One flew over cuckoo's nest

“You see? You see?” He squeals and rolls his eyes and spews stuff from his flask he’s laughing so hard. He’s laughing till i think he’ll explode.

When he finally drowns the laughing he starts back along the row of machines and goes into his lecture again. He stops suddenly and slaps his forehead — “Oh, scatterbrained me!” — and comes running back to the hanging Chronic to rip off another trophy and tie it to his girdle.

Right and left there are other things happening just as bad — crazy, horrible things too goofy and outlandish to cry about and too much true to laugh about — but the fog is getting thick enough I don’t have to watch. And somebody’s tugging at my arm. I know already what will happen: somebody’ll drag me out of the fog and we’ll be back on the ward and there won’t be a sign of what went on tonight and if I was fool enough to try and tell anybody about it they’d say, Idiot, you just had a nightmare; things as crazy as a big machine room down in the bowels of a dam where people get cut up by robot workers don’t exist.

But if they don’t exist, how can a man see them?

It’s Mr. Turkle that pulls me out of the fog by the arm, shaking me and grinning. He says, “You havin’ a bad dream, Mistuh Bromden.” He’s the aide works the long lonely shift from 11 to 7, an old Negro man with a big sleepy grin on the end of a long wobbly neck. He smells like he’s had a little to drink. “Back to sleep now, Mistuh Bromden.”

Some nights he’ll untie the sheet from across me if it’s so tight I squirm around. He wouldn’t do it if he thought the day crew knew it was him, because they’d probably fire him, but he figures the day crew will think it was me untied it. I think he really does it to be kind, to help — but he makes sure he’s safe first.

This time he doesn’t untie the sheet but walks away from me to help two aides I never saw before and a young doctor lift old Blastic onto the stretcher and carry him out, covered with a sheet — handle him more careful than anybody ever handled him before in all his life.

8

Come morning, McMurphy is up before I am, the first time anybody been up before me since Uncle Jules the Wallwalker was here. Jules was a shrewd old white-haired Negro with a theory the world was being tipped over on its side during the night by the black boys; he used to slip out in the early mornings, aiming to catch them tipping it. Like Jules, I’m up early in the mornings to watch what machinery they’re sneaking onto the ward or installing in the shaving room, and usually it’s just me and the black boys in the hall for fifteen minutes before the next patient is out of bed. But this morning I hear McMurphy out there in the latrine as I come out of the covers. Hear him singing! Singing so you’d think he didn’t have a worry in the world. His voice is clear and strong slapping up against the cement and steel.

“ ‘Your horses are hungry, that’s what she did say.’ ” He’s enjoying the way the sound rings in the latrine. “ ‘Come sit down beside me, an’ feed them some hay.’ ” He gets a breath, and his voice jumps a key, gaining pitch and power till it’s joggling the wiring in all the walls. “ ‘My horses ain’t hungry, they won’t eat your hay-ay-aeee.’ ” He holds the note and plays with it, then swoops down with the rest of the verse to finish it off. “ ‘So fare-thee-well, darlin’, I’m gone on my way.’ ”

Singing! Everybody’s thunderstruck. They haven’t heard such a thing in years, not on this ward. Most of the Acutes in the dorm are up on their elbows, blinking and listening. They look at one another and raise their eyebrows. How come the black boys haven’t hushed him up out there? They never let anybody raise that much racket before, did they? How come they treat this new guy different? He’s a man made outa skin and bone that’s due to get weak and pale and die, just like the rest of us. He lives under the same laws, gotta eat, bumps up against the same troubles; these things make him just as vulnerable to the Combine as anybody else, don’t they?

But the new guy is different, and the Acutes can see it, different from anybody been coming on this ward for the past ten years, different from anybody they ever met outside. He’s just as vulnerable, maybe, but the Combine didn’t get him.

“ ‘My wagons are loaded,’ ” he sings, “ ‘my whip’s in my hand…’ ”

How’d he manage to slip the collar? Maybe, like old Pete, the Combine missed getting to him soon enough with controls. Maybe he growed up so wild all over the country, batting around from one place to another, never around one town longer’n a few months when he was a kid so a school never got much a hold on him, logging, gambling, running carnival wheels, traveling lightfooted and fast, keeping on the move so much that the Combine never had a chance to get anything installed. Maybe that’s it, he never gave the Combine a chance, just like he never gave the black boy a chance to get to him with the thermometer yesterday morning, because a moving target is hard to hit.

No wife wanting new linoleum. No relatives pulling at him with watery old eyes. No one to care about, which is what makes him free enough to be a good con man. And maybe the reason the black boys don’t rush into that latrine and put a stop to his singing is because they know he’s out of control, and they remember that time with old Pete and what a man out of control can do. And they can see that McMurphy’s a lot bigger than old Pete; if it comes down to getting the best of him, it’s going to take all three of them and the Big Nurse waiting on the sidelines with a needle. The Acutes nod at one another; that’s the reason, they figure, that the black boys haven’t stopped his singing where they would stop any of the rest of us.

I come out of the dorm into the hall just as McMurphy comes out of the latrine. He’s got his cap on and not much else, just a towel grabbed around his hips. He’s holding a toothbrush in his other hand. He stands in the hall, looking up and down, rocking up on his toes to keep off the cold tile as much as he can. Picks him out a black boy, the least one, and walks up to him and whaps him on the shoulder just like they’d been friends all their lives.

“Hey there, old buddy, what’s my chance of gettin’ some toothpaste for brushin’ my grinders?”

The black boy’s dwarf head swivels and comes nose to knuckle with that hand. He frowns at it, then takes a quick check where’s the other two black boys just in case, and tells McMurphy they don’t open the cabinet till six- forty-five. “It’s a policy,” he says.

“Is that right? I mean, is that where they keep the toothpaste? In the cabinet?”

“Tha’s right, locked in the cabinet.”

The black boy tries to go back to polishing the baseboards, but that hand is still lopped over his shoulder like a big red clamp.

“Locked in the cabinet, is it? Well well well, now why do you reckon they keep the toothpaste locked up? I mean, it ain’t like it’s dangerous, is it? You can’t poison a man with it, can you? You couldn’t brain some guy with the tube, could you? What reason you suppose they have for puttin’ something as harmless as a little tube of toothpaste under lock and key?”

“It’s ward policy, Mr. McMurphy, tha’s the reason.” And when he sees that this last reason don’t affect McMurphy like it should, he frowns at that hand on his shoulder and adds, “What you s’pose it’d be like if evahbody was to brush their teeth whenever they took a notion to brush?”

McMurphy turns loose the shoulder, tugs at that tuft of red wool at his neck, and thinks this over. “Uh-huh, uh-huh, I think I can see what you’re drivin’ at: ward policy is for those that can’t brush after every meal.”

“My gaw, don’t you see?”

“Yes, now, I do. You’re saying people’d be brushin’ their teeth whenever the spirit moved them.”

“Tha’s right, tha’s why we—”

“And, lordy, can you imagine? Teeth bein’ brushed at six-thirty, six-twenty — who can tell? maybe even six o’clock. Yeah, I can see your point.”

He winks past the black boy at me standing against the wall.

“I gotta get this baseboard cleaned, McMurphy.”

“Oh. I didn’t mean to keep you from your job.” He starts to back away as the black boy bends to his work again. Then he comes forward and leans over to look in the can at the black boy’s side. “Well, look here; what do we have here?”

The black boy peers down. “Look where?”