Tasks

Explain the reason of Mr. Bromden becoming to pretend deaf.

Explain Bromden’s opinion about Combine and people getting fixed with it.

Answer the following questions.

1. What did McMurphy do when he was not approved of going out with Candy Starr?

2. Why did the Chief have some doubts about signing into the trip? 3. Who signed in to the fishing trip at the last moment?

4. What happened at the gas station?

5. What was the indication of a person being strong according to Mr. Bromden’s opinion?

6. What does anyone have to do to keep himself in balance?

7. Whom did George turn out to be in the past?

Choose the correct item.

1. McMurphy talked the Doctor Spivey into…

☐ turning on TV

☐ going to McDonalds

☐ bringing a ball

☐ letting him out

2. McMurphy asked the Big Nurse about the… .

☐ weather

☐ freedom

☐ sizes of her breasts

☐ children of hers

3. The first words Bromden said to McMurphy were… .

☐ “Bless you”

☐ “Thank you”

☐ “Fuck you”

☐ “Love you”

4. McMurphy promised Bromden… .

☐ a fishing trip

☐ a girl

☐ getting him big

☐ letting him out

Say whether the following statements are true or false.

1. McMurphy spent one hundred dollars to arrange the whole fishing trip.

2. Doctor Spivey went to the trip instead of the second girl.

3. The captain of the rented boat agreed to accompany the entire group to fishing.

4. Everyone on ship board caught a fish except George.

Part 4

26

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

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

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

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

The Acutes took to joking with McMurphy about 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 he was off the ward at ET or OT or PT, or when he was in the Nurses’ Station getting bawled out about something, matching her fixed plastic smile with his big ornery grin, they weren’t exactly laughing.

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

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

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

He dipped into his pocket for his cigarettes; when he couldn’t find any he borrowed one from Fredrickson, lit it with a stagey sweep of his match, and went on.

“I’ll admit I was confused by his actions at first. That window-breaking – Lord, I thought, here’s a man that seems to actually want to stay in this hospital, stick with his buddies and all that sort of thing, until I realized that McMurphy was doing it because he didn’t want to lose a good thing. He’s making the most of his time in here. Don’t ever be misled by his back-woodsy ways; he’s a very sharp operator, level-headed as they come. You watch; everything he’s done was done with reason.”

Billy wasn’t about to give in so easy. “Yeah. What about him teaching me to d-dance?” He was clenching his fists at his side; and on the backs of his hands I saw that the cigarette burns had all but healed, and in their place were tattoos he’d drawn by licking an indelible pencil. “What about that, Harding? Where is he making muh-muh-money out of teaching me to dance?”

“Don’t get upset, William,” Harding said. “But don’t get impatient, either. Let’s just sit easy and wait – and see how he works it.”

It seemed like Billy and I were the only two left who believed in McMurphy. And that very night Billy swung over to Harding’s way of looking at things when McMurphy came back from making another phone call and told Billy that the date with Candy was on for certain and added, writing an address down for him, that it might be a good idea to send her a little bread for the trip.

“Bread? Muh-money? How muh-muh-much?” He looked over to where Harding was grinning at him.

“Oh, you know, man – maybe ten bucks for her and ten – ”

“Twenty bucks! It doesn’t cost that muh-muh-much for bus fare down here.”

McMurphy looked up from under his hatbrim, gave Billy a slow grin, then rubbed his throat with his hand, running out a dusty tongue. “Boy, oh boy, but I’m terrible dry. Figure to be even drier by a week come Saturday. You wouldn’t begrudge her bringin’ me a little swallow, would you, Billy Boy?”

And gave Billy such an innocent look Billy had to laugh and shake his head, no, and go off to a corner to excitedly talk over the next Saturday’s plans with the man he probably considered a pimp.

I still had my own notions – how McMurphy was a giant come out of the sky to save us from the Combine that was networking the land with copper wire and crystal, how he was too big to be bothered with something as measly as money – but even I came halfway to thinking like the others. What happened was this: He’d helped carry the tables into the tub room before one of the group meetings and was looking at me standing beside the control panel.

“By God, Chief,” he said, “it appears to me you grooved ten inches since that fishing trip. And lordamighty, look at the size of that foot of yours; big as a flatcar!”

I looked down and saw how my foot was bigger than I’d ever remembered it, like McMurphy’s just saying it had blowed it twice its size.

“And that arm! That’s the arm of an ex-football-playing Indian if I ever saw one. You know what I think? I think you oughta give this here panel a leetle heft, just to test how you’re comin’.”

