One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest: 50th Anniversary Edition (39 page)

“Sandy came along. She just up and left that maniac from Beaverton that she married; isn’t that wild?”

The girl came through the window and kissed McMurphy and said, “Hello, Mack. I’m sorry I didn’t show up. But that’s over. You can take just so many funsies like white mice in your pillowcase and worms in your cold cream and frogs in your bra.” She shook her head once and wiped her hand in front of her like she was wiping away the memory of her animal-loving husband. “Cheesus, what a maniac.”

They were both in skirts and sweaters and nylons and barefoot, and both red-cheeked and giggling. “We had to keep asking for directions,” Candy explained, “at every bar we came to.”

Sandy was turning around in a big wide-eyed circle. “Whooee, Candy girl, what are we in
now
? Is this real? Are we in an asylum?
Man!
” She was bigger than Candy, and maybe five years older, and had tried to lock her bay-colored hair in a stylish bun at the back of her head, but it kept stringing down around her broad milk-fed cheek-bones,
and she looked like a cowgirl trying to pass herself off as a society lady. Her shoulders and breasts and hips were too wide and her grin too big and open for her to ever be called beautiful, but she was pretty and she was healthy and she had one long finger crooked in the ring of a gallon of red wine, and it swung at her side like a purse.

“How, Candy, how, how, how do these wild things happen to us?” She turned around once more and stopped, with her bare feet spread, giggling.

“These things don’t happen,” Harding said to the girl solemnly. “These things are fantasies you lie awake at night dreaming up and then are afraid to tell your analyst. You’re not
really
here. That wine isn’t real;
none
of this exists. Now, let’s go on from there.”

“Hello, Billy,” Candy said.

“Look at that stuff,” Turkle said.

Candy straight-armed one of the bottles awkwardly toward Billy. “I brought you a present.”

“These things are Thorne Smithian daydreams!” Harding said.

“Boy!” the girl named Sandy said. “What have we got ourselves into?”

“Shhhh,” Scanlon said and scowled around him. “You’ll wake up those other bastards, talking so loud.”

“What’s the matter, stingy?” Sandy giggled, starting to turn in her circle again. “You scared there’s not enough to go around?”

“Sandy, I mighta known you’d bring that damn cheap port.”

“Boy!” She stopped her turning to look up at me. “Dig this one, Candy. A Goliath—fee, fi, fo, fum.”

Mr. Turkle said, “Hot dog,” and locked the screen back, and Sandy said, “Boy,” again. We were all in an awkward little cluster in the middle of the day room, shifting around one another, saying things just because nobody knew what else to do yet—never been up against a situation like it—and I don’t know when this excited, uneasy flurry of talk and giggling and shuffling around the day room would’ve stopped if that ward door hadn’t rung with a key knocking it open down the hall—jarred everybody like a burglar alarm going off.

“Oh, Lord God,” Mr. Turkle said, clapping his hand on the top of his bald head, “it’s the soo-pervisor, come to fire my black ass.”

We all ran into the latrine and turned out the light and stood in the dark, listening to one another breathe. We could hear that supervisor
wander around the ward, calling for Mr. Turkle in a loud, half-afraid whisper. Her voice was soft and worried, rising at the end as she called, “Mr. Tur-kull? Mis-tur Turkle?”

“Where the hell is he?” McMurphy whispered. “Why don’t he answer her.”

“Don’t worry,” Scanlon said. “She won’t look in the can.”

“But why don’t he answer? Maybe he got too high.”

“Man, what you talkin’? I don’t get too high, not on a little middlin’ joint like that one.” It was Mr. Turkle’s voice somewhere in the dark latrine with us.

“Jesus, Turkle, what are you doing in here?” McMurphy was trying to sound stern and keep from laughing at the same time. “Get out there and see what she wants. What’ll she think if she doesn’t find you?”

“The end is upon us,” Harding said and sat down. “Allah be merciful.”

Turkle opened the door and slipped out and met her in the hall. She’d come over to see what all the lights were on about. What made it necessary to turn on every fixture in the ward? Turkle said every fixture wasn’t on; that the dorm lights were off and so were the ones in the latrine. She said that was no excuse for the other lights; what possible reason could there be for all this light? Turkle couldn’t come up with an answer for this, and during the long pause I heard the bottle being passed around near me in the dark. Out in the hall she asked him again, and Turkle told her, well, he was just cleanin’ up, policing the areas. She wanted to know why, then, was the latrine, the place that his job description called for him to have clean, the only place that was dark? And the bottle went around again while we waited to see what he’d answer. It came by me, and I took a drink. I felt I needed it. I could hear Turkle swallowing all the way out in the hall, umming and ahing for something to say.

