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.

It scared me some, walking off from them like that, because I never went against what the black boys ordered before. I looked back and saw them coming after me with the broom. They’d probably have come right on in the dorm and got me but for McMurphy; he was in there making such a fuss, roaring up and down between the beds, snapping a towel at the guys signed to go this morning, that the black boys decided maybe the dorm wasn’t such safe territory to venture into for no more than somebody to sweep a little dab of hallway.

McMurphy had his motorcycle cap pulled way forward on his red hair to look like a boat captain, and the tattoos showing out from the sleeves of his T-shirt were done in Singapore. He was swaggering around the floor like it was the deck of a ship, whistling in his hand like a bosun’s whistle.

“Hit the deck, mateys, hit the deck or I keelhaul the lot of ye from stock to stern!”

He rang the bedstand next to Harding’s bed with his knuckles.

“Six bells and all’s well. Steady as she goes. Hit the deck. Drop your cocks and grab your socks.”

He noticed me standing just inside the doorway and came rushing over to thump my back like a drum.

“Look here at the Big Chief; here’s an example of a good sailor and fisherman: up before day and out diggin’ red worms for bait. The rest of you scurvy bunch o’ lubbers’d do well to follow his lead. Hit the deck. Today’s the day! Outa the sack and into the sea!”

The Acutes grumbled and griped at him and his towel, and the Chronics woke up to look around with beads blue from lack of blood cut off by sheets tied too tight across the chest, looking around the dorm till they finally centered on me with weak and watered-down old looks, faces wistful and curious. They lay there watching me pull on warm clothes for the trip, making me feel uneasy and a little guilty. They could sense I had been singled out as the only Chronic making the trip. They watched me – old guys welded in wheelchairs for years, with catheters down their legs like vines rooting them for the rest of their lives right where they are, they watched me and knew instinctively that I was going. And they could still be a little jealous it wasn’t them. They could know because enough of the man in them had been damped out that the old animal instincts had taken over (old Chronics wake up sudden some nights, before anybody else knows a guy’s died in the dorm, and throw back their heads and howl), and they could be jealous because there was enough man left to still remember.

McMurphy went out to look at the list and came back and tried to talk one more Acute into signing, going down the line kicking at the beds still had guys in them with sheets pulled over their heads, telling them what a great thing it was to be out there in the teeth of the gale with a he-man sea crackin’ around and a goddam yo-heave-ho and a bottle of rum. “C’mon, loafers, I need one more mate to round out the crew, I need one more goddam volunteer…”

But he couldn’t talk anybody into it. The Big Nurse had the rest scared with her stories of how rough the sea’d been lately and how many boats’d sunk, and it didn’t look like we’d get that last crew member till a half-hour later when George Sorensen came up to McMurphy in the breakfast line where we were waiting for the mess hall to be unlocked for breakfast.

Big toothless knotty old Swede the black boys called Rub-adub George, because of his thing about sanitation, came shuffling up the hall, listing well back so his feet went well out in front of his head (sways backward this way to keep his face as far away from the man he’s talking to as he can), stopped in front of McMurphy, and mumbled something in his hand. George was very shy. You couldn’t see his eyes because they were in so deep under his brow, and he cupped his big palm around most of the rest of his face. His head swayed like a crow’s nest on top of his mastlike spine. He mumbled in his hand till McMurphy finally reached up and pulled the hand away so’s the words could get out.

“Now, George, what is it you’re sayin’?”

“Red worms,” he was saying. “I joost don’t think they do you no good – not for the Chin-nook.”

“Yeah?” McMurphy said. “Red worms? I might agree with you, George, if you let me know what about these red worms you’re speaking of.”

“I think joost a while ago I hear you say Mr. Bromden was out digging the red worms for bait.”

“That’s right, Pop, I remember.”

“So I joost say you don’t have you no good fortune with them worms. This here is the month with one big Chinook run – su-ure. Herring you need. Su-ure. You jig you some herring and use those fellows for bait, then you have some good fortune.”

His voice went up at the end of every sentence – for-chune – like he was asking a question. His big chin, already scrubbed so much this morning he’d worn the hide off it, nodded up and down at McMurphy once or twice, then turned him around to lead him down the hall toward the end of the line. McMurphy called him back.

“Now, hold ‘er a minute, George; you talk like you know something about this fishin’ business.”

George turned and shuffled back to McMurphy, listing back so far it looked like his feet had navigated right out from under him.

“You bet, su-ure. Twenty-five year I work the Chinook trollers, all the way from Half Moon Bay to Puget Sound. Twenty-five year I fish – before I get so dirty.” He held out his hands for us to see the dirt on them. Everybody around leaned over and looked. I didn’t see the dirt but I did see scars worn deep into the white palms from hauling a thousand miles of fishing line out of the sea. He let us look a minute, then rolled the hands shut and drew them away and hid them in his pajama shirt like we might dirty them looking, and stood grinning at McMurphy with gums like brine-bleached pork.

“I had a good troller boat, joost forty feet, but she drew twelve feet water and she was solid teak and solid oak.” He rocked back and forth in a way to make you doubt that the floor was standing level. “She was one good troller boat, by golly!”

He started to turn, but McMurphy stopped him again.

“Hell, George, why didn’t you say you were a fisherman? I been talking up this voyage like I was the Old Man of the Sea, but just between you an’ me an’ the wall there, the only boat I been on was the battleship Missouri and the only thing I know about fish is that I like eatin’ ‘em better than cleanin’ ‘em.”

“Cleanin’ is easy, somebody show you how.”

“By God, you’re gonna be our captain, George; we’ll be your crew.”

George tilted back, shaking his head. “Those boats awful dirty any more – everything awful dirty.”

“The hell with that. We got a boat specially sterilized fore and aft, swabbed clean as a bound’s tooth. You won’t get dirty, George, ‘cause you’ll be the captain. Won’t even have to bait a hook; just be our captain and give orders to us dumb landlubbers – how’s that strike you?”

I could see George was tempted by the way he wrung his hands under his shirt, but he still said he couldn’t risk getting dirty. McMurphy did his best to talk him into it, but George was still shaking his head when the Big Nurse’s key hit the lock of the mess hall and she came jangling out the door with her wicker bag of surprises, clicked down the line with automatic smile-and-good-morning for each man she passed. McMurphy noticed the way George leaned back from her and scowled. When she’d passed, McMurphy tilted his head and gave George the one bright eye.

“George, that stuff the nurse has been saying about the bad sea, about how terrible dangerous this trip might be – what about that?”

“That ocean could be awful bad, sure, awful rough.” McMurphy looked down at the nurse disappearing into the station, then back at George. George started twisting his hands around in his shirt more than ever, looking around at the silent faces watching him.

