One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey [47]
“Williams…I believe…you were supposed to have the windows of the Nurses’ Station polished by the time I arrived this morning.” He scuttles off like a black and white bug. “And you, Washington—and you…” Washington shuffles back to his bucket in almost a trot. She looks around again, wondering who else she can light into. She spots me, but by this time some of the other patients are out of the dorm and wondering about the little clutch of us here in the hall. She closes her eyes and concentrates. She can’t have them see her face like this, white and warped with fury. She uses all the power of control that’s in her. Gradually the lips gather together again under the little white nose, run together, like the red-hot wire had got hot enough to melt, shimmer a second, then click solid as the molten metal sets, growing cold and strangely dull. Her lips part, and her tongue comes between them, a chunk of slag. Her eyes open again, and they have that strange dull and cold and flat look the lips have, but she goes into her good-morning routine like there was nothing different about her, figuring the patients’ll be too sleepy to notice.
“Good morning, Mr. Sefelt, are your teeth any better? Good morning, Mr. Fredrickson, did you and Mr. Sefelt have a good night last night? You bed right next to each other, don’t you? Incidentally, it’s been brought to my attention that you two have made some arrangement with your medication—you are letting Bruce have your medication, aren’t you, Mr. Sefelt? We’ll discuss that later. Good morning, Billy; I saw your mother on the way in, and she told me to be sure to tell you she thought of you all the time and knew you wouldn’t disappoint her. Good morning, Mr. Harding—why, look, your fingertips are red and raw. Have you been chewing your fingernails again?”
Before they could answer, even if there was some answer to make, she turns to McMurphy still standing there in his shorts. Harding looks at the shorts and whistles.
“And you, Mr. McMurphy,” she says, smiling, sweet as sugar, “if you are finished showing off your manly physique and your gaudy underpants, I think you had better go back in the dorm and put on your greens.”
He tips his cap to her and to the patients ogling and poking fun at his white-whale shorts, and goes to the dorm without a word. She turns and starts off in the other direction, her flat red smile going out before her; before she’s got the door closed on her glass station, his singing is rolling from the dorm door into the hall again.
“‘She took me to her parlor, and coo-oo-ooled me with her fan’”—I can hear the whack as he slaps his bare belly—“‘whispered low in her mamma’s ear, I luh-uhvvv that gamblin’ man.’”
Sweeping the dorm soon’s it’s empty, I’m after dust mice under his bed when I get a smell of something that makes me realize for the first time since I been in the hospital that this big dorm full of beds, sleeps forty grown men, has always been sticky with a thousand other smells—smells of germicide, zinc ointment, and foot powder, smell of piss and sour old-man manure, of Pablum and eyewash, of musty shorts and socks musty even when they’re fresh back from the laundry, the stiff odor of starch in the linen, the acid stench of morning mouths, the banana smell of machine oil, and sometimes the smell of singed hair—but never before now, before he came in, the man smell of dust and dirt from the open fields, and sweat, and work.
All through breakfast McMurphy’s talking and laughing a mile a minute. After this morning he thinks the Big Nurse is going to be a snap. He don’t know he just caught her off guard and, if anything, made her strengthen herself.
He’s being the clown, working at getting some of the guys to laugh. It bothers him that the best they can do is grin weakly and snigger sometimes. He prods at Billy Bibbit, sitting across the table from him, says in a secret voice, “Hey, Billy boy, you remember that time