“He’s skulled,” McMurphy hissed. “Somebody’s gonna have to go out and help him.”

I heard a toilet flush behind me, and the door opened and Harding was caught in the hall light as he went out, pulling up his pajamas. I heard the supervisor gasp at the sight of him and he told her to pardon him, but he hadn’t seen her, being as it was so dark.”

“It isn’t dark.”

“In the latrine, I meant. I always switch off the lights to achieve a better bowel movement. Those mirrors, you understand; when the light is on the mirrors seem to be sitting in judgment over me to arbitrate a punishment if everything doesn’t come out right.”

“But Aide Turkle said he was cleaning in there …”

“And doing quite a good job, too, I might add—considering the restrictions imposed on him by the dark. Would you care to see?”

Harding pushed the door open a crack, and a slice of light cut across the latrine floor tile. I caught a glimpse of the supervisor backing off, saying she’d have to decline his offer but she had further rounds to make. I heard the ward door unlock again up the hall, and she let herself off the ward. Harding called to her to return soon for another visit, and everybody rushed out and shook his hand and pounded his back for the way he’d pulled it off.

We stood there in the hall, and the wine went around again. Sefelt said he’d as leave have that vodka if there was something to mix it with. He asked Mr. Turkle if there wasn’t something on the ward to put in it and Turkle said nothing but water. Fredrickson asked what about the cough sirup? “They give me a little now and then from a half-gallon jug in the drug room. It’s not bad tasting. You have a key for that room, Turkle?”

Turkle said the supervisor was the only one on nights who had a key to the drug room, but McMurphy talked him into letting us have a try at picking the lock. Turkle grinned and nodded his head lazily. While he and McMurphy worked at the lock on the drug room with paper clips, the girls and the rest of us ran around in the Nurses’ Station opening files and reading records.

“Look here,” Scanlon said, waving one of those folders. “Talk about complete. They’ve even got my first-grade report card in here. Aaah, miserable grades, just miserable.”

Bill and his girl were going over his folder. She stepped back to look him over. “All these things, Billy? Phrenic this and pathic that? You don’t look like you have all these things.”

The other girl had opened a supply drawer and was suspicious about what the nurses needed with
all
those hot-water bottles, a million of ‘em, and Harding was sitting on the Big Nurse’s desk, shaking his head at the whole affair.

McMurphy and Turkle got the door of the drug room open and
brought out a bottle of thick cherry-colored liquid from the ice box. McMurphy tipped the bottle to the light and read the label out loud.

“Artificial flavor, coloring, citric acid. Seventy per cent inert materials—that must be water—and twenty per cent alcohol—that’s fine—and ten per cent codeine Warning Narcotic May Be Habit Forming.” He unscrewed the bottle and took a taste of it, closing his eyes. He worked his tongue around his teeth and took another swallow and read the label again. “Well,” he said, and clicked his teeth together like they’d just been sharpened, “if we cut it a leetle bit with the vodka, I think it’ll be all right. How are we fixed for ice cubes, Turkey, old buddy?”

Mixed in paper medicine cups with the liquor and the port wine, the sirup had a taste like a kid’s drink but a punch like the cactus apple wine we used to get in The Dalles, cold and soothing on the throat and hot and furious once it got down. We turned out the lights in the day room and sat around drinking it. We threw the first couple of cups down like we were taking our medication, drinking it in serious and silent doses and looking one another over to see if it was going to kill anybody. McMurphy and Turkle switched back and forth from the drink to Turkle’s cigarettes and got to giggling again as they discussed how it would be to lay that little nurse with the birthmark who went off at midnight.

“I’d be scared,” Turkle said, “that she might go to whuppin’ me with that big ol’ cross on that chain. Wun’t that be a fix to be in, now?”

“
I’d
be scared,” McMurphy said, “that just about the time I was getting my jollies she’d reach around behind me with a thermometer and take my temperature!”

That busted everybody up. Harding stopped laughing long enough to join the joking.

“Or worse yet,” he said. “Just lie there under you with a dreadful concentration on her face, and tell you—oh Jesus, listen—tell you what your
pulse
was!”

