One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey [128]
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 ol’ 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 Millatoona. 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.
Tingle, ting-le, tang-le 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, tin-gle, tan-gle 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 jack-rabbits 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