One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest: 50th Anniversary Edition (22 page)

He sniffed all the holes over again one quick one, to get the smells down good, then suddenly froze still with one paw lifted and his head tilted, listening. I listened too, but I couldn’t hear anything except the popping of the window shade. I listened for a long time. Then, from a long way off, I heard a high, laughing gabble, faint and coming closer. Canada honkers going south for the winter. I remembered all the hunting and belly-crawling I’d ever done trying to kill a honker, and that I never got one.

I tried to look where the dog was looking to see if I could find the flock, but it was too dark. The honking came closer and closer till it seemed like they must be flying right through the dorm, right over my head. Then they crossed the moon—a black, weaving necklace, drawn into a V by that lead goose. For an instant that lead goose was right in the center of that circle, bigger than the others, a black cross opening and closing, then he pulled his V out of sight into the sky once more.

I listened to them fade away till all I could hear was my memory of
the sound. The dog could still hear them a long time after me. He was still standing with his paw up; he hadn’t moved or barked when they flew over. When he couldn’t hear them any more either, he commenced to lope off in the direction they had gone, toward the highway, loping steady and solemn like he had an appointment. I held my breath and I could hear the flap of his big paws on the grass as he loped; then I could hear a car speed up out of a turn. The headlights loomed over the rise and peered ahead down the highway. I watched the dog and the car making for the same spot of pavement.

The dog was almost to the rail fence at the edge of the grounds when I felt somebody slip up behind me. Two people. I didn’t turn, but I knew it was the black boy named Geever and the nurse with the birthmark and the crucifix. I heard a whir of fear start up in my head. The black boy took my arm and pulled me around. “I’ll get ‘im,” he says.

“It’s chilly at the window there, Mr. Bromden,” the nurse tells me. “Don’t you think we’d better climb back into our nice toasty bed?”

“He cain’t hear,” the black boy tells her. “I’ll take him. He’s always untying his sheet and roaming ‘round.”

And I move and she draws back a step and says, “Yes, please do,” to the black boy. She’s fiddling with the chain runs down her neck. At home she locks herself in the bathroom out of sight, strips down, and rubs that crucifix all over that stain running from the corner of her mouth in a thin line down across her shoulders and breasts. She rubs and rubs and hails Mary to beat thunder, but the stain stays. She looks in the mirror, sees it’s darker’n ever. Finally takes a wire brush used to take paint off boats and scrubs the stain away, puts a nightgown on over the raw, oozing hide, and crawls in bed.

But she’s too full of the stuff. While she’s asleep it rises in her throat and into her mouth, drains out of that corner of her mouth like purple spit and down her throat, over her body. In the morning she sees how she’s stained again and somehow she figures it’s not really from inside her—how could it be? a good Catholic girl like her?—and she figures it’s on account of working evenings among a whole wardful of people like me. It’s all our fault, and she’s going to get us for it if it’s the last thing she does. I wish McMurphy’d wake up and help me.

“You get him tied in bed, Mr. Geever, and I’ll prepare a medication.”

I
N THE GROUP MEETINGS
there were gripes coming up that had been buried so long the thing being griped about had already changed. Now that McMurphy was around to back them up, the guys started letting fly at everything that had ever happened on the ward they didn’t like.

“Why does the dorms have to be locked on the weekends?” Cheswick or somebody would ask. “Can’t a fellow even have the weekends to himself?”

“Yeah, Miss Ratched,” McMurphy would say. “Why?”

“If the dorms were left open, we have learned from past experience, you men would return to bed after breakfast.”

“Is that a mortal sin? I mean,
normal
people get to sleep late on the weekends.”

“You men are in this hospital,” she would say like she was repeating it for the hundredth time, “because of your proven inability to adjust to society. The doctor and I believe that every minute spent in the company of others, with some exceptions, is therapeutic, while every minute spent brooding alone only increases your separation.”

“Is that the reason that there has to be at least eight guys together before they can be taken off the ward to OT or PT or one of them Ts?”

“That is correct.”

“You mean it’s sick to want to be off by yourself?”

“I didn’t say that—”

“You mean if I go into latrine to relieve myself I should take along at least seven buddies to keep me from brooding on the can?”

