بخش 11

I see a Chronic float into sight a little below me. It’s old Colonel Matterson, reading from the wrinkled scripture of that long yellow hand. I look close at him because I figure it’s the last time I’ll ever see him. His face is enormous, almost more than I can bear. Every hair and wrinkle of him is big, as though I was looking at him with one of those microscopes. I see him so clear I see his whole life. The face is sixty years of southwest Army camps, rutted by iron-rimmed caisson wheels, worn to the bone by thousands of feet on two-day marches.

He holds out that long hand and brings it up in front of his eyes and squints into it, brings up his other hand and underlines the words with a finger wooden and varnished the color of a gunstock by nicotine. His voice as deep and slow and patient, and I see the words come out dark and heavy over his brittle lips when he reads.

“No… The flag is… Ah-mer-ica. America is… the plum. The peach. The wah-ter-mel-on. America is… the gumdrop. The pump-kin seed. America is… tell-ah-vision.”

It’s true. It’s all wrote down on that yellow hand. I can read it along with him myself.

“Now… The cross is… Mex-i-co.” He looks up to see if I’m paying attention, and when he sees I am he smiles at me and goes on. “Mexico is… the wal-nut. The hazelnut. The ay-corn. Mexico is… the rain-bow. The rain-bow is… wooden. Mexico is… woo-den.”

I can see what he’s driving at. He’s been saying this sort of thing for the whole six years he’s been here, but I never paid him any mind, figured he was no more than a talking statue, a thing made out of bone and arthritis, rambling on and on with these goofy definitions of his that didn’t make a lick of sense. Now, at last, I see what he’s saying. I’m trying to hold him for one last look to remember him, and that’s what makes me look hard enough to understand. He pauses and peers up at me again to make sure I’m getting it, and I want to yell out to him Yes, I see: Mexico is like the walnut; it’s brown and hard and you feel it with your eye and it feels like the walnut! You’re making sense, old man, a sense of your own. You’re not crazy the way they think. Yes… I see…

But the fog’s clogged my throat to where I can’t make a sound. As he sifts away I see him bend back over that hand.

“Now… The green sheep is… Can-a-da. Canada is… the fir tree. The wheat field. The cal-en-dar…”

I strain to see him drifting away. I strain so hard my eyes ache and I have to close them, and when I open them again the colonel is gone. I’m floating by myself again, more lost than ever.

This is the time, I tell myself. I’m going for good.

There’s old Pete, face like a searchlight. He’s fifty yards off to my left, but I can see him plain as though there wasn’t any fog at all. Or maybe he’s up right close and real small, I can’t be sure. He tells me once about how tired he is, and just his saying it makes me see his whole life on the railroad, see him working to figure out how to read a watch, breaking a sweat while he tries to get the right button in the right hole of his railroad overalls, doing his absolute damnedest to keep up with a job that comes so easy to the others they can sit back in a chair padded with cardboard and read mystery stories and girlie books. Not that he ever really figured to keep up—he knew from the start he couldn’t do that—but he had to try to keep up, just to keep them in sight. So for forty years he was able to live, if not right in the world of men, at least on the edge of it.

I can see all that, and be hurt by it, the way I was hurt by seeing things in the Army, in the war. The way I was hurt by seeing what happened to Papa and the tribe. I thought I’d got over seeing those things and fretting over them. There’s no sense in it. There’s nothing to be done.

“I’m tired,” is what he says.

“I know you’re tired, Pete, but I can’t do you no good fretting about it. You know I can’t.”

Pete floats on the way of the old colonel.

Here comes Billy Bibbit, the way Pete come by. They’re all filing by for a last look. I know Billy can’t be more’n a few feet away, but he’s so tiny he looks like he’s a mile off. His face is out to me like the face of a beggar, needing so much more’n anybody can give. His mouth works like a little doll’s mouth.

“And even when I pr-proposed, I flubbed it. I said ‘Huh-honey, will you muh-muh-muh-muh-muh…’ till the girl broke out l-laughing.”

Nurse’s voice, I can’t see where it comes from: “Your mother has spoken to me about this girl, Billy. Apparently she was quite a bit beneath you. What would you speculate it was about her that frightened you so, Billy?”