I shook my head and told him no, but he said we’d made a deal and I was obligated to give it a try to see how his growth system was working. I didn’t see any way out of it so I went to the panel just to show him I couldn’t do it. I bent down and took it by the levers.

“That’s the baby, Chief. Now just straighten up. Get those legs under your butt, there… yeah, yeah. Easy now… just straighten up. Hooeee! Now ease ‘er back to the deck.”

I thought he’d be real disappointed, but when I stepped back he was all grins and pointing to where the panel was off its mooring by half a foot. “Better set her back where she came from, buddy, so nobody’ll know. Mustn’t let anybody know yet.”

Then, after the meeting, loafing around the pinochle games, he worked the talk around to strength and gut-power and to the control panel in the tub room. I thought he was going to tell them how he’d helped me get my size back; that would prove he didn’t do everything for money.

But he didn’t mention me. He talked until Harding asked him if he was ready to have another try at lifting it and he said no, but just because he couldn’t lift it was no sign it couldn’t be done. Scanlon said maybe it could be done with a crane, but no man could lift that thing by himself, and McMurphy nodded and said maybe so, maybe so, but you never can tell about such things.

I watched the way he played them, got them to come around to him and say, No, by Jesus, not a man alive could lift it – finally even suggest the bet themselves. I watched how reluctant he looked to bet. He let the odds stack up, sucked them in deeper and deeper till he had five to one on a sure thing from every man of them, some of them betting up to twenty dollars. He never said a thing about seeing me lift it already.

All night I hoped he wouldn’t go through with it. And during the meeting the next day, when the nurse said all the men who participated in the fishing trip would have to take special showers because they were suspected of vermin, I kept hoping she’d fix it somehow, make us take our showers right away or something – anything to keep me from having to lift it.

But when the meeting was over he led me and the rest of the guys into the tub room before the black boys could lock it up, and had me take the panel by the levers and lift. I didn’t want to, but I couldn’t help it. I felt like I’d helped him cheat them out of their money. They were all friendly with him as they paid their bets, but I knew how they were feeling inside, how something had been kicked out from under them. As soon as I got the panel back in place, I ran out of the tub room without even looking at McMurphy and went into the latrine. I wanted to be by myself. I caught a look at myself in the mirror. He’d done what he said; my arms were big again, big as they were back in high school, back at the village, and my chest and shoulders were broad and hard. I was standing there looking when he came in. He held out a five-dollar bill.

“Here you go, Chief, chewin’-gum money.”

I shook my head and started to walk out of the latrine. He caught me by the arm.

“Chief, I just offered you a token of my appreciation. If you figure you got a bigger cut comin’ – ”

“No! Keep your money, I won’t have it.”

He stepped back and put his thumbs in his pockets and tipped his head up at me. He looked me over for a while.

“Okay,” he said. “Now what’s the story? What’s everybody in this place giving me the cold nose about?”

I didn’t answer him.

“Didn’t I do what I said I would? Make you man-sized again? What’s wrong with me around here all of a sudden? You birds act like I’m a traitor to my country.”

“You’re always… winning things!”

“Winning things! You damned moose, what are you accuse me of? All I do is hold up my end of the deal. Now what’s so all-fired – ”

“We thought it wasn’t to be winning things…”

I could feel my chin jerking up and down the way it does before I start crying, but I didn’t start crying. I stood there in front of him with my chin jerking. He opened his mouth to say something, and then stopped. He took his thumbs out of his pockets and reached up and grabbed the bridge of his nose between his thumb and finger, like you see people do whose glasses are too tight between the lenses, and he closed his eyes.

“Winning, for Christsakes,” he said with his eyes closed. ‘‘Hoo boy, winning.”

* * *

So I figure what happened in the shower room that afternoon was more my fault than anybody else’s. And that’s why the only way I could make any kind of amends was by doing what I did, without thinking about being cagey or safe or what would happen to me – and not worrying about anything else for once but the thing that needed to be done and the doing of it.

Just after we left the latrine the three black boys came around, gathering the bunch of us for our special shower. The least black boy, scrambling along the baseboard with a black, crooked hand cold as a crowbar, prying guys loose leaning there, said it was what the Big Nurse called a cautionary cleansing. In view of the company we’d had on our trip we should get cleaned before we spread anything through the rest of the hospital.

We lined up nude against the tile, and here one black boy came, a black plastic tube in his hand, squirting a stinking salve thick and sticky as egg white. In the hair first, then turn around an’ bend over an’ spread your cheeks!