“By golly!” he said suddenly. “You think I let her scare me about that ocean? You think that?”

“Ah, I guess not, George. I was thinking, though, that if you don’t come along with us, and if there is some awful stormy calamity, we’re every last one of us liable to be lost at sea, you know that? I said I didn’t know nothin’ about boating, and I’ll tell you something else: these two women coming to get us, I told the doctor was my two aunts, two widows of fishermen. Well, the only cruisin’ either one of them ever did was on solid cement. They won’t be no more help in a fix than me. We need you, George.” He took a pull on his cigarette and asked, “You got ten bucks, by the way?”

George shook his head.

“No, I wouldn’t suppose so. Well, what the devil, I gave up the idea of comin’ out ahead days ago. Here.” He took a pencil out of the pocket of his green jacket and wiped it clean on his shirttail, held it out to George. “You captain us, and we’ll let you come along for five.”

George looked around at us again, working his big brow over the predicament. Finally his gums showed in a bleached smile and he reached for the pencil. “By golly!” he said and headed off with the pencil to sign the last place on the list. After breakfast, walking down the hall, McMurphy stopped and printed C-A-P-T behind George’s name.

* * *

The whores were late. Everybody was beginning to think they weren’t coming at all when McMurphy gave a yell from the window and we all went running to look. He said that was them, but we didn’t see but one car, instead of the two we were counting on, and just one woman. McMurphy called to her through the screen when she stopped on the parking lot, and she came cutting straight across the grass toward our ward.

She was younger and prettier than any of us’d figured on. Everybody had found out that the girls were whores instead of aunts, and were expecting all sorts of things. Some of the religious guys weren’t any too happy about it. But seeing her coming lightfooted across the grass with her eyes green all the way up to the ward, and her hair, roped in a long twist at the back of her head, jouncing up and down with every step like copper springs in the sun, all any of us could think of was that she was a girl, a female who wasn’t dressed white from head to foot like she’d been dipped in frost, and how she made her money didn’t make any difference.

She ran right up against the screen where McMurphy was and hooked her fingers through the mesh and pulled herself against it. She was panting from the run, and every breath looked like she might swell right through the mesh. She was crying a little.

“McMurphy, oh, you damned McMurphy…”

“Never mind that. Where’s Sandra?”

“She got tied up, man, can’t make it. But you, damn it, are you okay?”

“She got tied up!”

“To tell the truth” – the girl wiped her nose and giggled “ – ol’ Sandy got married. You remember Artie Gilfillian from Beaverton? Always used to show up at the parties with some gassy thing, a gopher snake or a white mouse or some gassy thing like that in his pocket? A real maniac – ”

“Oh, sweet Jesus!” McMurphy groaned. “How’m I supposed to get ten guys in one stinkin’ Ford, Candy sweetheart? How’d Sandra and her gopher snake from Beaverton figure on me swinging that?”

The girl looked like she was in the process of thinking up an answer when the speaker in the ceiling clacked and the Big Nurse’s voice told McMurphy if he wanted to talk with his lady friend it’d be better if she signed in properly at the main door instead of disturbing the whole hospital. The girl left the screen and started toward the main entrance, and McMurphy left the screen and flopped down in a chair in the corner, his head hanging. “Hell’s bells,” he said.

The least black boy let the girl onto the ward and forgot to lock the door behind her (caught hell for it later, I bet), and the girl came jouncing up the hall past the Nurses’ Station, where all the nurses were trying to freeze her bounce with a united icy look, and into the day room just a few steps ahead of the doctor. He was going toward the Nurses’ Station with some papers, looked at her, and back at the papers, and back at her again, and went to fumbling after his glasses with both hands.

She stopped when she got to the middle of the dayroom floor and saw she was circled by forty staring men in green, and it was so quiet you could hear bellies growling, and, all along the Chronic row, hear catheters popping off.

She had to stand there a minute while she looked around to find McMurphy, so everybody got a long look at her. There was a blue smoke hung near the ceiling over her bead; I think apparatus burned out all over the ward trying to adjust to her come busting in like she did – took electronic readings on her and calculated they weren’t built to handle something like this on the ward, and just burned out, like machines committing suicide.

She had on a white T-shirt like McMurphy’s only a lot smaller, white tennis shoes and Levi pants snipped off above her knees to give her feet circulation, and it didn’t look like that was near enough material to go around, considering what it had to cover. She must’ve been seen with lots less by lots more men, but under the circumstances she began to, fidget around self-consciously like a schoolgirl on a stage. Nobody spoke while they looked. Martini did whisper that you could read the dates of the coins in her Levi pockets, they were so tight, but he was closer and could see better’n the rest of us.

Billy Bibbit was the first one to say something out loud, not really a word, just a low, almost painful whistle that described how she looked better than anybody else could have. She laughed and thanked him very much and he blushed so red that she blushed with him and laughed again. This broke things into movement. All the Acutes were coming across the floor trying to talk to her at once. The doctor was pulling on Harding’s coat, asking who is this. McMurphy got up out of his chair and walked through the crowd to her, and when she saw him she threw her arms around him and said, “You damned McMurphy,” and then got embarrassed and blushed again. When she blushed she didn’t look more than sixteen or seventeen, I swear she didn’t.

McMurphy introduced her around and she shook everybody’s hand. When she got to Billy she thanked him again for his whistle. The Big Nurse came sliding out of the station, smiling, and asked McMurphy how he intended to get all ten of us in one car, and he asked could he maybe borrow a staff car and drive a load himself, and the nurse cited a rule forbidding this, just like everyone knew she would. She said unless there was another driver to sign a Responsibility Slip that half of the crew would have to stay behind. McMurphy told her this’d cost him fifty goddam bucks to make up the difference; he’d have to pay the guys back who didn’t get to go.

“Then it may be,” the nurse said, “that the trip will have to be canceled – and all the money refunded.”

“I’ve already rented the boat; the man’s got seventy bucks of mine in his pocket right now!”

“Seventy dollars? So? I thought you told the patients you’d need to collect a hundred dollars plus ten of your own to finance the trip, Mr. McMurphy.”

“I was putting gas in the cars over and back.”

“That wouldn’t amount to thirty dollars, though, would it?”

She smiled so nice at him, waiting. He threw his hands in the air and looked at the ceiling.

