Ken Kesey - One flew over cuckoo's nest

“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.”