One flew over cuckoo's nest

“Look here in this old can, Sam. What is the stuff in this old can?”

“Tha’s… soap powder.”

“Well, I generally use paste, but” — McMurphy runs his toothbrush down in the powder and swishes it around and pulls it out and taps it on the side of the can — “but this will do fine for me. I thank you. We’ll look into that ward policy business later.”

And he heads back to the latrine, where I can hear his singing garbled by the piston beat of his toothbrushing.

That black boy’s standing there looking after him with his scrub rag hanging limp in his gray hand. After a minute he blinks and looks around and sees I been watching and comes over and drags me down the hall by the drawstring on my pajamas and pushes me to a place on the floor I just did yesterday.

“There! Damn you, right there! That’s where I want you workin’, not gawkin’ around like some big useless cow! There! There!”

And I lean over and go to mopping with my back to him so he won’t see me grin. I feel good, seeing McMurphy get that black boy’s goat like not many men could. Papa used to be able to do it — spraddle-legged, dead-panned, squinting up at the sky that first time the government men showed up to negotiate about buying off the treaty. “Canada honkers up there,” Papa says, squinting up. Government men look, rattling papers. “What are you — ? In July? There’s no — uh — geese this time of year. Uh, no geese.”

They had been talking like tourists from the East who figure you’ve got to talk to Indians so they’ll understand. Papa didn’t seem to take any notice of the way they talked. He kept looking at the sky. “Geese up there, white man. You know it. Geese this year. And last year. And the year before and the year before.”

The men looked at one another and cleared their throats. “Yes. Maybe true, Chief Bromden. Now. Forget geese. Pay attention to contract. What we offer could greatly benefit you — your people — change the lives of the red man.”

Papa said, “… and the year before and the year before and the year before…”

By the time it dawned on the government men that they were being poked fun at, all the council who’d been sitting on the porch of our shack, putting pipes in the pockets of their red and black plaid wool shirts and taking them back out again, grinning at one another and at Papa — they had all busted up laughing fit to kill. Uncle R & J Wolf was rolling on the ground, gasping with laughter and saying, “You know it, white man.”

It sure did get their goat; they turned without saying a word and walked off toward the highway, red-necked, us laughing behind them. I forget sometimes what laughter can do.

The Big Nurse’s key hits the lock, and the black boy is up to her soon as she’s in the door, shifting from foot to foot like a kid asking to pee. I’m close enough I hear McMurphy’s name come into his conversation a couple of times, so I know he’s telling her about McMurphy brushing his teeth, completely forgetting to tell her about the old Vegetable who died during the night. Waving his arms and trying to tell her what that fool redhead’s been up to already, so early in the morning — disrupting things, goin’ contrary to ward policy, can’t she do something?

She glares at the black boy till he stops fidgeting, then looks up the hall to where McMurphy’s singing is booming out of the latrine door louder than ever. “ ‘Oh, your parents don’t like me, they say I’m too po-o-or; they say I’m not worthy to enter your door.’ ”

Her face is puzzled at first; like the rest of us, it’s been so long since she’s heard singing it takes her a second to recognize what it is.

“ ‘Hard livin’s my pleasure, my money’s my o-o-own, an’ them that don’t like me, they can leave me alone.’ ”

She listens a minute more to make sure she isn’t hearing things; then she goes to puffing up. Her nostrils flare open, and every breath she draws she gets bigger, as big and tough-looking’s I seen her get over a patient since Taber was here. She works the hinges in her elbows and fingers. I hear a small squeak. She starts moving, and I get back against the wall, and when she rumbles past she’s already big as a truck, trailing that wicker bag behind in her exhaust like a semi behind a Jimmy Diesel. Her lips are parted, and her smile’s going out before her like a radiator grill. I can smell the hot oil and magneto spark when she goes past, and every step hits the floor she blows up a size bigger, blowing and puffing, roll down anything in her path! I’m scared to think what she’ll do.

Then, just as she’s rolling along at her biggest and meanest, McMurphy steps out of the latrine door right in front of her, holding that towel around his hips — stops her dead! She shrinks to about head-high to where that towel covers him, and he’s grinning down on her. Her own grin is giving way, sagging at the edges.

“Good morning, Miss Rat-shed! How’s things on the outside?”

“You can’t run around here — in a towel!”

“No?” He looks down at the part of the towel she’s eye to eye with, and it’s wet and skin tight. “Towels against ward policy too? Well, I guess there’s nothin’ to do exec—”

“Stop! don’t you dare. You get back in that dorm and get your clothes on this instant!”

She sounds like a teacher bawling out a student, so McMurphy hangs his head like a student and says in a voice sounds like he’s about to cry, “I can’t do that, ma’am. I’m afraid some thief in the night boosted my clothes whilst I slept. I sleep awful sound on the mattresses you have here.” “Somebody boosted…?”

“Pinched. Jobbed. Swiped. Stole,” he says happily. “You know, man, like somebody boosted my threads.” Saying this tickles him so he goes into a little barefooted dance before her.

“Stole your clothes?”

“That looks like the whole of it.”

“But — prison clothes? Why?”

He stops jigging around and hangs his head again. “All I know is that they were there when I went to bed and gone when I got up. Gone slick as a whistle. Oh, I do know they were nothing but prison clothes, coarse and faded and uncouth, ma’am, well I know it — and prison clothes may not seem like much to those as has more. But to a nude man—”

“That outfit,” she says, realizing, “was supposed to be picked up. You were issued a uniform of green convalescents this morning.”

He shakes his head and sighs, but still don’t look up. “No. No, I’m afraid I wasn’t. Not a thing this morning but the cap that’s on my head and—”

“Williams,” she hollers down to the black boy who’s still at the ward door like he might make a run for it. “Williams, can you come here a moment?”

He crawls to her like a dog to a whipping.

“Williams, why doesn’t this patient have an issue of convalescents?”

The black boy is relieved. He straightens up and grins, raises that gray hand and points down the other end of the hall to one of the big ones. “Mistuh Washington over there is ‘signed to the laundry duty this mornin’. Not me. No.”

“Mr. Washington!” She nails him with his mop poised over the bucket, freezes him there. “Will you come here a moment!” The mop slides without a sound back in the bucket, and with slow, careful movements he leans the handle against the wall. He turns around and looks down at McMurphy and the least black boy and the nurse. He looks then to his left and to his right, like she might be yelling at somebody else.

“Come down here!”

He puts his hands in his pockets and starts shuffling down the hall to her. He never walks very fast, and I can see how if he don’t get a move on she might freeze him and shatter him all to hell by just looking; all the hate and fury and frustration she was planning to use on McMurphy is beaming out down the hall at the black boy, and he can feel it blast against him like a blizzard wind, slowing him more than ever. He has to lean into it, pulling his arms around him. Frost forms in his hair and eyebrows. He leans farther forward, but his steps are getting slower; he’ll never make it.

Then McMurphy takes to whistling “Sweet Georgia Brown,” and the nurse looks away from the black boy just in time. Now she’s madder and more frustrated than ever, madder’n I ever saw her get. Her doll smile is gone,