Open the window, Turkle.”
   There were two girls in the dark, Candy and the other one that hadn’t shown up for the fishing trip. “Hot dog,” Turkle said, helping them through, “enough for ever’body.”
   We all went to help: they had to lift their tight skirts up to their thighs to step through the window. Candy said, “You damn McMurphy,” and tried so wild to throw her arms around him that she came near to breaking the bottles she held by the neck in each hand. She was weaving around quite a bit, and her hair was falling out of the hairdo she had piled on top of her head. I thought she looked better with it swung at the back like she’d worn it on the fishing trip. She gestured at the other girl with a bottle as she came through the window.
   “ Sandy came along. She just up and left that maniac from Beaverton that she married; isn’t that wild?”
   The girl came trough the window and kissed McMurphy and said, “Hello, Mack. I’m sorry I didn’t show up. But that’s over. You can take just so many funsies like white mice in your pillowcase and worms in your cold cream and frogs in your bra.” She shook her head once and wiped her hand in front of her like she was wiping away the memory of her animal-loving, husband. “Cheesus, what a maniac.”
   They were both in skirts and sweaters and nylons and barefoot, and both red-cheeked and giggling. “We had to keep asking for directions,” Candy explained, “at every bar we came to.
   Sandy was turning around in a big wide-eyed circle. “Whoee, Candy girl, what are we in now? Is this real? Are we in an asylum? Man!” She was bigger than Candy, and maybe five years older, and had tried to lock her bay-colored hair in a stylish bun at the back of her head, but it kept stringing down around her broad milk-fed cheekbones, and she looked like a cowgirl trying to pass herself off as a society lady. Her shoulders and breasts and hips were too wide and her grin too big and open for her to ever be called beautiful, but she was pretty and she was healthy and she had one long finger crooked in the ring of a gallon of red wine, and it swung at her side like a purse.
   “How, Candy, how, how, how do these wild things happen to us?” She turned around once more and stopped, with her bare feet spread, giggling.
   “These things don’t happen,” Harding said to the girl solemnly. “These things are fantasies you lie awake at night dreaming up and then are afraid to tell your analyst. You’re not really here. That wine isn’t real; none of this exists. Now, let’s go on from there.”
   “Hello, Billy,” Candy said.
   “Look at that stuff,” Turkle said.
   Candy straight-armed one of the bottles awkwardly toward Billy. “I brought you a present.”
   “These things are Thorne Smithian daydreams!” Harding said.
   “Boy!” the girl named Sandy said. “What have we got ourselves into?”
   “Shhhh,” Scanlon said and scowled around him. “You’ll wake up those other bastards, talking so loud.”
   “What’s the matter, stingy?” Sandy giggled, starting to turn in her circle again. “You scared there’s not enough to go around?”
   “ Sandy, I mighta known you’d bring that damn cheap port.”
   “Boy!” She stopped her turning to look up at me. “Dig this one, Candy. A Goliath—fee, fi, fo, fum.”
   Mr. Turkle said, “Hot dog,” and locked the screen back, and Sandy said, “Boy,” again. We were all in an awkward little cluster in the middle of the day room, shifting around one another, saying things just because nobody knew what else to do yet—never been up against a situation like it—and I don’t know when this excited, uneasy flurry of talk and giggling and shuffling around the day room would’ve stopped if that ward door hadn’t rung with a key knocking it open down the hall—jarred everybody like a burglar alarm going off.
   “Oh, Lord God,” Mr. Turkle said, clapping his hand on the top of his bald head, “it’s the soo-pervisor, come to fire my black ass.”
   We all ran into the latrine and turned out the light and stood in the dark, listening to one another breathe. We could hear that supervisor wander around the ward, calling for Mr. Turkle in a loud, half-afraid whisper. Her voice was soft and worried, rising at the end as she called, “Mr. Tur-kull? Mis-tur Turkle?”
   “Where the hell is he?” McMurphy whispered. “Why don’t he answer her?”
   “Don’t worry,” Scanlon said. “She won’t look in the can.”
   “But why don’t he answer? Maybe he got too high.”
   “Man, what you talkin’? I don’t get too high, not on a little middlin’ joint like that one.” It was Mr. Turkle’s voice somewhere in the dark latrine with us.
   “Jesus, Turkle, what are you doing in here?” McMurphy was trying to sound stern and keep from laughing at the same time. “Get out there and see what she wants. What’ll she think if she doesn’t find you?”
   “The end is upon us,” Harding said and sat down. “Allah be merciful.”
   Turkle opened the door and slipped out and met her in the hall. She’d come over to see what all the lights were on about. What made it necessary to turn on every fixture in the ward? Turkle said every fixture wasn’t on; that the dorm lights were off and so were the ones in the latrine. She said that was no excuse for the other lights; what possible reason could there be for all this light? Turkle couldn’t come up with an answer for this, and during the long pause I heard the battle being passed around near me in the dark. Out in the hall she asked him again, and Turkle told her, well, he was just cleanin’ up, policing the areas. She wanted to know why, then, was the latrine, the place that his job description called for him to have clean, the only place that was dark? And the bottle went around again while we waited to see what he’d answer. It came by me, and I took a drink. I felt I needed it. I could hear Turkle swallowing all the way out in the hall, umming and ahing for something to say.
   “He’s skulled,” McMurphy hissed. “Somebody’s gonna have to go out and help him.”
   I heard a toilet flush behind me, and the door opened and Harding was caught in the hall light as he went out, pulling up his pajamas. I heard the supervisor gasp at the sight of him and he told her to pardon him, but he hadn’t seen her, being as it was so dark.
   “It isn’t dark.”
   “In the latrine, I meant. I always switch off the lights to achieve a better bowel movement. Those mirrors, you understand; when the light is on the mirrors seem to be sitting in judgment over me to arbitrate a punishment if everything doesn’t come out right.”
   “But Aide Turkle said he was cleaning in there…”
   “And doing quite a good job, too, I might add—considering the restrictions imposed on him by the dark. Would you care to see?”
   Harding pushed the door open a crack, and a slice of light cut across the latrine floor tile. I caught a glimpse of the supervisor backing off, saying she’d have to decline his offer but she had further rounds to make. I heard the ward door unlock again up the hall, and she let herself off the ward. Harding called to her to return soon for another visit, and everybody rushed out and shook his hand and pounded his back for the way he’d pulled it off.
   We stood there in the hall, and the wine went around again. Sefelt said he’d as leave have that vodka if there was something to mix it with. He asked Mr. Turkle if there wasn’t something on the ward to put in it and Turkle said nothing but water. Fredrickson asked what about the cough sirup? “They give me a little now and then from a half-gallon jug in the drug room. It’s not bad tasting. You have a key for that room, Turkle?”
   Turkle said the supervisor was the only one on nights who had a key to the drug room, but McMurphy talked him into letting us have a try at picking the lock. Turkle grinned and nodded his head lazily. While he and McMurphy worked at the lock on the drug room with paper clips, the girls and the rest of us ran around in the Nurses’ Station opening files and reading records.
   “Look here,” Scanlon said, waving one of those folders. “Talk about complete. They’ve even got my first-grade report card in here. Aaah, miserable grades, just miserable.”
   Bill and his girl were going over his folder. She stepped back to look him over. “All these things, Billy? Phrenic this and pathic that? You don’t look like you have all these things.”
   The other girl had opened a supply drawer and was suspicious about what the nurses needed with all those hot-water bottles, a million of ‘em, and Harding was sitting on the Big Nurse’s desk, shaking his head at the whole affair.
   McMurphy and Turkle got the door of the drug room open and brought out a bottle of thick cherry-colored liquid from the ice box. McMurphy tipped the bottle to the light and read the label out loud.
   “Artificial flavor, coloring, citric acid. Seventy per cent inert materials—that must be water—and twenty per cent alcohol—that’s fine—and ten per cent codeine Warning Narcotic May Be Habit Forming.” He unscrewed the bottle and took a taste of it, closing his eyes. He worked his tongue around his teeth and took another swallow and read the label again. “Well,” he said, and clicked his teeth together like they’d just been sharpened, “if we cut it a leetle bit with the vodka, I think it’ll be all right. How are we fixed for ice cubes, Turkey, old buddy?”
   Mixed in paper medicine cups with the liquor and the port wine, the sirup had a taste like a kid’s drink but a punch like the cactus apple wine we used to get in The Dalles, cold and soothing on the throat and hot and furious once it got down. We turned out the lights in the day room and sat around drinking it. We threw the first couple of cups down like we were taking our medication, drinking it in serious and silent doses and looking one another over to see if it was going to kill anybody. McMurphy and Turkle switched back and forth from the drink to Turkle’s cigarettes and got to giggling again as they discussed how it would be to lay that little nurse with the birthmark who went off, at midnight.
   “I’d be scared,” Turkle said, “that she might go to whuppin’ me with that big of cross on that chain. Wun’t that be a fix to be in, now?”
   “I’d be scared,” McMurphy said, “that just about the time I was getting my jellies she’d reach around behind me with a thermometer and take my temperature!”
   That busted everybody up. Harding stopped laughing long enough to join the joking.
   “Or worse yet,” he said. “Just lie there under you with a dreadful concentration on her face, and tell you—oh Jesus, listen—tell you what your pulse was!”
   “Oh don’t… oh my Gawd…”
   “Or even worse, just lie there, and be able to calculate your pulse and temperature both—sans instruments!”
   “Oh Gawd, oh please don’t…”
   We laughed till we were rolling about the couches and chairs, choking and teary-eyed. The girls were so weak from laughing they had to try two or three times to get to their feet. “I gotta… go tinkle,” the big one said and went weaving and giggling toward the latrine and missed the door, staggered into the dorm while we all hushed one another with fingers to the lips, waiting, till she gave a squeal and we heard old Colonel Matterson roar, “The pillow is… a horse!”–and come whisking out of the dorm right behind her in his wheelchair.
   Sefelt wheeled the colonel back to the dorm and showed the girl where the latrine was personally, told her it was generally used by males only but he would stand at the door while she was in there and guard against intrusions on her privacy, defend it against all comers, by gosh. She thanked him solemnly and shook his hand and they saluted each other and while she was inside here came the colonel out of the dorm in his wheelchair again, and Sefelt had his hands full keeping him out of the latrine. When the girl came out of the door he was trying to ward off the charges of the wheelchair with his foot while we stood on the edge of the fracas cheering one guy or the other. The girl helped Sefelt put the colonel back to bed, and then the two of them went down the hall and waltzed to music nobody could hear.
   Harding drank and watched and shook his head. “It isn’t happening. It’s all a collaboration of Kafka and Mark Twain and Martini.”
   McMurphy and Turkle got to worrying that there might still be too many lights, so they went up and down the hall turning out everything that glowed, even the little knee-high night lights, till the place was pitch black. Turkle got out flashlights, and we played tag up and down the hall with wheelchairs from storage, having a big time till we heard one of Sefelt’s convulsion cries and went to find him sprawled twitching beside that big girl, Sandy. She was sitting on the floor brushing at her skirt, looking down at Sefelt. “I never experienced anything like it,” she said with quiet awe.
   Fredrickson knelt beside his friend and put a wallet between his teeth to keep him from chewing his tongue, and helped him get his pants buttoned. “You all right, Seef? Seef?”
   Sefelt didn’t open his eyes, but he raised a limp hand and picked the wallet out of his mouth. He grinned through his spit. “I’m all right,” he said. “Medicate me and turn me loose again.”
   You really need some medication, Seef?”
   “Medication.”
   “Medication,” Fredrickson said over his shoulder, still kneeling. “Medication,” Harding repeated and weaved off with his flashlight to the drug room. Sandy watched him go with glazed eyes. She was sitting beside Sefelt, stroking his head in wonderment.
   “Maybe you better bring me something too,” she called drunkenly after Harding. “I never experienced anything to come even close to it.”
   Down the hall we heard glass crash and Harding came back with a double handful of pills; he sprinkled them over Sefelt and the woman like he was crumbling clods into a grave. He raised his eyes toward the ceiling.
   “Most merciful God, accept these two poor sinners into your arms. And keep the doors ajar for the coming of the rest of us, because you are witnessing the end, the absolute, irrevocable, fantastic end. I’ve finally realized what is happening. It is our last fling. We are doomed henceforth. Must screw our courage to the sticking point and face up to our impending fate. We shall be all of us shot at dawn. One hundred cc’s apiece. Miss Ratched shall line us all against the wall, where we,,, face the terrible maw of a muzzle-loading shotgun which she has loaded with Miltowns! Thorazines! Libriums! Stelazines! And with a wave of her sword, blooie! Tranquilize all of us completely out of existence.”
   He sagged against the wall and slid to the floor, pills hopping out of his hands in all directions like red and green and orange bugs. “Amen,” he said and closed his eyes.
   The girl on the floor smoothed down her skirt over her long hard-working legs and looked at Sefelt still grinning and twitching there under the lights beside her, and said, “Never in my life experienced anything to come even halfway near it.”

