One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey [121]
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 accusin’ 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 there 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