One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey [39]
McMurphy sees how she’s looking so scared and big-eyed at him, so he sticks his head in the station door where she’s issuing pills, and gives her a big friendly grin to get acquainted on. This flusters her so she drops the water pitcher on her foot. She gives a cry and hops on one foot, jerks her hand, and the pill she was about to give me leaps out of the little cup and right down the neck of her uniform where that birthmark stain runs like a river of wine down into a valley.
“Let me give you a hand, ma’am.”
And that very hand comes through the station door, scarred and tattooed and the color of raw meat.
“Stay back! There are two aides on the ward with me!”
She rolls her eyes for the black boys, but they are off tying Chronics in bed, nowhere close enough to help in a hurry. McMurphy grins and turns the hand over so she can see he isn’t holding a knife. All she can see is the light shining off the slick, waxy, callused palm.
“All I mean to do, miss, is to—”
“Stay back! Patients aren’t allowed to enter the—Oh, stay back, I’m a Catholic!” and straightaway jerks at the gold chain around her neck so a cross flies out from between her bosoms, slingshots the lost pill up in the air! McMurphy strikes at the air right in front of her face. She screams and pops the cross in her mouth and clinches her eyes shut like she’s about to get socked, stands like that, paper-white except for that stain which turns darker than ever, as though it sucked the blood from all the rest of her body. When she finally opens her eyes again there’s that callused hand right in front of her with my little red capsule sitting in it.
“—was to pick up your waterin’ can you dropped.” He holds that out in the other hand.
Her breath comes out in a loud hiss. She takes the can from him. “Thank you. Good night, good night,” and closes the door in the next man’s face, no more pills tonight.
In the dorm McMurphy tosses the pill on my bed. “You want your sourball, Chief?”
I shake my head at the pill, and he flips it off the bed like it was a bug pestering him. It hops across the floor with a cricket scrabble. He goes to getting ready for bed, pulling off his clothes. The shorts under his work pants are coal black satin covered with big white whales with red eyes. He grins when he sees I’m looking at the shorts. “From a co-ed at Oregon State, Chief, a literary major.” He snaps the elastic with his thumb. “She gave them to me because she said I was a symbol.”
His arms and neck and face are sunburned and bristled with curly orange hairs. He’s got tattoos on each shoulder; one says “Fighting Leathernecks” and has a devil with a red eye and red horns and an M-l rifle, and the other is a poker hand fanned out across his muscle—aces and eights. He puts his roll of clothes on the nightstand next to my bed and goes to punching at his pillow. He’s been assigned the bed right next to mine.
He gets between the sheets and tells me I better hit the sack myself, that here comes one of those black boys to douse the lights on us. I look around, and the black boy named Geever is coming, and I kick off my shoes and get in bed just as he walks up to tie a sheet across me. When he’s finished with me he takes a last look around and giggles and flips the dorm lights off.
Except for the white powder of light from the Nurses’ Station out in the hall, the dorm is dark. I can just make out McMurphy next to me, breathing deep and regular, the covers over him rising and falling. The breathing gets slower and slower, till I figure he’s been asleep for a while. Then I hear a soft, throaty sound from his bed, like the chuckle of a horse. He’s still awake and he’s laughing to himself about something.
He stops laughing and whispers, “Why, you sure did give a jump when I told you that coon was coming, Chief. I thought somebody told me you was deef.”
First time for a long,