“I was in luh-love with her.”

I can’t do nothing for you either, Billy. You know that. None of us can. You got to understand that as soon as a man goes to help somebody, he leaves himself wide open. He has to be cagey, Billy, you should know that as well as anyone. What could I do? I can’t fix your stuttering. I can’t wipe the razorblade scars off your wrists or the cigarette burns off the back of your hands. I can’t give you a new mother. And as far as the nurse riding you like this, rubbing your nose in your weakness till what little dignity you got left is gone and you shrink up to nothing from humiliation, I can’t do anything about that, either. At Anzio, I saw a buddy of mine tied to a tree fifty yards from me, screaming for water, his face blistered in the sun. They wanted me to try to go out and help him. They’d of cut me in half from that farmhouse over there.

Put your face away, Billy.

They keep filing past.

It’s like each face was a sign like one of those “I’m Blind” signs the dago accordion players in Portland hung around their necks, only these signs say “I’m tired” or “I’m scared” or “I’m dying of a bum liver” or “I’m all bound up with machinery and people pushing me alla time.” I can read all the signs, it don’t make any difference how little the print gets. Some of the faces are looking around at one another and could read the other fellow’s if they would, but what’s the sense? The faces blow past in the fog like confetti.

I’m further off than I’ve ever been. This is what it’s like to be dead. I guess this is what it’s like to be a Vegetable; you lose yourself in the fog. You don’t move. They feed your body till it finally stops eating; then they burn it. It’s not so bad. There’s no pain. I don’t feel much of anything other than a touch of chill I figure will pass in time.

I see my commanding officer pinning notices on the bulletin board, what we’re to wear today. I see the US Department of Interior bearing down on our little tribe with a gravel-crushing machine.

I see Papa come loping out of a draw and slow up to try and take aim at a big six-point buck springing off through the cedars. Shot after shot puffs out of the barrel, knocking dust all around the buck. I come out of the draw behind Papa and bring the buck down with my second shot just as it starts climbing the rimrock. I grin at Papa.

I never knew you to miss a shot like that before, Papa. Eye’s gone, boy. Can’t hold a bead. Sights on my gun just now was shakin’ like a dog shittin’ peach pits.

Papa, I’m telling you: that cactus moon of Sid’s is gonna make you old before your time.

A man drinks that cactus moon of Sid’s boy, he’s already old before his time. Let’s go gut that animal out before the flies blow him.

That’s not even happening now. You see? There’s nothing you can do about a happening out of the past like that.

Look there, my man…

I hear whispers, black boys.

Look there, that old fool Broom, slipped off to sleep.

Tha’s right, Chief Broom, tha’s right. You sleep an’ keep outta trouble. Yasss.

I’m not cold any more. I think I’ve about made it. I’m off to where the cold can’t reach me. I can stay off here for good. I’m not scared any more. They can’t reach me. Just the words reach me, and those’re fading.

Well… in as much as Billy has decided to walk out on the discussion, does anyone else have a problem to bring before the group?

As a matter of fact, ma’am, there does happen to be something…

That’s that McMurphy. He’s far away. He’s still trying to pull people out of the fog. Why don’t he leave me be?

“…remember that vote we had a day or so back-about the TV time? Well, today’s Friday and I thought I might just bring it up again, just to see if anybody else has picked up a little guts.”

“Mr. McMurphy, the purpose of this meeting is therapy, group therapy, and I’m not certain these petty grievances—”

“Yeah, yeah, the hell with that, we’ve heard it before. Me and some of the rest of the guys decided—”

“One moment, Mr. McMurphy, let me pose a question to the group: do any of you feel that Mr. McMurphy is perhaps imposing his personal desires on some of you too much? I’ve been thinking you might be happier if he were moved to a different ward.”

Nobody says anything for a minute. Then someone says, “Let him vote, why dontcha? Why ya want to ship him to Disturbed just for bringing up a vote? What’s so wrong with changing time?”

“Why, Mr. Scanlon, as I recall, you refused to eat for three days until we allowed you to turn the set on at six instead of six-thirty.”

