27

Up on Disturbed there’s an everlasting high-pitched machine-room clatter, a prison mill stamping out license plates. And time is measured out by the di-dock, di-dock of a Ping-pong table. Men pacing their personal runways get to a wall and dip a shoulder and turn and pace back to another wall, dip a shoulder and turn and back again, fast short steps, wearing crisscrossing ruts in the tile floor, with a look of caged thirst. There’s a singed smell of men scared berserk and out of control, and in the corners and under the Ping-pong table there’s things crouched gnashing their teeth that the doctors and nurses can’t see and the aides can’t kill with disinfectant. When the ward door opened I smelled that singed smell and heard that gnash of teeth.

A tall bony old guy, dangling from a wire screwed in between his shoulder blades, met McMurphy and me at the door when the aides brought us in. He looked us over with yellow, scaled eyes and shook his head. “I wash my hands of the whole deal,” he told one of the colored aides, and the wire drug him off down the hall.

We followed him down to the day room, and Mc-Murphy stopped at the door and spread his feet and tipped his head back to look things over: he tried to put his thumbs in his pockets, but the cuffs were too tight. “It’s a scene,” he said out of the side of his mouth. I nodded my head. I’d seen it all before.

A couple of the guys pacing stopped to look at us, and the old bony man came dragging by again, washing his hands of the whole deal. Nobody paid us much mind at first. The aides went off to the Nurses’ Station, leaving us standing in the dayroom door. Murphy’s eye was puffed to give him a steady wink, and I could tell it hurt his lips to grin. He raised his cuffed hands and stood looking at the clatter of movement and took a deep breath.

“McMurphy’s the name, pardners,” he said in his drawling cowboy actor’s voice, “an’ the thing I want to know is who’s the peckerwood runs the poker game in this establishment?”

The Ping-pong clock died down in a rapid ticking on the floor.

“I don’t deal blackjack so good, hobbled like this, but I maintain I’m a fire-eater in a stud game.”

He yawned, hitched a shoulder, bent down and cleared his throat, and spat something at a wastepaper can five feet away; it rattled in with a ting and he straightened up again, grinned, and licked his tongue at the bloody gap in his teeth.

“Had a run-in downstairs. Me an’ the Chief here locked horns with two greasemonkeys.”

All the stamp-mill racket had stopped by this time, and everybody was looking toward the two of us at the door. McMurphy drew eyes to him like a sideshow barker. Beside him, I found that I was obliged to be looked at too, and with people staring at me I felt I had to stand up straight and tall as I could. That made my back hurt where I’d fallen in the shower with the black boy on me, but I didn’t let on. One hungry looker with a head of shaggy black hair came up and held his hand like he figured I had something for him. I tried to ignore him, but he kept running around in front of whichever way I turned, like a little kid, holding that empty hand cupped out to me.

McMurphy talked a while about the fight, and my back got to hurting more and more… I’d hunkered in my chair in the corner for so long that it was hard to stand straight very long. I was glad when a little lap nurse came to take us into the Nurses’ Station and I got a chance to sit and rest.

She asked if we were calm enough for her to take off the cuffs, and McMurphy nodded. He had slumped over with his head hung and his elbows between his knees and looked completely exhausted – it hadn’t occurred to me that it was just as hard for him to stand straight as it was for me.

The nurse – about as big as the small end of nothing whittled to a fine point, as McMurphy put it later – undid our cuffs and gave McMurphy a cigarette and gave me a stick of gum. She said she remembered that I chewed gum. I didn’t remember her at all. McMurphy smoked while she dipped her little hand full of pink birthday candles into a jar of salve and worked over his cuts, flinching every time he flinched and telling him she was sorry. She picked up one of his hands in both of hers and turned it over and salved his knuckles. “Who was it?” she asked, looking at the knuckles. “Was it Washington or Warren?”

McMurphy looked up at her. “Washington,” he said and grinned. “The Chief here took care of Warren.”

She put his hand down and turned to me. I could see the little bird bones in her face. “Are you hurt anywhere?” I shook my head.

“What about Warren and Williams?”

