One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey [98]
“No. I’m way too little. I used to be big, but not no more. You’re twice the size of me.”
“Hoo boy, you are crazy, aren’t you? The first thing I saw when I came in this place was you sitting over in that chair, big as a damn mountain. I tell you, I lived all over Klamath and Texas and Oklahoma and all over around Gallup, and I swear you’re the biggest Indian I ever saw.”
“I’m from the Columbia Gorge,” I said, and he waited for me to go on. “My Papa was a full Chief and his name was Tee Ah Millatoona. That means The-Pine-That-Stands-Tallest-on-the-Mountain, and we didn’t live on a mountain. He was real big when I was a kid. My mother got twice his size.”
“You must of had a real moose of an old lady. How big was she?”
“Oh—big, big.”
“I mean how many feet and inches?”
“Feet and inches? A guy at the carnival looked her over and says five feet nine and weight a hundred and thirty pounds, but that was because he’d just saw her. She got bigger all the time.”
“Yeah? How much bigger?”
“Bigger than Papa and me together.”
“Just one day took to growin’, huh? Well, that’s a new one on me: I never heard of an Indian woman doing something like that.”
“She wasn’t Indian. She was a town woman from The Dalles.”
“And her name was what? Bromden? Yeah, I see, wait a minute.” He thinks for a while and says, “And when a town woman marries an Indian that’s marryin’ somebody beneath her, ain’t it? Yeah, I think I see.”
“No. It wasn’t just her that made him little. Everybody worked on him because he was big, and wouldn’t give in, and did like he pleased. Everybody worked on him just the way they’re working on you.”
“They who, Chief?” he asked in a soft voice, suddenly serious.
“The Combine. It worked on him for years. He was big enough to fight it for a while. It wanted us to live in inspected houses. It wanted to take the falls. It was even in the tribe, and they worked on him. In the town they beat him up in the alleys and cut his hair short once. Oh, the Combine’s big—big. He fought it a long time till my mother made him too little to fight anymore and he gave up.”
McMurphy didn’t say anything for a long time after that. Then he raised up on his elbow and looked at me again, and asked why they beat him up in the alleys, and I told him that they wanted to make him see what he had in store for him only worse if he didn’t sign the papers giving everything to the government.
“What did they want him to give the government?”
“Everything. The tribe, the village, the falls…”
“Now I remember; you’re talking about the falls where the Indians used to spear salmon—long time ago. Yeah. But the way I remember it the tribe got paid some huge amount.”
“That’s what they said to him. He said, What can you pay for the way a man lives? He said, What can you pay for what a man is? They didn’t understand. Not even the tribe. They stood out in front of our door all holding those checks and they wanted him to tell them what to do now. They kept asking him to invest for them, or tell them where to go, or to buy a farm. But he was too little anymore. And he was too drunk, too. The Combine had whipped him. It beats everybody. It’ll beat you too. They can’t have somebody as big as Papa running around unless he’s one of them. You can see that.”
“Yeah, I reckon I can.”
“That’s why you shouldn’t of broke that window. They see you’re big, now. Now they got to bust you.”
“Like bustin’ a mustang, huh?”
“No. No, listen. They don’t bust you that way; they work on you ways you can’t fight! They put things in! They install things. They start as quick as they see you’re gonna be big and go to working and installing their filthy machinery when you’re little, and keep on and on and on till you’re fixed!”
“Take ’er easy, buddy; shhh.”
“And if you fight they lock you someplace and make you stop—”
“Easy, easy, Chief. Just cool it for a while. They heard you.”
He lay down and kept still. My bed was hot, I noticed. I could hear the squeak of rubber soles as the black