by Ken Kesey
"Not when we sleep," Cheswick says, "but all the rest of the time, and that's the truth."
"The hell with that. I'll tell that coon over there to turn it off or get his fat little ass kicked!"
He starts to stand up, and Harding touches his arm. "Friend, that is exactly the kind of statement that gets one branded assaultive. Are you so eager to forfeit the bet?"
McMurphy looks at him. "That's the way it is, huh? A pressure game? Keep the old pinch on?"
"That's the way it is."
He slowly lowers himself back into his seat, saying, "Horse muh-noo-ur."
Harding looks about at the other Acutes around the card table. "Gentlemen, already I seem to detect in our redheaded challenger a most unheroic decline of his TV-cowboy stoicism."
He looks at McMurphy across the table, smiling. McMurphy nods at him and tips his head back for the wink and licks his big thumb. "Well sir, ol' Professor Harding sounds like he's getting cocky. He wins a couple of splits and he goes to comin' on like a wise guy. Well well well; there he sits with a deuce showing and here's a pack of Mar'boros says he backs down.... Whups, he sees me, okeedokee, Perfessor, here's a trey, he wants another, gets another deuce, try for the big five, Perfessor? Try for that big double pay, or play it safe? Another pack says you won't. Well well well, the Perfessor sees me, this tells the tale, too bad, another lady and the Perfessor flunks his exams...."
The next song starts up from the speaker, loud and clangy and a lot of accordion. McMurphy takes a look up at the speaker, and his spiel gets louder and louder to match it.
"... hey-ya hey-ya, okay, next, goddammit, you hit or you sit ... comin at ya ... !"
Right up to the lights out at nine-thirty.
I could of watched McMurphy at that blackjack table all night, the way he dealt and talked and roped them in and led them smack up to the point where they were just about to quit, then backed down a hand or two to give them confidence and bring them along again. Once he took a break for a cigarette and tilted back in his chair, his hands folded behind his head, and told the guys, "The secret of being a top-notch con man is being able to know what the mark wants, and how to make him think he's getting it. I learned that when I worked a season on a skillo wheel in a carnival. You fe-e-el the sucker over with your eyes when he comes up and you say, 'Now here's a bird that needs to feel tough.' So every time he snaps at you for taking him you quake in your boots, scared to death, and tell him, 'Please, sir. No trouble. The next roll is on the house, sir.' So the both of you are getting what you want."
He rocks forward, and the legs of his chair come down with a crack. He picks up the deck, zips his thumb over it, knocks the edge of it against the table top, licks his thumb and finger.
"And what I deduce you marks need is a big fat pot to temptate you. Here's ten packages on the next deal. Hey-yah, comin' at you, guts ball from here on out...."
And throws back his head and laughs out loud at the way the guys hustled to get their bets down.
That laugh banged around the day room all evening, and all the time he was dealing he was joking and talking and trying to get the players to laugh along with him. But they were all afraid to loosen up; it'd been too long. He gave up trying and settled down to serious dealing. They won the deal off him a time or two, but he always bought it back or fought it back, and the cigarettes on each side of him grew in bigger and bigger pyramid stacks.
Then just before nine-thirty he started letting them win, lets them win it all back so fast they don't hardly remember losing. He pays out the last couple of cigarettes and lays down the deck and leans back with a sigh and shoves the cap out of his eyes, and the game is done.
"Well, sir, win a few, lose the rest is what I say." He shakes his head so forlorn. "I don't know--I was always a pretty shrewd customer at twenty-one, but you birds may just be too tough for me. You got some kinda uncanny knack, makes a man leery of playing against such sharpies for real money tomorrow."
He isn't even kidding himself into thinking they fall for that. He let them win, and every one of us watching the game knows it. So do the players. But there still isn't a man raking his pile of cigarettes--cigarettes he didn't really win but only won back because they were his in the first place--that doesn't have a smirk on his face like he's the toughest gambler on the whole Mississippi.