“Hoo boy, you don’t miss a chance do you, Miss District Attorney. Sure; I was keepin’ what was left over. I don’t think any of the guys ever thought any different. I figured to make a little for the trouble I took get – ”

“But your plans didn’t work out,” she said. She was still smiling at him, so full of sympathy. “Your little financial speculations can’t all be successes, Randle, and, actually, as I think about it now, you’ve had more than your share of victories.” She mused about this, thinking about something I knew we’d hear more about later. “Yes. Every Acute on the ward has written you an IOU for some ‘deal’ of yours at one time or another, so don’t you think you can bear up under this one small defeat?”

Then she stopped. She saw McMurphy wasn’t listening to her any more. He was watching the doctor. And the doctor was eying the blond girl’s T-shirt like nothing else existed. McMurphy’s loose smile spread out on his face as he watched the doctor’s trance, and he pushed his cap to the back of his head and strolled to the doctor’s side, startling him with a hand on the shoulder.

“By God, Doctor Spivey, you ever see a Chinook salmon hit a line? One of the fiercest sights on the seven seas. Say, Candy honeybun, whyn’t you tell the doctor here about deep-sea fishing and all like that…”

Working together, it didn’t take McMurphy and the girl but two minutes and the little doctor was down locking up his office and coming back up the hall, cramming papers in a brief case.

“Good deal of paper work I can get done on the boat,” he explained to the nurse and went past her so fast she didn’t have a chance to answer, and the rest of the crew followed, slower, grinning at her standing in the door of that Nurses’ Station.

The Acutes who weren’t going gathered at the dayroom door, told us don’t bring our catch back till it’s cleaned, and Ellis pulled his hands down off the nails in the wall and squeezed Billy Bibbit’s hand and told him to be a fisher of men.

And Billy, watching the brass brads on that woman’s Levis wink at him as she walked out of the day room, told Ellis to hell with that fisher of men business. He joined us at the door, and the least black boy let us through and locked the door behind us, and we were out, outside.

The sun was prying up the clouds and lighting the brick front of the hospital rose bed. A thin breeze worked at sawing what leaves were left from the oak trees, stacking them neatly against the wire cyclone fence. There was little brown birds occasionally on the fence; when a puff of leaves would hit the fence the birds would fly off with the wind. It looked at first like the leaves were hitting the fence and turning into birds and flying away.

It was a fine woodsmoked autumn day, full of the sound of kids punting footballs and the putter of small airplanes, and everybody should’ve been happy just being outside in it. But we all stood in a silent bunch with our hands in our pockets while the doctor walked to get his car. A silent bunch, watching the townspeople who were driving past on their way to work slow down to gawk at all the loonies in green uniforms. McMurphy saw how uneasy we were and tried to work us into a better mood by joking and teasing the girl, but this made us feel worse somehow. Everybody was thinking how easy it would be to return to the ward, go back and say they decided the nurse had been right; with a wind like this the sea would’ve been just too rough.

The doctor arrived and we loaded up and headed off, me and George and Harding and Billy Bibbit in the car with McMurphy and the girl, Candy; and Fredrickson and Sefelt and Scanlon and Martini and Tadem and Gregory following in the doctor’s car. Everyone was awfully quiet. We pulled into a gas station about a mile from the hospital; the doctor followed. He got out first, and the service-station man came bouncing out, grinning and wiping his hands on a rag. Then he stopped grinning and went past the doctor to see just what was in these cars. He backed off, wiping his hands on the oily rag, frowning. The doctor caught the man’s sleeve nervously and took out a ten-dollar bill and tucked it down in the man’s hands like setting out a tomato plant.

“Ah, would you fill both tanks with regular?” the doctor asked. He was acting just as uneasy about being out of the hospital as the rest of us were. “Ah, would you?”

“Those uniforms,” the service-station man said, “they’re from the hospital back up the road, aren’t they?” He was looking around him to see if there was a wrench or something handy. He finally moved over near a stack of empty pop bottles. “You guys are from that asylum.”

The doctor fumbled for his glasses and looked at us too, like he’d just noticed the uniforms. “Yes. No, I mean. We, they are from the asylum, but they are a work crew, not inmates, of course not. A work crew.”

The man squinted at the doctor and at us and went off to whisper to his partner, who was back among the machinery. They talked a minute, and the second guy hollered and asked the doctor who we were and the doctor repeated that we were a work crew, and both of the guys laughed. I could tell by the laugh that they’d decided to sell us the gas – probably it would be weak and dirty and watered down and cost twice the usual price – but it didn’t make me feel any better. I could see everybody was feeling pretty bad. The doctor’s lying made us feel worse than ever – not because of the lie, so much, but because of the truth.

The second guy came over to the doctor, grinning. “You said you wanted the Soo-preme, sir? You bet. And how about us checking those oil filters and windshield wipes?” He was bigger than his friend. He leaned down on the doctor like he was sharing a secret. “Would you believe it: eighty-eight per cent of the cars show by the figures on the road today that they need new oil filters and windshield wipes?”

His grin was coated with carbon from years of taking out spark plugs with his teeth. He kept leaning down on the doctor, making him squirm with that grin and waiting for him to admit he was over a barrel. “Also, how’s your work crew fixed for sunglasses? We got some good Polaroids.” The doctor knew he had him. But just the instant he opened his mouth, about to give in and say Yes, anything, there was a whirring noise and the top of our car was folding back. McMurphy was fighting and cursing the accordion-pleated top, trying to force it back faster than the machinery could handle it. Everybody could see how mad he was by the way he thrashed and beat at that slowly rising top; when he got it cussed and hammered and wrestled down into place he climbed right out over the girl and over the side of the car and walked up between the doctor and the service-station guy and looked up into the black mouth with one eye.

“Okay now, Hank, we’ll take regular, just like the doctor ordered. Two tanks of regular. That’s all. The hell with that other slum. And we’ll take it at three cents off because we’re a goddamned government-sponsored expedition.”

The guy didn’t budge. “Yeah? I thought the professor here said you weren’t patients?”

“Now Hank, don’t you see that was just a kindly precaution to keep from startlin’ you folks with the truth? The doc wouldn’t lie like that about just any patients, but we ain’t ordinary nuts; we’re every bloody one of us hot off the criminal-insane ward, on our way to San Quentin where they got better facilities to handle us. You see that freckle-faced kid there? Now he might look like he’s right off a Saturday Evening Post cover, but he’s a insane knife artist that killed three men. The man beside him is known as the Bull Goose Loony, unpredictable as a wild hog. You see that big guy? He’s an Indian and he beat six white men to death with a pick handle when they tried to cheat him trading muskrat hides. Stand up where they can get a look at you, Chief.”

Harding goosed me with his thumb, and I stood up on the floor of the car. The guy shaded his eyes and looked up at me and didn’t say anything.

“Oh, it’s a bad group, I admit,” McMurphy said, “but it’s a planned, authorized, legal government-sponsored excursion, and we’re entitled to a legal discount just the same as if we was the FBI.”

