One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey [136]
“Look here,” Scanlon said, waving one of those folders. “Talk about complete. They’ve even got my first-grade report card in here. Aaah, miserable grades, just miserable.”
Bill and his girl were going over his folder. She stepped back to look him over. “All these things, Billy? Phrenic this and pathic that? You don’t look like you have all these things.”
The other girl had opened a supply drawer and was suspicious about what the nurses needed with all those hot-water bottles, a million of ’em, and Harding was sitting on the Big Nurse’s desk, shaking his head at the whole affair.
McMurphy and Turkle got the door of the drug room open and brought out a bottle of thick cherry-colored liquid from the ice box. McMurphy tipped the bottle to the light and read the label out loud.
“Artificial flavor, coloring, citric acid. Seventy percent inert materials—that must be water—and twenty percent alcohol—that’s fine—and ten percent codeine. Warning Narcotic May Be Habit Forming.” He unscrewed the bottle and took a taste of it, closing his eyes. He worked his tongue around his teeth and took another swallow and read the label again. “Well,” he said, and clicked his teeth together like they’d just been sharpened, “if we cut it a leetle bit with the vodka, I think it’ll be all right. How are we fixed for ice cubes, Turkey, old buddy?”
Mixed in paper medicine cups with the liquor and the port wine, the syrup had a taste like a kid’s drink but a punch like the cactus apple wine we used to get in The Dalles, cold and soothing on the throat and hot and furious once it got down. We turned out the lights in the day room and sat around drinking it. We threw the first couple of cups down like we were taking our medication, drinking it in serious and silent doses and looking one another over to see if it was going to kill anybody. McMurphy and Turkle switched back and forth from the drink to Turkle’s cigarettes and got to giggling again as they discussed how it would be to lay that little nurse with the birthmark who went off at midnight.
“I’d be scared,” Turkle said, “that she might go to whuppin’ me with that big ol’ cross on that chain. Wun’t that be a fix to be in, now?”
“I’d be scared,” McMurphy said, “that just about the time I was getting my jollies she’d reach around behind me with a thermometer and take my temperature!”
That busted everybody up. Harding stopped laughing long enough to join the joking.
“Or worse yet,” he said. “Just lie there under you with a dreadful concentration on her face, and tell you—oh Jesus, listen—tell you what your pulse was!”
“Oh don’t…oh my Gawd…”
“Or even worse, just lie there and be able to calculate your pulse and temperature both—sans instruments!”
“Oh Gawd, oh please don’t…”
We laughed till we were rolling about the couches and chairs, choking and teary-eyed. The girls were so weak from laughing they had to try two or three times to get to their feet. “I gotta…go tinkle,” the big one said and went weaving and giggling toward the latrine and missed the door, staggered into the dorm while we all hushed one another with fingers to the lips, waiting, till she gave a squeal and we heard old Colonel Matterson roar, “The pillow is…a horse!”—and come whisking out of the dorm right behind her in his wheelchair.
Sefelt wheeled the colonel back to the dorm and showed the girl where the latrine was personally, told her it was generally used by males only but he would stand at the door while she was in there and guard against intrusions on her privacy, defend it against all comers, by gosh. She thanked him solemnly and shook his hand and they saluted each other and while she was inside here came the colonel out of the dorm in his wheelchair again, and Sefelt had his hands full keeping him out of the latrine. When the girl came out of the door he was trying to ward off the charges of the wheelchair with his foot while we stood on the edge of the fracas cheering one guy or the other. The girl helped Sefelt put the colonel back to bed, and then the two of them