“Oh don’t … oh my Gawd …”

“Or even worse, just lie there and be able to calculate your pulse and temperature both—sans instruments!”

“Oh Gawd, oh please don’t …”

We laughed till we were rolling about the couches and chairs, choking and teary-eyed. The girls were so weak from laughing they
had to try two or three times to get to their feet. “I gotta … go tinkle,” the big one said and went weaving and giggling toward the latrine and missed the door, staggered into the dorm while we all hushed one another with fingers to the lips, waiting, till she gave a squeal and we heard old Colonel Marterson roar, “The pillow is … a
horse!
“—and come whisking out of the dorm right behind her in his wheelchair.

Sefelt wheeled the colonel back to the dorm and showed the girl where the latrine was personally, told her it was generally used by males only but he would stand at the door while she was in there and guard against intrusions on her privacy, defend it against all comers, by gosh. She thanked him solemnly and shook his hand and they saluted each other and while she was inside here came the colonel out of the dorm in his wheelchair again, and Sefelt had his hands full keeping him out of the latrine. When the girl came out of the door he was trying to ward off the charges of the wheelchair with his foot while we stood on the edge of the fracas cheering one guy or the other. The girl helped Sefelt put the colonel back to bed, and then the two of them went down the hall and waltzed to music nobody could hear.

Harding drank and watched and shook his head. “It isn’t happening. It’s all a collaboration of Kafka and Mark Twain and Martini.”

McMurphy and Turkle got to worrying that there might still be too many lights, so they went up and down the hall turning out everything that glowed, even the little knee-high night lights, till the place was pitch black. Turkle got out flashlights, and we played tag up and down the hall with wheelchairs from storage, having a big time till we heard one of Sefelt’s convulsion cries and went to find him sprawled twitching beside that big girl, Sandy. She was sitting on the floor brushing at her skirt, looking down at Sefelt. “I never experienced anything like it,” she said with quiet awe.

Fredrickson knelt beside his friend and put a wallet between his teeth to keep him from chewing his tongue, and helped him get his pants buttoned. “You all right, Seef? Seef?”

Sefelt didn’t open his eyes, but he raised a limp hand and picked the wallet out of his mouth. He grinned through his spit. “I’m all right,” he said. “Medicate me and turn me loose again.”

“You really need some medication, Seef?”

“Medication.”

“Medication,” Fredrickson said over his shoulder, still kneeling. “Medication,” Harding repeated and weaved off with his flashlight to the drug room. Sandy watched him go with glazed eyes. She was sitting beside Sefelt, stroking his head in wonderment.

“Maybe you better bring me something too,” she called drunkenly after Harding. “I never experienced anything to come even
close
to it.”

Down the hall we heard glass crash and Harding came back with a double handful of pills; he sprinkled them over Sefelt and the woman like he was crumbling clods into a grave. He raised his eyes toward the ceiling.

“Most merciful God, accept these two poor sinners into your arms. And keep the doors ajar for the coming of the rest of us, because you are witnessing the end, the absolute, irrevocable, fantastic end. I’ve finally realized what is happening. It is our last fling. We are doomed henceforth. Must screw our courage to the sticking point and face up to our impending fate. We shall be all of us shot at dawn. One hundred cc’s apiece. Miss Ratched shall line us all against the wall, where we’ll face the terrible maw of a muzzle-loading shotgun which she has loaded with Miltowns! Thorazines! Libriums! Stelazines! And with a wave of her sword,
blooie
! Tranquilize all of us completely out of existence.”

He sagged against the wall and slid to the floor, pills hopping out of his hands in all directions like red and green and orange bugs. “Amen,” he said and closed his eyes.

The girl on the floor smoothed down her skirt over her long hardworking legs and looked at Sefelt still grinning and twitching there under the lights beside her, and said, “Never in my life experienced anything to come even
halfway
near it.”

Harding’s speech, if it hadn’t actually sobered people, had at least made them realize the seriousness of what we were doing. The night was getting on, and some thought had to be given to the arrival of the staff in the morning. Billy Bibbit and his girl mentioned that it was after four o’clock and, if it was all right, if people didn’t mind, they’d like to have Mr. Turkle unlock the Seclusion Room. They went off under
an arch of flashlight beams, and the rest of us went into the day room to see what we could decide about cleaning up. Turkle was all but passed out when he got back from Seclusion, and we had to push him into the day room in a wheel chair.