   Harding’s speech, if it hadn’t actually sobered people, had at least made them realize the seriousness of what we were doing. The night was getting on, and some thought had to be given to the arrival of the staff in the morning. Billy Bibbit and his girl mentioned that it was after four o’clock and, if it was all right, if people didn’t mind, they’d like to have Mr. Turkle unlock the Seclusion Room. They went off under an arch of flashlight beams, and the rest of us went into the day room to see what we could decide about cleaning up. Turkle was all but passed out when he got back from Seclusion, and we had to push him into the day room in a wheel chair.
   As I walked after them it came to me as a kind of sudden surprise that I was drunk, actually drunk, glowing and grinning and staggering drunk for the first time since the Army, drunk along with half a dozen other guys and a couple of girls—right on the Big Nurse’s ward! Drunk and running and laughing and carrying on with women square in the center of the Combine’s most powerful stronghold! I thought back on the night, on what we’d been doing, and it was near impossible to believe. I had to keep reminding myself that it had truly happened, that we had made it happen. We had just unlocked a window and let it in like you let in the fresh air. Maybe the Combine wasn’t all-powerful. What was to stop us from doing it again, now that we saw we could? Or keep us from doing other things we wanted? I felt so good thinking about this that I gave a yell and swooped down on McMurphy and the girl Sandy walking along in front of me, grabbed them both up, one in each arm, and ran all the way to the day room with them hollering and kicking like kids. I felt that good.
   Colonel Matterson got up again, bright-eyed and full of lessons, and Scanlon wheeled him back to bed. Sefelt and Martini and Fredrickson said they’d better hit the sack too. McMurphy and I and Harding and the girl and Mr. Turkle stayed up to finish off the cough sirup and decide what we were going to do about the mess the ward was in. Me and Harding acted like we were the only ones really very worried– about it; McMurphy and the big girl just sat there and sipped that sirup and grinned at each other and played hand games in the shadows, and Mr. Turkle kept dropping off to sleep. Harding did his best to try to get them concerned.
   “All of you fail to compren’ the complexities of the situation,” he said.
   “Bull,” McMurphy said.
   Harding slapped the table. “McMurphy, Turkle, you fail to realize what has occurred here tonight. On a mental ward. Miss Ratched’s ward! The reekerputions will be… devastating!”
   McMurphy bit the girl’s ear lobe. Turkle nodded and opened one eye and said, “Tha’s true. She’ll be on tomorrow, too.”
   “I, however, have a plan,” Harding said. He got to his feet. He said McMurphy was obviously too far gone to handle the situation himself and someone else would have to take over. As he talked he stood straighter and became more sober. He spoke in an earnest and urgent voice, and his hands shaped what he said. I was glad he was there to take over.
   His plan was that we were to tie up Turkle and make it look like McMurphy’d snuck up behind him, tied him up with oh, say, strips of torn sheet, and relieved him of his keys, and after getting the keys had broken into the drug room, scattered drugs around, and raised hell with the files just to spite the nurse—she’d believe that part—then he’d unlocked the screen and made his escape.
   McMurphy said it sounded like a television plot and it was so ridiculous it couldn’t help but work, and he complimented Harding on his clear-headedness. Harding said the plan had its merits; it would keep the other guys out of trouble with the nurse, and keep Turkle his job, and get McMurphy off the ward. He said McMurphy could have the girls drive him to Canada or Tiajuana, or even Nevada if he wanted, and be completely safe; the police never press too hard to pick up AWOLs from the hospital because ninety per cent of them always show back up in a few days, broke and drunk and looking for that free bed and board. We talked about it for a while and finished the cough sirup. We finally talked it to silence. Harding sat back down.
   McMurphy took his arm from around the girl and looked from me to Harding, thinking, that strange, tired expression on his face again. He asked what about us, why didn’t we just up and get our clothes on and make it out with him?
   “I’m not quite ready yet, Mack,” Harding told him.
   “Then what makes you think I am?”
   Harding looked at him in silence for a time and smiled, then said, “No, you don’t understand. I’ll be ready in a few weeks. But I want to do it on my own, by myself, right out that front door, with all the traditional red tape and complications. I want my wife to be here in a car at a certain time to pick me up. I want them to know I was able to do it that way.”
   McMurphy nodded. “What about you, Chief?”
   “I figure I’m all right. Just I don’t know where I want to go yet. And somebody should stay here a few weeks after you’re gone to see that things don’t start sliding back.”
   “What about Billy and Sefelt and Fredrickson and the rest?”
   “I can’t speak for them,” Harding said. “They’ve still got their problems, just like all of us. They’re still sick men in lots of ways. But at least there’s that: they are sick men now. No more rabbits, Mack. Maybe they can be well men someday. I can’t say.”
   McMurphy thought this over, looking at the backs of his hands. He looked back up to Harding.
   “Harding, what is it? What happens?”
   “You mean all this?”
   McMurphy nodded.
   Harding shook his head. “I don’t think I can give you an answer. Oh, I could give you Freudian reasons with fancy talk, and that would be right as far as it went. But what you want are the reasons for the reasons, and I’m not able to give you those. Not for the others, anyway. For myself? Guilt. Shame. Fear. Self-belittlement. I discovered at an early age that I was—shall we be kind and say different? It’s a better, more general word than the other one. I indulged in certain practices that our society regards as shameful. And I got sick. It wasn’t the practices, I don’t think, it was the feeling that the great, deadly, pointing forefinger of society was pointing at me—and the great voice of millions chanting, ‘Shame. Shame. Shame.’ It’s society’s way of dealing with someone different.”
   “I’m different,” McMurphy said. “Why didn’t something like that happen to me? I’ve had people bugging me about one thing or another as far back as I can remember but that’s not what—but it didn’t drive me crazy.”
   “No, you’re right. That’s not what drove you crazy. I wasn’t giving my reason as the sole reason. Though I used to think at one time, a few years ago, my turtleneck years, that society’s chastising was the sole force that drove one along the road to crazy, but you’ve caused me to re-appraise my theory. There’s something else that drives people, strong people like you, my friend, down that road.”
   “Yeah? Not that I’m admitting I’m down that road, but what is this something else?”
   “It is us.” He swept his hand about him in a soft white circle and repeated, “Us.”
   McMurphy halfheartedly said, “Bull,” and grinned and stood up, pulling the girl to her feet. He squinted up at the dim clock. “It’s nearly five. I need me a little shut-eye before my big getaway. The day shift doesn’t come on for another two hours yet; let’s leave Billy and Candy down there a while longer. I’ll cut out about six. Sandy, honey, maybe an hour in the dorm would sober us up. What do you say? We got a long drive tomorrow, whether it’s Canada or Mexico or wherever.”
   Turkle and Harding and I stood up too. Everybody was still weaving pretty much, still pretty drunk, but a mellow, sad feeling, had drifted over the drunk. Turkle said he’d boot McMurphy and the girl out of bed in an hour.
   “Wake me up too,” Harding said. “I’d like to stand there at the window with a silver bullet in my hand and ask ‘Who wawz that’er masked man?’ as you ride—”
   “The hell with that. You guys both get in bed, and I don’t want to ever see hide nor hair of you again. You get me?”
   Harding grinned and nodded but he didn’t say anything. McMurphy put his hand out, and Harding shook it. McMurphy tipped back like a cowboy reeling out of a saloon and winked.
   “You can be bull goose loony again, buddy, what with Big Mack outa the way.”
   He turned to me and frowned. “I don’t know what you can be, Chief. You still got some looking to do. Maybe you could get you a job being the bad guy on TV rasslin’. Anyway, take ‘er easy.”
   I shook his hand, and we all started for the dorm. McMurphy told Turkle to tear up some sheets and pick out some of his favorite knots to be tied with. Turkle said he would. I got into my bed in the graying light of the dorm and heard McMurphy and the girl get into his bed. I was feeling numb and warm. I heard Mr. Turkle open the door to the linen room out in the hall, heave a long, loud, belching sigh as he pulled the door closed behind him. My eyes got used to the dark, and I could see McMurphy and the girl snuggled into each other’s shoulders, getting comfortable, more like two tired little kids than a grown man and a grown woman in bed together to make love.
   And that’s the way the black boys found them when they came to turn on the dorm lights at six-thirty.

