One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (21 page)

“So you believe it would be wise,” the doctor asks, “to send him up to Disturbed?”

“I believe it would be at the very least safe,” the guy with the pipe answers, closing his eyes.

“I’m afraid I’ll have to withdraw my suggestion and go along with Robert,” Alvin tells them all, “if only for my own protection.”

They all laugh. They’re all more relaxed now, certain they’ve come round to the plan she was wanting. They all have a sip of coffee on it except the guy with the pipe, and he has a big to-do with the thing going out all the time, goes through a lot of matches and sucking and puffing and popping of his lips. It finally smokes up again to suit him, and he says, a little proudly, “Yes, Disturbed Ward for ol’ Red McMurphy, I’m afraid. You know what I think, observing him these few days?”

“Schizophrenic reaction?” Alvin asks.

Pipe shakes his head.

“Latent Homosexual with Reaction Formation?” the third one says.

Pipe shakes his head again and shuts his eyes. “No,” he says and smiles round the room, “
Negative Oedipal
.”

They all congratulate him.

“Yes, I think there is a lot pointing to it,” he says. “But whatever the final diagnosis is, we must keep one thing in mind: we’re not dealing with an ordinary man.”

“You—are very, very wrong, Mr. Gideon.” It’s the Big Nurse.

Everybody’s head jerks toward her—mine too, but I check myself and pass the motion off like I’m trying to scrub a speck I just discovered on the wall above my head. Everybody’s confused all to hell for sure now. They figured they were proposing just what she’d want, just what she was planning to propose in the meeting herself. I thought so too. I’ve seen her send men half the size of McMurphy up to Disturbed for no more reason than there was a chance they might spit on somebody; now she’s got this bull of a man who’s bucked her and everybody else on the staff, a guy she all but said was on his way off the ward earlier this afternoon, and she says no.

“No. I don’t agree. Not at all.” She smiles around at all of them. “I don’t agree that he should be sent up to Disturbed, which would simply be an easy way of passing our problem on to another ward, and I don’t agree that he is some kind of extraordinary being—some kind of ‘super’ psychopath.”

She waits but nobody is about to disagree. For the first time she takes a sip of her coffee; the cup comes away from her mouth with that red-orange color on it. I stare at the rim of the cup in spite of myself; she
couldn’t
be wearing lipstick that color. That color on the rim of the cup must be from heat, touch of her lips set it smoldering.

“I’ll admit that my first thought when I began to recognize Mr. McMurphy for the disturbing force that he is was that he should most definitely be sent up to Disturbed. But now I believe.it is too late. Would removing him undo the harm that he has done to our ward? I don’t believe it would, not after this afternoon. I believe if he were sent to Disturbed now it would be exactly what the patients would expect. He would be a martyr to them. They would never be given the opportunity to see that this man is not an—as you put it, Mr. Gideon—‘extraordinary person.’ ”

She takes another sip and sets the cup on the table; the whack of it sounds like a gavel; all three residents sit bold upright.

“No. He isn’t extraordinary. He is simply a man and no more, and is subject to all the fears and all the cowardice and all the timidity that any other man is subject to. Given a few more days, I have a very strong feeling that he will prove this, to us as well as the rest of the patients. If we keep him on the ward I am certain his brashness will subside, his self-made rebellion will dwindle to nothing, and”—she smiles, knowing something nobody else does—“that our redheaded hero will cut himself down to something the patients will all recognize and lose respect for: a braggart and a blowhard of the type who may climb up on a soapbox and shout for a following, the way we’ve all seen Mr. Cheswick do, then back down the moment there is any real danger to him personally.”

“Patient McMurphy”—the boy with the pipe feels he should try to defend his position and save face just a little bit “does not strike me as a coward.”

I expect her to get mad, but she doesn’t; she just gives him that let’s-wait-and-see look and says, “I didn’t say he was exactly a coward, Mr. Gideon; oh, no. He’s simply very fond of someone. As a psychopath, he’s much too fond of a Mr. Randle Patrick McMurphy to subject him to any needless danger.” She gives the boy a smile that puts his pipe out for sure this time. “If we just wait for a while, our hero will—what is it you college boys say?—give up his bit? Yes?”