The guy looked back at McMurphy, and McMurphy hooked his thumbs in his pockets and rocked back and looked up at him across the scar on his nose. The guy turned to check if his buddy was still stationed at the case of empty pop bottles, then grinned back down on McMurphy.

“Pretty tough customers, is that what you’re saying, Red? So much we better toe the line and do what we’re told, is that what you’re saying? Well, tell me, Red, what is it you’re in for? Trying to assassinate the President?”

“Nobody could prove that, Hank. They got me on a bum rap. I killed a man in the ring, ya see, and sorta got taken with the kick.”

“One of these killers with boxing gloves, is that what you’re telling me, Red?”

“Now I didn’t say that, did I? I never could get used to those pillows you wore. No, this wasn’t no televised main event from the Cow Palace; I’m more what you call a backlot boxer.”

The guy hooked his thumbs in his pockets to mock McMurphy. “You are more what I call a back-lot bull-thrower.”

“Now I didn’t say that bull-throwing wasn’t also one of my abilities, did I? But I want you to look here.” He put his hands up in the guy’s face, real close, turning them over slowly, palm and knuckle. “You ever see a man get his poor old meathooks so pitiful chewed up from just throwin’ the bull? Did you, Hank?”

He held those hands in the guy’s face a long time, waiting to see if the guy had anything else to say. The guy looked at the hands, and at me, and back at the hands. When it was clear he didn’t have anything else real pressing to say, McMurphy walked away from him to the other guy leaning against the pop cooler and plucked the doctor’s ten-dollar bill out of his fist and started for the grocery store next to the station.

“You boys tally what the gas comes to and send the bill to the hospital,” he called back. “I intend to use the cash to pick up some refreshments for the men. I believe we’ll get that in place of windshield wipes and eighty-eight per cent oil filters.”

By the time he got back everybody was feeling cocky as fighting roosters and calling orders to the service-station guys to check the air in the spare and wipe the windows and scratch that bird dropping off the hood if you please, just like we owned the show. When the big guy didn’t get the windshield to suit Billy, Billy called him right back.

“You didn’t get this sp-spot here where the bug h-h-hit.”

“That wasn’t a bug,” the guy said sullenly, scratching at it with his fingernail, “that was a bird.”

Martini called all the way from the other car that it couldn’t of been a bird. “There’d be feathers and bones if it was a bird.”

A man riding a bicycle stopped to ask what was the idea of all the green uniforms; some kind of club? Harding popped right up and answered him.

“No, my friend. We are lunatics from the hospital up the highway, psycho-ceramics, the cracked pots of mankind. Would you like me to decipher a Rorschach for you? No? You must hurry on? Ah, he’s gone. Pity.” He turned to McMurphy. “Never before did I realize that mental illness could have the aspect of power, power. Think of it: perhaps the more insane a man is, the more powerful he could become. Hitler an example. Fair makes the old brain reel, doesn’t it? Food for thought there.”

Billy punched a beer can for the girl, and she flustered him so with her bright smile and her “Thank you, Billy,” that he took to opening cans for all of us.

While the pigeons fretted up and down the sidewalk with their hands folded behind their backs.

I sat there, feeling whole and good, sipping at a beer; I could hear the beer all the way down me – zzzth, zzzth, like that. I had forgotten that there can be good sounds and tastes like the sound and taste of a beer going down. I took another big drink and started looking around me to see what else I had forgotten in twenty years.

“Man!” McMurphy said as he scooted the girl out from under the wheel and tight over against Billy. “Will you just look at the Big Chief slug down on that firewater!” – and slammed the car out into traffic with the doctor squealing behind to keep up.

He’d shown us what a little bravado and courage could accomplish, and we thought he’d taught us how to use it. All the way to the coast we had fun pretending to be brave. When people at a stop light would stare at us and our green uniforms we’d do just like he did, sit up straight and strong and toughlooking and put a big grin on our face and stare straight back at them till their motors died and their windows sunstreaked and they were left sitting when the light changed, upset bad by what a tough bunch of monkeys was just now not three feet from them, and help nowhere in sight.

As McMurphy led the twelve of us toward the ocean.

* * *

I think McMurphy knew better than we did that our tough looks were all show, because he still wasn’t able to get a real laugh out of anybody. Maybe he couldn’t understand why we weren’t able to laugh yet, but he knew you can’t really be strong until you can see a funny side to things. In fact, he worked so hard at pointing out the funny side of things that I was wondering a little if maybe he was blind to the other side, if maybe he wasn’t able to see what it was that parched laughter deep inside your stomach. Maybe the guys weren’t able to see it either, just feel the pressures of the different beams and frequencies coming from all directions, working to push and bend you one way or another, feel the Combine at work – but I was able to see it.

The way you see the change in a person you’ve been away from for a long time, where somebody who sees him every day, day in, day out, wouldn’t notice because the change is gradual. All up the coast I could see the signs of what the Combine had accomplished since I was last through this country, things like, for example – a train stopping at a station and laying a string of full-grown men in mirrored suits and machined hats, laying them like a hatch of identical insects, half-life things coming pht-pht-pht out of the last car, then hooting its electric whistle and moving on down the spoiled land to deposit another hatch.

Or things like five thousand houses punched out identical by a machine and strung across the hills outside of town, so fresh from the factory they’re still linked together like sausages, a sign saying “NEST IN THE WEST HOMES – NO DWN. PAYMENT FOR VETS,” a playground down the hill from the houses, behind a checker-wire fence and another sign that read “ST. LUKE’S SCHOOL FOR BOYS” – there were five thousand kids in green corduroy pants and white shirts under green pullover sweaters playing crack-the-whip across an acre of crushed gravel. The line popped and twisted and jerked like a snake, and every crack popped a little kid off the end, sent him rolling up against the fence like a tumbleweed. Every crack. And it was always the same little kid, over and over.

All that five thousand kids lived in those five thousand houses, owned by those guys that got off the train. The houses looked so much alike that, time and time again, the kids went home by mistake to different houses and different families. Nobody ever noticed. They ate and went to bed. The only one they noticed was the little kid at the end of the whip. He’d always be so scuffed and bruised that he’d show up out of place wherever he went. He wasn’t able to open up and laugh either. It’s a hard thing to laugh if you can feel the pressure of those beams coming from every new car that passes, or every new house you pass.

“We can even have a lobby in Washington,” Harding was saying, “an organization NAAIP. Pressure groups. Big billboards along the highway showing a babbling schizophrenic running a wrecking machine, bold, red and green type: ‘Hire the Insane.’ We’ve got a rosy future, gentlemen.”