The guys complained and kidded and joked about it, trying not to look at one another or those floating slate masks working down the line behind the tubes, like nightmare faces in negative, sighting down soft, squeezy nightmare gunbarrels. They kidded the black boys by saying things like “Hey, Washington, what do you fellas do for fun the other sixteen hours?” “Hey, Williams, can you tell me what I had for breakfast?”

Everybody laughed. The black boys clenched their jaws and didn’t answer; this wasn’t the way things used to be before that damned redhead came around.

When Fredrickson spread his cheeks there was such a sound I thought the least black boy’d be blown clear off his feet.

“Hark!” Harding said, cupping his hand to his ear. “The lovely voice of an angel.”

Everyone was roaring, laughing and kidding one another, until the black boy moved on and stopped in front of the next man, and the room was suddenly absolutely quiet. The next man was George. And in that one second, with the laughing and kidding and complaining stopped, with Fredrickson there next to George straightening up and turning around and a big black boy about to ask George to lean his head down for a squirt of that stinking salve – right at that time all of us had a good idea about everything that was going to happen, and why it had to happen, and why we’d all been wrong about Mc-Murphy.

George never used soap when he showered. He wouldn’t even let somebody hand him a towel to dry himself with. The black boys on the evening shift who supervised the usual Tuesday and Thursday evening showers had learned it was easier to leave it go like this, and they didn’t force him to do any different. That was the way it’d been for a long time. All the black boys knew it. But now everybody knew – even George, leaning backward, shaking his head, covering himself with big oakleaf hands – that this black boy, with his nose busted and his insides soured and his two buddies standing behind him waiting to see what he would do, couldn’t afford to pass up the chance.

“Ahhhh, bend you head down here, Geo’ge…”

The guys were already looking to where McMurphy stood a couple of men down the line.

“Ahhhh, c’mon, Geo’ge…”

Martini and Sefelt were standing in the shower, not moving. The drain at their feet kept choking short little gulps of air and soapy water. George looked at the drain a second, as if it were speaking to him. He watched it gurgle and choke. He looked back at the tube in the black hand before him, slow mucus running out of the little hole at the top of the tube down over the pig-iron knuckles. The black boy moved the tube forward a few inches, and George listed farther back, shaking his head.

“No – none that stoof.”

“You gonna have to do it, Rub-a-dub,” the black boy said, sounding almost sorry. “You gonna have to. We can’t have the place crawlin’ with bugs, now, can we? For all I know you got bugs on you a good inch deep!”

“No!” George said.

“Ahhh, Geo’ge, you jes’ don’t have no idea. These bugs, they very, very teeny – no bigger’n a pinpoint. An’, man, what they do is get you by the short hair an’ hang on, an’ drill, down inside you, Geo’ge.”

“No bugs!” George said.

“Ahhh, let me tell you, Geo’ge: I seen cases where these awful bugs actually – ”

“Okay, Washington,” McMurphy said.

The scar where the black boy’s nose had been broken was a twist of neon. The black boy knew who’d spoken to him, but he didn’t turn around; the only way we knew he’d even heard was by the way he stopped talking and reached up a long gray finger and drew it across the scar he’d got in that basketball game. He rubbed his nose a second, then shoved his hand out in front of George’s face, scrabbling the fingers around. “A crab, Geo’ge, see? See here? Now you know what a crab look like, don’t you? Sure now, you get crabs on that fishin’ boat. We can’t have crabs drillin’ down into you, can we, Geo’ge?”

“No crabs!” George yelled. “No!” He stood straight and his brow lifted enough so we could see his eyes. The black boy stepped back a ways. The other two laughed at him. “Somethin’ the matter, Washington, my man?” the big one asked. “Somethin’ holding up this end of the pro-ceedure, my man?”

He stepped back in close. “Geo’ge, I’m tellin’ you: bend down! You either bend down and take this stuff – or I lay my hand on you!” He held it up again; it was big and black as a swamp. “Put this black! filthy! stinkin’! hand all over you!”

“No hand!” George said and lifted a fist above his head as if he would crash the slate skull to bits, splatter cogs and nuts and bolts all over the floor. But the black boy just ran the tube up against George’s belly-button and squeezed, and George doubled over with a suck of air. The black boy squirted a load in his whispy white hair, then rubbed it in with his hand, smearing black from his hand all over George’s head. George wrapped both arms around his belly and screamed.

“No! No!”