McMurphy told her he thought they might be sporting some plaster the next time she saw them. She nodded and looked at her feet. “It’s not all like her ward,” she said. “A lot of it is, but not all. Army nurses, trying to run an Army hospital. They are a little sick themselves. I sometimes think all single nurses should be fired after they reach thirty-five.”

“At least all single Army nurses,” McMurphy added. He asked how long we could expect to have the pleasure of her hospitality.

“Not very long, I’m afraid.”

“Not very long, you’re afraid?” McMurphy asked her.

“Yes. I’d like to keep men here sometimes instead of sending them back, but she has seniority. No, you probably won’t be very long – I mean – like you are now.”

The beds on Disturbed are all out of tune, too taut or too loose. We were assigned beds next to each other. They didn’t tie a sheet across me, though they left a little dim light on near the bed. Halfway through the night somebody screamed, “I’m starting to spin, Indian! Look me, look me!” I opened my eyes and saw a set of long yellow teeth glowing right in front of my face. It was the hungry-looking guy. “I’m starting to spin! Please look me!”

The aides got him from behind, two of them, dragged him laughing and yelling out of the dorm: “I’m starting to spin, Indian!” – then just laugh. He kept saying it and laughing all the way down the hall till the dorm was quiet again, and I could hear that one other guy saying, “Well… I wash my hands of the whole deal.”

“You had you a buddy for a second there, Chief,” McMurphy whispered and rolled over to sleep. I couldn’t sleep much the rest of the night and I kept seeing those yellow teeth and that guy’s hungry face, asking to Look me! Look me! Or, finally, as I did get to sleep, just asking. That face, just a yellow, starved need, come looming out of the dark in front of me, wanting things… asking things. I wondered how McMurphy slept, plagued by a hundred faces like that, or two hundred, or a thousand.

They’ve got an alarm on Disturbed to wake the patients. They don’t just turn on the lights like downstairs. This alarm sounds like a gigantic pencil-sharpener grinding up something awful. McMurphy and I both sat bolt upright when we heard it and were about to lie back down when a loudspeaker called for the two of us to come to the Nurses’ Station. I got out of bed, and my back had stiffened up overnight to where I could just barely bend; I could tell by the way McMurphy gimped around that he was as stiff as I was.

“What they got on the program for us now, Chief?” he asked. “The boot? The rack? I hope nothing too strenuous, because, man, am I stove up bad!”

I told him it wasn’t strenuous, but I didn’t tell him anything else, because I wasn’t sure myself till I got to the Nurses’ Station, and the nurse, a different one, said, “Mr. Mc-Murphy and Mr. Bromden?” then handed us each a little paper cup.

I looked in mine, and there are three of those red capsules. This tsing whirs in any head I can’t stop.

“Hold on,” McMurphy says. “These are those knockout pills, aren’t they?”

The nurse nods, twists her head to check behind her; there’s two guys waiting with ice tongs, hunching forward with their elbows linked.

McMurphy hands back the cup, says, “No sir, ma’am, but I’ll forgo the blindfold. Could use a cigarette, though.”

I hand mine back too, and she says she must phone and she slips the glass door across between us, is at the phone before anybody can say anything else.

“I’m sorry if I got you into something, Chief,” Mc-Murphy says, and I barely can hear him over the noise of the phone wires whistling in the walls. I can feel the scared downhill rush of thoughts in my head.

We’re sitting in the day room, those faces around us in a circle, when in the door comes the Big Nurse herself, the two big black boys on each side, a step behind her. I try to shrink down in my chair, away from her, but it’s too late. Too many people looking at me; sticky eyes hold me where I sit.

“Good morning,” she says, got her old smile back now. McMurphy says good morning, and I keep quiet even though she says good morning to me too, out loud. I’m watching the black boys; one has tape on his nose and his arm in a sling, gray hand dribbling out of the cloth like a drowned spider, and the other one is moving like he’s got some kind of cast around his ribs. They are both grinning a little. Probably could of stayed home with their hurts, but wouldn’t miss this for nothing. I grin back just to show them.

The Big Nurse talks to McMurphy, soft and patient, about the irresponsible thing he did, the childish thing, throwing a tantrum like a little boy – aren’t you ashamed? He says he guesses not and tells her to get on with it.

