One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey [100]
“There you’ll be. It’s the Big Chief Bromden, cuttin’ down the boulevard—men, women, and kids rockin’ back on their heels to peer at him: ‘Well well well, what giant’s this here, takin’ ten feet at a step and duckin’ for telephone wires?’ Comes stompin’ through town, stops just long enough for virgins, the rest of you twitches might’s well not even line up ‘less you got tits like muskmelons, nice strong white legs long enough to lock around his mighty back, and a little can of poozle warm and juicy and sweet as butter an’ honey….”
In the dark there he went on, spinning his tale about how it would be, with all the men scared and all the beautiful young girls panting after me. Then he said he was going out right this very minute and sign my name up as one of his fishing crew. He stood up, got the towel from his bedstand and wrapped it around his hips and put on his cap, and stood over my bed.
“Oh man, I tell you, I tell you, you’ll have women trippin’ you and beatin’ you to the floor.”
And all of a sudden his hand shot out and with a swing of his arm untied my sheet, cleared my bed covers, and left me lying there naked.
“Look there, Chief. Haw. What’d I tell ya? You growed a half a foot already.”
Laughing, he walked down the row of beds to the hall.
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 going 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