* * *

We crossed a bridge over the Siuslaw. There was just enough mist in the air that I could lick out my tongue to the wind and taste the ocean before we could see it. Everyone knew we were getting close and didn’t speak all the way to the docks.

The captain who was supposed to take us out had a bald gray metal head set in a black turtleneck like a gun turret on a U-boat; the cold cigar sticking from his mouth swept over us. He stood beside McMurphy on the wooden pier and looked out to sea as he talked. Behind him and up a bunch of steps, six or eight men in windbreakers were sitting on a bench along the front of the bait shop. The captain talked loudly, half to the loafers on his one side and half to McMurphy on the other side, firing his copper-jacket voice someplace in between.

“Don’t care. Told you specifically in the letter. You don’t have a signed waiver clearing me with proper authorities, I don’t go out.” The round head swiveled in the turret of his sweater, beading down that cigar at the lot of us. “Look there. Bunch like that at sea, could go to diving overboard like rats. Relatives could sue me for everything I own. I can’t risk it.”

McMurphy explained how the other girl was supposed to get all those papers up in Portland. One of the guys leaning against the bait shop called, “What other girl? Couldn’t Blondie there handle the lot of you?” McMurphy didn’t pay the guy any mind and went on arguing with the captain, but you could see how it bothered the girl. Those men against the shop kept leering at her and leaning close together to whisper things. All our crew, even the doctor, saw this and got to feeling ashamed that we didn’t do something. We weren’t the cocky bunch that was back at the service station.

McMurphy stopped arguing when he saw he wasn’t getting any place with the captain, and turned around a couple of times, running his hand through his hair.

“Which boat have we got rented?”

“That’s it there. The Lark. Not a man sets foot on her till I have a signed waiver clearing me. Not a man.”

“I don’t intend to rent a boat so we can sit all day and watch it bob up and down at the dock,” McMurphy said. “Don’t you have a phone up there in your bait shack? Let’s go get this cleared up.”

They thumped up the steps onto the level with the bait shop and went inside, leaving us clustered up by ourselves, with that bunch of loafers up there watching us and making comments and sniggering and goosing one another in the ribs. The wind was blowing the boats at their moorings, nuzzling them up against the wet rubber tires along the dock so they made a sound like they were laughing at us. The water was giggling under the boards, and the sign hanging over the door to the bait shack that read “SEAMAN’S SERVICE – CAPT BLOCK, PROP” was squeaking and scratching as the wind rocked it on rusty hooks. The mussels that clung to the pilings, four feet out of water marking the tide line, whistled and clicked in the sun.

The wind had turned cold and mean, and Billy Bibbit took off his green coat and gave it to the girl, and she put it on over her thin little T-shirt. One of the loafers kept calling down, “Hey you, Blondie, you like fruitcake kids like that?” The man’s lips were kidney-colored and he was purple under his eyes where the wind’d mashed the veins to the surface. “Hey you, Blondie,” he called over and over in a high, tired voice, “hey you, Blondie… hey you, Blondie… hey you, Blondie…”

We bunched up closer together against the wind.

“Tell me, Blondie, what’ve they got you committed for?”

“Ahr, she ain’t committed, Perce, she’s part of the cure!”

“Is that right, Blondie? You hired as part of the cure? Hey you, Blondie.”

She lifted her head and gave us a look that asked where was that hard-boiled bunch she’d seen and why weren’t they saying something to defend her? Nobody would answer the look. All our hard-boiled strength had just walked up those steps with his arm around the shoulders of that bald-headed captain.

She pulled the collar of the jacket high around her neck and hugged her elbows and strolled as far away from us down the dock as she could go. Nobody went after her. Billy Bibbit shivered in the cold and bit his lip. The guys at the bait shack whispered something else and whooped out laughing again.

“Ask ‘er, Perce – go on.”

“Hey, Blondie, did you get ‘am to sign a waiver clearing you with proper authorities? Relatives could sue, they tell me, if one of the boys fell in and drown while he was on board. Did you ever think of that? Maybe you’d better stay here with us, Blondie.”

“Yeah, Blondie; my relatives wouldn’t sue. I promise. Stay here with us fellows, Blondie.”

I imagined I could feel my feet getting wet as the dock sank with shame into the bay. We weren’t fit to be out here with people. I wished McMurphy would come back out and cuss these guys good and then drive us back where we belonged.

The man with the kidney lips folded his knife and stood up and brushed the whittle shavings out of his lap. He started walking toward the steps. “C’mon now, Blondie, what you want to mess with these bozos for?”

She turned and looked at him from the end of the dock, then back at us, and you could tell she was thinking his proposition over when the door of the bait shop opened and McMurphy came shoving out past the bunch of them, down the steps.

“Pile in, crew, it’s all set! Gassed and ready and there’s bait and beer on board.”

He slapped Billy on the rear and did a little hornpipe and commenced slinging ropes from their snubs.

“Ol’ Cap’n Block’s still on the phone, but we’ll be pulling off as quick as he comes out. George, let’s see if you can get that motor warmed up. Scanlon, you and Harding untie that rope there. Candy! What you doing off down there? Let’s get with it, honey, we’re shoving off.”

We swarmed into the boat, glad for anything that would take us away from those guys standing in a row at the bait shop. Billy took the girl by the hand and helped her on board. George hummed over the dashboard up on the bridge, pointing out buttons for McMurphy to twist or push.

“Yeah, these pukers, puke boats, we call them,” he said to McMurphy, “they joost as easy like driving the ottomobile.”

The doctor hesitated before climbing aboard and looked toward the shop where all the loafers stood milling toward the steps.

“Don’t you think, Randle, we’d better wait… until the captain – ”

McMurphy caught him by the lapels and lifted him clear of the dock into the boat like he was a small boy. “Yeah, Doc,” he said, “wait till the captain what?” He commenced to laugh like he was drunk, talking in an excited, nervous way. “Wait till the captain comes out and tells us that the phone number I gave him is a flophouse up in Portland? You bet. Here, George, damn your eyes; take hold of this thing and get us out of here! Sefelt! Get that rope loose and get on. George, come on.”

The motor chugged and died, chugged again like it was clearing its throat, then roared full on.

“Hoowee! There she goes. Pour the coal to ‘er, George, and all hands stand by to repel boarders!”

A white gorge of smoke and water roared from the back of the boat, and the door of the bait shop crashed open and the captain’s head came booming out and down the steps like it was not only dragging his body behind it but the bodies of the eight other guys as well. They came thundering down the dock and stopped right at the boil of foam washing over their feet as George swung the big boat out and away from the docks and we had the sea to ourselves.

