One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey [99]
“He finally just drank,” I whispered. I didn’t seem to be able to stop talking, not till I finished telling what I thought was all of it. “And the last I see him he’s blind in the cedars from drinking and every time I see him put the bottle to his mouth he don’t suck out of it, it sucks out of him until he’s shrunk so wrinkled and yellow even the dogs don’t know him, and we had to cart him out of the cedars, in a pickup, to a place in Portland, to die. I’m not saying they kill. They didn’t kill him. They did something else.”
I was feeling awfully sleepy. I didn’t want to talk anymore. I tried to think back on what I’d been saying, and it didn’t seem like what I’d wanted to say.
“I been talking crazy, ain’t I?”
“Yeah, Chief”—he rolled over in his bed—“you been talkin’ crazy.”
“It wasn’t what I wanted to say. I can’t say it all. It don’t make sense.”
“I didn’t say it didn’t make sense, Chief, I just said it was talkin’ crazy.”
He didn’t say anything after that for so long I thought he’d gone to sleep. I wished I’d told him good night. I looked over at him, and he was turned away from me. His arm wasn’t under the covers, and I could just make out the aces and eights tattooed there. It’s big, I thought, big as my arms used to be when I played football. I wanted to reach over and touch the place where he was tattooed, to see if he was still alive. He’s layin’ awful quiet, I told myself, I ought to touch him to see if he’s still alive….
That’s a lie. I know he’s still alive. That ain’t the reason I want to touch him.
I want to touch him because he’s a man.
That’s a lie too. There’s other men around. I could touch them.
I want to touch him because I’m one of these queers!
But that’s a lie too. That’s one fear hiding behind another. If I was one of these queers I’d want to do other things with him. I just want to touch him because he’s who he is.
But as I was about to reach over to that arm he said, “Say, Chief,” and rolled in bed with a lurch of covers, facing me, “Say, Chief, why don’t you come on this fishin’ trip with us tomorrow?”
I didn’t answer.
“Come on, what do ya say? I look for it to be one hell of an occasion. You know these two aunts of mine comin’ to pick us up? Why, those ain’t aunts, man, no; both those girls are workin’ shimmy dancers and hustlers I know from Portland. What do you say to that?”
I finally told him I was one of the Indigents.
“You’re what?”
“I’m broke.”
“Oh,” he said. “Yeah, I hadn’t thought of that.”
He was quiet for a time again, rubbing that scar on his nose with his finger. The finger stopped. He raised up on his elbow and looked at me.
“Chief,” he said slowly, looking me over, “when you were full-sized, when you used to be, let’s say, six seven or eight and weighed two eighty or so—were you strong enough to, say, lift something the size of that control panel in the tub room?”
I thought about that panel. It probably didn’t weigh a lot more’n oil drums I’d lifted in the Army. I told him I probably could of at one time.
“If you got that big again, could you still lift it?”
I told him I thought so.
“To hell with what you think; I want to know can you promise to lift it if I get you big as you used to be? You promise me that, and you not only get my special body-buildin’ course for nothing but you get yourself a ten-buck fishin’ trip, free!” He licked his lips and lay back. “Get me good odds too, I bet.”
He lay there chuckling over some thought of his own. When I asked him how he was going to get me big again he shushed me with a finger to his lips.
“Man, we can’t let a secret like this out. I didn’t say I’d tell you how, did I? Hoo boy, blowin’ a man back up to full size is a secret you can’t share with everybody, be dangerous in the hands of an enemy. You won’t even know it’s happening most of the time yourself. But I give you my solemn word, you follow my training program, and here’s what’ll happen.”
He swung his legs out of bed and sat on the edge with his hands on his knees. The dim