One flew over cuckoo's nest

on a chain.

And on the porch, hanging, was one of those things the Japs make out of glass and hang on strings — rings and clangs in the least little blow — with only four pieces of glass left to go. These four swung and whipped and rung little chips off on the wooden porch floor.

McMurphy put the car back in gear.

“Once, I been here — since way the hell gone back in the year we were all gettin’ home from that Korea mess. For a visit. My old man and old lady were still alive. It was a good home.”

He let out the clutch and started to drive, then stopped instead.

“My God,” he said, “look over there, see a dress?” He pointed out back. “In the branch of that tree? A rag, yellow and black?”

I was able to see a thing like a flag, flapping high in the branches over a shed.

“The first girl ever drug me to bed wore that very same dress. I was about ten and she was probably less, and at the time a lay seemed like such a big deal I asked her if didn’t she think, feel, we oughta announce it some way? Like, say, tell our folks, ‘Mom, Judy and me got engaged today.’ And I meant what I said, I was that big a fool. I thought if you made it, man, you were legally wed, right there on the spot, whether it was something you wanted or not, and that there wasn’t any breaking the rule. But this little whore — at the most eight or nines — reached down and got her dress off the floor and said it was mine, said, ‘You can hang this up someplace, I’ll go home in my drawers, announce it that way they’ll get the idea.’ Jesus, nine years old,” he said, reached over and pinched Candy’s nose, “and knew a lot more than a good many pros.”

She bit his hand, laughing, and he studied the mark.

“So, anyhow, after she went home in her pants I waited till dark when I had the chance to throw that damned dress out in the night — but you feel that wind? Caught the dress like a kite and whipped it around the house outa sight and the next morning, by God, it was hung up in that tree for the whole town, was how I figured then, to turn out and see.”

He sucked his hand, so woebegone that Candy laughed and gave it a kiss.

“So my colors were flown, and from that day to this it seemed I might as well live up to my name — dedicated lover — and it’s the God’s truth: that little nine-year-old kid out of my youth’s the one who’s to blame.”

The house drifted past. He yawned and winked. “Taught me to love, bless her sweet ass.”

Then — as he was talking — a set of tail-lights going past lit up McMurphy’s face, and the windshield reflected an expression that was allowed only because he figured it’d be too dark for anybody in the car to see, dreadfully tired and strained and frantic, like there wasn’t enough time left for something he had to do…

While his relaxed, good-natured voice doled out his life for us to live, a rollicking past full of kid fun and drinking buddies and loving women and barroom battles over meager honors — for all of us to dream ourselves into.

Part 4

26

The Big Nurse had her next maneuver under way the day after the fishing trip. The idea had come to her when she was talking to McMurphy the day before about how much money he was making off the fishing trip and other little enterprises along that line. She bad worked the idea over that night, looking at it from every direction this time until she was dead sure it could not fail, and all the next day she fed hints around to start a rumor and have it breeding good before she actually said anything about it.

She knew that people, being like they are, sooner or later are going to draw back a ways from somebody who seems to be giving a little more than ordinary, from Santa Clauses and missionaries and men donating funds to worthy causes, and begin to wonder: What’s in it for them? Grin out of the side of their mouths when the young lawyer, say, brings a sack of pecans to the kids in his district school — just before nominations for state senate, the sly devil — and say to one another, He’s nobody’s fool.

She knew it wouldn’t take too much to get the guys to wondering just what it was, now that you mention it, that made McMurphy spend so much time and energy organizing fishing trips to the coast and arranging Bingo parties and coaching basketball teams. What pushed him to keep up a full head of steam when everybody else on the ward had always been content to drift along playing pinochle and reading last year’s magazines? How come this one guy, this Irish rowdy from a work farm where he’d been serving time for gambling and battery, would loop a kerchief around his head, coo like a teenager, and spend two solid hours having every Acute on the ward hoorahing him while he played the girl trying to teach Billy Bibbit to dance? Or how come a seasoned con like this — an old pro, a carnival artist, a dedicated odds-watcher gambling man — would risk doubling his stay in the nuthouse by making more and more an enemy out of the woman who had the say — so as to who got discharged and who didn’t?

The nurse got the wondering started by pasting up a statement of the patients’ financial doings over the last few months; it must have taken her hours of work digging into records. It showed a steady drain out of the funds of all the Acutes, except one. His funds had risen since the day he came in.

The Acutes took to joking with McMurphy about how it looked like he was taking them down the line, and he was never one to deny it. Not the least bit. In fact, he bragged that if he stayed on at this hospital a year or so he just might be discharged out of it into financial independence, retire to Florida for the rest of his life. They all laughed about that when he was around, but when he was off the ward at ET or OT or PT, or when he was in the Nurses’ Station getting bawled out about something, matching her fixed plastic smile with his big ornery grin, they weren’t exactly laughing.

They began asking one another why he’d been such a busy bee lately, hustling things for the patients like getting the rule lifted that the men had to be together in therapeutic groups of eight whenever they went somewhere (“Billy here has been talkin’ about slicin’ his wrists again,” he said in a meeting when he was arguing against the group-of-eight rule. “So is there seven of you guys who’d like to join him and make it therapeutic?”), and like the way he maneuvered the doctor, who was much closer to the patients since the fishing trip, into ordering subscriptions to Playboy and Nugget and Man and getting rid of all the old McCall’s that bloated-face Public Relation had been bringing from home and leaving in a pile on the ward, articles he thought we might be particularly interested in checked with a green-ink pen. McMurphy even had a petition in the mail to somebody back in Washington, asking that they look into the lobotomies and electro-shock that were still going on in government hospitals. I just wonder, the guys were beginning to ask, what’s in it for ol’ Mack?

After the thought had been going around the ward a week or so, the Big Nurse tried to make her play in group meeting; the first time she tried, McMurphy was there at the meeting and he beat her before she got good and started (she started by telling the group that she was shocked and dismayed by the pathetic state the ward had allowed itself to fall into: Look around, for heaven sakes; actual pornography clipped from those smut books and pinned on the walls — she was planning, incidentally, to see to it that the Main Building made an investigation of the dirt that had been brought into this hospital. She sat back in her chair, getting ready to go on and point out who was to blame and why, sitting on that couple seconds of silence that followed her threat like sitting on a throne, when McMurphy broke her spell into whoops of laughter by telling her to be sure, now, an’ remind the Main Building to bring their leetle hand mirrors when they came for the investigation) — so the next time she made her play she made sure he wasn’t at the meeting.

He had a long-distance phone call from Portland and was down in the phone lobby with one of the black boys, waiting for the party to call again. When one o’clock came around and we went to moving things, getting the