Before she could come up with an answer to that, Cheswick bounced to his feet and hollered at her, “Yeah, is that what you mean?” and the other Acutes sitting around the meeting would say “Yeah, yeah, is that what you mean?”

She would wait till they all died down and the meeting was quiet again, then say quietly, “If you men can calm yourself enough to act like a group of adults at a discussion instead of children on the playground, we will ask the doctor if he thinks it would be beneficial to consider a change in the ward policy at this time. Doctor?”

Everybody knew the kind of answer the doctor would make, and
before he even had the chance Cheswick would be off on another complaint. “Then what about our cigarettes, Miss Ratched?”

“Yeah, what about that,” the Acutes grumbled.

McMurphy turned to the doctor and put the question straight to
him
this time before the nurse had a chance to answer. “Yeah, Doc, what about our cigarettes? How does she have the right to keep the cigarettes—
our
cigarettes—piled up on her desk in there like she owned them, bleed a pack out to us now and again whenever she feels like it. I don’t care much about the idea of buying a carton of cigarettes and having somebody tell me when I can smoke them.”

The doctor tilted his head so he could look at the nurse through his glasses. He hadn’t heard about her taking over the extra cigarettes to stop the gambling. “What’s this about cigarettes, Miss Ratched? I don’t believe I’ve heard—”

“I feel, Doctor, that three and four and sometimes five packages of cigarettes a day are entirely too many for a man to smoke. That is what seemed to be happening last week—after Mr. McMurphy’s arrival—and that is why I thought it might be best to impound the cartons the men purchased at the canteen and allow each man only one pack a day.”

McMurphy leaned forward and whispered loudly to Cheswick, “Hear tell her next decision is about trips to the can; not only does a guy have to take his seven buddies into the latrine with him but he’s also limited to two trips a day, to be taken when she says so.”

And leaned back in his chair and laughed so hard that nobody else could say anything for nearly a minute.

McMurphy was getting a lot of kick out of all the ruckus he was raising, and I think was a little surprised that he wasn’t getting a lot of pressure from the staff too, especially surprised that the Big Nurse wasn’t having any more to say to him than she was. “I thought the old buzzard was tougher than this,” he said to Harding after one meeting; “Maybe all she needed to straighten her out was a good bringdown. The thing is”—he frowned—”she acts like she still holds all the cards up that white sleeve of hers.”

He went on getting a kick out of it till about Wednesday of the next week. Then he learned why the Big Nurse was so sure of her hand. Wednesday’s the day they pack everybody up who hasn’t got some kind of rot and move to the swimming pool, whether we want to
go or not. When the fog was on the ward I used to hide in it to get out of going. The pool always scared me; I was always afraid I’d step in over my head and drown, be sucked off down the drain and clean out to sea. I used to be real brave around water when I was a kid on the Columbia; I’d walk the scaffolding around the falls with all the other men, scrambling around with water roaring green and white all around me and the mist making rainbows, without even any hobnails like the men wore. But when I saw my Papa start getting scared of things, I got scared too, got so I couldn’t even stand a shallow pool.

We came out of the locker room and the pool was pitching and splashing and full of naked men; whooping and yelling bounced off the high ceiling the way it always does in indoor swimming pools. The black boys herded us into it. The water was a nice warm temperature but I didn’t want to get away from the side (the black boys walk along the edge with long bamboo poles to shove you away from the side if you try to grab on) so I stayed close to McMurphy on account of I knew they wouldn’t try to make him go into deep water if he didn’t want to.

He was talking to the lifeguard, and I was standing a few feet away. McMurphy must of been standing in a hole because he was having to tread water where I was just standing on the bottom. The lifeguard was standing on the edge of the pool; he had a whistle and a T-shirt on with his ward number on it. He and McMurphy had got to talking about the difference between hospital and jail, and McMurphy was saying how much better the hospital was. The lifeguard wasn’t so sure. I heard him tell McMurphy that, for one thing, being committed ain’t like being sentenced. “You’re sentenced in a jail, and you got a date ahead of you when you
know
you’re gonna be turned loose,” he said.