She talks to him about how they, the patients downstairs on our ward, at a special group meeting yesterday afternoon, agreed with the staff that it might be beneficial that he receive some shock therapy – unless he realizes his mistakes. All he has to do is admit he was wrong, to indicate, demonstrate rational contact, and the treatment would be canceled this time.

That circle of faces waits and watches. The nurse says it’s up to him.

“Yeah?” he says. “You got a paper I can sign?”

“Well, no, but if you feel it nec— ”

“And why don’t you add some other things while you’re at it and get them out of the way – things like, oh, me being part of a plot to overthrow the government and like how I think life on your ward is the sweetest goddamned life this side of Hawaii – you know, that sort of crap.”

“I don’t believe that would – ”

“Then, after I sign, you bring me a blanket and a package of Red Cross cigarettes. Hooee, those Chinese Commies could have learned a few things from you, lady.”

“Randle, we are trying to help you.”

But he’s on his feet, scratching at his belly, walking on past her and the black boys rearing back, toward the card tables. “O-kay, well well well, where’s this poker table, buddies…?”

The nurse stares after him a moment, then walks into the Nurses’ Station to use the phone.

Two colored aides and a white aide with curly blond hair walk us over to the Main Building. McMurphy talks with the white aide on the way over, just like he isn’t worried about a thing.

There’s frost thick on the grass, and the two colored aides in front trail puffs of breath like locomotives. The sun wedges apart some of the clouds and lights up the frost till the grounds are scattered with sparks. Sparrows fluffed out against the cold, scratching among the sparks for seeds. We cut across the crackling grass, past the digger squirrel holes where I saw the dog. Cold sparks. Frost down the holes, clear out of sight.

I feel that frost in my belly.

We get up to that door, and there’s a sound behind like bees stirred up. Two men in front of us, reeling under the red capsules, one bawling like a baby, saying, “It’s my cross, thank you Lord, it’s all I got, thank you Lord…”

The other guy waiting is saying, “Guts ball, guts ball.” He’s the lifeguard from the pool. And he’s crying a little too.

I won’t cry or yell. Not with McMurphy here.

The technician asks us to take off our shoes, and Mc-Murphy asks him if we get our pants slit and our heads shaved too. The technician says no such luck.

The metal door looks out with its rivet eyes.

The door opens, sucks the first man inside. The lifeguard won’t budge. A beam like neon smoke comes out of the black panel in the room, fastens on his cleat-marked forehead and drags him in like a dog on a leash. The beam spins him around three times before the door closes, and his face is scrambled fear. “Hut one,” he grunts. “Hut two! Hut three!”

I hear them in there pry up his forehead like a manhole cover, clash and snarl of jammed cogs.

Smoke blows the door open, and a Gurney comes out with the first man on it, and he rakes me with his eyes. That face. The Gurney goes back in and brings the lifeguard out. I can hear the yell-leaders spelling out his name.

The technician says, “Next group.”

The floor’s cold, frosted, crackling. Up above the light whines, tube long and white and icy. Can smell the graphite salve, like the smell in a garage. Can smell acid of fear. There’s one window, up high, small, and outside I see those puffy sparrows strung up on a wire like brown beads. Their heads sunk in the feathers against the cold. Something goes to blowing wind over my hollow bones, higher and higher, air raid! air raid!

“Don’t holler, Chief…”

Air raid!

“Take ‘er easy. I’ll go first. My skull’s too thick for them to hurt me. And if they can’t hurt me they can’t hurt you.”

Climbs on the table without any help and spreads his arms out to fit the shadow. A switch snaps the clasps on his wrists, ankles, clamping him into the shadow. A hand takes off his wristwatch, won it from Scanion, drops it near the panel, it springs open, cogs and wheels and the long dribbling spiral of spring jumping against the side of the panel and sticking fast.

He don’t look a bit scared. He keeps grinning at me.

They put the graphite salve on his temples. “What is it?” he says. “Conductant,” the technician says. “Anointest my head with conductant. Do I get a crown of thorns?”

They smear it on. He’s singing to them, makes their hands shake.