“A man needs to see the world news, don’t he? God, they coulda bombed Washington and it’d been a week before we’d of heard.”

“Yes? And how do you feel about relinquishing your world news to watch a bunch of men play baseball?”

“We can’t have both, huh? No, I suppose not. Well, what the dickens—I don’t guess they’ll bomb us this week.” “Let’s let him have the vote, Miss Ratched.”

“Very well. But I think this is ample evidence of how much he is upsetting some of you patients. What is it you are proposing, Mr. McMurphy?”

“I’m proposing a revote on watching the TV in the afternoon.”

“You’re certain one more vote will satisfy you? We have more important things—”

“It’ll satisfy me. I just’d kind of like to see which of these birds has any guts and which doesn’t.”

“It’s that kind of talk, Doctor Spivey, that makes me wonder if the patients wouldn’t be more content if Mr. McMurphy were moved.”

“Let him call the vote, why dontcha?”

“Certainly, Mr. Cheswick. A vote is now before the group. Will a show of hands be adequate, Mr. McMurphy, or are you going to insist on a secret ballot?”

“I want to see the hands. I want to see the hands that don’t go up, too.”

“Everyone in favor of changing the television time to the afternoon, raise his hand.”

The first hand that comes up, I can tell, is McMurphy’s, because of the bandage where that control panel cut into him when he tried to lift it. And then off down the slope I see them, other hands coming up out of the fog. It’s like… that big red hand of McMurphy’s is reaching into the fog and dropping down and dragging the men up by their hands, dragging them blinking into the open. First one, then another, then the next. Right on down the line of Acutes, dragging them out of the fog till there they stand, all twenty of them, raising not just for watching TV, but against the Big Nurse, against her trying to send McMurphy to Disturbed, against the way she’s talked and acted and beat them down for years.

Nobody says anything. I can feel how stunned everybody is, the patients as well as the staff. The nurse can’t figure what happened; yesterday, before he tried lifting that panel, there wasn’t but four or five men might of voted. But when she talks she don’t let it show in her voice how surprised she is.

“I count only twenty, Mr. McMurphy.”

“Twenty? Well, why not? Twenty is all of us there—” His voice hangs as he realizes what she means. “Now hold on just a goddamned minute, lady—”

“I’m afraid the vote is defeated.”

“Hold on just one goddamned minute!”

“There are forty patients on the ward, Mr. McMurphy. Forty patients, and only twenty voted. You must have a majority to change the ward policy. I’m afraid the vote is closed.”

The hands are coming down across the room. The guys know they’re whipped, are trying to slip back into the safety of the fog. McMurphy is on his feet.

“Well, I’ll be a sonofabitch. You mean to tell me that’s how you’re gonna pull it? Count the votes of those old birds over there too?”

“Didn’t you explain the voting procedure to him, Doctor?”

“I’m afraid—a majority is called for, McMurphy. She’s right, she’s right.”

“A majority, Mr. McMurphy; it’s in the ward constitution.” “And I suppose the way to change the damned constitution is with a majority vote. Sure. Of all the chicken-shit things I’ve ever seen, this by God takes the cake!”

“I’m sorry, Mr. McMurphy, but you’ll find it written in the policy if you’d care for me to—”

“So this’s how you work this democratic bullshit—hell’s bells!”

“You seem upset, Mr. McMurphy. Doesn’t he seem upset, Doctor? I want you to note this.”

“Don’t give me that noise, lady. When a guy’s getting screwed he’s got a right to holler. And we’ve been damn well screwed.”

“Perhaps, Doctor, in view of the patient’s condition, we should bring this meeting to a close early today—”

“Wait! Wait a minute, let me talk to some of those old guys.”

“The vote is closed, Mr. McMurphy.”

“Let me talk to ‘em.”

He’s coming across the day room at us. He gets bigger and bigger, and he’s burning red in the face. He reaches into the fog and tries to drag Ruckly to the surface because Ruckly’s the youngest.

“What about you, buddy? You want to watch the World Series? Baseball? Baseball games? Just raise that hand up there—”

“Fffffffuck da wife.”