29

   I‘ve given what happened next a good lot of thought, and I’ve come around to thinking that it was bound to be and would have happened in one way or another, at this time or that, even if Mr. Turkle had got McMurphy and the two girls up and off the ward like was planned. The Big Nurse would have found out some way what had gone on, maybe just by the look on Billy’s face, and she’d have done the same as she did whether McMurphy was still around or not. And Billy would have done what he did, and McMurphy would have heard about it and come back.
   Would have had to come back, because he could no more have sat around outside the hospital, playing poker in Carson‘ City or Reno or someplace, and let the Big Nurse have the last move and get the last play, than he could have let her get by with it right under his nose. It was like he’d signed on for the whole game and there wasn’t any way of him breaking his contract.
   As soon as we started getting out of bed and circulating around the ward, the story of what had taken place was spreading in a brush fire of low talk. “They had a what?” asked the ones who hadn’t been in on it. “A whore? In the dorm? Jesus.” Not only a whore, the others told them, but a drunken blast to boot. McMurphy was planning to sneak her out before the day crew came on but he didn’t wake up. “Now what kind of crock are you giving us?” “No crock. It’s every word gospel. I was in on it.”
   Those who had been in on the night started telling about it with a kind of quiet pride and wonder, the way people tell about seeing a big hotel fire or a dam bursting—very solemn and respectful because the casualties aren’t even counted yet—but the longer the telling went on, the less solemn the fellows got. Everytime the Big Nurse and her hustling black boys turned up something new, such as the empty bottle of cough syrup or the fleet of wheelchairs parked at the end of the hall like empty rides in an amusement park, it brought another part of the night back sudden and clear to be told to the guys who weren’t in on it and to be savored by the guys who were. Everybody had been herded into the day room by the black boys, Chronics and Acutes alike, milling together in excited confusion. The two old Vegetables sat sunk in their bedding, snapping their eyes and their gums. Everybody was still in pajamas and slippers except McMurphy and the girl; she was dressed, except for her shoes and the nylon stockings, which now hung over her shoulder, and he was in his black shorts with the white whales. They were sitting together on a sofa, holding hands. The girl had dozed off again, and McMurphy was leaning against her with a satisfied and sleepy grin.
   Our solemn worry was giving way, in spite of us, to joy and humor. When the nurse found the pile of pills Harding had sprinkled on Sefelt and the girl, we started to pop and snort to keep from laughing, and by the time they found Mr. Turkle in the linen room and led him out blinking and groaning, tangled in a hundred yards of torn sheet like a mummy with a hangover, we were roaring. The Big Nurse took our good humor without so much as a trace of her little pasted smile; every laugh was being forced right down her throat till it looked as if any minute she’d blow up like a bladder.
   McMurphy draped one bare leg over the edge of the sofa nd pulled his cap down to keep the light from hurting his reddened eyes, and he kept licking out a tongue that looked like it had been shellacked by that cough syrup. He looked sick and terrifically tired, and he kept pressing the heels of his hands against his temples and yawning, but as bad as he seemed to feel he still held his grin and once or twice went so far as to laugh out loud at some of the things the nurse kept turning up.
   When the nurse went in to call the Main Building to report Mr. Turkle’s resignation, Turkle and the girl Sandy took the opportunity to unlock that screen again and wave good-by to all and go loping off across the grounds, stumbling and slipping on the wet, sun-sparkle grass.
   “He didn’t lock it back up,” Harding said to McMurphy. “Go on. Go on after them!”
   McMurphy groaned and opened one eye bloody as a hatching egg. “You kidding me? I couldn’t even get my head through that window, let alone my whole body.”
   “My friend, I don’t believe you fully comprehend—”
   “Harding, goddam you and your big words; all I fully comprehend this morning is I’m still half drunk. And sick. Matter of fact, I think you’re still drunk too. Chief, how about you; are you still drunk?”
   I said that my nose and cheeks didn’t have any feeling in them yet, if this could be taken to mean anything.
   McMurphy nodded once and closed his eyes again; he laced his hands across his chest and slid down in his chair, his chin settling into his collar. He smacked his lips and smiled as if he were napping. “Man,” he said, “everybody is still drunk.”
   Harding was still concerned. He kept on about how the best thing for McMurphy to do was get dressed, quickly, while old Angel of Mercy was in there calling the doctor again to report the atrocities she had uncovered, but McMurphy maintained that there wasn’t anything to get so excited about; he wasn’t any worse off than before, was he? “I’ve took their best punch,” he said. Harding threw up his hands and went off, predicting doom.
   One of the black boys saw the screen was unlocked and locked it and went into the Nurses’ Station for the big flat ledger, came back out running his finger down the roll and lipping the names he read out loud as he sighted the men that matched up with them. The roll is listed alphabetically backwards to throw people off, so he didn’t get to the Bs till right at the last. He looked around the day room without taking his finger from that last name in the ledger.
   “Bibbit. Where’s Billy Bibbit?” His eyes were big. He was thinking Billy’d slipped out right under his nose and would he ever catch it. “Who saw Billy Bibbit go, you damn goons?”
   This set people to remembering just where Billy was; there were whispers and laughing again.
   The black boy went back into the station, and we saw him telling the nurse. She smashed the phone down in the cradle and came out the door with the black boy hot after her; a lock of her hair had broken loose from beneath her white cap and fell across her face like wet ashes. She was sweating between her eyebrows and under her nose. She demanded we tell her where the Eloper had gone. She was answered with a chorus of laughter, and her eyes went around the men.
   “So? He’s not gone, is he? Harding, he’s still here—on the ward, isn’t he? Tell me. Sefelt, tell me!”
   She darted the eyes out with every word, stabbing at the men’s faces, but the men were immune to her poison. Their eyes met hers; their grins mocked the old confident smile she had lost.
   “ Washington! Warren! Come with me for room check.”
   We rose and followed as the three of them went along, unlocking the lab, the tub room, the doctor’s office… Scanlon covered his grin with his knotty hand and whispered, “Hey, ain’t it gonna be some joke on of Billy.” We all nodded. “And Billy’s not the only one it’s gonna be a joke on, now that I think about it; remember who’s in there?”
   The nurse reached the door of the Seclusion Room at the end of the hall. We pushed up close to see, crowding and craning to peep over the Big Nurse and the two black boys as she unlocked it and swung it open. It was dark in the windowless room. There was a squeak and a scuffle in the dark, and the nurse reached out, flicked the light down on Billy and the girl where they were blinking up from that mattress on the floor like two owls from a nest. The nurse ignored the howl of laughter behind her.
   “William Bibbit!” She tried so hard to sound cold and stern. “William… Bibbit!”
   “Good morning, Miss Ratched,” Billy said, not even making any move to get up and button his pajamas. He took the girl’s hand in his and grinned. “This is Candy.”
   The nurse’s tongue clucked in her bony throat. “Oh, Billy Billy Billy—I’m so ashamed for you.”
   Billy wasn’t awake enough to respond much to her shaming, and the girl was fussing around looking under the mattress for her nylons, moving slow and warm-looking after sleep. Every so often she would stop her dreamy fumbling and look up and smile at the icy figure of the nurse standing there with her arms crossed, then feel to see if her sweater was buttoned, and go back to tugging for her nylon caught between the mattress and the tile floor. They both moved like fat cats full of warm milk, lazy in the sun: I guessed they were still fairly drunk too.
   “Oh, Billy,” the nurse said, like she was so disappointed she might break down and cry. “A woman like this. A cheap! Low! Painted—”
   “Courtesan?” Harding suggested. “Jezebel?” The nurse turned and tried to nail him with her eyes, but he just went on. “Not Jezebel? No?” He scratched his head in thought. “How about Salome? She’s notoriously evil. Perhaps ‘dame’ is the word you want. Well, I’m just trying to help.”
   She swung back to Billy. He was concentrating on getting to his feet. He rolled over and came to his knees, butt in the air like a cow getting up, then pushed up on his hands, then came to one foot, then the other, and straightened. He looked pleased with his success, as if he wasn’t even aware of us crowding at the door teasing him and hoorahing him.
   The loud talk and laughter swirled around the nurse. She looked from Billy and the girl to the bunch of us behind her. The enamel-and-plastic face was caving in. She shut her eyes and strained to calm her trembling, concentrating. She knew this was it, her back to the wall. When her eyes opened again, they were very small and still.
   “What worries me, Billy,” she said—I could hear the change in her voice—”is how your poor mother is going to take this.”
   She got the response she was after. Billy flinched and put his hand to his cheek like he’d been burned with acid.
   “Mrs. Bibbit’s always been so proud of your discretion. I know she has. This is going to disturb her terribly. You know how she is when she gets disturbed, Billy; you know how ill the poor woman can become. She’s very sensitive. Especially concerning her son. She always spoke so proudly of you. She al—”
   “Nuh! Nuh!” His mouth was working. He shook his head, begging her. “You d-don’t n-n-need!”
   “Billy Billy Billy,” she said. “Your mother and I are old friends.”
   “No!” he cried. His voice scraped the white, bare walls of the Seclusion Room. He lifted his chin so he was shouting at the moon of light in the ceiling. “N-n-no!”
   We’d stopped laughing. We watched Billy folding into the floor, head going back, knees coming forward. He rubbed his hand up and down that green pant leg. He was shaking his head in panic like a kid that’s been promised a whipping just as soon as a willow is cut. The nurse touched his shoulder to comfort him. The touch shook him like a blow.
   “Billy, I don’t want her to believe something like this of you—but what am I to think?”
   “Duh-duh-don’t t-tell, M-M-M-Miss Ratched. Duh-duh-duh—”
   “Billy, I have to tell. I hate to believe you would behave like this, but, really, what else can I think? I find you alone, on a mattress, with this sort of woman.”
   “No! I d-d-didn’t. I was—” His hand went to his cheek again and stuck there. “She did.”
   “Billy, this girl could not have pulled you in here forcibly.” She shook her head. “Understand, I would like to believe something else—for your poor mother’s sake.”
   The hand pulled down his cheek, raking long red marks. “She d-did.” He looked around him. “And M-M-McMurphy! He did. And Harding! And the-the-the rest! They t-t-teased me, called me things!”
   Now his face was fastened to hers. He didn’t look to one side or the other, but only straight ahead at her face, like there was a spiraling light there instead of features, a hypnotizing swirl of cream white and blue and orange. He swallowed and waited for her to say something, but she wouldn’t; her skill, her fantastic mechanical power flooded back into her, analyzing the situation and reporting to her that all she had to do was keep quiet.
   “They m-m-made me! Please, M-Miss Ratched, they may-may-MAY –!”
   She checked her beam, and Billy’s face pitched downward, sobbing with relief. She put a hand on his neck and drew his cheek to her starched breast, stroking his shoulder while she turned a slow, contemptuous look across the bunch of us.
   “It’s all right, Billy. It’s all right. No one else is going to harm you. It’s all right. I’ll explain to your mother.”
   She continued to glare at us as she spoke. It was strange to hear that voice, soft and soothing and warm as a pillow, coming out of a face hard as porcelain.
   “All right, Billy. Come along with me. You can wait over here in the doctor’s office. There’s no reason for you to be submitted to sitting out in the day room with these… friends of yours.”
   She led him into the office, stroking his bowed head and saying, “Poor boy, poor little boy,” while we faded back down the hall silently and sat down in the day room without looking at one another or speaking. McMurphy was the last one to take a seat.
   The Chronics across the way had stopped milling around and were settling into their slots. I looked at McMurphy out of the corner of my eye, trying not to be obvious about it. He was in his chair in the corner, resting a second before he came out for the next round—in a long line of next rounds. The thing he was fighting, you couldn’t whip it for good. All you could do was keep on whipping it, till you couldn’t come out any more and somebody else had to take your place.
   There was more phoning going on in the Nurses’ Station and a number of authorities showing up for a tour of the evidence. When the doctor himself finally came in, every one of these people gave him a look like the whole thing had been planned by him, or at least condoned and authorized. He was white and shaky under their eyes. You could see he’d already heard about most of what had gone on here, on his ward, but the Big Nurse outlined it for him again, in slow, loud details so we could hear it too. Hear it in the proper way, this time, solemnly, with no whispering or giggling while she talked. The doctor nodded and fiddled with his glasses, batting eyes so watery I thought he must be splashing her. She finished by telling him about Billy and the tragic experience we had put the poor boy through.
   “I left him in your office. Judging from his present state, I suggest you see him right away. He’s been through a terrible ordeal. I shudder to think of the damage that must have been done to the poor boy.”
   She waited until the doctor shuddered too.
   “I think you should go see if you can speak with him. He needs a lot of sympathy. He’s in a pitiful state.”
   The doctor nodded again and walked off toward his office. We watched him go.
   “Mack,” Scanlon said. “Listen—you don’t think any of us are being taken in by this crap, do you? It’s bad, but we know where the blame lies—we ain’t blaming you.”
   “No,” I said, “none of us blame you.” And wished I’d had my tongue pulled out as soon as I saw the way he looked at me.
   He closed his eyes and relaxed. Waiting, it looked like. Harding got up and walked over to him and had just opened his mouth to say something when the doctor’s voice screaming down the hall smashed a common horror and realization onto everybody’s face.
   “Nurse!” he yelled. “Good lord, nurse!”