“Now turn around, Geo’ge – ”

“I said that’s enough, buddy.” This time the way his voice sounded made the black boy turn and face him. I saw the black boy was smiling, looking at McMurphy’s nakedness – no hat or boots or pockets to hook his thumbs into. The black boy grinned up and down him.

“McMurphy,” he said, shaking his head. “Y’know, I was beginnin’ to think we might never get down to it.”

“You goddamned coon,” McMurphy said, somehow sounding more tired than mad. The black boy didn’t say anything. McMurphy raised his voice. “Goddamned motherfucking nigger!”

The black boy shook his head and giggled at his two buddies. “What you think Mr. McMurphy is drivin’ at with that kind of talk, man? You think he wants me to take the initiative? Heeheehee. Don’t he know we trained to take such awful-soundin’ insults from these crazies?”

“Cocksucker! Washington, you’re nothing but a – ”

Washington had turned his back on him, turning to George again. George was still bent over, gasping from the blow of that salve in his belly. The black boy grabbed his arm and swung ‘him facing the wall.

“Tha’s right, Geo’ge, now spread those cheeks.”

“No-o-o!”

“Washington,” McMurphy said. He took a deep breath and stepped across to the black boy, shoving him away from George. “Washington, all right, all right…”

Everybody could hear the helpless, cornered despair in McMurphy’s voice.

“McMurphy, you forcing me to protect myself. Ain’t he forcing me, men?” The other two nodded. He carefully laid down the tube on the bench beside George, came back up with his fist swinging all in the same motion and busting McMurphy across the cheek by surprise. McMurphy nearly fell. He staggered backward into the naked line of men, and the guys caught him and pushed him back toward the smiling slate face. He got hit again, in the neck, before he gave up to the idea that it had started, at last, and there wasn’t anything now but get what he could out of it. He caught the next swing blacksnaking at him, and held him by the wrist while he shook his head clear.

They swayed a second that way, panting along with the panting drain; then McMurphy shoved the black boy away and went into a crouch, rolling the big shoulders up to guard his chin, his fists on each side of his head, circling the man in front of him.

And that neat, silent line of nude men changed into a yelling circle, limbs and bodies knitting in a ring of flesh.

The black arms stabbed in at the lowered red head and bull neck, chipped blood off the brow and the cheek. The black boy danced away. Taller, arms longer than Mc-Murphy’s thick red arms, punches faster and sharper, he was able to chisel at the shoulders and the head without getting in close. McMurphy kept walking forward – trudging, flatfooted steps, face down and squinting up between those tattooed fists on each side of his head – till he got the black boy against the ring of nude men and drove a fist square in the center of the white, starched chest. That slate face cracked pink, ran a tongue the color of strawberry ice cream over the lips. He ducked away from McMurphy’s tank charge and got in another couple of licks before that fist laid him another good one. The mouth flew open wider this time, a blotch of sick color.

McMurphy had red marks on the head and shoulders, but he didn’t seem to be hurt. He kept coming, taking ten blows for one. It kept on this way, back and forth in the shower room, till the black boy was panting and staggering and working mainly at keeping out of the way of those clubbing red arms. The guys were yelling for McMurphy to lay him out. McMurphy didn’t act in any hurry.

The black boy spun away from a blow on his shoulder and looked quick to where the other two were watching. “Williams… Warren… damn you!” The other big one pulled the crowd apart and grabbed McMurphy around the arms from behind. McMurphy shook him off like a bull shaking off a monkey, but he was right back.

So I picked him off and threw him in the shower. He was full of tubes; he didn’t weigh more’n ten or fifteen pounds.

The least black boy swung his head from side to side, turned, and ran for the door. While I was watching him go, the other one came out of the shower and put a wrestling hold on me – arms up under mine from behind and hands locked behind my neck – and I had to run backward into the shower and mash him against the tile, and while I was lying there in the water trying to watch McMurphy bust some more of Washington’s ribs, the one behind me with the wrestling hold went to biting my neck and I had to break the hold. He laid still then, the starch washing from the uniform down the choking drain.

And by the time the least black boy came running back in with straps and cuffs and blankets and four more aides from Disturbed, everybody was getting dressed and shaking my hand and McMurphy’s hand and saying they had it coming and what a rip-snorter of a fight it had been, what a tremendous big victory. They kept talking like that, to cheer us up and make us feel better, about what a fight, what a victory – as the Big Nurse helped the aides from Disturbed adjust those soft leather cuffs to fit our arms.