But this morning I have to sit in the chair and only listen to them bring him in. Still, even though I cant see him, I know hes no ordinary Admission. I dont hear him slide scared along the wall, and when they tell him about the shower he dont just submit with a weak little yes, he tells them right back in a loud, brassy voice that hes already plenty damn clean, thank you.
They showered me this morning at the courthouse and last night at the jail. And I swear I believe theyd of washed my ears for me on the taxi ride over if they coulda found the facilities. Hoo boy, seems like everytime they ship me someplace I gotta get scrubbed down before, after, and during the operation. Im gettin so the sound of water makes me start gathering up my belongings. And get back away from me with that thermometer, Sam, and give me a minute to look my new home over; I never been in a Institute of Psychology before.
The patients look at one anothers puzzled faces, then back to the door, where his voice is still coming in. Talking loudern youd think he needed to if the black boys were anywhere near him. He sounds like hes way above them, talking down, like hes sailing fifty yards overhead, hollering at those below on the ground. He sounds big. I hear him coming down the hall, and he sounds big in the way he walks, and he sure dont slide; hes got iron on his heels and he rings it on the floor like horseshoes. He shows up in the door and stops and hitches his thumbs in his pockets, boots wide apart, and stands there with the guys looking at him.
Good mornin, buddies.
Theres a paper Halloween bat hanging on a string above his head; he reaches up and flicks it so it spins around.
Mighty nice fall day.
He talks a little the way Papa used to, voice loud and full of hell, but he doesnt look like Papa; Papa was a full-blood Columbia Indian a chief and hard and shiny as a gunstock. This guy is redheaded with long red sideburns and a tangle of curls out from under his cap, been needing cut a long time, and hes broad as Papa was tall, broad across the jaw and shoulders and chest, a broad white devilish grin, and hes hard in a different kind of way from Papa, kind of the way a baseball is hard under the scuffed leather. A seam runs across his nose and one cheekbone where somebody laid him a good one in a fight, and the stitches are still in the seam. He stands there waiting, and when nobody makes a move to say anything to him he commences to laugh. Nobody can tell exactly why he laughs; theres nothing funny going on. But its not the way that Public Relation laughs, its free and loud and it comes out of his wide grinning mouth and spreads in rings bigger and bigger till its lapping against the walls all over the ward. Not like that fat Public Relation laugh. This sounds real. I realize all of a sudden its the first laugh Ive heard in years.
He stands looking at us, rocking back in his boots, and he laughs and laughs. He laces his fingers over his belly without taking his thumbs out of his pockets. I see how big and beat up his hands are. Everybody on the ward, patients, staff, and all, is stunned dumb by him and his laughing. Theres no move to stop him, no move to say anything. He laughs till hes finished for a time, and he walks on into the day room. Even when he isnt laughing, that laughing sound hovers around him, the way the sound hovers around a big bell just quit ringing its in his eyes, in the way he smiles and swaggers, in the way he talks.
My name is McMurphy, buddies, R. P. McMurphy, and Im a gambling fool. He winks and sings a little piece of a song: and whenever I meet with a deck a cards I lays my money down, and laughs again.
He walks to one of the card games, tips an Acutes cards up with a thick, heavy finger, and squints at the hand and shakes his head.
Yessir, thats what I came to this establishment for, to bring you birds fun an entertainment around the gamin table. Nobody left in that Pendleton Work Farm to make my days interesting any more, so I requested a transfer, ya see. Needed some new blood. Hooee, look at the way this bird holds his cards, showin to everybody in a block; man! Ill trim you babies like little lambs.
Cheswick gathers his cards together. The redheaded man sticks his hand out for Cheswick to shake.
Hello, buddy; whats that youre playin? Pinochle[3]? Jesus, no wonder you dont care nothin about showing your hand. Dont you have a straight deck around here? Well say, here we go, I brought along my own deck, just in case, has something in it other than face cards and check the pictures, huh? Every one different. Fifty-two positions.
Cheswick is pop-eyed already, and what he sees on those cards dont help his condition.
Easy now, dont smudge em; we got lots of time, lots of games ahead of us. I like to use my deck here because it takes at least a week for the other players to get to where they can even see the suit.
Hes got on work-farm pants and shirt, sunned out till theyre the color of watered milk. His face and neck and arms are the color of oxblood leather from working long in the fields. Hes got a primer-black motorcycle cap stuck in his hair and a leather jacket over one arm, and hes got on boots gray and dusty and heavy enough to kick a man half in two. He walks away from Cheswick and takes off the cap and goes to beating a dust storm out of his thigh. One of the black boys circles him with the thermometer, but hes too quick for them; he slips in among the Acutes and starts moving around shaking hands before the black boy can take good aim. The way he talks, his wink, his loud talk, his swagger all remind me of a car salesman or a stock auctioneer or one of those pitchmen you see on a sideshow stage, out in front of his flapping banners, standing there in a striped shirt with yellow buttons, drawing the faces off the sawdust like a magnet.
What happened, you see, was I got in a couple of hassles at the work farm, to tell the pure truth, and the court ruled that Im a psychopath. And do you think Im gonna argue with the court? Shoo, you can bet your bottom dollar I dont. If it gets me outta those damned pea fields Ill be whatever their little heart desires, be it psychopath or mad dog or werewolf, because I dont care if I never see another weedin hoe to my dying day. Now they tell me a psychopaths a guy fights too much and fucks too much, but they aint wholly right, do you think? I mean, whoever heard tell of a man gettin too much poozle? Hello, buddy, what do they call you? My names McMurphy and Ill bet you two dollars here and now that you cant tell me how many spots are in that pinochle hand youre holding dont look. Two dollars; what dya say? God damn, Sam! Cant you wait half a minute to prod me with that damn thermometer of yours?