   She ran, and the three black boys ran, down the hall to where the doctor was still calling. But not a patient got up. We knew there wasn’t anything for us to do now but just sit tight and wait for her to come to the day room to tell us what we all had known was one of the things that was bound to happen.
   She walked straight to McMurphy.
   “He cut his throat,” she said. She waited, hoping he would say something. He wouldn’t look up. “He opened the doctor’s desk and found some instruments and cut his throat. The poor miserable, misunderstood boy killed himself. He’s there now, in the doctor’s chair, with his throat cut.”
   She waited again. But he still wouldn’t look up.
   “First Charles Cheswick and now William Bibbit! I hope you’re finally satisfied. Playing with human lives—gambling with human lives—as if you thought yourself to be a God!”
   She turned and walked into the Nurses’ Station and closed the door behind her, leaving a shrill, killing-cold sound ringing in the tubes of light over our heads.
   First I had a quick thought to try to stop him, talk him into taking what he’d already won and let her have the last round, but another, bigger thought wiped the first thought away completely. I suddenly realized with a crystal certainty that neither I nor any of the half-score of us could stop him. That Harding’s arguing or my grabbing him from behind, or old Colonel Matterson’s teaching or Scanlon’s griping, or all of us together couldn’t rise up and stop him.
   We couldn’t stop him because we were the ones making him do it. It wasn’t the nurse that was forcing him, it was our need that was making him push himself slowly up from sitting, his big hands driving down on the leather chair arms, pushing him up, rising and standing like one of those moving-picture zombies, obeying orders beamed at him from forty masters. It was us that had been making him go on for weeks, keeping him standing long after his feet and legs had given out, weeks of making him wink and grin and laugh and go on with his act long after his humor had been parched dry between two electrodes.
   We made him stand and hitch up his black shorts like they were horsehide chaps, and push back his cap with one finger like it was a ten-gallon Stetson, slow, mechanical gestures—and when he walked across the floor you could hear the iron in his bare heels ring sparks out of the tile.
   Only at the last—after he’d smashed through that glass door, her face swinging around, with terror forever ruining any other look she might ever try to use again, screaming when he grabbed for her and ripped her uniform all the way down the front, screaming again when the two nippled circles started from her chest and swelled out and out, bigger than anybody had ever even imagined, warm and pink in the light—only at the last, after the officials realized that the three black boys weren’t going to do anything but stand and watch and they would have to beat him off without their help, doctors and supervisors and nurses prying those heavy red fingers out of the white flesh of her throat as if they were her neck bones, jerking him backward off of her with a loud heave of breath, only then did he show any sign that he might be anything other than a sane, willful, dogged man performing a hard duty that finally just had to be done, like it or not.
   He gave a cry. At the last, falling backward, his face appearing to us for a second upside down before he was smothered on the floor by a pile of white uniforms, he let himself cry out:
   A sound of cornered-animal fear and hate and surrender d defiance, that if you ever trailed coon or cougar or lynx is;like the last sound the treed and shot and falling animal makes as the dogs get him, when he finally doesn’t care any more about anything but himself and his dying.
   I hung around another couple of weeks to see what was to come. Everything was changing. Sefelt and Fredrickson signed out together Against Medical Advice, and two days later another three Acutes left, and six more transferred to another ward. There was a lot of investigation about the party on the ward and about Billy’s death, and the doctor was informed that his resignation would be accepted, and he informed them that they would have to go the whole way and can him if they wanted him out.
   The Big Nurse was over in Medical for a week, so for a while we had the little Jap nurse from Disturbed running the ward; that gave the guys a chance to change a lot of the ward policy. By the time the Big Nurse came back, Harding had even got the tub room back open and was in there dealing blackjack himself, trying to make that airy, thin voice of his sound like McMurphy’s auctioneer bellow. He was dealing when he heard her key hit the lock.
   We all left the tub room and came out in the hall to meet her, to ask about McMurphy. She jumped back two steps when we approached, and I thought for a second she might run. Her face was bloated blue and out of shape on one side, closing one eye completely, and she had a heavy bandage around her throat. And a new white uniform. Some of the guys grinned at the front of it; in spite of its being smaller and tighter and more starched than her old uniforms, it could no longer conceal the fact that she was a woman.
   Smiling, Harding stepped up close and asked what had become of Mack.
   She took a little pad and pencil from the pocket of her uniform and wrote, “He will be back,” on it and passed it around. The paper trembled in her hand. “Are you sure?” Harding wanted to know after he read it. We’d heard all kinds of things, that he’d knocked down two aides on Disturbed and taken their keys and escaped, that he’d been sent back to the work farm—even that the nurse, in charge now till they got a new doctor, was giving him special therapy.
   “Are you quite positive?” Harding repeated.
   The nurse took out her pad again. She was stiff in the joints, and her more than ever white hand skittered on the pad like one of those arcade gypsies that scratch out fortunes for a penny. “Yes, Mr. Harding,” she wrote. “I would not say so if I was not positive. He will be back.”
   Harding read the paper, then tore it up and threw the pieces at her. She flinched and raised her hand to protect the bruised side of her face from the paper. “Lady, I think you’re full of so much bullshit,” Harding told her. She stared at him, and her hand wavered over the pad a second, but then she turned and walked into the Nurses’ Station, sticking the pad and pencil back down in the pocket of her uniform.
   “Hum,” Harding said. “Our conversation was a bit spotty, it seemed. But then, when you are told that you are full of bullshit, what kind of written comeback can you make?”
   She tried to get her ward back into shape, but it was difficult with McMurphy’s presence still tromping up and down the halls and laughing out loud in the meetings and singing in the latrines. She couldn’t rule with her old power any more, not by writing things on pieces of paper. She was losing her patients one after the other. After Harding signed out and was picked up by his wife, and George transferred to a different ward, just three of us were left out of the group that had been on the fishing crew, myself and Martini and Scanlon.
   I didn’t want to leave just yet, because she seemed to be too sure; she seemed to be waiting for one more round, and I wanted to be there in case it came off. And one morning, after McMurphy’d been gone three weeks, she made her last play.
   The ward door opened, and the black boys wheeled in this Gurney with a chart at the bottom that said in heavy black letters, MCMURPHY, RANDLE P. POST-OPERATIVE. And below this was written in ink, LOBOTOMY.
   They pushed it into the day room and left it standing against the wall, along next to the Vegetables. We stood at the foot of the Gurney, reading the chart, then looked up to the other end at the head dented into the pillow, a swirl of red hair over a face milk-white except for the heavy purple bruises around the eyes.
   After a minute of silence Scanlon turned and spat on the floor. “Aaah, what’s the old bitch tryin’ to put over on us anyhow, for crap sakes. That ain’t him.”
   “Nothing like him,” Martini said.
   “How stupid she think we are?”
   “Oh, they done a pretty fair job, though,” Martini said, moving up alongside the head and pointing as he talked. “See. They got the broken nose and that crazy scar—even the sideburns.”
   “Sure,” Scanlon growled, “but hell!”
   I pushed past the other patients to stand beside Martini. “Sure, they can do things like scars and broken noses,” I said. “But they can’t do that look. There’s nothin’ in the face. Just like one of those store dummies, ain’t that right, Scanlon?”
   Scanlon spat again. “Damn right. Whole thing’s, you know, too blank. Anybody can see that.”
   “Look here,” one of the patients said, peeling back the sheet, “tattoos.”
   “Sure,” I said, “they can do tattoos. But the arms, huh? The arms? They couldn’t do those. His arms were big!”
   For the rest of the afternoon Scanlon and Martini and I ridiculed what Scanlon called that crummy sideshow fake lying there on the Gurney, but as the hours passed and the swelling began subsiding around the eyes I saw more and more guys strolling over to look at the figure. I watched them walk by acting like they were going to the magazine rack or the drinking fountain, so they could sneak another look at the face. I watched and tried to figure out what he would have done. I was only sure of one thing: he wouldn’t have left something like that sit there in the day room with his name tacked on it for twenty or thirty years so the Big Nurse could use it as an example of what can happen if you buck the system. I was sure of that.
   I waited that night until the sounds in the dorm told me everybody was asleep, and until the black boys had stopped making their rounds. Then I turned my head on the pillow so I could see the bed next to mine. I’d been listening to the breathing for hours, since they had wheeled the Gurney in and lifted the stretcher onto the bed, listening to the lungs stumbling and stopping, then starting again, hoping as I listened they would stop for good—but I hadn’t turned to look yet.
   There was a cold moon at the window, pouring light into the dorm like skim milk. I sat up in bed, and my shadow fell across the body, seeming to cleave it in half between the hips and the shoulders, leaving only a black space. The swelling had gone down enough in the eyes that they were open; they stared into the full light of the moon, open and undreaming, glazed from being open so long without blinking until they were like smudged fuses in a fuse box. I moved to pick up the pillow, and the eyes fastened on the movement and followed me as I stood up and crossed the few feet between the beds.
   The big, hard body had a tough grip on life. It fought a long time against having it taken away, flailing and thrashing around so much I finally had to lie full length on top of it and scissor the kicking legs with mine while I mashed the pillow into the face. I lay there on top of the body for what seemed days. Until the thrashing stopped. Until it was still a while and had shuddered once and was still again. Then I rolled off. I lifted the pillow, and in the moonlight I saw the expression hadn’t changed from the blank, dead-end look the least bit, even under suffocation. I took my thumbs and pushed the lids down and held them till they stayed. Then I lay back on my bed.
   I lay for a while, holding the covers over my face, and thought I was being pretty quiet, but Scanlon’s voice hissing from his bed let me know I wasn’t.
   “Take it easy, Chief,” he said. “Take it easy. It’s okay.”
   “Shut up,” I whispered. “Go back to sleep.”
   It was quiet a while; then I heard him hiss again and ask, “Is it finished?”
   I told him yeah.
   “Christ,” he said then, “she’ll know. You realize that, don’t you? Sure, nobody’ll be able to prove anything—anybody coulda kicked off in post-operative like he was, happens all the time—but her, she’ll know.”
   I didn’t say anything.
   “Was I you, Chief, I’d breeze my tail outa here. Yessir. I tell you what. You leave outa here, and I’ll say I saw him up and moving around after you lift and cover you that way. That’s the best idea, don’t you think?”
   “Oh, yeah, just like that. Just ask ‘em to unlock the door and let me out.”
   “No. He showed you how one time, if you think back. That very first week. You remember?”
   I didn’t answer him, and be didn’t say anything else, and it was quiet in the dorm again. I lay there a few minutes longer and then got up and started putting on my clothes. When I finished dressing I reached into McMurphy’s nightstand and got his cap and tried it on. It was too small, and I was suddenly ashamed of trying to wear it. I dropped it on Scanlon’s bed as I walked out of the dorm. He said, “Take it easy, buddy,” as I walked out.
   The moon straining through the screen of the tub-room windows showed the hunched, heavy shape of the control panel, glinted off the chrome fixtures and glass gauges so cold I could almost hear the click of it striking. I took a deep breath and bent over and took the levers. I heaved my legs under me and felt the grind of weight at my feet. I heaved again and heard the wires and connections tearing out of the floor. I lurched it up to my knees and was able, to get an arm around it and my other hand under it. The chrome was cold against my neck and the side of my head. I put my back toward the screen, then spun and let the momentum carry the panel through the Screen and window with a ripping crash. The glass splashed out in the moon, like a bright cold water baptizing the sleeping earth. Panting, I thought for a second about going back and getting Scanlon and some of the others, but then I heard the running squeak of the black boys’ shoes in the hall and I put my hand on the sill and vaulted after the panel, into the moonlight.
   I ran across the grounds in the direction I remembered seeing the dog go, toward the highway. I remember I was taking huge strides as I ran, seeming to step and float a long ways before my next foot struck the earth. I felt like I was flying. Free. Nobody bothers coming after an AWOL, I knew, and Scanlon could handle any questions about the dead man—no need to be running like this. But I didn’t stop. I ran for miles before I stopped and walked up the embankment onto the highway.
   I caught a ride with a guy, a Mexican guy, going north in a truck full of sheep, and gave him such a good story about me being a professional Indian wrestler the syndicate had tried to lock up in a nuthouse that he stopped real quick and gave me a leather jacket to cover my greens and loaned me ten bucks to eat on while I hitchhiked to Canada. I had him write his address down before he drove off and I told him I’d send him the money as soon as I got a little ahead.
   I might go to Canada eventually, but I think I’ll stop along the Columbia on the way. I’d like to check around Portland and Hood River and The Dalles to see if there’s any of the guys I used to know back in the village who haven’t drunk themselves goofy. I’d like to see what they’ve been doing since the government tried to buy their right to be Indians. I’ve even heard that some of the tribe have took to building their old ramshackle wood scaffolding all over that big million-dollar hydroelectric dam, and are spearing salmon in the spillway. I’d give something to see that. Mostly, I’d just like to look over the country around the gorge again, just to bring some of it clear in my mind again.
   I been away a long time.

