One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest: 50th Anniversary Edition (38 page)

All the guys came over and wanted me to tell them everything that had happened; how was he acting up there? What was he doing? Was it true, what was being rumored over at the gym, that they’d been hitting him every day with EST and he was shrugging it off like water, makin’ book with the technicians on how long he could keep his eyes open after the poles touched.

I told them all I could, and nobody seemed to think a thing about me all of a sudden talking with people—a guy who’d been considered deaf and dumb as far back as they’d known him, talking, listening, just like anybody. I told them everything that they’d heard was true, and tossed in a few stories of my own. They laughed so hard about some of the things he’d said to the nurse that the two Vegetables under their wet sheets on the Chronics’ side grinned and snorted along with the laughter, just like they understood.

When the nurse herself brought the problem of Patient McMurphy up in group the next day, said that for some unusual reason he did not seem to be responding to EST at all and that more drastic means might be required to make contact with him, Harding said, “Now, that is possible, Miss Ratched, yes—but from what I hear about your dealings upstairs with McMurphy, he hasn’t had any difficulty making contact with you.”

She was thrown off balance and flustered so bad with everybody in the room laughing at her, that she didn’t bring it up again.

She saw that McMurphy was growing bigger than ever while he was upstairs where the guys couldn’t see the dent she was making on him, growing almost into a legend. A man out of sight can’t be made to look weak, she decided, and started making plans to bring him back
down to our ward. She figured the guys could see for themselves then that he could be as vulnerable as the next man. He couldn’t continue in his hero role if he was sitting around the day room all the time in a shock stupor.

The guys anticipated this, and that as long as he was on the ward for them to see she would be giving him shock every time he came out of it. So Harding and Scanlon and Fredrickson and I talked over how we could convince him that the best thing for everybody concerned would be his escaping the ward. And by the Saturday when he was brought back to the ward—footworking into the day room like a boxer into a ring, clasping his hands over his head and announcing the champ was back—we had our plan all worked out. We’d wait until dark, set a mattress on fire, and when the firemen came we’d rush him out the door. It seemed such a fine plan we couldn’t see how he could refuse.

But we didn’t think about its being the day he’d made a date to have the girl, Candy, sneak onto the ward for Billy.

They brought him back to the ward about ten in the morning—“Fulla piss an’ vinegar, buddies; they checked my plugs and cleaned my points, and I got a glow on like a Model T spark coil. Ever use one of those coils around Halloween time?
Zam
! Good clean fun.” And he batted around the ward bigger than ever, spilled a bucket of mop water under the Nurses’ Station door, laid a pat of butter square on the toe of the least black boy’s white suede shoes without the black boy noticing, and smothered giggles all through lunch while it melted to show a color Harding referred to as a “most suggestive yellow,”—bigger than ever, and each time he brushed close by a student nurse she gave a yip and rolled her eyes and pitter-patted off down the hall, rubbing her flank.

We told him of our plan for his escape, and he told us there was no hurry and reminded us of Billy’s date. “We can’t disappoint Billy Boy, can we, buddies? Not when he’s about to cash in his cherry. And it should be a nice little party tonight if we can pull it off; let’s say maybe it’s my going-away party.”

It was the Big Nurse’s weekend to work—she didn’t want to miss his return—and she decided we’d better have us a meeting to get something settled. At the meeting she tried once more to bring up her suggestion for a more drastic measure, insisting that the doctor
consider such action “before it is too late to help the patient.” But McMurphy was such a whirligig of winks and yawns and belches while she talked, she finally hushed, and when she did he gave the doctor and all the patients fits by agreeing with everything she said.

“Y’know, she might be right, Doc; look at the good that few measly volts have done me. Maybe if we
doubled
the charge I could pick up channel eight, like Martini; I’m tired of layin’ in bed hallucinatin’ nothing but channel four with the news and weather.”

The nurse cleared her throat, trying to regain control of her meeting. “I wasn’t suggesting that we consider more shock, Mr. McMurphy—”

“Ma’am?”

“I was suggesting—that we consider an operation. Very simple, really. And we’ve had a history of past successes eliminating aggressive tendencies in certain hostile cases—”

“Hostile? Ma’am, I’m friendly as a pup. I haven’t kicked the tar out of an aide in nearly two weeks. There’s been no cause to do any cuttin’, now, has there?”

She held out her smile, begging him to see how sympathetic she was. “Randle, there’s no cutting involv—”

“Besides,” he went on, “it wouldn’t be any use to lop ‘em off; I got another pair in my nightstand.”

“Another—pair?”

“One about as big as a baseball, Doc.”

“Mr. McMurphy!” Her smile broke like glass when she realized she was being made fun of.

“But the other one is big enough to be considered normal.”

He went on like this clear up to the time we were ready for bed. By then there was a festive, county-fair feeling on the ward as the men whispered of the possibility of having a party if the girl came with drinks. All the guys were trying to catch Billy’s eye and grinning and winking at him every time he looked. And when we lined up for medication McMurphy came by and asked the little nurse with the crucifix and the birthmark if he could have a couple of vitamins. She looked surprised and said she didn’t see that there was any reason why not and gave him some pills the size of birds’ eggs. He put them in his pocket.

“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 get 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. (“Ahhh, 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 hee, 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 of 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.”

There were two girls in the dark, Candy and the other one that hadn’t shown up for the fishing trip. “Hot dog,” Turkle said, helping them through, “enough for ever’body.”

We all went to help: they had to lift their tight skirts up to their thighs to step through the window. Candy said, “You damn McMurphy,” and tried so wild to throw her arms around him that she came near to breaking the bottles she held by the neck in each hand. She was weaving around quite a bit, and her hair was falling out of the hairdo she had piled on top of her head. I thought she looked better with it swung at the back like she’d worn it on the fishing trip. She gestured at the other girl with a bottle as she came through the window.