“But that may take weeks—” the boy starts.

“We have weeks,” she says. She stands up, looking more pleased with herself than I’ve seen her look since McMurphy came to trouble her a week ago. “We have weeks, or months, or even years if need be. Keep in mind that Mr. McMurphy is committed. The length of time he spends in this hospital is entirely up to us. Now, if there is nothing else…”

The way the Big Nurse acted so confident in that staff meeting, that worried me for a while, but it didn’t make any difference to McMurphy. All weekend, and the next week, he was just as hard on her and her black boys as he ever was, and the patients were loving it. He’d won his bet; he’d got the nurse’s goat the way he said he would, and had collected on it, but that didn’t stop him from going right ahead and acting like he always had, hollering up and down the hall, laughing at the black boys, frustrating the whole staff, even going so far as to step up to the Big Nurse in the hall one time and ask her, if she didn’t mind tellin’, just what was the actual inch-by-inch measurement on them great big of breasts that she did her best to conceal but never could. She walked right on past, ignoring him just like she chose to ignore the way nature had tagged her with those outsized badges of femininity, just like she was above him, and sex, and everything else that’s weak and of the flesh.

When she posted work assignments on the bulletin board, and he read that she’d given him latrine duty, he went to her office and knocked on that window of hers and personally thanked her for the honor, and told her he’d think of her every time he swabbed out a urinal. She told him that wasn’t necessary; just do his work and that would be sufficient, thank you.

The most work he did on them was to run a brush around the bowls once or twice apiece, singing some song as loud as he could in time to the swishing brush; then he’d splash in some Clorox and he’d be through. “That’s clean enough,” he’d tell the black boy who got after him for the way he hurried through his job, “maybe not clean enough for
some
people, but myself I plan to piss in ‘em, not eat lunch out of ‘em.” And when the Big Nurse gave in to the black boy’s frustrated pleading and came in to check McMurphy’s cleaning assignment personally, she brought a little compact mirror and she held it under the rim of the bowls. She walked along shaking her head and saying, “Why, this is an outrage… an outrage…” at every bowl. McMurphy sidled right along beside her, winking down his nose and saying in answer, “No; that’s a toilet bowl… a
toilet
bowl.”

But she didn’t lose control again, or even act at all like she might. She would get after him about the toilets, using that same terrible, slow, patient pressure she used on everybody, as he stood there in front of her, looking like a little kid getting a bawling out, hanging his head, and the toe of one boot on top of the other, saying, “I
try
and
try
, ma’am, but I’m afraid I’ll never make my mark as head man of the crappers.”

Once he wrote something on a slip of paper, strange writing that looked like a foreign alphabet, and stuck it up under one of those toilet bowl rims with a wad of gum; when she came to that toilet with her mirror she gave a short gasp at what she read reflected and dropped her mirror in the toilet. But she didn’t lose control. That doll’s face and that doll’s smile were ‘ forged in confidence. She stood up from the toilet bowl and gave him a look that would peel paint and told him it was his job to make the latrine
cleaner
, not dirtier.

Actually, there wasn’t much cleaning of any kind getting done on the ward. As soon as it came time in the afternoon when the schedule called for house duties, it was also time for the baseball games to be on TV, and everybody went and lined the chairs up in front of the set and they didn’t move out of them until dinner. It didn’t make any difference that the power was shut off in the Nurses’ Station and we couldn’t see a thing but that blank gray screen, because McMurphy’d entertain us for hours, sit and talk and tell all kinds of stories, like how he made a thousand dollars in one month driving truck for a gyppo outfit and then lost every penny of it to some Canadian in an ax-throwing contest, or how he and a buddy slick-tongued a guy into riding a brahma bull at a rodeo in Albany, into riding him while he wore a blindfold: “Not the bull, I mean, the
guy
had on the blindfold.” They told the guy that the blindfold would keep him from getting dizzy when the bull went to spinning; then, when they got a bandanna wrapped around his eyes to where he couldn’t see, they set him on that bull backward. McMurphy told it a couple of times and slapped his thigh with his hat and laughed everytime he remembered it. “Blindfolded and backwards… And I’m a sonofagun if he didn’t stay the limit and won the purse. And I was second; if he’d been throwed I’d of took first and a neat little purse. I swear the next time I pull a stunt like that I’ll blindfold the damn bull instead.”