Demon Box

Ken Kesey

D Tank Kickout
Joon the Goon Was What
Mother’s day 1969: Quiston’s Report
Tranny Man over the Border
In The Plaza
His Wife
His Dog
The Hot Steep Thick
El Mecanico Fantastico
Him and His Wife Again
His Friends
The First Crack
The Aftermath
The Tranny Man’s Dream
His Virility
Puerto Sancto Darkness
Last Shot of Tranny Man’s Wife
Last Shot of Tranny Man
Abdul & Ebenezer
The Day after Superman Died
The Search for the Secret Pyramid
I: Safari So Good
II: Ramadan: “They Teem by Night!”
III: Inside the Throne
IV: Down the Tombs of Taurus
V: Within the Stone Heart
VI
Killer
OLEO Demon Briefs & Dopey Ditties
Caleb Dreams
Chilly Sherree
Be Kind to Your Webfooted Friends—for a Mother May Be Ducking Somebody
Blackberry Vines
Death Valley Dolly
Ragweed Ruth
Pack of Walnettos
Finding Doctor Fung
Fung Meeting—Beijing Campus
Run into Great Wall
Little Tricker the Squirrel Meets Big Double the Bear
Good Friday
Now We Know How Many Holes It Takes to Fill the Albert Hall
The Demon Box:
Last Time the Angels Came up