“ ‘Get Wildroot Cream Oil, Cholly…’ ”

Put on those things like headphones, crown of silver thorns over the graphite at his temples. They try to hush his singing with a piece of rubber hose for him to bite on.

“ ‘Mage with thoothing lan-o-lin.’ ”

Twist some dials, and the machine trembles, two robot arms pick up soldering irons and hunch down on him. He gives me the wink and speaks to me, muffled, tells me something, says something to me around that rubber hose just as those irons get close enough to the silver on his temples – light arcs across, stiffens him, bridges him up off the table till nothing is down but his wrists and ankles and out around that crimped black rubber hose a sound like hooeee! and he’s frosted over completely with sparks.

And out the window the sparrows drop smoking off the wire.

They roll him out on a Gurney, still jerking, face frosted white. Corrosion. Battery acid. The technician turns to me.

Watch that other moose. I know him. Hold him!

It’s not a will-power thing any more.

Hold him! Damn. No more of these boys without Seconal.

The clamps bite my wrists and ankles.

The graphite salve has iron filings in it, temples scratching.

He said something when he winked. Told me something.

Man bends over, brings two irons toward the ring on my head.

The machine hunches on me.

AIR RAID.

Hit at a lope, running already down the slope. Can’t get back, can’t go ahead, look down the barrel an’ you dead dead dead.

We come up outa the bullreeds run beside the railroad track. I lay an ear to the track, and it burns my cheek.

“Nothin’ either way,” I say, “a hundred miles…”

“Hump,” Papa says.

“Didn’t we used to listen for buffalo by stickin’ a knife in the ground, catch the handle in our teeth, hear a herd way off?”

“Hump,” he says again, but he’s tickled. Out across the other side of the track a fencerow of wheat chats from last winter. Mice under that stuff, the dog says.

“Do we go up the track or down the track, boy?”

“We go across, is what the ol’ dog says.”

“That dog don’t heel.”

“He’ll do. There’s birds over there is what the of dog says.”

“Better hunting up the track bank is what your ol’ man says.”

“Best right across in the chats of wheat, the dog tells me.”

Across – next thing I know there’s people all over the track, blasting away at pheasants like anything. Seems our dog got too far out ahead and run all the birds outa the chats to the track.

Dog got three mice.

… man, Man, MAN, MAN… broad and big with a wink like a star.

Ants again oh Jesus and I got ‘em bad this time, prickle-footed bastards. Remember the time we found those ants tasted like dill pickles? Hee? You said it wasn’t dill pickles and I said it was, and your mama kicked the living tar outa me when she heard: Teachin’ a kid to eat bugs!

Ugh. Good Injun boy should know how to survive on anything he can eat that won’t eat him first.

We ain’t Indians. We’re civilized and you remember it.

You told me Papa. When I die pin me up against the sky.

Mama’s name was Bromden. Still is Bromden. Papa said he was born with only one name, born smack into it the way a calf drops out in a spread blanket when the cow insists on standing up. Tee Ah Millatoona, the Pine-That-Stands-Tallest-on-the-Mountain, and I’m the biggest by God Injun in the state of Oregon and probly California and Idaho. Born right into it.

You’re the biggest by God fool if you think that a good Christian woman takes on a name like Tee Ah Millatoo-na. You were born into a name, so okay, I’m born into a name. Bromden. Mary Louise Bromden.

And when we move into town, Papa says, that name makes gettin’ that Social Security card a lot easier.

Guy’s after somebody with a riveter’s hammer, get him too, if he keeps at it. I see those lightning flashes again, colors striking.

Ting. Tingle, tingle, tremble toes, she’s a good fisherman, catches hens, puts ‘em inna pens… wire blier, limber lock, three geese inna flock… one flew east, one flew west, one flew over the cuckoo’s nest… O-U-T spells out… goose swoops down and plucks you out.

My old grandma chanted this, a game we played by the hours, sitting by the fish racks scaring flies. A game called Tingle Tingle Tangle Toes. Counting each finger on my two outspread hands, one finger to a syllable as she chants.

Tingle, ting-le, tang-le toes (seven fingers) she’s a good fisherman, catches hens (sixteen fingers, tapping a finger on each beat with her black crab hand, each of my fingernails looking up at her like a little face asking to be the you that the goose swoops down and plucks out).

