One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey [145]
Smiling, Harding stepped up close and asked what had become of Mack.
She took a little pad and pencil from the pocket of her uniform and wrote, “He will be back,” on it and passed it around. The paper trembled in her hand. “Are you sure?” Harding wanted to know after he read it. We’d heard all kinds of things, that he’d knocked down two aides on Disturbed and taken their keys and escaped, that he’d been sent back to the work farm—even that the nurse, in charge now till they got a new doctor, was giving him special therapy.
“Are you quite positive?” Harding repeated.
The nurse took out her pad again. She was stiff in the joints, and her more than ever white hand skittered on the pad like one of those arcade gypsies that scratch out fortunes for a penny. “Yes, Mr. Harding,” she wrote. “I would not say so if I was not positive. He will be back.”
Harding read the paper, then tore it up and threw the pieces at her. She flinched and raised her hand to protect the bruised side of her face from the paper. “Lady, I think you’re full of so much bullshit,” Harding told her. She stared at him, and her hand wavered over the pad a second, but then she turned and walked into the Nurses’ Station, sticking the pad and pencil back down in the pocket of her uniform.
“Hum,” Harding said. “Our conversation was a bit spotty, it seemed. But then, when you are told that you are full of bullshit, what kind of written comeback can you make?”
She tried to get her ward back into shape, but it was difficult with McMurphy’s presence still tromping up and down the halls and laughing out loud in the meetings and singing in the latrines. She couldn’t rule with her old power anymore, not by writing things on pieces of paper. She was losing her patients one after the other. After Harding signed out and was picked up by his wife, and George transferred to a different ward, just three of us were left out of the group that had been on the fishing crew, myself and Martini and Scanlon.
I didn’t want to leave just yet, because she seemed to be too sure; she seemed to be waiting for one more round, and I wanted to be there in case it came off. And one morning, after McMurphy’d been gone three weeks, she made her last play.
The ward door opened, and the black boys wheeled in this Gurney with a chart at the bottom that said in heavy black letters, MCMURPHY, RANDLE P. POST-OPERATIVE. And below this was written in ink, LOBOTOMY.
They pushed it into the day room and left it standing against the wall, along next to the Vegetables. We stood at the foot of the Gurney, reading the chart, then looked up to the other end at the head dented into the pillow, a swirl of red hair over a face milk-white except for the heavy purple bruises around the eyes.
After a minute of silence Scanlon turned and spat on the floor. “Aaah, what’s the old bitch tryin’ to put over on us anyhow, for crap sakes. That ain’t him.”
“Nothing like him,” Martini said.
“How stupid she think we are?”
“Oh, they done a pretty fair job, though,” Martini said, moving up alongside the head and pointing as he talked. “See. They got the broken nose and that crazy scar—even the sideburns.”
“Sure,” Scanlon growled, “but hell!”
I pushed past the other patients to stand beside Martini. “Sure, they can do things like scars and broken noses,” I said. “But they can’t do that look. There’s nothin’ in the face. Just like one of those store dummies, ain’t that right, Scanlon?”
Scanlon spat again. “Damn right. Whole thing’s, you know, too blank. Anybody can see that.”
“Look here,” one of the patients said, peeling back the sheet, “tattoos.”
“Sure,” I said, “they can do tattoos. But the arms, huh? The arms? They couldn’t do those. His arms were big!”
For the rest of the afternoon Scanlon and Martini