Demon Box
by Ken Kesey

D Tank Kickout

   I check in at the SM County facilities dressed in my usual leather jacket, striped pants and shoes, silver whistle hanging around my neck. They allow you to wear street business up at camp. The bulls here at County Slam hate the policy. Lt. Gerder looks up from his typewriter sees my outfit and his already stone-cold face freezes even harder.
   “All right, Deboree. Give me everything.”
   “Everything?” Usually they let the Honor Camp prisoners check through, trust them to give up their watches, pocketknives, etc.
   “Everything. We don’t want you blowing your whistle at midnight.”
   “Make me out a complete property slip, then.”
   He gives me an unwavering stare through the mesh as he takes a triplicate form from a waiting stack and rolls it into the typewriter.
   “One whistle,” I say, pulling the chain over my head. “With a silver crucifix soldered to the side.”
   He doesn’t type.
   “One blues harp, E flat.”
   He continues to look at me over the keys.
   “Come on, Gerder; you want everything, I want a property slip for everything—whistles, harps, and all.”
   We both know what I’m really worried about are my two Honor Camp notebooks. [1]
   “You just slide everything into the trough,” he says. “In fact, I want you out of that Davy Crockett costume, Jackoff. Peel it.”
   He comes out of the cage while I take off the fringed jacket Behema made me from the hide we skinned off the cow elk Houlihan ran over coming down off Seven Devils Pass that All Souls’ Eve with the brakes gone and the headlights blown.
   “Stuff it in the trough. Now, hands on the wall feet on the line. Spread ‘em.” He gives the inside of my ankle a kick. “Deputy Rhack, back me while I examine this prisoner.”
   They frisk me. The whole shot, flashlight and all. Taking sunglasses, handkerchief, fingernail clippers, ballpoint pens and everything. My two notebooks are wrapped in the big farewell card Fastinaux drew for me on butcher paper. Gerder rips it off and stuffs it in the wastebasket. He tosses the notebooks on top of the other stuff.
   “I get a property slip for this stuff, Gerder. That’s the law.”
   “While you’re in my tanks,” Lt. Gerder lets me know, “you go by my law.”
   No malice in his voice. No anger. Just information.
   “Okay then”—I take my two notebooks out of the trough and hold them up—“witness these.” Showing them to Deputy Rhack and the rest of the men waiting in the receiving room. “Everybody? Two notebooks.”
   Then hand them to Gerder. He carries them around into his cage and sets them next to his typewriter. He hammers at the keys, ignoring the roomful of rancor across the counter from him. Rhack isn’t so cool; a lot of these guys will be back up at camp with him for many months yet, where he’s a guard without a gun. First he tries to oil us all with a wink, then he turns to me, smiling his sincerest man-to-man smile.
   “So, Devlin… you think you got a book outta these six months with us?”
   “I think so.”
   “How do you think it’ll come out; in weekly installments in the Chronicle?”
   “I hope not.” Bonehead move, giving those three pages of notes to that Sunday supplement reporter—pulled my own covers. “It should make a book on its own.”
   “You’ll have to change a lot, I’ll bet… like the names.”
   “I’ll bet a carton I don’t. Sergeant Rhack? Lieutenant Gerder? Where can you come up with better names than those?”
   Before Rhack can think up an answer Gerder jerks the papers out and slides them under the mesh. “Sign all three, Deputy.”
   Rhack has to use one of the pens from my pile. When Gerder gets the signed forms back he scoops all the little stuff out of the trough into a pasteboard property box with a numbered lid. He puts my wadded jacket on top.
   “Okay, Deboree.” He swivels to the panel of remote switches. “Zip up your pants and step to the gate.”
   “What about my notebooks?”
   “You’ll find stationery in Detain. Next.”
   Rhack hands me my ballpoint as I pass, and Gerder’s right: there is paper in D Tank. Sixo is still here, too, after coming down for his kickout more than a week ago. In blues now instead of the flashy slacks and sportjacket, but still trying to keep up the cocky front, combing his greasy pomp, talking tough: “Good deal! The pussy wagon has arrived.”
   One by one the other guys that rode down on Rhack’s shuttle show up. Gerder has had to give them each the same treatment, taking cigarettes, paperbacks, everything.
   “Sorry about that,” I tell them.
   “Steer clear of Deboree,” Sixo advises them. “He’s a heat magnet.”
   Just then keys jangle. “Deboree! Duggs is here to see you.”
   Door slides open. I follow the turnkey down the row of cells to a room with a desk. Probation Officer Duggs is sitting behind it. My two notebooks are on the desk beside my rapsheets. Duggs looks up from the records.
   “I see you made it without getting any more Bad Time tacked on,” Duggs says.
   “I was good.”
   Duggs closes the folder. “Think anybody’ll be here for you at midnight?”
   “One of my family, probably.”
   “Down all the way from Oregon?”
   “I hope so.”
   “Some family.” He looks at me: caseworker look, conditioned sincere. Sympathetic. “Sorry about the report on your father.”
   “Thanks.”
   “That’s why Judge Rilling waived that Bad Time, you know?”
   “I know.”
   He lectures me awhile on the evils of blah blah blah. I let him run out his string. Finally he stands up, comes round the desk, sticks out his hand. “Okay, Short-timer. But don’t miss the ten-thirty hearing Monday morning if you want to get released to an Oregon PO.”
   “I’ll be here.”
   “I’ll walk you back.”
   On the walk back to D Tank he asks what about this Jail Book; when will it be coming out? When it’s over, I tell him. When might that be? When it stops happening. Will this talk tonight be in it? Yes… tonight, Monday morning, last week—everything will be in it.
   “Deboree!” Sixo calls through the bars. “Put this in your fucking book: a guy—me—a guy shuns his comrades, plays pinochle five months with the motherfucking brass up there—five and a half months! When he musters down, one of those bulls misses a pack of Winstons and calls down and asks, ‘What brand of cigarettes did Sixo check in with? Winstons? Slap a hold on him!’ I mean is that cold or what, man? Is that a ballbusting bitch? But, what the fuck; Sixo will survive,” he crows. “Angelo Sixo is Sir Vivor!”
   Some dudes can snivel so it sounds like they’re crowing.
   They lock me in and Duggs leaves. Sixo sits back down. He’s doing Double Time, on hold like this—Now Time along with Street-to-come Time. You can even be made to serve Triple Time, which adds on Street-gone-by Time and that is called Guilt. A man waiting for his kickout is on what’s called Short Time. Short Time is known for being Hard Time. Lots of Short-timers go nuts or fuck up or try a run. Short is often harder than Long.
   The best is Straight Time. That’s what the notebooks are about.
   More guys check in. Weekenders. D-Tankers. Some Blood hollers from the shadows, “Mercy, Deputy Dawg… we done already got motherfuckers wall to wall…”

 
Drunk tank full to overflowing
Motherfuckers wall to wall
Coming twice as fast as going
Time gets big; tank gets small.
 

 
Dominoes slap on the table
Bloods play bones in tank next door
Bust a bone, if you be able
Red Death [2] stick it good some more.
 

 
Three days past my kickout time
Ask to phone; don’t get the juice—
Crime times crime just equals more crime
Cut the motherfuckers loose.
 

 
Will I make the Christmas kickout?
Will commissary come today?
Will they take my blood for Good Time
Or just take my guts away?
 

 
Some snitch found my homemade outfit!
They’ve staked a bull up at the still!
They’ve scoped the pot plants we were sprouting
At the bottom of the hill.
 

 
They punched my button, pulled my covers
Blew my cool, ruint my ruse
They’ve rehabilitated this boy
Cut this motherfucker loose.
 

 
The fish that nibbles on the wishing
Let him off his heavy rod
The gowned gavel-bangers fishing
Cut them loose from playing God.
 

 
Back off Johnson, back off peacefreaks
From vendettas, from Vietnam
Cut loose the squares, cut loose the hippies
Cut loose the dove, cut loose the bomb.
 

 
You, the finger on the trigger
You, the hand that weaves the noose
You hold the blade of brutal freedom—
Cut all the motherfuckers loose.
 

   Eleven forty they take me out give me my clothes, whistle and harp put me in this room with a bench and one other Short-timer, gray-pated mahogany-hued old dude of sixty years or so.
   “Oh, am I one Ready Freddy. Am I ever!”
   He’s pacing around the little room picking up and putting back down and picking back up one of those old-fashioned footrest shoeshine kits, full of personals. He has on a worn black suit, maroon tie and white shirt. His shoes have a sensational shine.
   “What you in for, Home?”
   “Weed. What about you?”
   “I pull a knife on my brother-in-law… my old woman call the cops. Wasn’t no actual goddamn fight whatsoever. But I don’t care. Just let me on my mother way!”
   Putting down his kit sipping his coffee picking his kit back up.
   “Yessir, on my way!”
   “Good luck on it,” I say.
   “Same to you. Ah, I don’t care. I even lost some weight in here. Met some nice folks, too…”
   A young black trusty stops in and gives him a number on a slip of paper.
   “I hope you writ where I can read it,” the old man says.
   “Plenty big, Pop. Don’t forget. Call soon as you hit a phone, tell her her Sugardog still be barkin’.”
   “I’ll do it, I sure will!”
   “Thanks, Pop. Be cool.”
   As soon as the kid is gone the old man wads the paper and drops it in the pisser.
   “Damn fool tramp. Met some real motherfuckers, too, as you can see.” He puts the kit down so he can rub his hands as he paces. “Oh, that ol’ city be just right, Saturday night still cookin’. If I can get me to a bus, that is. What’s the time?”
   “I got twelve straight up. I should have some family waiting; we’ll give you a lift.”
   “Appreciate it,” he says. “Straight up you tell me? Ah well, I don’t care. We got nothin but time to do, wherever we be. What you say you been in on?”
   “Possession and cultivation.”
   “If that ain’t a shame—for the good green gift of the Lord. He hadn’t wanted it to grow, there wouldna been seeds. How much they give you?”
   “Six months, five-hundred-dollar fine, three-year tail.”
   “If that ain’t the shits.”
   “It’s done.”
   “I reckon. Nothin but time—” He starts to take a sip of his cold coffee, stops—“ ‘ceptin, oh, I am ready.”
   He puts the cup down, picks the kit back up.
   “Franklin!” a voice calls. “William O.—”
   “In the wind, Boss. On my way!”
   I’m alone on the bench, sipping what’s left of his cup of coffee, spoon still sticking out. The plastic bag his suit was in hangs from the conduit; his blues are right where he left them, on the floor. Ghost clothes. I’m ready too. This stationery is finished both sides.
   “Deboree! Devlin E.—”
   “On my way!”