I like the game and I like Grandma. I don’t like Mrs. Tingle Tangle Toes, catching hens. I don’t like her. I do like that goose flying over the cuckoo’s nest. I like him, and I like Grandma, dust in her wrinkles.

Next time I saw her she was stone cold dead, right in the middle of The Dalles on the sidewalk, colored shirts standing around, some Indians, some cattlemen, some wheatmen. They cart her down to the city burying ground, roll red clay into her eyes.

I remember hot, still electric-storm afternoons when jackrabbits ran under Diesel truck wheels.

Joey Fish-in-a-Barrel has twenty thousand dollars and three Cadillacs since the contract. And he can’t drive none of ‘em.

I see a dice.

I see it from the inside, me at the bottom. I’m the weight, loading the dice to throw that number one up there above me. They got the dice loaded to throw a snake eyes, and I’m the load, six lumps around me like white pillows is the other side of the dice, the number six that will always be down when he throws. What’s the other dice loaded for? I bet it’s loaded to throw one too. Snake eyes. They’re shooting with crookies against him, and I’m the load.

Look out, here comes a toss. Ay, lady, the smokehouse is empty and baby needs a new pair of opera pumps. Comin’ at ya. Faw!

Crapped out.

Water. I’m lying in a puddle.

Snake eyes. Caught him again. I see that number one up above me: he can’t whip frozen dice behind the feed-store in an alley – in Portland.

The alley is a tunnel it’s cold because the sun is late afternoon. Let me… go see Grandma. Please, Mama.

What was it he said when he winked?

One flew east one flew west.

Don’t stand in my way.

Damn it, nurse, don’t stand in my way Way WAY!

My roll. Faw. Damn. Twisted again. Snake eyes.

The schoolteacher tell me you got a good head, boy, be something…

Be what, Papa? A rug-weaver like Uncle R & J Wolf? A basket-weaver? Or another drunken Indian?

I say, attendant, you’re an Indian, aren’t you?

Yeah, that’s right.

Well, I must say, you speak the language quite well.

Yeah.

Well… three dollars of regular.

They wouldn’t be so cocky if they knew what me and the moon have going. No damned regular Indian… He who – what was it? – walks out of step, hears another drum.

Snake eyes again. Hoo boy, these dice are cold.

After Grandma’s funeral me and Papa and Uncle Running-and-Jumping Wolf dug her up. Mama wouldn’t go with us; she never heard of such a thing. Hanging a corpse in a tree! It’s enough to make a person sick.

Uncle R & J Wolf and Papa spent twenty days in the drunk tank at The Dalles jail, playing rummy, for Violation of the Dead.

But she’s our goddanged mother!

It doesn’t make the slightest difference, boys. You shoulda left her buried. I don’t know when you blamed Indians will learn. Now, where is she? you’d better tell.

Ah, go fuck yourself, paleface, Uncle R & J said, rolling himself a cigarette. I’ll never tell.

High high high in the hills, high in a pine tree bed, she’s tracing the wind with that old hand, counting the clouds with that old chant:… three geese in a flock…

What did you say to me when you winked?

Band playing. Look – the sky, it’s the Fourth of July. Dice at rest.

They got to me with the machine again… I wonder… What did he say?

… wonder how McMurphy made me big again.

He said Guts ball.

They’re out there. Black boys in white suits peeing under the door on me, come in later and accuse me of soaking all six these pillows I’m lying on! Number six. I thought the room was a dice. The number one, the snake eye up there, the circle, the white light in the ceiling… is what I’ve been seeing… in this little square room… means it’s after dark. How many hours have I been out? It’s fogging a little, but I won’t slip off and hide in it. No… never again…

I stand, stood up slowly, feeling numb between the shoulders. The white pillows on the floor of the Seclusion Room were soaked from me peeing on them while I was out. I couldn’t remember all of it yet, but I rubbed my eyes with the heels of my hands and tried to clear my head. I worked at it. I’d never worked at coming out of it before.

I staggered toward the little round chicken-wired window in the door of the room and tapped it with my knuckles. I saw an aide coming up the hall with a tray for me and knew this time I had them beat.