The fat black boy and a black boy named Geever run us out of the day room and commence turning lights off with a little key on a chain, and as the ward gets dimmer and darker the eyes of the little birthmarked nurse in the station get bigger and brighter. She's at the door of the glass station, issuing nighttime pills to the men that shuffle past her in a line, and she's having a hard time keeping straight who gets poisoned with what tonight. She's not even watching where she pours the water. What has distracted her attention this way is that big redheaded man with the dreadful cap and the horrible-looking scar, coming her way. She's watching McMurphy walk away from the card table in the dark day room, his one horny hand twisting the red tuft of hair that sticks out of the little cup at the throat of his work-farm shirt, and I figure by the way she rears back when he reaches the door of the station that she's probably been warned about him beforehand by the Big Nurse. ("Oh, one more thing before I leave it in your hands tonight, Miss Pilbow; that new man sitting over there, the one with the garish red sideburns and facial lacerations--I've reason to believe he is a sex maniac.")
McMurphy sees how she's looking so scared and big-eyed at him, so he sticks his head in the station door where she's issuing pills, and gives her a big friendly grin to get acquainted on. This flusters her so she drops the water pitcher on her foot. She gives a cry and hops on one foot, jerks her hand, and the pill she was about to give me leaps out of the little cup and right down the neck of her uniform where that birthmark stain runs like a river of wine down into a valley.
"Let me give you a hand, ma'am."
And that very hand comes through the station door, scarred and tattooed and the color of raw meat.
"Stay back! There are two aides on the ward with me!"
She rolls her eyes for the black boys, but they are off tying Chronics in bed, nowhere close enough to help in a hurry. McMurphy grins and turns the hand over so she can see he isn't holding a knife. All she can see is the light shining off the slick, waxy, callused palm.
"All I mean to do, miss, is to--"
"Stay back! Patients aren't allowed to enter the--Oh, stay back, I'm a Catholic!" and straightaway jerks at the gold chain around her neck so a cross flies out from between her bosoms, slingshots the lost pill up in the air! McMurphy strikes at the air right in front of her face. She screams and pops the cross in her mouth and clinches her eyes shut like she's about to get socked, stands like that, paper-white except for that stain which turns darker than ever, as though it sucked the blood from all the rest of her body. When she finally opens her eyes again there's that callused hand right in front of her with my little red capsule sitting in it.
"--was to pick up your waterin' can you dropped." He holds that out in the other hand.
Her breath comes out in a loud hiss. She takes the can from him. "Thank you. Good night, good night," and closes the door in the next man's face, no more pills tonight.
In the dorm McMurphy tosses the pill on my bed. "You want your sourball, Chief?"
I shake my head at the pill, and he flips it off the bed like it was a bug pestering him. It hops across the floor with a cricket scrabble. He goes to getting ready for bed, pulling off his clothes. The shorts under his work pants are coal black satin covered with big white whales with red eyes. He grins when he sees I'm looking at the shorts. "From a coed at Oregon State, Chief, a Literary major." He snaps the elastic with his thumb. "She gave them to me because she said I was a symbol."
His arms and neck and face are sunburned and bristled with curly orange hairs. He's got tattoos on each big shoulder; one says "Fighting Leathernecks" and has a devil with a red eye and red horns and an M-1 rifle, and the
other is a poker hand fanned out across his muscle--aces and eights. He puts his roll of clothes on the nightstand next to my bed and goes to punching at his pillow. He's been assigned the bed right next to mine.
He gets between the sheets and tells me I better hit the sack myself, that here comes one of those black boys to douse the lights on us. I look around, and the black boy named Geever is coming, and I kick off my shoes and get in bed just as he walks up to tie a sheet across me. When he's finished with me he takes a last look around and giggles and flips the dorm lights off.
Except for the white powder of light from the Nurses' Station out in the hall, the dorm is dark. I can just make out McMurphy next to me, breathing deep and regular, the covers over him rising and falling. The breathing gets slower and slower, till I figure he's been asleep for a while. Then I hear a soft, throaty sound from his bed, like the chuckle of a horse. He's still awake and he's laughing to himself about something.
He stops laughing and whispers, "Why, you sure did give a jump when I told you that coon was coming, Chief. I thought somebody told me you was deef."