Joon the Goon Was What

   …she used to be called on the beat scene. Shows up this A.M. with her old man who turns out to be the guy in jail with me called Hub, the dude that did two for two. Famous for stretching a two-month Disturbing rap to two years by not standing for any shit. Proud of his rep in the slam, on the streets now he’s vowed to change his violent ways—no more red meat, red wine or white crosstops.
   Joon drove him up from Calif this morn for the sake of our soothing farm influence. Their Nova quit on the road before it made it into our drive. They explained everything in a bashful stammer, Joon blushing, Hub wringing his huge tattooed hands together like mastiffs in a pit.
   We talked some about the early frost, the green tomatoes, how some of them might ripen inside in the sun on windowsills. I told them they better use our car and jumpers to get their rig off the road. They head off, Joon in the lead, her purse knocking against her knobby knees. Made me think of Steinbeck and the thirties and the hand-scrawled warnings that are turning up taped to all the cash registers in the area: no checks cashed for more than amount of purchase!
   The first school bus slows and stops by the frost-gilded corn, lets Caleb off just in front of where Hub has my clunker mouth to mouth with his. The kids at the windows flash peace signs; the look of Joon’s tie-dye wraparound, I guess.
   A neighbor goes by and honks—our ritzy neighbor, the one with rich relatives and a “ranch” instead of a farm. He’s driving a new maroon metallic-flake Mustang.
   Sounds like they got the clunker clunking again; I hear it pulling into my drive below.
   Caleb brings up the mail-bills, broadsides, and a hardbound tome called Love of Place, authored by a famous holy man I’ve never heard of. You can’t learn love of place from those above or below you, it don’t seem to me…
   Lotsa action, banging, clunking, as the sun seeps through hazy September. A plane mumbles by and the corn goes golder and golder.
   The second, bigger-kids’ bus. Quiston and Sherree get out. Caleb goes loping through the rows to greet them, swinging a golden ear around his head.
   “Hey I bet you didn’t know Joon and her Goon was here!”

Mother’s day 1969: Quiston’s Report

   I think she’s out of the woods I think she’s made it to where she ought to have a name.
   Dad thinks.
   I think a good name is Feline, Sherree says, ree–ally…
   Sherree and Caleb and me we’re in the orchard feeding her warm water out of one of Sherree’s Tiny Tears bottles. We’re outside because Dad wants to get some footage. He’s moving the tripod all over, worrying about shadows. I think she looks perfect, hopping around in the soft yellow mustard and sunshine. I been thinking about the softness of things, and time going by, and how it will be good to have pictures of her growing up with us all, all the cows and the dogs and ducks and geese and pigeons and peacocks and cats and horses and chickens and bees, with Rumiocho the Parrot and Basil the Raven and Jenny the Donkey, and all these people.
   The camera is going. Dad shoots me and Caleb feeding her and Sherree making a garland and putting it around her neck: Princess Fe-line. Then Dobbs shows up in the dumptruck full of his kids and the mint compost mix that Mom ordered.
   We all ride out to Mom’s garden smelling like a million old Life Savers, and Dad shoots us shoveling and sweeping it out. Then us standing with our shovels and brooms on our shoulders. He shoots the chickens all already lined up at the fence like for class pictures, and Stewart making a big show out of beating up on Frank Dobbs’s dog, Kilroy. Then he wants to finish the roll shooting the horses out in the far field.
   Quiston, he says, you lock all these damn dogs in the paintroom. So they won’t go bothering the fawn.
   When the dogs are all shut in the paintroom we climb in the back of the dumptruck that’s never dumped since Dobbs fixed it, and ride out to the pasture. Me and Caleb and all the Dobbs kids, and Sherree with her nose wrinkled at the smell. When we go by the orchard she’s still nested right where we left her, in the tall mustard behind the flat-tired tractor. Her head is up like a princess all right, showing off her necklace of daisies and bachelor buttons.
   The horses are excited to have all these people come visit. Dad shoots them prancing around on their green carpet, fat and feisty. He shoots until he finishes the roll and puts the camera in its suitcase, then gets out the grain bucket. He shakes it so they can hear there’s something in it and then heads for the side gate. He wants to get them off the main pasture so it will make hay. They don’t want to go. The colt Wild Snort and Johnny bump and nip at each other. Horsing around like kids in the locker room Dad says. Wild Snort’s a young Appaloosa stud dropped off by Deadheads passing through last fall, and he’s mine if I demonstrate I can take proper care of him.
   His mother the white-eyed mare hangs back, watching. She’s watching her kid sow his wild oats Dobbs says. Then she goes through the gate where Dad is shaking the bucket. Wild Snort follows in after, then Jenny the Donkey. Johnny the Gelding is last, being ornery and nearsighted. We have to chase him and chase him until we finally drive him close enough he sees the other horses getting the grain poured out of the bucket; then he goes through in a gallop.
   Dad says Johnny is like a proud old silver-haired Texas Ranger, always got his man never took a bribe, but he’s older now… has to finally go for the bucket.
   Jenny the Donkey goes sidling up to the poured-out grain, rump first. And Jenny’s like a Juàrez hooker Dobbs says… she has to do what she has to do, too.
   Sherree walks back to the house. Caleb and Dobbs’s kids are all off in the clover, chasing gardener snakes. I ride back in the cab between Dad and Dobbs. At the corral fence there’s Joon the Goon in her nightgown, standing right alongside Abdul the Bull. Both of them are frowning out across the pasture, to make sure nothing’s being mistreated. Such barbarism, Hubert, Dad says, like he’s being Joon talking to her boyfriend Hub standing alongside, not the bull. Cruel, carnivorous barbarism! Makes me shudder.
   Dobbs answers, I know what you mean, Joonbug—being the bull being Hub—but it’s the only free accommodations available, here in carnivore country.
   Dad laughs. People on food trips are funny to him. We drive through and I get out and shut the gate behind us. Joon is stepped up on the bottom rail so she can frown at Johnny prancing around where Wild Snort is jumped up on Jenny the Donkey from behind. Jenny’s huffing and twisting this way and that. You guys, Dad says. I don’t know who he’s being.
   We fix the pipe and turn on the pump and drive back in through the orchard past the beehives. Yesterday’s new swarm is still there in the blossoms, drooping from a branch, like a big cluster of peach grapes, buzzing and working in the low light. The sun is slid nearly down the naked chin of old Nebo. Dad stands out on the runner board of the dumptruck and hollers for everybody to come in from the field: Star Trek in town at Uncle Buddy’s in less than an hour!
   From the garden where she’s been raking, Mom hollers, An hour? More like less than half an hour!
   Dobbs goes to put some bales in the back to sit on and roust up Mickey. Sherree goes to get tomorrow’s homework to take to Grandma and Grandpa’s. Caleb and Louise and May go to let out the dogs. I run on ahead of Dad back out to the orchard, to bring her in for the night.
   Something is wrong. She is just where we left her, but her head is tilted wrong. Her garland has fallen off and there’s a look in her tilted face. It isn’t drowsiness and neither is it loss of moisture like from her diarrhea two days ago. I run to lift her and the head flops: Dad! He comes running.
   Shit! The goddamn dogs got her.
   I locked the dogs in the paintroom.
   Maybe it was the neighbor’s dog. Shit!
   She feels—ah Dad, her back feels broke! Do you think she got run over when we came in from the pasture?
   I don’t think so, Dad says. I saw her when we drove through the orchard. She was fine then.
   It was the sun! Mom warned us. It was too much sun!
   Naw… you think? She wasn’t out in the sun that long, it didn’t seem… really.
   It really didn’t. Dad took her and carried her out of the orchard around the barn to the concrete grain storage, not because it was where Hub was living with Joon but because it was the coolest room on the place. The room looked cramped and little, with ten times the clutter that all of us used to make when we lived in it and we were six! Dad cleared a spot and found a half-blowed-up air mattress and laid her on it. I saw everybody coming so I climbed up on the cement shelf that used to be my bed. Everybody crowded in and fussed over her. Her breath was getting raspy and she was starting to twitch. I saw twitches begin, first at her spotted tail, then pretty soon they were running up her spine, then over her shoulders and around to her chest. Mom came and gave her some more of the clorzum milk she’d froze from when Floozie’s calf died, and I tried to pray. But all the time I could see the life twitching against the little ribcage like it wanted out.
   Hub came in from work and yelled a cussword. She was really his. He found her up where they were logging, no mother in sight. Orphaned by a sonofabitch poacher, was what he figured, poor thing. When he saw her in a wad on the rubber mattress, he yelled and threw his plaid lunchbox against the concrete wall and dropped to his knees. He started rubbing his huge rough hands up and down his pantlegs and cussing in a whisper. It was all raspy. He reached out to touch her. She arched backward into his hand when he stroked her neck, then flopped limp. He cussed and cussed and cussed.
   She got worse. Her breaths came harder. Even up on my old shelf I could hear the stuff gurgling in her. Mom said she was afraid that she was drowning. Fluid in her lungs. Pneumonia.
   Dad and Hub took turns holding her up with her head down, so they could get on their knees to try and suck that stuff out. Jelly stuff, silver gray, out of her nostrils. The blackbright shine was going away in her eyes, and the twitch against her ribs was getting calmer. Once, bowing backwards, she gave out a call, thin and high. It reminded me of the sound of Grandpa’s little wooden varmint caller that he blows in the dark when he wants to lure in a fox or a cougar or a bobcat. Or says he does.
   Hub kept sucking and puffing. She was getting bloated. Dad let him do it for a long time before he said, Give it in, Hub. She’s dead. When Hub stopped and Dad put her down, the air coming out made a sound, but not an animal sound. It was a kind of silly honk, like Caleb’s Harpo horn he got a long time later.
   Sherree and Joon filled an apple box with rose petals and clover blossoms. Mom found a piece of silk from China. Out at the pump the cows and horses all stood around and watched. We put a round stone on top, a fine big stone Mom found on a river called Row. Before we were born, she said. Dad played his flute and Dobbs blowed his mouthharp and Joon tinkled on that old Fisher-Price xylophone Great-grandma Whittier gave me that still works. Hub blew once on a blade of grass—it made that same thin sound—and the funeral was over.
   So we missed Star Trek at Buddy’s and Sunday supper and Grandma and Grandpa’s and everything. Dad cut our hair instead. Everybody went to bed early. Then, this morning, still foggy before the schoolbus comes, there’s a loud bunch of barking from the pond. Mom says, Never you kids mind finish your breakfast and get things ready. She’ll go see what it’s all about. She goes out the sliding kitchen window and heads down through the mist. Hub gets up and watches, sipping his coffee, then the barking stops and he comes back to the table. Joon puts his lunchbucket on the table next to his plate and Hub grunts. I think for a minute he’s going to go to cussing again. But then here comes Mom back, Stewart and Lance jumping all over her! She’s carrying our five-gallon minnow-catching bucket held high from the dogs, and she’s red with excitement.
   I thought it was a frog a bullfrogthat the darned old heron had crippled but couldn’t carry off, she says. Except when I got closer I saw it was hairy. It was swimming like anything out where Stewart was barking, round and round and around in the pondweeds. I told Stewart, No! Leave it alone! Hush! And as soon as he hushes, I swear, here it comes right up the bank at us! I scooped it in the bucket before I knew what it was…
   It’s a big old bull gopher, mean-looking as the devil. His front teeth are terrible, like two rusty chisel blades. He’s up on his hind feet in the can, chittering and snapping at our faces over the brim. Hub takes the bucket and grins down into it, pretty terrible-toothed himself. Him and the animal chitter back and forth a minute, then he opens his lunchbox and dumps the gopher right in, right with his plaid thermos bottle and his apple and his celery and his Saran-wrapped sandwiches, and snaps it shut.
   I’ll turn him loose up at the logging show, Hub says, turning his yellow grin toward Joon the Goon.
   Be careful, Joon says, grinning herself, that you don’t get mixed up and turn loose your cheese sandwich and eat the gopher. Yeah, Sherree says, ree–ally—like she can—and goes out to wait for the bus. Caleb says Yeah, ree–ally. Mom says Here comes the bus Quiston get your assignment sheet Caleb where’s your shoes! Hub says he will be careful, thanks for breakfast, see y’all this evening…
   I don’t know what I’ll say, first period oral assignment—Tell What You Did For Your Mother On Mother’s Day.

