One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey [129]
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 feedstore 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.
There had been times when I’d wandered around in a daze for as long as two weeks after a shock treatment, living in that foggy, jumbled blur which is a whole lot like the ragged edge of sleep, that gray zone between light and dark, or between sleeping and waking or living and dying; where you know you’re not unconscious anymore but don’t know yet what day it is or who you are or what’s the use of coming back at all—for two weeks. If you don’t have a reason to wake up you can loaf around in that gray zone for a long, fuzzy time, or if you want to bad enough I found you can come fighting