A sudden turn of the boat had thrown Candy to her knees, and Billy was helping her up and trying to apologize for the way he’d acted on the dock at the same time. McMurphy came down from the bridge and asked if the two of them would like to be alone so they could talk over old times, and Candy looked at Billy and all he could do was shake his head and stutter. McMurphy said in that case that he and Candy’d better go below and check for leaks and the rest of us could make do for a while. He stood at the door down to the cabin and saluted and winked and appointed George captain and Harding second in command and said, “Carry on, mates,” and followed the girl out of sight into the cabin.

The wind lay down and the sun got higher, chrome-plating the east side of the deep green swells. George aimed the boat straight out to sea, full throttle, putting the docks and that bait shop farther and farther behind us. When we passed the last point of the jetty and the last black rock, I could feel a great calmness creep over me, a calmness that increased the farther we left land behind us.

The guys had talked excitedly for a few minutes about our piracy of the boat, but now they were quiet. The cabin door opened once long enough for a hand to shove out a case of beer, and Billy opened us each one with an opener he found in the tackle box, and passed them around. We drank and watched the land sinking in our wake.

A mile or so out George cut the speed to what he called a trolling idle, put four guys to the four poles in the back of the boat, and the rest of us sprawled in the sun on top of the cabin or up on the bow and took off our shirts and watched the guys trying to rig their poles. Harding said the rule was a guy got to hold a pole till he got one strike, then he had to change off with a man who hadn’t had a chance. George stood at the wheel, squinting out through the salt-caked windshield, and hollered instructions back how to fix up the reels and lines and how to tie a herring into the herring harness and how far back to fish and how deep:

“And take that number four pole and you put you twelve ounces on him on a rope with a breakaway rig – I show you how in joost a minute – and we go after that big fella down on the bottom with that pole, by golly!”

Martini ran to the edge and leaned over the side and stared down into the water in the direction of his line. “Oh. Oh, my God,” he said, but whatever he saw was too deep down for the rest of us.

There were other sports boats trolling up and down the coast, but George didn’t make any attempt to join them; he kept pushing steadily straight on out past them, toward the open sea. “You bet,” he said. “We go out with the commercial boats, where the real fish is.”

The swells slid by, deep emerald on one side, chrome on the other. The only noise was the engine sputtering and humming, off and on, as the swells dipped the exhaust in and out of the water, and the funny, lost cry of the raggedy little black birds swimming around asking one another directions. Everything else was quiet. Some of the guys slept, and the others watched the water. We’d been trolling close to an hour when the tip of Sefelt’s pole arched and dived into the water.

“George! Jesus, George, give us a hand!”

George wouldn’t have a thing to do with the pole; he grinned and told Sefelt to ease up on the star drag, keep the tip pointed up, up, and work hell outa that fella!

“But what if I have a seizure?” Sefelt hollered.

“Why, we’ll simply put hook and line on you and use you for a lure,” Harding said. “Now work that fella, as the captain ordered, and quit worrying about a seizure.”

Thirty yards back of the boat the fish broke into the sun in a shower of silver scales, and Sefelt’s eyes popped and be got go excited watching the fish he let the end of his pole go down, and the line snapped into the boat like a rubber band.

“Up, I told you! You let him get a straight pull, don’t you see? Keep that tip up… up! You had you one big silver there, by golly.”

Sefelt’s jaw was white and shaking when he finally gave up the pole to Fredrickson. “Okay – but if you get a fish with a hook in his mouth, that’s my godblessed fish!”

I was as excited as the rest. I hadn’t planned on fishing, but after seeing that steel power a salmon has at the end of a line I got off the cabin top and put on my shirt to wait my turn at a pole.

Scanlon got up a pool for the biggest fish and another for the first fish landed, four bits from everybody that wanted in it, and he’d no more’n got his money in his pocket than Billy drug in some awful thing that looked like a ten-pound toad with spines on it like a porcupine.

“That’s no fish,” Scanlon said. “You can’t win on that.”

“It isn’t a b-b-bird.”

“That there, he’s a ling cod,” George told us. “He’s one good eating fish you get all his warts off.”

“See there. He is too a fish. P-p-pay up.”

Billy gave me his pole and took his money and went to sit up close to the cabin where McMurphy and the girl were, looking at the closed door forlornly. “I wu-wu-wu-wish we had enough poles to go around,” he said, leaning back against the side of the cabin.

I sat down and held the pole and watched the line swoop out into the wake. I smelt the air and felt the four cans of beer I’d drunk shorting out dozens of control leads down inside me: all around, the chrome sides of the swells flickered and flashed in the sun.

George sang out for us to look up ahead, that here come just what we been looking for. I leaned around to look, but all I saw was a big drifting log and those black seagulls circling and diving around the log, like black leaves caught up in a dust devil. George speeded up some, heading into the place where the birds circled, and the speed of the boat dragged my line until I couldn’t see how you’d be able to tell if you did get a bite.

“Those fellas, those cormorants, they go after a school of candle fishes,” George told us as he drove. “Little white fishes the size of your finger. You dry them and they burn joost like a candle. They are food fish, chum fish. And you bet where there’s a big school of them candle fish you find the silver salmon feeding.”

He drove into the birds, missing the floating log, and suddenly all around me the smooth slopes of chrome were shattered by diving birds and churning minnows, and the sleek silver-blue torpedo backs of the salmon slicing through it all. I saw one of the backs check its direction and turn and set course for a spot thirty yards behind the end of my pole, where my herring would be. I braced, my heart ringing, and then felt a jolt up both arms as if somebody’d hit the pole with a ball bat, and my line went burning off the reel from under my thumb, red as blood. “Use the star drag!” George yelled at me, but what I knew about star drags you could put in your eye so I just mashed harder with my thumb until the line turned back to yellow, then slowed and stopped. I looked around, and there were all three of the other poles whipping around just like mine, and the rest of the guys scrambling down off the cabin at the excitement and doing everything in their power to get underfoot.

“Up! Up! Keep the tip up!” George was yelling.

“McMurphy! Get out here and look at this.”

“Godbless you, Fred, you got my blessed fish!”

“McMurphy, we need some help!”

