One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey [125]
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 Jap 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