McMurphy stopped splashing around like he had been. He swam slowly to the edge of the pool and held there, looking up at the lifeguard. “And if you’re committed?” he asked after a pause.

The lifeguard raised his shoulders in a musclebound shrug and tugged at the whistle around his neck. He was an old pro-footballer with cleat marks in his forehead, and every so often when he was off his ward a signal would click back of his eyes and his lips’d go to spitting numbers and he’d drop to all fours in a line stance and cut loose on some strolling nurse, drive a shoulder in her kidneys just in time to let the halfback shoot past through the hole behind him. That’s why
he was up on Disturbed; whenever he wasn’t lifeguarding he was liable to do something like that.

He shrugged again at McMurphy’s question, then looked back and forth to see if any black boys were around, and knelt close to the edge of the pool. He held his arm out for McMurphy to look at.

“You see this cast?”

McMurphy looked at the big arm. “You don’t have a cast on that arm, buddy.”

The lifeguard just grinned. “Well, that cast’s on there because I got a bad fracture in the last game with the Browns. I can’t get back in togs till the fracture knits and I get the cast off. The nurse on my ward tells me she’s curing the arm in secret. Yeah, man, she says if I go easy on that arm, don’t exert it or nothing, she’ll take the cast off and I can get back with the ball club.”

He put his knuckles on the wet tile, went into a three-point stance to test how the arm was coming along. McMurphy watched him a minute, then asked how long he’d been waiting for them to tell him his arm was healed so he could leave the hospital. The lifeguard raised up slowly and rubbed his arm. He acted hurt that McMurphy had asked that, like he thought he was being accused of being soft and licking his wounds. “I’m committed,” he said, “I’d of left here before now if it was up to me. Maybe I couldn’t play first string, with this bum arm, but I could of folded towels, couldn’t I? I could of done
something
. That nurse on my ward, she keeps telling the doctor I ain’t ready. Not even to fold towels in the crummy old locker room, I ain’t ready.”

He turned and walked over to his lifeguard chair, climbed up the chair ladder like a drugged gorilla, and peered down at us, his lower lip pushed way out. “I was picked up for drunk and disorderly, and I been here eight years and eight months,” he said.

McMurphy pushed backward from the edge of the pool and trod water and thought this over: he’d had a six months’ sentence at the work farm with two months finished, four more to go—and four more months was the most he wanted to spend locked up any place. He’d been close to a month in this nuthouse and it might be a lot better than a work farm, what with good beds and orange juice for breakfast, but it wasn’t better to the point that he’d want to spend a couple of years here.

He swam over to the steps at the shallow end of the pool and sat there the rest of the period, tugging that little tuft of wool at his throat and frowning. Watching him sitting there frowning all to himself, I remembered what the Big Nurse had said in the meeting, and I began to feel afraid.

When they blew the whistle for us to leave the pool and we all were straggling toward the locker room, we ran into this other ward coming into the swimming pool for their period, and in the footbath at the shower you had to go through was this one kid from the other ward. He had a big spongy pink head and bulgy hips and legs—like somebody’d grabbed a balloon full of water and squeezed it in the middle—and he was lying on his side in the footbath, making noises like a sleepy seal. Cheswick and Harding helped him stand up, and he lay right back down in the footbath. The head bobbed around in the disinfectant. McMurphy watched them lift him standing again.

“What the devil is he?” he asked.

“He has hydrocephalus,” Harding told him; “Some manner of lymph disorder, I believe. Head fills up with liquid. Give us a hand helping him stand up.”

They turned the kid loose, and he lay back down in the footbath again; the look on his face was patient and helpless and stubborn; his mouth sputtered and blew bubbles in the milky-looking water. Harding repeated his request to McMurphy to give them a hand, and he and Cheswick bent down to the kid again. McMurphy pushed past them and stepped across the kid into the shower.

“Let him lay,” he said, washing himself down in the shower. “Maybe he don’t like deep water.”

I could see it coming. The next day he surprised everybody on the ward by getting up early and polishing that latrine till it sparkled, and then went to work on the hall floors when the black boys asked him to. Surprised everybody but the Big Nurse; she acted like it was nothing surprising at all.