Ken Kesey - One flew over cuckoo's nest

By the time it dawned on the government men that they were being poked fun at, all the council who’d been sitting on the porch of our shack, putting pipes in the pockets of their red and black plaid wool shirts and taking them back out again, grinning at one another and at Papa — they had all busted up laughing fit to kill. Uncle R & J Wolf was rolling on the ground, gasping with laughter and saying, “You know it, white man.”

It sure did get their goat; they turned without saying a word and walked off toward the highway, red-necked, us laughing behind them. I forget sometimes what laughter can do.

The Big Nurse’s key hits the lock, and the black boy is up to her soon as she’s in the door, shifting from foot to foot like a kid asking to pee. I’m close enough I hear McMurphy’s name come into his conversation a couple of times, so I know he’s telling her about McMurphy brushing his teeth, completely forgetting to tell her about the old Vegetable who died during the night. Waving his arms and trying to tell her what that fool redhead’s been up to already, so early in the morning — disrupting things, goin’ contrary to ward policy, can’t she do something?

She glares at the black boy till he stops fidgeting, then looks up the hall to where McMurphy’s singing is booming out of the latrine door louder than ever. “ ‘Oh, your parents don’t like me, they say I’m too po-o-or; they say I’m not worthy to enter your door.’ ”

Her face is puzzled at first; like the rest of us, it’s been so long since she’s heard singing it takes her a second to recognize what it is.

“ ‘Hard livin’s my pleasure, my money’s my o-o-own, an’ them that don’t like me, they can leave me alone.’ ”

She listens a minute more to make sure she isn’t hearing things; then she goes to puffing up. Her nostrils flare open, and every breath she draws she gets bigger, as big and tough-looking’s I seen her get over a patient since Taber was here. She works the hinges in her elbows and fingers. I hear a small squeak. She starts moving, and I get back against the wall, and when she rumbles past she’s already big as a truck, trailing that wicker bag behind in her exhaust like a semi behind a Jimmy Diesel. Her lips are parted, and her smile’s going out before her like a radiator grill. I can smell the hot oil and magneto spark when she goes past, and every step hits the floor she blows up a size bigger, blowing and puffing, roll down anything in her path! I’m scared to think what she’ll do.

Then, just as she’s rolling along at her biggest and meanest, McMurphy steps out of the latrine door right in front of her, holding that towel around his hips — stops her dead! She shrinks to about head-high to where that towel covers him, and he’s grinning down on her. Her own grin is giving way, sagging at the edges.

“Good morning, Miss Rat-shed! How’s things on the outside?”

“You can’t run around here — in a towel!”

“No?” He looks down at the part of the towel she’s eye to eye with, and it’s wet and skin tight. “Towels against ward policy too? Well, I guess there’s nothin’ to do exec—”

“ Stop! don’t you dare. You get back in that dorm and get your clothes on this instant!”

She sounds like a teacher bawling out a student, so McMurphy hangs his head like a student and says in a voice sounds like he’s about to cry, “I can’t do that, ma’am. I’m afraid some thief in the night boosted my clothes whilst I slept. I sleep awful sound on the mattresses you have here.” “Somebody boosted…?”

“Pinched. Jobbed. Swiped. Stole,” he says happily. “You know, man, like somebody boosted my threads.” Saying this tickles him so he goes into a little barefooted dance before her.

“Stole your clothes?”

“That looks like the whole of it.”

“But — prison clothes? Why?”

He stops jigging around and hangs his head again. “All I know is that they were there when I went to bed and gone when I got up. Gone slick as a whistle. Oh, I do know they were nothing but prison clothes, coarse and faded and uncouth, ma’am, well I know it — and prison clothes may not seem like much to those as has more . But to a nude man—”

“That outfit,” she says, realizing, “was supposed to be picked up. You were issued a uniform of green convalescents this morning.”

He shakes his head and sighs, but still don’t look up. “No. No, I’m afraid I wasn’t. Not a thing this morning but the cap that’s on my head and—”

“Williams,” she hollers down to the black boy who’s still at the ward door like he might make a run for it. “Williams, can you come here a moment?”

He crawls to her like a dog to a whipping.

“Williams, why doesn’t this patient have an issue of convalescents?”

The black boy is relieved. He straightens up and grins, raises that gray hand and points down the other end of the hall to one of the big ones. “Mistuh Washington over there is ‘signed to the laundry duty this mornin’. Not me. No.”

“Mr. Washington!” She nails him with his mop poised over the bucket, freezes him there. “Will you come here a moment!” The mop slides without a sound back in the bucket, and with slow, careful movements he leans the handle against the wall. He turns around and looks down at McMurphy and the least black boy and the nurse. He looks then to his left and to his right, like she might be yelling at somebody else.

“Come down here!”

He puts his hands in his pockets and starts shuffling down the hall to her. He never walks very fast, and I can see how if he don’t get a move on she might freeze him and shatter him all to hell by just looking; all the hate and fury and frustration she was planning to use on McMurphy is beaming out down the hall at the black boy, and he can feel it blast against him like a blizzard wind, slowing him more than ever. He has to lean into it, pulling his arms around him. Frost forms in his hair and eyebrows. He leans farther forward, but his steps are getting slower; he’ll never make it.

Then McMurphy takes to whistling “Sweet Georgia Brown,” and the nurse looks away from the black boy just in time. Now she’s madder and more frustrated than ever, madder’n I ever saw her get. Her doll smile is gone, stretched tight and thin as a red-hot wire. If some of the patients could be out to see her now, McMurphy could start collecting his bets.

The black boy finally gets to her, and it took him two hours. She draws a long breath. “Washington, why wasn’t this man issued a change of greens this morning? Couldn’t you see he had nothing on but a towel?”

“And my cap,” McMurphy whispers, tapping the brim with his finger.

“Mr. Washington?”

The big black boy looks at the little one who pointed him out, and the little black boy commences to fidget again. The big boy looks at him a long time with those radio-tube eyes, plans to square things with him later; then the head turns and he looks McMurphy up and down, taking in the hard, heavy shoulders, the lopsided grin, the scar on the nose, the hand clamping the towel in place, and then he looks at the nurse.

“I guess—” he starts out.

“You guess! You’ll do more than guess! You’ll get him a uniform this instant, Mr. Washington, or spend the next two weeks working on Geriatrics Ward! Yes. You may need a month of bedpans and slab baths to refresh your appreciation of just how little work you aides have to do on this ward. If this was one of the other wards, who do you think would be scouring the hall all day? Mr. Bromden here? No, you know who it would be. We excuse you aides from most of your housekeeping duties to enable you to see to the patients. And that means seeing that they don’t parade around exposed. What do you think would have happened if one of the young nurses had come in early and found a patient running round the halls without a uniform? What do you think!”