I heard McMurphy laughing and saw him out of the corner of my eye, just standing at the cabin door, not even making a move to do anything, and I was too busy cranking at my fish to ask him for help. Everyone was shouting at him to do something, but he wasn’t moving. Even the doctor, who had the deep pole, was asking McMurphy for assistance. And McMurphy was just laughing. Harding finally saw McMurphy wasn’t going to do anything, so he got the gaff and jerked my fish into the boat with a clean, graceful motion like he’s been boating fish all his life. He’s big as my leg, I thought, big as a fence post! I thought, he’s bigger’n any fish we ever got at the falls. He’s springing all over the bottom of the boat like a rainbow gone wild! Smearing blood and scattering scales like little silver dimes, and I’m scared he’s gonna flop overboard. McMurphy won’t make a move to help. Scanlon grabs the fish and wrestles it down to keep it from flopping over the side. The girl comes running up from below, yelling it’s her turn, dang it, grabs my pole, and jerks the hook into me three times while I’m trying to tie on a herring for her.

“Chief, I’ll be damned if I ever saw anything so slow! Ugh, your thumb’s bleeding. Did that monster bite you? Somebody fix the Chief ’s thumb – hurry!”

“Here we go into them again,” George yells, and I drop the line off the back of the boat and see the flash of the herring vanish in the dark blue-gray charge of a salmon and the line go sizzling down into the water. The girl wraps both arms around the pole and grits her teeth. “Oh no you don’t, dang you! Oh no…!”

She’s on her feet, got the butt of the pole scissored in her crotch and both arms wrapped below the reel and the reel crank knocking against her as the line spins out: “Oh no you don’t!” She’s still got on Billy’s green jacket, but that reel’s whipped it. She’s and everybody on board sees the T-shirt she had on is gone – everybody gawking, trying to play his own fish, dodge mine slamming around the boat bottom, with the crank of that reel fluttering her breast at such a speed the nipple’s just red blur!

Billy jumps to help. All he can think to do is reach around from behind and help her squeeze the pole tighter in between her breasts until the reel’s finally stopped by nothing more than the pressure of her flesh. By this time she’s flexed so taut and her breasts look so firm I think she and Billy could both turn loose with their hands and arms and she’d still keep hold of that pole.

This scramble of action holds for a space, a second there on the sea – the men yammering and struggling and cussing and trying to tend their poles while watching the girl; the bleeding, crashing battle between Scanlon and my fish at everybody’s feet; the lines all tangled and shooting every which way with the doctor’s glasses-on-a-string tangled and dangling from one line ten feet off the back of the boat, fish striking at the flash of the lens, and the girl cussing for all she’s worth and looking now at her bare breasts, one white and one smarting red – and George takes his eye off where he’s going and runs the boat into that log and kills the engine.

While McMurphy laughs. Rocking farther and farther backward against the cabin top, spreading his laugh out across the water – laughing at the girl, at the guys, at George, at me sucking my bleeding thumb, at the captain back at the pier and the bicycle rider and the service-station guys and the five thousand houses and the Big Nurse and all of it. Because he knows you have to laugh at the things that hurt you just to keep yourself in balance, just to keep the world from running you plumb crazy. He knows there’s a painful side; he knows my thumb smarts and his girl friend has a bruised breast and the doctor is losing his glasses, but he won’t let the pain blot out the humor no more’n he’ll let the humor blot out the pain.

I notice Harding is collapsed beside McMurphy and is laughing too. And Scanlon from the bottom of the boat. At their own selves as well as at the rest of us. And the girl, with her eyes still smarting as she looks from her white breast to her red one, she starts laughing. And Sefelt and the doctor, and all.

It started slow and pumped itself full, swelling the men bigger and bigger. I watched, part of them, laughing with them – and somehow not with them. I was off the boat, blown up off the water and skating the wind with those black birds, high above myself, and I could look down and see myself and the rest of the guys, see the boat rocking there in the middle of those diving birds, see McMur-phy surrounded by his dozen people, and watch them, us, swinging a laughter that rang out on the water in ever-widening circles, farther and farther, until it crashed up on beaches all over the coast, on beaches all over all coasts, in wave after wave after wave.

* * *

The doctor had hooked something off the bottom on the deep pole, and everybody else on board except George had caught and landed a fish by the time he lifted it up to where we could even see it – just a whitish shape appearing, then diving for the bottom in spite of everything the doctor tried to do to hold it. As soon as he’d get it up near the top again, lifting and reeling at it with tight, stubborn little grunts and refusing any help the guys might offer, it would see the light and down it would go.

George didn’t bother starting the boat again, but came down to show us how to clean the fish over the side and rip the gills out so the meat would stay sweeter. McMurphy tied a chunk of meat to each end of a four-foot string, tossed it in the air, and sent two squawking birds wheeling off, “Till death do them part.”

The whole back of the boat and most of the people in it were dappled with red and silver. Some of us took our shirts off and dipped them over the side and tried to clean them. We fiddled around this way, fishing a little, drinking the other case of beer, and feeding the birds till afternoon, while the boat rolled lazily around the swells and the doctor worked with his monster from the deep. A wind came up and broke the sea into green and silver chunks, like a field of glass and chrome, and the boat began to rock and pitch about more. George told the doctor he’d have to land his fish or cut it loose because there was a bad sky coming down on us. The doctor didn’t answer. He just heaved harder on the pole, bent forward and reeled the slack, and heaved again.

Billy and the girl had climbed around to the bow and were talking and looking down in the water. Billy hollered that he saw something, and we all rushed to that side, and a shape broad and white was becoming solid some ten or fifteen feet down. It was strange watching it rise, first just a light coloring, then a white form like fog under water, becoming solid, alive…

“Jesus God,” Scanlon cried, “that’s the doc’s fish!”

It was on the side opposite the doctor, but we could see by the direction of his line that it led to the shape under the water.

“We’ll never get it in the boat,” Sefelt said. “And the wind’s getting stronger.”

“He’s a big flounder,” George said. “Sometimes they weigh two, three hundred. You got to lift them in with the winch.”

“We’ll have to cut him loose, Doc,” Sefelt said and put his arm across the doctor’s shoulders. The doctor didn’t say anything; he had sweated clear through his suit between his shoulders, and his eyes were bright red from going so long without glasses. He kept heaving until the fish appeared on his side of the boat. We watched it near the surface for a few minutes longer, then started getting the rope and gaff ready.

Even with the gaff in it, it took another hour to drag the fish into the back of the boat. We had to hook him with all three other poles, and McMurphy leaned down and got a hand in his gills, and with a heave he slid in, transparent white and flat, and flopped down to the bottom of the boat with the doctor.

“That was something.” The doctor panted from the floor, not enough strength left to push the huge fish off him. “That was… certainly something.”

The boat pitched and cracked all the way back to shore, with McMurphy telling grim tales about shipwrecks and sharks. The waves got bigger as we got closer to shore, and from the crests clots of white foam blew swirling up in the wind to join the gulls. The swells at the mouth of the jetty were combing higher than the boat, and George had us all put on life jackets. I noticed all the other sports boats were in.

