Ken Kesey - One flew over cuckoo's nest

“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 had 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.

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.