One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey [44]
The black boy tries to go back to polishing the baseboards, but that hand is still lopped over his shoulder like a big red clamp.
“Locked in the cabinet, is it? Well well well, now why do you reckon they keep the toothpaste locked up? I mean, it ain’t like it’s dangerous, is it? You can’t poison a man with it, can you? You couldn’t brain some guy with the tube, could you? What reason you suppose they have for puttin’ something as harmless as a little tube of toothpaste under lock and key?”
“It’s ward policy, Mr. McMurphy, tha’s the reason.” And when he sees that this last reason don’t affect McMurphy like it should, he frowns at that hand on his shoulder and adds, “What you s’pose it’d be like if evahbody was to brush their teeth whenever they took a notion to brush?”
McMurphy turns loose the shoulder, tugs at the tuft of red wool at his neck, and thinks this over. “Uh-huh, uhhuh, I think I can see what you’re drivin’ at: ward policy is for those that can’t brush after every meal.”
“My gaw, don’t you see?”
“Yes, now, I do. You’re saying people’d be brushin’ their teeth whenever the spirit moved them.”
“Tha’s right, tha’s why we—”
“And, lordy, can you imagine? Teeth bein’ brushed at six-thirty, six-twenty—who can tell? maybe even six o’clock. Yeah, I can see your point.”
He winks past the black boy at me standing against the wall.
“I gotta get this baseboard cleaned, McMurphy.”
“Oh. I didn’t mean to keep you from your job.” He starts to back away as the black boy bends to his work again. Then he comes forward and leans over to look in the can at the black boy’s side. “Well, look here; what do we have here?”
The black boy peers down. “Look where?”
“Look here in this old can, Sam. What is the stuff in this old can?”
“Tha’s…soap powder.”
“Well, I generally use paste, but”—McMurphy runs his toothbrush down in the powder and swishes it around and pulls it out and taps it on the side of the can—“but this will do fine for me. I thank you. We’ll look into that ward policy business later.”
And he heads back to the latrine, where I can hear his singing garbled by the piston beat of his toothbrushing.
That black boy’s standing there looking after him with his scrub rag hanging limp in his gray hand. After a minute he blinks and looks around and sees I been watching and comes over and drags me down the hall by the drawstring on my pajamas and pushes me to a place on the floor I just did yesterday.
“There! Damn you, right there! That’s where I want you workin’, not gawkin’ around like some big useless cow! There! There!”
And I lean over and go to mopping with my back to him so he won’t see me grin. I feel good, seeing McMurphy get that black boy’s goat like not many men could. Papa used to be able to do it—spraddle-legged, dead-panned, squinting up at the sky that first time the government men showed up to negotiate about buying off the treaty. “Canada honkers up there,” Papa says, squinting up. Government men look, rattling papers. “What are you—? In July? There’s no—uh—geese this time of year. Uh, no geese.”
They had been talking like tourists from the East who figure you’ve got to talk to Indians so they’ll understand. Papa didn’t seem to take any notice of the way they talked. He kept looking at the sky. “Geese up there, white man. You know it. Geese this year. And last year. And the year before and the year before.”
The men looked at one another and cleared their throats. “Yes. Maybe true, Chief Bromden. Now. Forget geese. Pay attention to contract. What we offer could greatly benefit you—your people—change the lives of the red man.”
Papa said, “…and the year before and the year before and the year before…”
By the time it dawned on the government men that they were being poked fun at, all the council who’d been sitting on the porch of our shack, putting pipes in the pockets of their red and black plaid wool shirts and taking them back out again, grinning at one another and at Papa—they had all busted up laughing fit to kill. Uncle R & J Wolf was rolling on the ground, gasping