One flew over cuckoo's nest

“No. No, listen. They don’t bust you that way; they work on you ways you can’t fight! They put things in! They install things. They start as quick as they see you’re gonna be big and go to working and installing their filthy machinery when you’re little, and keep on and on and on till you’re fixed!”

“Take ‘er easy, buddy; shhh.”

“And if you fight they lock you someplace and make you stop—”

“Easy, easy, Chief. Just cool it for a while. They heard you.” He lay down and kept still. My bed was hot, I noticed. I could hear the squeak of rubber soles as the black boy came in with a flashlight to see what the noise was. We lay still till he left.

“He finally just drank,” I whispered. I didn’t seem to be able to stop talking, not till I finished telling what I thought was all of it. “And the last I see him he’s blind in the cedars from drinking and every time I see him put the bottle to his mouth he don’t suck out of it, it sucks out of him until he’s shrunk so wrinkled and yellow even the dogs don’t know him, and we had to cart him out of the cedars, in a pickup, to a place in Portland, to die. I’m not saying they kill. They didn’t kill him. They did something else.”

I was feeling awfully sleepy. I didn’t want to talk any more. I tried to think back on what I’d been saying, and it didn’t seem like what I’d wanted to say.

“I been talking crazy, ain’t I?”

“Yeah, Chief” — he rolled over in his bed — “you been talkin’ crazy.”

“It wasn’t what I wanted to say. I can’t say it all. It don’t make sense.”

“I didn’t say it didn’t make sense, Chief, I just said it was talkin’ crazy.”

He didn’t say anything after that for so long I thought he’d gone to sleep. I wished I’d told him good night. I looked over at him, and he was turned away from me. His arm wasn’t under the covers, and I could just make out the aces and eights tattooed there. It’s big, I thought, big as my arms used to be when I played football. I wanted to reach over and touch the place where he was tattooed, to see if he was still alive. He’s layin’ awful quiet, I told myself, I ought to touch him to see if he’s still alive. …

That’s a lie. I know he’s still alive. That ain’t the reason I want to touch him.

I want to touch him because he’s a man.

That’s a lie too. There’s other men around. I could touch them.

I want to touch him because I’m one of these queers!

But that’s a lie too. That’s one fear hiding behind another. If I was one of these queers I’d want to do other things with him. I just want to touch him because he’s who he is.

But as I was about to reach over to that arm he said, “Say, Chief,” and rolled in bed with a lurch of covers, facing me, “Say, Chief, why don’t you come on this fishin’ trip with us tomorrow?”

I didn’t answer.

“Come on, what do ya say? I look for it to be one hell of an occasion. You know these two aunts of mine comin’ to pick us up? Why, those ain’t aunts, man, no; both those girls are workin’ shimmy dancers and hustlers I know from Portland. What do you say to that?”

I finally told him I was one of the Indigents.

“You’re what?”

“I’m broke.”

“Oh,” he said. “Yeah, I hadn’t thought of that.”

He was quiet for a time again, rubbing that scar on his nose with his finger. The finger stopped. He raised up on his elbow and looked at me.

“Chief,” he said slowly, looking me over, “when you were full-sized, when you used to be, let’s say, six seven or eight and weighed two eighty or so — were you strong enough to, say, lift something the size of that control panel in the tub room?”

I thought about that panel. It probably didn’t weigh a lot more’n oil drums I’d lifted in the Army. I told him I probably could of at one time.

“If you got that big again, could you still lift it?”

I told him I thought so.

“To hell with what you think; I want to know can you promise to lift it if I get you big as you used to be? You promise me that, and you not only get my special body-buildin’ course for nothing but you get yourself a ten-buck fishin’ trip, free!” He licked his lips and lay back. “Get me good odds too, I bet.”

He lay there chuckling over some thought of his own. When I asked him how he was going to get me big again he shushed me with a finger to his lips.

“Man, we can’t let a secret like this out. I didn’t say I’d tell you how, did I? Hoo boy, blowin’ a man back up to full size is a secret you can’t share with everybody, be dangerous in the hands of an enemy. You won’t even know it’s happening most of the time yourself. But I give you my solemn word, you follow my training program, and here’s what’ll happen.”

He swung his legs out of bed and sat on the edge with his hands on his knees. The dim light coming in over his shoulder from the Nurses’ Station caught the shine of his teeth and the one eye glinting down his nose at me. The rollicking auctioneer’s voice spun softly through the dorm.

“There you’ll be. It’s the Big Chief Bromden, cuttin’ down the boulevard — men, women, and kids rockin’ back on their heels to peer at him: ‘Well well well, what giant’s this here, takin’ ten feet at a step and duckin’ for telephone wires?’ Comes stompin’ through town, stops just long enough for virgins, the rest of you twitches might’s well not even line up ‘less you got tits like muskmelons, nice strong white legs long enough to lock around his mighty back, and a little cup of poozle warm and juicy and sweet as butter an’ honey…”

In the dark there he went on, spinning his tale about how it would be, with all the men scared and all the beautiful young girls panting after me. Then he said he was going out right this very minute and sign my name up as one of his fishing crew. He stood up, got the towel from his bedstand and wrapped it around his hips and put on his cap, and stood over my bed.

“Oh man, I tell you, I tell you, you’ll have women trippin’ you and beatin’ you to the floor.”

And all of a sudden his hand shot out and with a swing of his arm untied my sheet, cleared my bed of covers, and left me lying there naked.

“Look there, Chief. Haw. What’d I tell ya? You growed a half a foot already.”

Laughing, he walked down the row of beds to the hall.

25

Two whores on their way down from Portland to take us deep-sea fishing in a boat! It made it tough to stay in bed until the dorm lights came on at six-thirty.

I was the first one up out of the dorm to look at the list posted on the board next to the Nurses’ Station, check to see if my name was really signed there. SIGN UP FOR DEEP SEA FISHING was printed in big letters at the top, then McMurphy had signed first and Billy Bibbit was number one, right after McMurphy. Number three was Harding and number four was Fredrickson, and all the way down to number ten where nobody’d signed yet. My name was there, the last put down, across from the number nine. I was actually going out of the hospital with two whores on a fishing boat; I had to keep saying it over and over to myself to believe it.

The three black boys slipped up in front of me and read the list with gray fingers, found my name there and turned to grin at me.

“Why, who you s’pose signed Chief Bromden up for this foolishness? Inniuns ain’t able to write.”

“What makes you think Inniuns able to read?”

The starch was still fresh and stiff enough this early that their arms rustled in the white suits when they moved, like paper wings. I acted deaf to them laughing at me, like I didn’t even know, but when they stuck a broom out for me to do their work up the hall, I turned around and walked back to the dorm, telling myself, The hell with that. A man goin’ fishing with two whores from Portland don’t have to take that crap.