FIRST TIME FOR A LONG, long time I'm in bed without taking that little red capsule (if I hide to keep from taking it, the night nurse with the birthmark sends the black boy named Geever out to hunt me down, hold me captive with his flashlight till she can get the needle ready), so I fake sleep when the black boy's coming past with his light.
When you take one of those red pills you don't just go to sleep; you're paralyzed with sleep, and all night long you can't wake, no matter what goes on around you. That's why the staff gives me the pills; at the old place I took to waking up at night and catching them performing all kinds of horrible crimes on the patients sleeping around me.
I lie still and slow my breathing, waiting to see if something is going to happen. It is dark my lord and I hear them slipping around out there in their rubber shoes; twice they peek in the dorm and run a flashlight over everybody. I keep my eyes shut and keep awake. I hear a wailing from up on Disturbed, loo loo looo--got some guy wired to pick up code signals.
"Oh, a beer, I think, fo' the long night ahead," I hear a black boy whisper to the other. Rubber shoes squeak off toward the Nurses' Station, where the refrigerator is. "You like a beer, sweet thing with a birthmark? Fo' the long night ahead?"
The guy upstairs hushes. The low whine of the devices in the walls gets quieter and quieter, till it hums down to nothing. Not a sound across the hospital--except for a dull, padded rumbling somewhere deep in the guts of the building, a sound that I never noticed before--a lot like the sound you hear when you're standing late at night on top of a big hydroelectric dam. Low, relentless, brute power.
The fat black boy stands out there in the hall where I can see him, looking all around and giggling. He walks toward the dorm door, slow, wiping the wet gray palms in his armpits. The light from the Nurses' Station throws his shadow on the dorm wall big as an elephant, gets smaller as he walks to the dorm door and looks in. He giggles again and unlocks the fuse box by the door and reaches in. "Tha's right, babies, sleep tight."
Twists a knob, and the whole floor goes to slipping down away from him standing in the door, lowering into the building like a platform in a grain elevator!
Not a thing but the dorm floor moves, and we're sliding away from the walls and door and the windows of the ward at a hell of a clip--beds, bedstands, and all. The machinery--probably a cog-and-track affair at each corner of the shaft--is greased silent as death. The only sound I hear is the guys breathing, and that drumming under us getting louder the farther down we go. The light of the dorm door five hundred yards back up this hole is nothing but a speck, dusting the square sides of the shaft with a dim powder. It gets dimmer and dimmer till a faraway scream comes echoing down the sides of the shaft--"Stay back!"--and the light goes out altogether.
The floor reaches some kind of solid bottom far down in the ground and stops with a soft jar. It's dead black, and I can feel the sheet around me choking off my wind. Just as I get the sheet untied, the floor starts sliding forward with a little jolt. Some kind of castors under it I can't hear. I can't even hear the guys around me breathing, and I realize all of a sudden it's because that drumming's gradually got so loud I can't hear anything else. We must be square in the middle of it. I go to clawing at that damned sheet tied across me and just about have it loose when a whole wall slides up, reveals a huge room of endless machines stretching clear out of sight, swarming with sweating, shirtless men running up and down catwalks, faces blank and dreamy in firelight thrown from a hundred blast furnaces.
It--everything I see--looks like it sounded, like the inside of a tremendous dam. Huge brass tubes disappear upward in the dark. Wires run to transformers out of sight. Grease and cinders catch on everything, staining the couplings and motors and dynamos red and coal black.
The workers all move at the same smooth sprint, an easy, fluid stride. No one's in a hurry. One will hold up a second, spin a dial, push a button, throw a switch, and one side of his face flashes white like lightning from the spark of the connecting switch, and run on, up steel steps and along a corrugated iron catwalk--pass each other so smooth and close I hear the slap of wet sides like the slap of a salmon's tail on water--stop again, throw lightning from another switch, and run on again. They twinkle in all directions clean on out of sight, these flash pictures of the dreamy doll faces of the workmen.
A workman's eyes snap shut while he's going at full run, and he drops in his tracks; two of his buddies running by grab him up and lateral him into a furnace as they pass. The furnace whoops a ball of fire and I hear the popping of a million tubes like walking through a field of seed pods. This sound mixes with the whirr and clang of the rest of the machines.