We were three jackets short, and there was a fuss as to who’d be the three that braved that bar without jackets. It finally turned out to be Billy Bibbit and Harding and George, who wouldn’t wear one anyway on account of the dirt. Everybody was kind of surprised that Billy had volunteered, took his life jacket off right away when we found we were short, and helped the girl into it, but everybody was even more surprised that McMurphy hadn’t insisted that he be one of the heroes; all during the fuss he’d stood with his back against the cabin, bracing against the pitch of the boat, and watched the guys without saying a word. Just grinning and watching.

We hit the bar and dropped into a canyon of water, the bow of the boat pointing up the hissing crest of the wave going before us, and the rear down in the trough in the shadow of the wave looming behind us, and everybody in the back hanging on the rail and looking from the mountain that chased behind to the streaming black rocks of the jetty forty feet to the left, to George at the wheel. He stood there like a mast. He kept turning his head from the front to the back, gunning the throttle, easing off, gunning again, holding us steady riding the uphill slant of that wave in front. He’d told us before we started the run that if we went over that crest in front, we’d surfboard out of control as soon as the prop and rudder broke water, and if we slowed down to where that wave behind caught up it would break over the stern and dump ten tons of water into the boat. Nobody joked or said anything funny about the way he kept turning his head back and forth like it was mounted up there on a swivel.

Inside the mooring the water calmed to a choppy surface again, and at our dock, by the bait shop, we could see the captain waiting with two cops at the water’s edge. All the loafers were gathered behind them. George headed at them full throttle, booming down on them till the captain went to waving and yelling and the cops headed up the steps with the loafers. Just before the prow of the boat tore out the whole dock, George swung the wheel, threw the prop into reverse, and with a powerful roar snuggled the boat in against the rubber tires like he was easing it into bed. We were already out tying up by the time our wake caught up; it pitched all the boats around and slopped over the dock and whitecapped around the docks like we’d brought the sea home with us.

The captain and the cops and the loafers came tromping back down the steps to us. The doctor carried the fight to them by first off telling the cops they didn’t have any jurisdiction over us, as we were a legal, government-sponsored expedition, and if there was anyone to take the matter up with it would have to be a federal agency. Also, there might be some investigation into the number of life jackets that the boat held if the captain really planned to make trouble. Wasn’t there supposed to be a life jacket for every man on board, according to the law? When the captain didn’t say anything the cops took some names and left, mumbling and confused, and as soon as they were off the pier McMurphy and the captain went to arguing and shoving each other around. McMurphy was drunk enough he was still trying to rock with the roll of the boat and he slipped on the wet wood and fell in the ocean twice before he got his footing sufficient to hit the captain one up alongside of his bald head and settle the fuss. Everybody felt better that that was out of the way, and the captain and McMurphy both went to the bait shop to get more beer while the rest of us worked at hauling our fish out of the hold. The loafers stood on that upper dock, watching and smoking pipes they’d carved themselves. We were waiting for them to say something about the girl again, hoping for it, to tell the truth, but when one of them finally did say something it wasn’t about the girl but about our fish being the biggest halibut he’d ever seen brought in on the Oregon coast. All the rest nodded that that was sure the truth. They came edging down to look it over. They asked George where he learned to dock a boat that way, and we found out George’d not just run fishing boats but he’d also been captain of a PT boat in the Pacific and got the Navy Cross. “Shoulda gone into public office,” one of the loafers said. “Too dirty,” George told him.

They could sense the change that most of us were only suspecting; these weren’t the same bunch of weak-knees from a nuthouse that they’d watched take their insults on the dock this morning. They didn’t exactly apologize to the girl for the things they’d said, but when they asked to see the fish she’d caught they were just as polite as pie. And when McMurphy and the captain came back out of the bait shop we all shared a beer together before we drove away.

It was late when we got back to the hospital.

The girl was sleeping against Billy’s chest, and when she raised up his arm’d gone dead holding her all that way in such an awkward position, and she rubbed it for him. He told her if he had any of his weekends free he’d ask her for a date, and she said she could come to visit in two weeks if he’d tell her what time, and Billy looked at Mc-Murphy for an answer. McMurphy put his arms around both of their shoulders and said, “Let’s make it two o’clock on the nose.”

“Saturday afternoon?” she asked.

He winked at Billy and squeezed the girl’s head in the crook of his arm. “No. Two o’clock Saturday night. Slip up and knock on that same window you was at this morning. I’ll talk the night aide into letting you in.”

She giggled and nodded. “You damned McMurphy,” she said.

Some of the Acutes on the ward were still up, standing around the latrine to see if we’d been drowned or not. They watched us march into the hall, blood-speckled, sunburned, stinking of beer and fish, toting our salmon like we were conquering heroes. The doctor asked if they’d like to come out and look at his halibut in the back of his car, and we all started back out except McMurphy. He said he guessed he was pretty shot and thought he’d hit the hay. When he was gone one of the Acutes who hadn’t made the trip asked how come McMurphy looked so beat and worn out where the rest of us looked redcheeked and still full of excitement. Harding passed it off as nothing more than the loss of his suntan.

“You’ll recall McMurphy came in full steam, from a rigorous life outdoors on a work farm, ruddy of face and abloom with physical health. We’ve simply been witness to the fading of his magnificent psychopathic suntan. That’s all. Today he did spend some exhausting hours – in the dimness of the boat cabin, incidentally – while we were out in the elements, soaking up the Vitamin D. Of course, that may have exhausted him to some extent, those rigors down below, but think of it, friends. As for myself, I believe I could have done with a little less Vitamin D and a little more of his kind of exhaustion. Especially with little Candy as a taskmaster. Am I wrong?”

I didn’t say so, but I was wondering if maybe he wasn’t wrong. I’d noticed McMurphy’s exhaustion earlier, on the trip home, after he’d insisted on driving past the place where he’d lived once. We’d just shared the last beer and slung the empty can out the window at a stop sign and were just leaning back to get the feel of the day, swimming in that kind of tasty drowsiness that comes over you after a day of going hard at something you enjoy doing – half sunburned and half drunk and keeping awake only because you wanted to savor the taste as long as you could. I noticed vaguely that I was getting so’s I could see some good in the life around me. McMurphy was teaching me. I was feeling better than I’d remembered feeling since I was a kid, when everything was good and the land was still singing kids’ poetry to me.

We’d drove back inland instead of the coast, to go through this town McMurphy’d lived in the most he’d ever lived in one place. Down the face of the Cascade hill, thinking we were lost till… we came to a town covered a space about twice the size of the hospital ground. A gritty wind had blown out the sun on the street where he stopped. He parked in some reeds and pointed across the road.

“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.