One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey [134]
“Look, McM-M-M-Murphy, wait.” Billy was balking like a mule.
“Don’t you mamamamurphy me, Billy Boy. It’s too late to back out now. You’ll pull through. I’ll tell you what: I got five dollars here says you burn that woman down; all right? Open the window, Turkle.”
There were two girls in the dark, Candy and the other one that hadn’t shown up for the fishing trip. “Hot dog,” Turkle said, helping them through, “enough for ever’body.”
We all went to help: they had to lift their tight skirts up to their thighs to step through the window. Candy said, “You damn McMurphy,” and tried so wild to throw her arms around him that she came near to breaking the bottles she held by the neck in each hand. She was weaving around quite a bit, and her hair was falling out of the hairdo she had piled on top of her head. I thought she looked better with it swung at the back like she’d worn it on the fishing trip. She gestured at the other girl with a bottle as she came through the window.
“Sandy came along. She just up and left that maniac from Beaverton that she married; isn’t that wild?”
The girl came through the window and kissed McMurphy and said, “Hello, Mack. I’m sorry I didn’t show up. But that’s over. You can take just so many funsies like white mice in your pillowcase and worms in your cold cream and frogs in your bra.” She shook her head once and wiped her hand in front of her like she was wiping away the memory of her animal-loving husband. “Cheesus, what a maniac.”
They were both in skirts and sweaters and nylons and barefoot, and both red-cheeked and giggling. “We had to keep asking for directions,” Candy explained, “at every bar we came to.”
Sandy was turning around in a big wide-eyed circle. “Whoee, Candy girl, what are we in now? Is this real? Are we in an asylum? Man!” She was bigger than Candy, and maybe five years older, and had tried to lock her bay-colored hair in a stylish bun at the back of her head, but it kept stringing down around her broad milk-fed cheekbones, and she looked like a cowgirl trying to pass herself off as a society lady. Her shoulders and breasts and hips were too wide and her grin too big and open for her to ever be called beautiful, but she was pretty and she was healthy and she had one long finger crooked in the ring of a gallon of red wine, and it swung at her side like a purse.
“How, Candy, how, how, how do these wild things happen to us?” She turned around once more and stopped, with her bare feet spread, giggling.
“These things don’t happen,” Harding said to the girl solemnly. “These things are fantasies you lie awake at night dreaming up and then are afraid to tell your analyst. You’re not really here. That wine isn’t real; none of this exists. Now, let’s go on from there.”
“Hello, Billy,” Candy said.
“Look at that stuff,” Turkle said.
Candy straight-armed one of the bottles awkwardly toward Billy. “I brought you a present.”
“These things are Thorne Smithian daydreams!” Harding said.
“Boy!” the girl named Sandy said. “What have we got ourselves into?”
“Shhhh,” Scanlon said and scowled around him. “You’ll wake up those other bastards, talking so loud.”
“What’s the matter, stingy?” Sandy giggled, starting to turn in her circle again. “You scared there’s not enough to go around?”
“Sandy, I mighta known you’d bring that damn cheap port.”
“Boy!” She stopped her turning to look up at me. “Dig this one, Candy. A Goliath—fee, fi, fo, fum.”
Mr. Turkle said, “Hot dog,” and locked the screen back, and Sandy said, “Boy,” again. We were all in an awkward little cluster in the middle of the day room, shifting around one another, saying things just because nobody knew what else to do yet—never been up against a situation like it—and I don’t know when this excited, uneasy flurry of talk and giggling and shuffling around the day room would’ve stopped if that ward door hadn’t rung with a key knocking it open down the hall—jarred everybody like a burglar alarm going