• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1147 0

hell, but he doesn’t look like Papa; Papa was a full-blood Columbia Indian—a chief—and hard and shiny as a gunstock. This guy is redheaded with long red sideburns and a tangle of curls out from under his cap, been needing cut a long time, and he’s broad as Papa was tall, broad across the jaw and shoulders and chest, a broad white devilish grin, and he’s hard in a different kind of way from Papa, kind of the way a baseball is hard under the scuffed leather. A seam runs across his nose and one cheekbone where somebody laid him a good one in a fight, and the stitches are still in the seam. He stands there waiting, and when nobody makes a move to say anything to him he commences to laugh. Nobody can tell exactly why he laughs; there’s nothing funny going on. But it’s not the way that Public Relation laughs, it’s free and loud and it comes out of his wide grinning mouth and spreads in rings bigger and bigger till it’s lapping against the walls all over the ward. Not like that fat Public Relation laugh. This sounds real. I realize all of a sudden it’s the first laugh I’ve heard in years.

He stands looking at us, rocking back in his boots, and he laughs and laughs. He laces his fingers over his belly without taking his thumbs out of his pockets. I see how big and beat up his hands are. Everybody on the ward, patients, staff, and all, is stunned dumb by him and his laughing. There’s no move to stop him, no move to say anything. He laughs till he’s finished for a time, and he walks on into the day room. Even when he isn’t laughing, that laughing sound hovers around him, the way the sound hovers around a big bell just quit ringing—it’s in his eyes, in the way he smiles and swaggers, in the way he talks.

“My name is McMurphy, buddies, R. P. McMurphy, and I’m a gambling fool.” He winks and sings a little piece of a song: “‘…and whenever I meet with a deck a cards I lays…my money…down,’” and laughs again.

He walks to one of the cards games, tips an Acute’s cards up with a thick, heavy finger, and squints at the hand and shakes his head.

“Yessir, that’s what I came to this establishment for, to bring you birds fun an’ entertainment around the gamin’ table. Nobody left in that Pendleton Work Farm to make my days interesting anymore, so I requested a transfer, ya see. Needed some new blood. Hooee, look at the way this bird holds his cards, showin’ to everybody in a block; man! I’ll trim you babies like little lambs.”

Cheswick gathers his cards together. The redheaded man sticks his hand out for Cheswick to shake.

“Hello, buddy; what’s that you’re playin’? Pinochle? Jesus, no wonder you don’t care nothin’ about showing your hand. Don’t you have a straight deck around here? Well say, here we go, I brought along my own deck, just in case, has something in it other than face cards—and check the pictures, huh? Ever one different. Fifty-two positions.”

Cheswick is pop-eyed already, and what he sees on those cards don’t help his condition.

“Easy now, don’t smudge ’em; we got lots of time, lots of games ahead of us. I like to use my deck here because it takes at least a week for the other players to get to where they can even see the suit….”

He’s got on work-farm pants and shirt, sunned out till they’re the color of watered milk. His face and neck and arms are the color of oxblood leather from working long in the fields. He’s got a primer-black motorcycle cap stuck in his hair and a leather jacket over one arm, and he’s got on boots gray and dusty and heavy enough to kick a man half in two. He walks away from Cheswick and takes off the cap and goes to beating a dust storm out of his thigh. One of the black boys circles him with the thermometer, but he’s too quick for them; he slips in among the Acutes and starts moving around shaking hands before the black boy can take good aim. The way he talks, his wink, his loud talk, his swagger all remind me of a car salesman or a stock auctioneer—or one of those pitchmen you see on a sideshow stage, out in front of his flapping banners, standing there in a striped shirt with yellow buttons, drawing