“All right, forget it. You, partner, how about you? What was your name—Ellis? What do you say, Ellis, to watching a ball game on TV? Just raise your hand…”

Ellis’s hands are nailed to the wall, can’t be counted as a vote.

“I said the voting is closed, Mr. McMurphy. You’re just making a spectacle of yourself.”

He don’t pay any attention to her. He comes on down the line of Chronics. “C’mon, c’mon, just one vote from you birds, just raise a hand. Show her you can still do it.”

“I’m tired,” says Pete and wags his head.

“The night is… the Pacific Ocean.” The Colonel is reading off his hand, can’t be bothered with voting.

“One of you guys, for cryin’ out loud! This is where you get the edge, don’t you see that? We have to do this—or we’re whipped! Don’t a one of you clucks know what I’m talking about enough to give us a hand? You, Gabriel? George? No? You, Chief, what about you?”

He’s standing over me in the mist. Why won’t he leave me be?

“Chief, you’re our last bet.”

The Big Nurse is folding her papers; the other nurses are standing up around her. She finally gets to her feet.

“The meeting is adjourned, then”, I hear her say. “And I’d like to see the staff down in the staff room in about an hour. So, if there is nothing el—”

It’s too late to stop it now. McMurphy did something to it that first day, put some kind of hex on it with his hand so it won’t act like I order it. There’s no sense in it, any fool can see; I wouldn’t do it on my own. Just by the way the nurse is staring at me with her mouth empty of words I can see I’m in for trouble, but I can’t stop it. McMurphy’s got hidden wires hooked to it, lifting it slow just to get me out of the fog and into the open where I’m fair game. He’s doing it, wires…

No. That’s not the truth. I lifted it myself.

McMurphy whoops and drags me standing, pounding my back.

“Twenty-one! The Chief’s vote makes it twenty-one! And by God if that ain’t a majority I’ll eat my hat!”

“Yippee,” Cheswick yells. The other Acutes are coming across toward me.

“The meeting was closed,” she says. Her smile is still there, but the back of her neck as she walks out of the day room and into the Nurses’ Station, is red and swelling like she’ll blow apart any second.

But she don’t blow up, not right off, not until about an hour later. Behind the glass her smile is twisted and queer, like we’ve never seen before. She just sits. I can see her shoulders rise and fall as she breathes.

McMurphy looks up at the clock and he says it’s time for the game. He’s over by the drinking fountain with some of the other Acutes, down on his knees scouring off the baseboard. I’m sweeping out the broom closet for the tenth time that day. Scanlon and Harding, they got the buffer going up and down the hall, polishing the new wax into shining figure eights. McMurphy says again that he guesses it must be game time and he stands up, leaves the scouring rag where it lies. Nobody else stops work. McMurphy walks past the window where she’s glaring out at him and grins at her like he knows he’s got her whipped now. When he tips his head back and winks at her she gives that little sideways jerk of her head.

Everybody keeps on at what he’s doing, but they all watch out of the corners of their eyes while he drags his armchair out to in front of the TV set, then switches on the set and sits down. A picture swirls onto the screen of a parrot out on the baseball field singing razor-blade songs. McMurphy gets up and turns up the sound to drown out the music coming down from the speaker in the ceiling, and he drags another chair in front of him and sits down and crosses his feet on the chair and leans back and lights a cigarette. He scratches his belly and yawns.

“Hoo-weee! Man, all I need me now is a can of beer and a red-hot.”

We can see the nurse’s face get red and her mouth work as she stares at him. She looks around for a second and sees everybody’s watching what she’s going to do—even the black boys and the little nurses sneaking looks at her, and the residents beginning to drift in for the staff meeting, they’re watching. Her mouth clamps shut. She looks back at McMurphy and waits till the razor-blade song is finished; then she gets up and goes to the steel door where the controls are, and she flips a switch and the TV picture swirls back into the gray. Nothing is left on the screen but a little eye of light beading right down on McMurphy sitting there.

That eye don’t faze him a bit. To tell the truth, he don’t even let on he knows the picture is turned off; he puts his cigarette between his teeth and pushes his cap forward in his red hair till he has to lean back to see out from under the brim.