Tranny Man over the Border

In The Plaza

   –hibiscus blooms fall with heavy plops, lie sprawled on the sunny cobblestones and cement benches like fat Mexican generals, scarlet-and-green parade uniforms, gawdy and limp, too hot and tired to rise back to the rank of their branches. Later, perhaps. Now, siesta…


   “Not good!” yells the gray crewcut American from Portland with his fifty-year face running sweat and his new Dodge Polaro sitting behind a tow truck outside the Larga Distancia Oficina. “Not three thrown in less than five thousand miles!”
   Yelling from Puerto Sancto, Mexico, to Tucson, Arizona, where he’d bought his last transmission after buying his second in Oroville, California, where he’d paid without much complaint because it is possible to strip the gears with the hard business miles he’d put on it, but a tranny again in Tucson? And now, less than a week later? The third blown?
   “Not good at all! So listen up; I’m gonna jerk the thing out and ship it back first train your direction. I expect the same promptness from you garage boys, right? I expect a new transmission down here in time for us to make the festival in Guadalajara one week from tomorrow! There’s no excuse for this kinda workmanship I can tell you that!”
   What he didn’t tell the garage boys in Tucson was that he was pulling a twenty-four-foot mobile home.
   “I been a Dodge man ten years. We don’t want a ten-year relationship to blow up from one fluke, right?”
   He hung up and turned to me. Next in line, I had been his nearest audience.
   “That’ll get some greasemonkeys’ asses smoking in Tucson, won’t it, Red?” He leaned close, as if we had known each other for years. “They aren’t a bad bunch. Fact is, I hope I can find me a mechanic down here with a fraction the know-how as those Arizona boys.”
   Reaffirmation of Yankee superiority left him so flushed with feeling for his countrymen that he chose to overlook the stubbled look of me.
   “What’s your name, Red? You remind me of my oldest boy a little, behind that brush.”
   “Deboree,” I told him, taking his hand. “Devlin Deboree.”
   “What brings you to primitive Puerto Sancto, Dev? Let me guess. You’re a nature photographer. I saw you out there after those fallen posies.”
   “Way wrong,” I told him. “It isn’t even my camera. My father sent his along. He came to Sancto last year with my brother and me, and nobody took picture one.”
   “So Dad sent you to bring back the missed memories. He musta been a lot more impressed than I been.”
   “Wrong again. He sent me to bring back jumping beans.”
   “Jumping beans?”
   “Mexican jumping beans. When we were down here last year he met a mechanic who also grew jumping beans. He bought a hundred bucks’ worth of this year’s harvest.”
   “Jumping beans?”
   “Five gallons. Dad’s going to give one bean away with each quart of his new ice cream, to publicize the flavor. Not Jumping Bean—Pina Colada. We run a creamery.”
   “ ‘Debris,’ huh?” He gave me a wink to let me know he was kidding. “Like in ‘rubbish’?”
   I told him it was more like in Polish. He laughed.
   “Well, you remind me of my kid, whatever. Why don’t you join me in the Hotel Sol bar after your call? We’ll see if I remind you of your old man.
   He winked again and left, roguishly tipping his fishing cap to the rest of the tourists waiting to contact home.
   I found him under a palapa umbrella by the pool. His look of confidence was already a little faded, and he was wondering if maybe he shouldn’t’ve also had a good U.S. mechanic come with the transmission—pay the man’s way now, fight it out with the Dodge people later. I observed some of these Mexican mechanics were pretty good. He agreed they had to be pretty good, to keep these hand-me-downs running, but what did they know about a modern automatic transmission? He pulled down his sunglasses and drew me again into that abrupt intimacy.
   “You can take the best carburetor man in the whole country, say, and turn him loose in an area he isn’t qualified in, and you’re going to have troubles. Believe me, numerous troubles…”
   This truth and his drink made him feel better. The grin returned and the ungreased whine of panic was almost oiled out of his voice by his second Seagram’s and Seven-Up. By the bottom of his third he was ready to slip ‘er into whiskeydrive and lecture me as to all the troubles a man can encounter along the rocky road of life, brought about mainly by unqualified incompetents in areas where they didn’t belong. Numerous troubles! To steer him away from a tirade I interrupted with what I thought was a perfectly peaceful question: How many did he have with him? One eye narrowed strangely and slid over my backpack and beard. With a voice geared all the way back into suspicion he informed me that his wife was along and what about it.
   I gaped, amazed. He thinks that I meant how many troubles meaning his wife or whoever meaning I’m trying to cast some snide insinuation about his family! Far out, I thought, and to calm him I said I wished my wife and kids were along. Still suspicious, he asked how many kids, and how old. I told him. He asked where they were and I said in school—
   “But if I have to wait much longer for these jumping beans I’m going to have them all fly down. Sometimes you have to skip a little school to further your education, right?”
   “Right!” This brought him close again. “Don’t I wish my woman’d known that when my kids were kids! ‘After they get their educations’ was her motto. Right, Mother, sure…”
   I thought he was going to get melancholy again, but he squared his shoulders instead and clinked his glass against mine. “Decent of you and your brother to take a trip with your old dad, Red.” He was glad I had turned out not to be some hippy rucksack smartass after all, but a decent American boy, considerate of his father. He twisted in his chair and called grandly for the waiter to bring us another round uno mas all around, muy goddamn pronto.
   “If you aren’t a little hardboiled,” he confided, shifting back to wink at me, “they overcharge.”
   He grinned and the wink reopened, but for one tipsy second that eye didn’t match up with its mate. “Overcharge!” he prompted, commanding the orb back into place.
   By the time the drinks arrived the twitch was corrected and his look confident and roguish again. For a moment, though, a crack had been opened. I had seen all the way inside to the look behind the looks and, oh gosh, folks, that look was dreadful afraid. Of what? It’s difficult to say, exactly. But it wasn’t of me. Nor do I think he was really afraid of the numerous troubles on the rocky road ahead, not even of getting stranded gearless in this primitive anarchy of a nation.
   What I think, folks, looking at the developed pictures and remembering back to that momentary glimpse into his private abyss, is that this guy was afraid of the Apocalypse.