One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey [66]
Everybody keeps on at what he’s doing, but they all watch out of the corners of their eyes while he drags his armchair out to in front of the TV set, then switches on the set and sits down. A picture swirls onto the screen of a parrot out on the baseball field singing razor-blade songs. McMurphy gets up and turns up the sound to drown out the music coming down from the speaker in the ceiling, and he drags another chair in front of him and sits down and crosses his feet on the chair and leans back and lights a cigarette. He scratches his belly and yawns.
“Hoo-weee! Man, all I need me now is a can of beer and a red-hot.”
We can see the nurse’s face get red and her mouth work as she stares at him. She looks around for a second and sees everybody watching what she’s going to do—even the black boys and the little nurses sneaking looks at her, and the residents beginning to drift in for the staff meeting, they’re watching. Her mouth clamps shut. She looks back at McMurphy and waits till the razor-blade song is finished; then she gets up and goes to the steel door where the controls are, and she flips a switch and the TV picture swirls back into the gray. Nothing is left on the screen but a little eye of light beading right down on McMurphy sitting there.
That eye don’t faze him a bit. To tell the truth, he don’t even let on he knows the picture is turned off; he puts his cigarette between his teeth and pushes his cap forward in his red hair till he has to lean back to see out from under the brim.
And sits that way, with his hands crossed behind his head and his feet stuck out in a chair, a smoking cigarette sticking out from under his hatbrim—watching the TV screen.
The nurse stands this as long as she can; then she comes to the door of the Nurses’ Station and calls across to him he’d better help the men with the housework. He ignores her.
“I said, Mr. McMurphy, that you are supposed to be working during these hours.” Her voice has a tight whine like an electric saw ripping through pine. “Mr. McMurphy, I’m warning you!”
Everybody’s stopped what he was doing. She looks around her, then takes a step out of the Nurses’ Station toward McMurphy.
“You’re committed, you realize. You are…under the jurisdiction of me…the staff.” She’s holding up a fist, all those red-orange fingernails burning into her palm. “Under jurisdiction and control—”
Harding shuts off the buffer, and leaves it in the hall, and goes pulls him a chair up alongside McMurphy and sits down and lights him a cigarette too.
“Mr. Harding! You return to your scheduled duties!”
I think how her voice sounds like it hit a nail, and this strikes me so funny I almost laugh.
“Mr. Har-ding!”
Then Cheswick goes and gets him a chair, and then Billy Bibbit goes, and then Scanlon and then Fredrickson and Sefelt, and then we all put down our mops and brooms and scouring rags and we all go pull us chairs up.
“You men—Stop this. Stop!”
And we’re all sitting there lined up in front of that blanked-out TV set, watching the gray screen just like we could see the baseball game clear as day, and she’s ranting and screaming behind us.
If somebody’d of come in and took a look, men watching a blank TV, a fifty-year-old woman hollering and squealing at the back of their heads about discipline and order and recriminations, they’d of thought the whole bunch was crazy as loons.
part 2
Just at the edge of my vision I can see that white enamel face in the Nurses’ Station, teetering over the desk, see it warp and flow as it tries to pull back into shape. The rest of the guys are watching too, though they’re trying to act like they aren’t. They’re trying to act like they still got their eyes on nothing