One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey [46]
He crawls to her like a dog to a whipping.
“Williams, why doesn’t this patient have an issue of convalescents?”
The black boy is relieved. He straightens up and grins, raises that gray hand and points down the other end of the hall to one of the big ones. “Mistuh Washington over there is ’signed to the laundry duty this mornin’. Not me. No.”
“Mr. Washington!” She nails him with his mop poised over the bucket, freezes him there. “Will you come here a moment!”
The mop slides without a sound back in the bucket, and with slow, careful movements he leans the handle against the wall. He turns around and looks down at McMurphy and the least black boy and the nurse. He looks then to his left and to his right, like she might be yelling at somebody else.
“Come down here!”
He puts his hands in his pockets and starts shuffling down the hall to her. He never walks very fast, and I can see how if he don’t get a move on she might freeze him and shatter him all to hell by just looking; all the hate and fury and frustration she was planning to use on McMurphy is beaming out down the hall at the black boy, and he can feel it blast against him like a blizzard wind, slowing him more than ever. He has to lean into it, pulling his arms around him. Frost forms in his hair and eyebrows. He leans farther forward, but his steps are getting slower; he’ll never make it.
Then McMurphy takes to whistling “Sweet Georgia Brown,” and the nurse looks away from the black boy just in time. Now she’s madder and more frustrated than ever, madder’n I ever saw her get. Her doll smile is gone, stretched tight and thin as a red-hot wire. If some of the patients could be out to see her now, McMurphy could start collecting his bets.
The black boy finally gets to her, and it took him two hours. She draws a long breath. “Washington, why wasn’t this man issued a change of greens this morning? Couldn’t you see he had nothing on but a towel?”
“And my cap,” McMurphy whispers, tapping the brim with his finger.
“Mr. Washington?”
The big black boy looks at the little one who pointed him out, and the little black boy commences to fidget again. The big boy looks at him a long time with those radio-tube eyes, plans to square things with him later; then the head turns and he looks McMurphy up and down, taking in the hard, heavy shoulders, the lopsided grin, the scar on the nose, the hand clamping the towel in place, and then he looks at the nurse.
“I guess—” he starts out.
“You guess! You’ll do more than guess! You’ll get him a uniform this instant, Mr. Washington, or spend the next two weeks working on Geriatrics Ward! Yes. You may need a month of bedpans and slab baths to refresh your appreciation of just how little work you aides have to do on this ward. If this was one of the other wards, who do you think would be scouring the hall all day? Mr. Bromden here? No, you know who it would be. We excuse you aides from most of your housekeeping duties to enable you to see to the patients. And that means seeing that they don’t parade around exposed. What do you think would have happened if one of the young nurses had come in early and found a patient running round the halls without a uniform? What do you think!”
The big black boy isn’t too sure what, but he gets her drift and ambles off to the linen room to get McMurphy a set of greens—probably ten sizes too small—and ambles back and holds it out to him with a look of the clearest hate I ever saw. McMurphy just looks confused, like he don’t know how to take the outfit the black boy’s handing to him, what with one hand holding the toothbrush and the other hand holding up the towel. He finally winks at the nurse and shrugs and unwraps the towel, drapes it over her shoulder like she was a wooden rack.
I see he had his shorts on under the towel all along.
I think for a fact that she’d rather he’d of been stark naked under that towel than had on those shorts. She’s glaring at those big white whales leaping round on his shorts in pure wordless outrage. That’s more’n she can take.