One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey [78]
“Let him lay,” he said, washing himself down in the shower. “Maybe he don’t like deep water.”
I could see it coming. The next day he surprised everybody on the ward by getting up early and polishing that latrine till it sparkled, and then went to work on the hall floors when the black boys asked him to. Surprised everybody but the Big Nurse; she acted like it was nothing surprising at all.
And that afternoon in the meeting when Cheswick said that everybody’d agreed that there should be some kind of showdown on the cigarette situation, saying, “I ain’t no little kid to have cigarettes kept from me like cookies! We want something done about it, ain’t that right, Mack?” and waited for McMurphy to back him up, all he got was silence.
He looked over at McMurphy’s corner. Everybody did. McMurphy was there, studying the deck of cards that slid in and out of sight in his hands. He didn’t even look up. It was awfully quiet; there was just that slap of greasy cards and Cheswick’s heavy breathing.
“I want something done!” Cheswick suddenly yelled again. “I ain’t no little kid!” He stamped his foot and looked around him like he was lost and might break out crying any minute. He clenched both fists and held them at his chubby round chest. His fists made little pink balls against the green, and they were clenched so hard he was shaking.
He never had looked big; he was short and too fat and had a bald spot in the back of his head that showed like a pink dollar, but standing there by himself in the center of the day room like that he looked tiny. He looked at McMurphy and got no look back, and went down the line of Acutes looking for help. Each time a man looked away and refused to back him up, and the panic in his face doubled. His looking finally came to a stop at the Big Nurse. He stamped his foot again.
“I want something done! Hear me? I want something done! Something! Something! Some—”
The two big black boys clamped his arms from behind, and the least one threw a strap around him. He sagged like he’d been punctured, and the two big ones dragged him up to Disturbed; you could hear the soggy bounce of him going up the steps. When they came back and sat down, the Big Nurse turned to the line of Acutes across the room and looked at them. Nothing had been said since Cheswick left.
“Is there anymore discussion,” she said, “on the rationing of cigarettes?”
Looking down the canceled row of faces hanging against the wall across the room from me, my eyes finally came to McMurphy in his chair in the corner, concentrating on improving his one-handed card cut…and the white tubes in the ceiling begin to pump their refrigerated light again…I can feel it, beams all the way into my stomach.
After McMurphy doesn’t stand up for us any longer, some of the Acutes talk and say he’s still outsmarting the Big Nurse, say that he got word she was about to send him to Disturbed and decided to toe the line a while, not give her any reason. Others figure he’s letting her relax, then he’s going to spring something new on her, something wilder and more ornery than ever. You can hear them talking in groups, wondering.
But me, I know why. I heard him talk to the lifeguard. He’s finally getting cagey, is all. The way Papa finally did when he came to realize that he couldn’t beat that group from town who wanted the government to put in the dam because of the money and the work it would bring, and because it would get rid of the village: Let that tribe of fish Injuns take their stink and their two hundred thousand dollars the government is paying them and go some place else with it! Papa had done the smart thing signing the papers; there wasn’t anything to gain by bucking it. The government would of got it anyhow, sooner or later; this way the tribe would get paid good. It was the smart thing. McMurphy was doing the smart thing. I could see that. He was giving in because it was the smartest thing to do, not because of any of these other reasons the Acutes were making