One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey [45]
It sure did get their goat; they turned without saying a word and walked off toward the highway, red-necked, us laughing behind them. I forget sometimes what laughter can do.
The Big Nurse’s key hits the lock, and the black boy is up to her soon as she’s in the door, shifting from foot to foot like a kid asking to pee. I’m close enough I hear McMurphy’s name come into his conversation a couple of times, so I know he’s telling her about McMurphy brushing his teeth, completely forgetting to tell her about the old Vegetable who died during the night. Waving his arms and trying to tell her what that fool redhead’s been up to already, so early in the morning—disrupting things, goin’ contrary to ward policy, can’t she do something?
She glares at the black boy till he stops fidgeting, then looks up the hall to where McMurphy’s singing is booming out of the latrine door louder than ever. “‘Oh, your parents don’t like me, they say I’m too po-o-or; they say I’m not worthy to enter your door.’”
Her face is puzzled at first; like the rest of us, it’s been so long since she’s heard singing it takes her a second to recognize what it is.
“‘Hard livin’s my pleasure, my money’s my o-o-own, an’ them that don’t like me, they can leave me alone.’”
She listens a minute more to make sure she isn’t hearing things; then she goes to puffing up. Her nostrils flare open, and every breath she draws she gets bigger, as big and tough-looking’s I seen her get over a patient since Taber was here. She works the hinges in her elbows and fingers. I hear a small squeak. She starts moving, and I get back against the wall, and when she rumbles past she’s already big as a truck, trailing that wicker bag behind in her exhaust like a semi behind a Jimmy Diesel. Her lips are parted, and her smile’s going out before her like a radiator grill. I can smell the hot oil and magneto spark when she goes past, and every step hits the floor she blows up a size bigger, blowing and puffing, roll down anything in her path! I’m scared to think what she’ll do.
Then, just as she’s rolling along at her biggest and meanest, McMurphy steps out of the latrine door right in front of her, holding that towel around his hips—stops her dead! She shrinks to about head-high to where that towel covers him, and he’s grinning down on her. Her own grin is giving way, sagging at the edges.
“Good morning, Miss Rat-shed! How’s things on the outside?”
“You can’t run around here—in a towel!”
“No?” He looks down at the part of the towel she’s eye to eye with, and it’s wet and skin tight. “Towels against ward policy too? Well, I guess there’s nothin’ to do exce—”
“Stop! don’t you dare. You get back in that dorm and get your clothes on this instant!”
She sounds like a teacher bawling out a student, so McMurphy hangs his head like a student and says in a voice sounds like he’s about to cry, “I can’t do that, ma’am. I’m afraid some thief in the night boosted my clothes whilst I slept. I sleep awful sound on the mattresses you have here.”
“Somebody boosted…?”
“Pinched. Jobbed. Swiped. Stole,” he says happily. “You know, man, like somebody boosted my threads.” Saying this tickles him so he goes into a little barefooted dance before her.
“Stole your clothes?”
“That looks like the whole of it.”
“But—prison clothes? Why?”
He stops jigging around and hangs his head again. “All I know is that they were there when I went to bed and gone when I got up. Gone slick as a whistle. Oh, I do know they were nothing but prison clothes, coarse and faded and uncouth, ma’am, well I know it—and prison clothes may not seem like much to those as has more. But to a nude man—”
“That outfit,” she says, realizing, “was supposed to be picked up. You were issued a uniform of green convalescents this morning.”
He shakes his head and sighs, but still don’t look up. “No. No, I’m afraid I wasn’t. Not a thing this morning but the cap that’s on my head and—”
“Williams,” she hollers down to the black boy who’s still at the ward door like he might make a run for it.