And sits that way, with his hands crossed behind his head and his feet stuck out in a chair, a smoking cigarette sticking out from under his hatbrim—watching the TV screen.

The nurse stands this as long as she can; then she comes to the door of the Nurses’ Station and calls across to him he’d better help the men with the housework. He ignores her.

“I said, Mr. McMurphy, that you are supposed to be working during these hours.” Her voice has a tight whine like an electric saw ripping through pine. “Mr. McMurphy, I’m warning you!”

Everybody’s stopped what he was doing. She looks around her, then takes a step out of the Nurses’ Station toward McMurphy.

“You’re committed, you realize. You are… under the jurisdiction of me… the staff.” She’s holding up a fist, all those red-orange fingernails burning into her palm. “Under jurisdiction and control—”

Harding shuts off the buffer, and leaves it in the hall, and goes pulls him a chair up alongside McMurphy and sits down and lights him a cigarette too.

“Mr. Harding! You return to your scheduled duties!”

I think how her voice sounds like it hit a nail, and this strikes me so funny I almost laugh.

“Mr. Har-ding!”

Then Cheswick goes and gets him a chair, and then Billy Bibbit goes, and then Scanlon and then Fredrickson and Sefelt, and then we all put down our mops and brooms and scouring rags and we all go pull us chairs up.

“You men—Stop this. Stop!”

And we’re all sitting there lined up in front of that blanked-out TV set, watching the gray screen just like we could see the baseball game clear as day, and she’s ranting and screaming behind us.

If somebody’d of come in and took a look, men watching a blank TV, a fifty-year-old woman hollering and squealing at the back of their heads about discipline and order and recriminations, they’d of thought the whole bunch was crazy as loons. Part 2 16

Just at the edge of my vision I can see that white enamel face in the Nurses’ Station, teetering over the desk, see it warp and flow as it tries to pull back into shape. The rest of the guys are watching too, though they’re trying to act like they aren’t. They’re trying to act like they still got their eyes on nothing but that blank TV in front of us, but anyone can see they’re all sneaking looks at the Big Nurse behind her glass there, just the same as I am. For the first time she’s on the other side of the glass and getting a taste of how it feels to be watched when you wish more than anything else to be able to pull a green shade between your face and all the eyes that you can’t get away from.

The residents, the black boys, all the little nurses, they’re watching her too, waiting for her to go down the hall where it’s time for the meeting she herself called, and waiting to see how she’ll act now that it’s known she can be made to lose control. She knows they’re watching, but she don’t move. Not even when they start strolling down to the staff room without her. I notice all the machinery in the wall is quiet, like it’s still waiting for her to move.

There’s no more fog any place.

All of a sudden I remember I’m supposed to clean the staff room. I always go down and clean the staff room during these meetings they have, been doing it for years. But now I’m too scared to get out of my chair. The staff always let me clean the room because they didn’t think I could hear, but now that they saw me lift my hand when McMurphy told me to, won’t they know I can hear? Won’t they figure I been hearing all these years, listening to secrets meant only for their ears? What’ll they do to me in that staff room if they know that?

Still, they expect me to be in there. If I’m not, they’ll know for sure that I can hear, be way ahead of me, thinking, You see? He isn’t in here cleaning, don’t that prove it? It’s obvious what’s to be done…

I’m just getting the full force of the dangers we let ourselves in for when we let McMurphy lure us out of the fog.

There’s a black boy leaning against the wall near the door, arms crossed, pink tongue tip darting back and forth over his lips, watching us sitting in front of the TV set. His eyes dart back and forth like his tongue and stop on me, and I see his leather eyelids raise a little. He watches me for a long time, and I know he’s wondering about the way I acted in the group meeting. Then he comes off the wall with a lurch, breaking contact, and goes to the broom closet and brings back a bucket of soapy water and a sponge, drags my arms up and hangs the bucket bale over it, like hanging a kettle on a fireplace boom.

“Le’s go, Chief,” he says. “Le’s get up and get to your duties.”

