One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey [49]
He gets three bets and takes up his butter pat and puts it on his knife, gives it a flip. It sticks a good six inches or so to the left of the clock, and everybody kids him about it until he pays his bets. They’re still riding him about did he mean Dead-Eye or Dead-Eyes when the least black boy gets back from hosing Vegetables and everybody looks into his plate and keeps quiet. The black boy senses something is in the air, but he can’t see what. And he probably never would of known except old Colonel Matterson is gazing around, and he sees the butter stuck up on the wall and this causes him to point up at it and go into one of his lessons, explaining to us all in his patient, rumbling voice, just like what he said made sense.
“The but-ter…is the Re-pub-li-can party….”
The black boy looks where the colonel is pointing, and there that butter is, easing down the wall like a yellow snail. He blinks at it but he doesn’t say a word, doesn’t even bother looking around to make certain who flipped it up there.
McMurphy is whispering and nudging the Acutes sitting around him, and in a minute they all nod, and he lays three dollars on the table and leans back. Everybody turns in his chair and watches that butter sneak on down the wall, starting, hanging still, shooting ahead and leaving a shiny trail behind it on the paint. Nobody says a word. They look at the butter, then at the clock, then back at the butter. The clock’s moving now.
The butter makes it down to the floor about a half minute before seven-thirty, and McMurphy gets back all the money he lost.
The black boy wakes up and turns away from the greasy stripe on the wall and says we can go, and McMurphy walks out of the mess hall, folding his money in his pocket. He puts his arms around the black boy’s shoulders and half walks, half carries him, down the hall toward the day room. “The day’s half gone, Sam, ol’ buddy, an’ I’m just barely breaking even. I’ll have to hustle to catch up. How about breaking out that deck of cards you got locked securely in that cabinet, and I’ll see if I can make myself heard over that loudspeaker.”
Spends most of that morning hustling to catch up by dealing more blackjack, playing for IOUs now instead of cigarettes. He moves the blackjack table two or three times to try to get out from under the speaker. You can tell it’s getting on his nerves. Finally he goes to the Nurses’ Station and raps on a pane of glass till the Big Nurse swivels in her chair and opens the door, and he asks her how about turning that infernal noise off for a while. She’s calmer than ever now, back in her seat behind her pane of glass; there’s no heathen running around half-naked to unbalance her. Her smile is settled and solid. She closes her eyes and shakes her head and tells McMurphy very pleasantly, No.
“Can’t you even ease down the volume? It ain’t like the whole state of Oregon needed to hear Lawrence Welk play ‘Tea for Two’ three times every hour, all day long! If it was soft enough to hear a man shout his bets across the table I might get a game of poker going—”
“You’ve been told, Mr. McMurphy, that it’s against the policy to gamble for money on the ward.”
“Okay, then down soft enough to gamble for matches, for fly buttons—just turn the damn thing down!”
“Mr. McMurphy”—she waits and lets her calm schoolteacher tone sink in before she goes on; she knows every Acute on the ward is listening to them—“do you want to know what I think? I think you are being very selfish. Haven’t you noticed there are others in this hospital besides yourself? There are old men here who couldn’t hear the radio at all if it were lower, old fellows who simply aren’t capable of reading, or working puzzles—or playing cards to win other men’s cigarettes. Old fellows like Matterson and Kittling, that music coming from the loudspeaker