One flew over cuckoo's nest

bedspread and shined the light under. “How ‘bout that? I bet they’s pieces of gum under here been used a thousand times!”

This tickled McMurphy. He went to giggling at what he saw. The black boy held up the sack and rattled it, and they laughed some more about it. The black boy told McMurphy good night and rolled the top of the sack like it was his lunch and went off somewhere to hide it for later.

“Chief?” McMurphy whispered. “I want you to tell me something.” And he started to sing a little song, a hillbilly song, popular a long time ago: “ ‘Oh, does the Spearmint lose its flavor on the bedpost overnight?’ “

At first I started getting real mad. I thought he was making fun of me like other people had.

“ ‘When you chew it in the morning,’ ” he sang in a whisper, “ ‘will it be too hard to bite?’ ”

But the more I thought about it the funnier it seemed to me. I tried to stop it but I could feel I was about to laugh — not at McMurphy’s singing, but at my own self.

“ ‘This question’s got me goin’, won’t somebody set me right; does the Spearmint lose its flavor on the bedpost o-ver niiiite?’ ”

He held out that last note and twiddled it down me like a feather. I couldn’t help but start to chuckle, and this made me scared I’d get to laughing and not be able to stop. But just then McMurphy jumped off his bed and went to rustling through his nightstand, and I hushed. I clenched my teeth, wondering what to do now. It’d been a long time since I’d let anyone hear me do any more than grunt or bellow. I heard him shut the bedstand, and it echoed like a boiler door. I heard him say, “Here,” and something lit on my bed. Little. Just the size of a lizard or a snake…

“Juicy Fruit is the best I can do for you at the moment, Chief. Package I won off Scanlon pitchin’ pennies.” And he got back in bed.

And before I realized what I was doing, I told him Thank you.

He didn’t say anything right off. He was up on his elbow, watching me the way he’d watched the black boy, waiting for me to say something else. I picked up the package of gum from the bedspread and held it in my hand and told him Thank you.

It didn’t sound like much because my throat was rusty and my tongue creaked. He told me I sounded a little out of practice and laughed at that. I tried to laugh with him, but it was a squawking sound, like a pullet trying to crow. It sounded more like crying than laughing.

He told me not to hurry, that he had till six-thirty in the morning to listen if I wanted to practice. He said a man been still long as me probably had a considerable lot to talk about, and he lay back on his pillow and waited. I thought for a minute for something to say to him, but the only thing that came to my mind was the kind of thing one man can’t say to another because it sounds wrong in words. When he saw I couldn’t say anything he crossed his hands behind his head and started talking himself.

“Ya know, Chief, I was just rememberin’ a time down in the Willamette Valley — I was pickin’ beans outside of Eugene and considering myself damn lucky to get the job. It was in the early thirties so there wasn’t many kids able to get jobs. I got the job by proving to the bean boss I could pick just as fast and clean as any of the adults. Anyway, I was the only kid in the rows. Nobody else around me but grown-ups. And after I tried a time or two to talk to them I saw they weren’t for listening to me — scrawny little patchquilt redhead anyhow. So I hushed. I was so peeved at them not listening to me I kept hushed the livelong four weeks I picked that field, workin’ right along side of them, listening to them prattle on about this uncle or that cousin. Or if somebody didn’t show up for work, gossip about him. Four weeks and not a peep out of me. Till I think by God they forgot I could talk, the mossbacked old bastards. I bided my time. Then, on the last day, I opened up and went to telling them what a petty bunch of farts they were. I told each one just how his buddy had drug him over the coals when he was absent. Hooee, did they listen then! They finally got to arguing with each other and created such a shitstorm I lost my quarter-cent-a-pound bonus I had comin’ for not missin’ a day because I already had a bad reputation around town and the bean boss claimed the disturbance was likely my fault even if he couldn’t prove it. I cussed him out too. My shootin’ off my mouth that time probably cost me twenty dollars or so. Well worth it, too.”

He chuckled a while to himself, remembering, then turned his head on his pillow and looked at me.

“What I was wonderin’, Chief, are you biding your time towards the day you decide to lay into them?”

“No,” I told him. “I couldn’t.”

“Couldn’t tell them off? It’s easier than you think.”

“You’re  … lot bigger, tougher’n I am,” I mumbled.

“How’s that? I didn’t get you, Chief.”

I worked some spit down in my throat. “You are bigger and tougher than I am. You can do it.”

“Me? Are you kidding? Criminy, look at you: you stand a head taller’n any man on the ward. There ain’t a man here you couldn’t turn every way but loose, and that’s a fact!”

“No. I’m way too little. I used to be big, but not no more. You’re twice the size of me.”

“Hoo boy, you are crazy, aren’t you? The first thing I saw when I came in this place was you sitting over in that chair, big as a damn mountain. I tell you, I lived all over Klamath and Texas and Oklahoma and all over around Gallup, and I swear you’re the biggest Indian I ever saw.”

“I’m from the Columbia Gorge,” I said, and he waited for me to go on. “My Papa was a full Chief and his name was Tee Ah Millatoona. That means The-Pine-That-Stands-Tallest-on-the-Mountain, and we didn’t live on a mountain. He was real big when I was a kid. My mother got twice his size.”

“You must of had a real moose of an old lady. How big was she?”

“Oh — big, big.”

“I mean how many feet and inches?”

“Feet and inches? A guy at the carnival looked her over and says five feet nine and weight a hundred and thirty pounds, but that was because he’d just saw her. She got bigger all the time.’”

“Yeah? How much bigger?”

“Bigger than Papa and me together.”

“Just one day took to growin’, huh? Well, that’s a new one on me: I never heard of an Indian woman doing something like that.”

“She wasn’t Indian. She was a town woman from The Dalles.”

“And her name was what? Bromden? Yeah, I see, wait a minute.” He thinks for a while and says, “And when a town woman marries an Indian that’s marryin’ somebody beneath her, ain’t it? Yeah, I think I see.”

“No. It wasn’t just her that made him little. Everybody worked on him because he was big, and wouldn’t give in, and did like he pleased. Everybody worked on him just the way they’re working on you.”

“They who, Chief?” he asked in a soft voice, suddenly serious.

“The Combine. It worked on him for years. He was big enough to fight it for a while. It wanted us to live in inspected houses. It wanted to take the falls. It was even in the tribe, and they worked on him. In the town they beat him up in the alleys and cut his hair short once. Oh, the Combine’s big — big. He fought it a long time till my mother made him too little to fight any more and he gave up.”

McMurphy didn’t say anything for a long time after that. Then he raised up on his elbow and looked at me again, and asked why they beat him up in the alleys, and I told him that they wanted to make him see what he had in store for him only worse if he didn’t sign the papers giving everything to the government.

“What did they want him to give to the government?”

“Everything. The tribe, the village, the falls…”

“Now I remember; you’re talking about the falls where the Indians used to spear salmon — long time ago. Yeah. But the way I remember it the tribe got paid some huge amount.”

“That’s what they said to him. He said, What can you pay for the way a man lives? He said, What can you pay for what a man is? They didn’t understand. Not even the tribe. They stood out in front of our door all holding those checks and they wanted him to tell them what to do now. They kept asking him to invest for them, or tell them where to go, or to buy a farm. But he was too little anymore. And he was too drunk, too. The Combine had whipped him. It beats everybody. It’ll beat you too. They can’t have somebody as big as Papa running around unless he’s one of them. You can see that.”

“Yeah, I reckon I can.”

“That’s why you shouldn’t of broke that window. They see you’re big, now. Now they got to bust you.”

“Like bustin’ a mustang, huh?”