One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (34 page)

“There. That’s the one. Looks like it’s propped up outta the weeds—my misspent youth’s humble abode.”

Out along the dim six-o’clock street, I saw leafless trees standing, striking the sidewalk there like wooden lightning, concrete split apart where they hit, all in a fenced-in ring. An iron line of pickets stuck out of the ground along the front of a tangleweed yard, and on back was a big frame house with a porch, leaning a rickety shoulder hard into the wind so’s not to be sent tumbling away a couple of blocks like an empty cardboard grocery box. The wind was blowing a few drops of rain, and I saw the house had its eyes clenched shut and locks at the door banged 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 oft 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.

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 bow 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 be 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 he 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 day room ready, the least black boy asked if she wanted him to go down and get McMurphy and Washington for the meeting, but she said no, it was all right, let him stay—besides, some of the men here might like a chance to discuss our Mr. Randle Patrick McMurphy in the absence of his dominating presence.

They started the meeting telling funny stories about him and what he’d done, and talked for a while about what a great guy he was, and she kept still, waiting till they all talked this out of their systems. Then the other questions started coming up. What about McMurphy? What made him go on like he was, do the things he did? Some of the guys wondered if maybe that tale of him faking fights at the work farm to get sent here wasn’t just more of his spoofing, and that maybe he was crazier than people thought. The Big Nurse smiled at this and raised her hand.

“Crazy like a fox,” she said. “I believe that is what you’re trying to say about Mr. McMurphy.”

“What do you m-m-mean?” Billy asked. McMurphy was his special friend and hero, and he wasn’t too sure he was pleased with the way she’d laced that compliment with things she didn’t say out loud. “What do you m-m-mean, ‘like a fox’?”

“It’s a simple observation, Billy,” the nurse answered pleasantly. “Let’s see if some of the other men could tell you what it means. What about you, Mr. Scanlon?”

“She means, Billy, that Mack’s nobody’s fool.”

“Nobody said he wuh-wuh-wuh-
was!”
Billy hit the arm of the chair with his fist to get out the last word. “But Miss Ratched was im-implying—”

“No, Billy, I wasn’t implying anything. I was simply observing that Mr. McMurphy isn’t one to run a risk without a reason. You would agree to that, wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t all of you agree to that?”

Nobody said anything.

“And yet,” she went on, “he seems to do things without thinking of himself at all, as if he were a martyr or a saint. Would anyone venture that Mr. McMurphy was a saint?”

She knew she was safe to smile around the room, waiting for an answer.

“No, not a saint
or
a martyr. Here. Shall we examine a cross-section of this man’s philanthropy?” She took a sheet of yellow paper out of her basket. “Look at some of these
gifts
, as devoted fans of his might call them. First, there was the gift of the tub room. Was that actually his to give? Did he lose anything by acquiring it as a gambling casino? On the other hand, how much do you suppose he made in the short time he was croupier of his little Monte Carlo here on the ward? How much did you lose, Bruce? Mr. Sefelt? Mr. Scanlon? I think you all have some idea what your personal losses were, but do you know what his total winnings came to, according to deposits he has made at Funds? Almost three hundred dollars.”

Scanlon gave a low whistle, but no one else said anything.

“I have various other bets he made listed here, if any of you care to look, including something to do with deliberately trying to upset the staff. And all of this gambling was, is, completely against ward policy and every one of you who dealt with him knew it.”

She looked at the paper again, then put it back in the basket.

“And this recent fishing trip? What do you suppose Mr. McMurphy’s profit was on this venture? As I see it, he was provided with a car of the doctor’s, even with money from the doctor for gasoline, and, I am told, quite a few other benefits—without having paid a nickel. Quite like a fox, I must say.”

She held up her hand to stop Billy from interrupting.

“Please, Billy, understand me: I’m not criticizing this sort of activity as such; I just thought it would be better if we didn’t have any delusions about the man’s motives. But, at any rate, perhaps it isn’t fair to make these accusations without the presence of the man we are speaking of. Let’s return to the problem we were discussing yesterday—what was it?” She went leafing through her basket. “What was it, do you remember, Doctor Spivey?”

The doctor’s head jerked up. “No… wait… I think…”

She pulled a paper from a folder. “Here it is. Mr. Scanlon; his feelings about explosives. Fine. We’ll go into that now, and at some other time when Mr. McMurphy is present we’ll return to him. I do think, however, that you might give what was said today some thought. Now, Mr. Scanlon…”

Later that day there were eight or ten of us grouped together at the canteen door, waiting till the black boy was finished shoplifting hair oil, and some of the guys brought it up again. They said they didn’t agree with what the Big Nurse had been saying, but, hell, the old girl had some good points. And yet, damn it, Mack’s still a good guy… really.

Harding finally brought the conversation into the open.

“My friends, thou protest too much to believe the protesting. You are all believing deep inside your stingy little hearts that our Miss Angel of Mercy Ratched is absolutely correct in every assumption she made today about McMurphy. You know she was, and so do I. But why deny it? Let’s be honest and give this man his due instead of secretly criticizing his capitalistic talent. What’s wrong with him making a little profit? We’ve all certainly got our money’s worth every time he fleeced us, haven’t we? He’s a shrewd character with an eye out for a quick dollar. He doesn’t make any pretense about his motives, does he? Why should we? He has a healthy and honest attitude about his chicanery, and I’m all for him, just as I’m for the dear old capitalistic system of free individual enterprise, comrades, for him and his downright bullheaded gall and the American flag, bless it, and the Lincoln Memorial and the whole bit. Remember the Maine, P. T. Barnum and the Fourth of July. I feel
compelled
to defend my friend’s honor as a good old red, white, and blue hundred-per-cent American con man. Good guy, my foot. McMurphy would be embarrassed to absolute
tears
if he were aware of some of the simon-pure motives people had been claiming were behind some of his dealings. He would take it as a direct effrontery to his craft.”