One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey [96]
I jerked back up under the covers before he saw me looking. My heart was banging in my ears, scared he’d seen me. I wanted to tell him to get away, to mind his own business and leave my chewing gum alone, but I couldn’t even let on I heard. I lay still to see if he’d caught me bending over to peek under the bed at him, but he didn’t give any sign—all I heard was the zzzth-zzzth of his scissors and pieces falling into the sack, reminded me of hailstones the way they used to rattle on our tar-paper roof. He clacked his tongue and giggled to himself.
“Um-ummm. Lord gawd amighty. Hee. I wonder how many times this muthuh chewed some o’ this stuff? Just as hard.”
McMurphy heard the black boy muttering to himself and woke and rolled up to one elbow to look at what he was up to at this hour down on his knees under my bed. He watched the black boy a minute, rubbing his eyes to be sure of what he was seeing, just like you see little kids rub their eyes; then he sat up completely.
“I will be a sonofabitch if he ain’t in here at eleven-thirty at night, fartin’ around in the dark with a pair of scissors and a paper sack.” The black boy jumped and swung his flashlight up in McMurphy’s eyes. “Now tell me, Sam: what the devil are you collectin’ that needs the cover of night?”
“Go back to sleep, McMurphy. It don’t concern nobody else.”
McMurphy let his lips spread in a slow grin, but he didn’t look away from the light. The black boy got uneasy after about half a minute of shining that light on McMurphy sitting there, on that glossy new-healed scar and those teeth and that tattooed panther on his shoulder, and took the light away. He bent back to his work, grunting and puffing like it was a mighty effort prying off dried gum.
“One of the duties of a night aide,” he explained between grunts, trying to sound friendly, “is to keep the bedside area cleaned up.”
“In the dead of night?”
“McMurphy, we got a thing posted called a Job Description, say cleanliness is a twenty-fo’-hour job!”
“You might of done your twenty-four hours’ worth before we got in bed, don’t you think, instead of sittin’ out there watching TV till ten-thirty. Does Old Lady Ratched know you boys watch TV most of your shift? What do you reckon she’d do if she found out about that?”
The black boy got up and sat on the edge of my bed. He tapped the flashlight against his teeth, grinning and giggling. The light lit his face up like a black jack o’lantern.
“Well, let me tell you about this gum,” he said and leaned close to McMurphy like an old chum. “You see, for years I been wondering where Chief Bromden got his chewin’ gum—never havin’ any money for the canteen, never havin’ anybody give him a stick that I saw, never askin’ Public Relations—so I watched, and I waited. And look here.” He got back on his knees and lifted the edge of my bedspread and shined the light under. “How ’bout that? I bet they’s pieces of gum under here been used a thousand times!”
This tickled McMurphy. He went to giggling at what he saw. The black boy held up the sack and rattled it, and they laughed some more about it. The black boy told McMurphy good night and rolled the top of the sack like it was his lunch and went off somewhere to hide it for later.
“Chief?” McMurphy whispered. “I want you to tell me something.” And he started to sing a little song, a hillbilly song, popular a long time ago: “‘Oh, does the Spearmint lose its flavor on the bedpost overnight?’”
At first I started getting real mad. I thought he was making fun of me like other people had.
“‘When you chew it in the morning,’” he sang in a whisper, “‘will it be too hard to bite?’”
But the more I thought about it the funnier it seemed to me. I tried to stop it but I could feel I