There's a rhythm to it, like a thundering pulse.
The dorm floor slides on out of the shaft and into the machine room. Right away I see what's straight above us--one of those trestle affairs like you find in meat houses, rollers on tracks to move carcasses from the cooler to the butcher without much lifting. Two guys in slacks, white shirts with the sleeves turned back, and thin black ties are leaning on the catwalk above our beds, gesturing to each other as they talk, cigarettes in long holders tracing lines of red light. They're talking but you can't make out the words above the measured roar rising all around them. One of the guys snaps his fingers, and the nearest workman veers in a sharp turn and sprints to his side. The guy points down at one of the beds with his cigarette holder, and the worker trots off to the steel stepladder and runs down to our level, where he goes out of sight between two transformers huge as potato cellars.
When that worker appears again he's pulling a hook along the trestle overhead and taking giant strides as he swings along it. He passes my bed and a furnace whooping somewhere suddenly lights his face up right over mine, a face handsome and brutal and waxy like a mask, wanting nothing. I've seen a million faces like it.
He goes to the bed and with one hand grabs the old Vegetable Blastic by the heel and lifts him straight up like Blastic don't weigh more'n a few pounds; with the other hand the worker drives the hook through the tendon back of the heel, and the old guy's hanging there upside down, his moldy face blown up big, scared, the eyes scummed with mute fear. He keeps flapping both arms and the free leg till his pajama top falls around his head. The worker grabs the top and bunches and twists it like a burlap sack and pulls the trolley clicking back over the trestle to the catwalk and looks up to where those two guys in white shirts are standing. One of the guys takes a scalpel from a holster at his belt. There's a chain welded to the scalpel. The guy lowers it to the worker, loops the other end of the chain around the railing so the worker can't run off with a weapon.
The worker takes the scalpel and slices up the front of old Blastic with a clean swing and the old man stops thrashing around. I expect to be sick, but there's no blood or innards falling out like I was looking to see--just a shower of rust and ashes, and now and again a piece of wire or glass
. Worker's standing there to his knees in what looks like clinkers.
A furnace got its mouth open somewhere, licks up somebody.
I think about jumping up and running around and waking up McMurphy and Harding and as many of the guys as I can, but there wouldn't be any sense in it. If I shook somebody awake he'd say, Why you crazy idiot, what the hell's eating you? And then probably help one of the workers lift me onto one of those hooks himself, saying, How about let's see what the insides of an Indian are like?
I hear the high, cold, whistling wet breath of the fog machine, see the first wisps of it come seeping out from under McMurphy's bed. I hope he knows enough to hide in the fog.
I hear a silly prattle reminds me of somebody familiar, and I roll enough to get a look down the other way. It's the hairless Public Relation with the bloated face, that the patients are always arguing about why it's bloated. "I'll say he does," they'll argue. "Me, I'll say he doesn't; you ever hear of a guy really who wore one?" "Yeh, but you ever hear of a guy like him before?" The first patient shrugs and nods. "Interesting point."
Now he's stripped except for a long undershirt with fancy monograms sewed red on front and back. And I see once and for all (the undershirt rides up his back some as he comes walking past, giving me a peek) that he definitely does wear one, laced so tight it might blow up any second.
And dangling from the stays he's got half a dozen withered objects, tied by the hair like scalps.
He's carrying a little flask of something that he sips from to keep his throat open for talking, and a camphor hanky he puts in front of his nose from time to time to stop out the stink. There's a clutch of schoolteachers and college girls and the like hurrying after him. They wear blue aprons and their hair in pin curls. They are listening to him give a brief lecture on the tour.
He thinks of something funny and has to stop his lecture long enough for a swig from the flask to stop the giggling. During the pause one of his pupils stargazes around and sees the gutted Chronic dangling by his heel. She gasps and jumps back. The Public Relation turns and catches sight of the corpse and rushes to take one of those limp hands and give it a spin. The student shrinks forward for a cautious look, face in a trance.