One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey [77]
He shrugged again at McMurphy’s question, then looked back and forth to see if any black boys were around, and knelt close to the edge of the pool. He held his arm out for McMurphy to look at.
“You see this cast?”
McMurphy looked at the big arm. “You don’t have a cast on that arm, buddy.”
The lifeguard just grinned. “Well, that cast’s on there because I got a bad fracture in the last game with the Browns. I can’t get back in togs till the fracture knits and I get the cast off. The nurse on my ward tells me she’s curing the arm in secret. Yeah, man, she says if I go easy on that arm, don’t exert it or nothing, she’ll take the cast off and I can get back with the ball club.”
He put his knuckles on the wet tile, went into a three-point stance to test how the arm was coming along. McMurphy watched him a minute, then asked how long he’d been waiting for them to tell him his arm was healed so he could leave the hospital. The lifeguard raised up slowly and rubbed his arm. He acted hurt that McMurphy had asked that, like he thought he was being accused of being soft and licking his wounds. “I’m committed,” he said. “I’d of left here before now if it was up to me. Maybe I couldn’t play first string, with this bum arm, but I could of folded towels, couldn’t I? I could of done something. That nurse on my ward, she keeps telling the doctor I ain’t ready. Not even to fold towels in the crummy old locker room, I ain’t ready.”
He turned and walked over to his lifeguard chair, climbed up the chair ladder like a drugged gorilla, and peered down at us, his lower lip pushed way out. “I was picked up for drunk and disorderly, and I been here eight years and eight months,” he said.
McMurphy pushed backward from the edge of the pool and trod water and thought this over: he’d had a six months’ sentence at the work farm with two months finished, four more to go—and four more months was the most he wanted to spend locked up any place. He’d been close to a month in this nuthouse and it might be a lot better than a work farm, what with good beds and orange juice for breakfast, but it wasn’t better to the point that he’d want to spend a couple of years here.
He swam over to the steps at the shallow end of the pool and sat there the rest of the period, tugging that little tuft of wool at his throat and frowning. Watching him sitting there frowning all to himself, I remembered what the Big Nurse had said in the meeting, and I began to feel afraid.
When they blew the whistle for us to leave the pool and we all were straggling toward the locker room, we ran into this other ward coming into the swimming pool for their period, and in the footbath at the shower you had to go through was this one kid from the other ward. He had a big spongy pink head and bulgy hips and legs—like somebody’d grabbed a balloon full of water and squeezed it in the middle—and he was lying on his side in the footbath, making noises like a sleepy seal. Cheswick and Harding helped him stand up, and he lay right back down in the footbath. The head bobbed around in the disinfectant. McMurphy watched them lift him standing again.
“What the devil is he?” he asked.
“He has hydrocephalus,” Harding told him. “Some manner of lymph disorder, I believe. Head fills up with liquid. Give us a hand helping him stand up.”
They turned the kid loose, and he lay back down in the footbath again; the look on his face was patient and helpless and stubborn; his mouth sputtered and blew bubbles in the milky-looking water. Harding repeated his request to McMurphy to give them a hand, and he and Cheswick bent