One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey [95]
The other two, John and the woman, are just standing. Not a one of the three acts like they heard a thing I said; in fact they’re all looking off from me like they’d as soon I wasn’t there at all.
And everything stops and hangs this way for a minute.
I get the funniest feeling that the sun is turned up brighter than before on the three of them. Everything else looks like it usually does—the chickens fussing around in the grass on top of the ’dobe houses, the grasshoppers batting from bush to bush, the flies being stirred into black clouds around the fish racks by the little kids with sage flails, just like every other summer day. Except the sun, on these three strangers, is all of a sudden way the hell brighter than usual and I can see the…seams where they’re put together. And, almost, see the apparatus inside them take the words I just said and try to fit the words in here and there, this place and that, and when they find the words don’t have any place ready-made where they’ll fit, the machinery disposes of the words like they weren’t even spoken.
The three are stock still while this goes on. Even the swing’s stopped, nailed out at a slant by the sun, with the fat man petrified in it like a rubber doll. Then Papa’s guinea hen wakes up in the juniper branches and sees we got strangers on the premises and goes to barking at them like a dog, and the spell breaks.
The fat man hollers and jumps out of the swing and sidles away through the dust, holding his hat up in front of the sun so’s he can see what’s up there in the juniper tree making such a racket. When he sees it’s nothing but a speckled chicken he spits on the ground and puts his hat on.
“I, myself, sincerely feel,” he says, “that whatever offer we make on this…metropolis will be quite sufficient.”
“Could be. I still think we should make some effort to speak with the Chief—”
The old woman interrupts him by taking one ringing step forward. “No.” This is the first thing she’s said. “No,” she says again in a way that reminds me of the Big Nurse. She lifts her eyebrows and looks the place over. Her eyes spring up like the numbers in a cash register; she’s looking at Mamma’s dresses hung so carefully on the line, and she’s nodding her head.
“No. We don’t talk with the Chief today. Not yet. I think…that I agree with Breckenridge for once. Only for a different reason. You recall the record we have shows the wife is not Indian but white? White. A woman from town. Her name is Bromden. He took her name, not she his. Oh, yes, I think if we just leave now and go back into town, and, of course, spread the word with the townspeople about the government’s plans so they understand the advantages of having a hydroelectric dam and a lake instead of a cluster of shacks beside a falls, then type up an offer—and mail it to the wife, you see, by mistake? I feel our job will be a great deal easier.”
She looks off to the men on the ancient, rickety, zigzagging scaffolding that has been growing and branching out among the rocks of the falls for hundreds of years.
“Whereas if we meet now with the husband and make some abrupt offer, we may run up against an untold amount of Navaho stubbornness and love of—I suppose we must call it home.”
I start to tell them he’s not Navaho, but think what’s the use if they don’t listen? They don’t care what tribe he is.
The woman smiles and nods at both the men, a smile and a nod to each, and her eyes ring them up, and she begins to move stiffly back to their car, talking in a light, young voice.
“As my sociology professor used to emphasize, ‘There is generally one person in every situation you must never underestimate the power of.’”
And they get back in the car and drive away, with me standing there wondering if they ever even saw me.
I was kind of amazed that I’d remembered that. It was the first time in what seemed to me centuries that I’d been able to remember much about my childhood. It fascinated me to discover I could still do it. I stay in bed awake, remembering other happenings, and just about that time, while I was