Whack his leg and throw back his head and laugh and laugh, digging his thumb into the ribs of whoever was sitting next to him, trying to get him to laugh too.

There was times that week when I’d hear that full-throttled laugh, watch him scratching his belly and stretching and yawning and leaning back to wink at whoever he was joking with, everything coming to him just as natural as drawing breath, and I’d quit worrying about the Big Nurse and the Combine behind her. I’d think he was strong enough being his own self that he would never back down the way she was hoping he would. I’d think, maybe he truly is something extraordinary. He’s what he is, that’s it. Maybe that makes him strong enough, being what he is. The Combine hasn’t got to him in all these years; what makes that nurse think she’s gonna be able to do it in a few weeks? He’s not gonna let them twist him and manufacture him.

And later, hiding in the latrine from the black boys, I’d take a look at my own self in the mirror and wonder how it was possible that anybody could manage such an enormous thing as being what he was. There’d be my face in the mirror, dark and hard with big, high cheekbones like the cheek underneath them had been hacked out with a hatchet, eyes all black and hard and mean-looking, just like Papa’s eyes or the eyes of all those tough, mean-looking Indians you see on TV, and I’d think, That ain’t me, that ain’t my face. It wasn’t even me when I was trying to be that face. I wasn’t even really me then; I was just being the way I looked, the way people wanted. It don’t seem like I ever have been me. How can McMurphy be what he is?

I was seeing him different than when he first came in; I was seeing more to him than just big hands and red sideburns and a broken-nosed grin. I’d see him do things that didn’t fit with his face or hands, things like painting a picture at OT with real paints on a blank paper with no lines or numbers anywhere on it to tell him where to paint, or like writing letters to somebody in a beautiful flowing hand. How could a man who looked like him paint pictures or write letters to people, or be upset and worried like I saw him once when he got a letter back? These were the kind of things you expected from Billy Bibbit or Harding. Harding had hands that looked like they should have done paintings, though they never did; Harding trapped his hands and forced them to work sawing planks for doghouses. McMurphy wasn’t like that. He hadn’t let what he looked like run his life one way or the other, any more than he’d let the Combine mill him into fitting where they wanted him to fit.

I was seeing lots of things different. I figured the fog machine had broke down in the walls when they turned it up too high for that meeting on Friday, so now they weren’t able to circulate fog and gas and foul up the way things looked. For the first time in years 1 was seeing people with none of that black outline they used to have, and one night I was even able to see out the windows.

Like I explained, most nights before they ran me to bed they gave me this pill, knocked me out and kept me out. Or if something went haywire with the dose and I woke up, my eyes were all crusted over and the dorm was full of smoke, wires in the walls loaded to the limit, twisting and sparking death and hate in the air—all too much for me to take so I’d ram my head under the pillow and try to get back to sleep. Every time I peeked back out there would be the smell of burning hair and a sound like sidemeat on a hot griddle.

But this one night, a few nights after the big meeting, I woke up and the dorm was clean and silent; except for the soft breathing of the men and the stuff rattling around loose under the brittle ribs of the two old Vegetables, it was dead quiet. A window was up, and the air in the dorm was clear and had a taste to it made me feel kind of giddy and drunk, gave me this sudden yen to get up out of bed and do something.

I slid from between the sheets and walked barefoot across the cold tile between the beds. I felt the tile with my feet and wondered how many times, how many thousand times, had I run a mop over this same tile floor and never felt it at all. That mopping seemed like a dream to me, like I couldn’t exactly believe all those years of it had really happened. Only that cold linoleum under my feet was real right then, only that moment.

I walked among the guys heaped in long white rows like snowbanks, careful not to bump into somebody, till I came to the wall with the windows. I walked down the windows to one where the shade popped softly in and out with the breeze, and I pressed my forehead up against the mesh. The wire was cold and sharp, and I rolled my head against it from side to side to feel it with my cheeks, and I smelled the breeze. It’s fall coming, I thought, I can smell that sour-molasses smell of silage, clanging the air like a bell—smell somebody’s been burning oak leaves, left them to smolder overnight because they’re too green.