I don’t move. The bucket rocks on my arm. I don’t make a sign I heard. He’s trying to trick me. He asks me again to get up, and when I don’t move he rolls his eyes up to the ceiling and sighs, reaches down and takes my collar, and tugs a little, and I stand up. He stuffs the sponge in my pocket and points up the hall where the staff room is, and I go.

And while I’m walking up the hall with the bucket, zoom, the Big Nurse comes past me with all her old calm speed and power and turns into the door. That makes me wonder.

Out in the hall all by myself, I notice how clear it is—no fog any place. It’s a little cold where the nurse just went past, and the white tubes in the ceiling circulate frozen light like rods of glowing ice, like frosted refrigerator coils rigged up to glow white. The rods stretch down to the staff-room door where the nurse just turned in at the end of the hall—a heavy steel door like the door of the Shock Shop in Building One, except there are numbers printed on this one, and this one has a little glass peephole up head-high to let the staff peek out at who’s knocking. As I get closer I see there’s light seeping out this peephole, green light, bitter as bile. The staff meeting is about to start in there, is why there’s this green seepage; it’ll be all over the walls and windows by the time the meeting is halfway through, for me to sponge off and squeeze in my bucket, use the water later to clear the drains in the latrine.

Cleaning the staff room is always bad. The things I’ve had to clean up in these meetings nobody’d believe; horrible things, poisons manufactured right out of skin pores and acids in the air strong enough to melt a man. I’ve seen it.

I been in some meetings where the table legs strained and contorted and the chairs knotted and the walls gritted against one another till you could of wrung sweat out the room. I been in meetings where they kept talking about a patient so long that the patient materialized in the flesh, nude on the coffee table in front of them, vulnerable to any fiendish notion they took; they’d have him smeared around in an awful mess before they were finished.

That’s why they have me at the staff meetings, because they can be such a messy affair and somebody has to clean up, and since the staff room is open only during the meetings it’s got to be somebody they think won’t be able to spread the word what’s going on. That’s me. I been at it so long, sponging and dusting and mopping this staff room and the old wooden one at the other place, that the staff usually don’t even notice me; I move around in my chores, and they see right through me like I wasn’t there—the only thing they’d miss if I didn’t show up would be the sponge and the water bucket floating around.

But this time when I tap at the door and the Big Nurse looks through the peephole she looks dead at me, and she takes longer than ordinary unlocking that door to let me in. Her face has come back into shape, strong as ever, it seems to me. Everybody else goes ahead spooning sugar in their coffee and borrowing cigarettes, the way they do before every meeting, but there’s a tenseness in the air. I think it’s because of me at first. Then I notice that the Big Nurse hasn’t even sat down, hasn’t even bothered to get herself a cup of coffee.

She lets me slip through the door and stabs me again with both eyes as I go past her, closes that door when I’m in and locks it, and pivots around and glares at me some more. I know she’s suspicious. I thought she might be too upset by the way McMurphy defied her to pay any attention to me, but she don’t look shook at all. She’s clear-headed and wondering now just how did Mr. Bromden hear that Acute McMurphy asking him to raise his hand on that vote? She’s wondering how did he know to lay down his mop and go sit with the Acutes in front of that TV set? None of the other Chronics did that. She’s wondering if it isn’t time we did some checking on our Mr. Chief Bromden.

I put my back to her and dig into the corner with my sponge. I lift the sponge up above my head so everybody in the room can see how it’s covered with green slime and how hard I’m working; then I bend over and rub harder than ever. But hard as I work and hard as I try to act like I’m not aware of her back there, I can still feel her standing at the door and drilling into my skull till in a minute she’s going to break through, till I’m just about to give up and yell and tell them everything if she don’t take those eyes off me.

Then she realizes that she’s being stared at too—by all the rest of the staff. Just like she’s wondering about me, they are wondering about her and what she’s planning to do about that redhead back down there in the day room. They’re watching to see what she’ll say about him, and they don’t care anything about some fool Indian on his hands and knees in the corner. They’re waiting for her so she quits looking at me and goes and draws a cup of coffee and sits down, stirs sugar in it so careful the spoon never touches the side of the cup.