3
The new man stands looking a minute, to get the setup of the day room.
One side of the room younger patients, known as Acutes because the doctors figure them still sick enough to be fixed, practice arm wrestling and card tricks where you add and subtract and count down so many and its a certain card. Billy Bibbit tries to learn to roll a tailor-made cigarette, and Martini walks around, discovering things under the tables and chairs. The Acutes move around a lot. They tell jokes to each other and snicker in their fists (nobody ever dares let loose and laugh, the whole staff d be in with notebooks and a lot of questions) and they write letters with yellow, runty, chewed pencils.
They spy on each other. Sometimes one man says something about himself that he didnt aim to let slip, and one of his buddies at the table where he said it yawns and gets up and sidles over to the big log book by the Nurses Station and writes down the piece of information he heard of therapeutic interest to the whole ward, is what the Big Nurse says the book is for, but I know shes just waiting to get enough evidence to have some guy reconditioned at the Main Building, overhauled in the head to straighten out the trouble.
The guy that wrote the piece of information in the log book, he gets a star by his name on the roll and gets to sleep late the next day.
Across the room from the Acutes are the culls of the Combines product, the Chronics. Not in the hospital, these, to get fixed, but just to keep them from walking around the streets giving the product a bad name. Chronics are in for good, the staff concedes. Chronics are divided into Walkers like me, can still get around if you keep them fed, and Wheelers and Vegetables. What the Chronics are or most of us are machines with flaws inside that cant be repaired, flaws born in, or flaws beat in over so many years of the guy running head-on into solid things that by the time the hospital found him he was bleeding rust in some vacant lot.
But there are some of us Chronics that the staff made a couple of mistakes on years back, some of us who were Acutes when we came in, and got changed over. Ellis is a Chronic came in an Acute and got fouled up bad when they overloaded him in that filthy brain-murdering room that the black boys call the Shock Shop. Now hes nailed against the wall in the same condition they lifted him off the table for the last time, in the same shape, arms out, palms cupped, with the same horror on his face. Hes nailed like that on the wall, like a stuffed trophy. They pull the nails when its time to eat or time to drive him in to bed when they want him to move sos I can mop the puddle where he stands. At the old place he stood so long in one spot the piss ate the floor and beams away under him and he kept falling through to the ward below, giving them all kinds of census headaches down there when roll check came around.
Ruckly is another Chronic came in a few years back as an Acute, but him they overloaded in a different way: they made a mistake in one of their head installations. He was being a holy nuisance all over the place, kicking the black boys and biting the student nurses on the legs, so they took him away to be fixed. They strapped him to that table, and the last anybody saw of him for a while was just before they shut the door on him; he winked, just before the door closed, and told the black boys as they backed away from him, Youll pay for this, you damn tarbabies.
And they brought him back to the ward two weeks later, bald and the front of his face an oily purple bruise and two little button-sized plugs stitched one above each eye. You can see by his eyes how they burned him out over there; his eyes are all smoked up and gray and deserted inside like blown fuses. All day now he wont do a thing but hold an old photograph up in front of that burned-out face, turning it over and over in his cold fingers, and the picture wore gray as his eyes on both sides with all his handling till you cant tell any more what it used to be.
The staff, now, they consider Ruckly one of their failures, but Im not sure but what hes better off than if the installation had been perfect. The installations they do nowadays are generally successful. The technicians got more skill and experience. No more of the button holes in the forehead, no cutting at all they go in through the eye sockets. Sometimes a guy goes over for an installation, leaves the ward mean and mad and snapping at the whole world and comes back a few weeks later with black-and-blue eyes like hed been in a fist-fight, and hes the sweetest, nicest, best-behaved thing you ever saw. Hell maybe even go home in a month or two, a hat pulled low over the face of a sleepwalker wandering round in a simple, happy dream. A success, they say, but I say hes just another robot for the Combine and might be better off as a failure, like Ruckly sitting there fumbling and drooling over his picture. He never does much else. The dwarf black boy gets a rise out of him from time to time by leaning close and asking, Say, Ruckly, what you figure your little wife is doing in town tonight? Rucklys head comes up. Memory whispers someplace in that jumbled machinery. He turns red and his veins clog up at one end. This puffs him up so he can just barely make a little whistling sound in his throat. Bubbles squeeze out the corner of his mouth, hes working his jaw so hard to say something. When he finally does get to where he can say his few words its a low, choking noise to make your skin crawl Fffffffuck da wife! Fffffffuck da wife! and passes out on the spot from the effort.
Ellis and Ruckly are the youngest Chronics. Colonel Matterson is the oldest, an old, petrified cavalry soldier from the First War who is given to lifting the skirts of passing nurses with his cane, or teaching some kind of history out of the text of his left hand to anybody thatll listen. Hes the oldest on the ward, but not the ones been here longest his wife brought him in only a few years back, when she got to where she wasnt up to tending him any longer.
Im the one been here on the ward the longest, since the Second World War. I been here on the ward longern anybody. Longern any of the other patients. The Big Nurse has been here longern me.
The Chronics and the Acutes dont generally mingle. Each stays on his own side of the day room the way the black boys want it. The black boys say its more orderly that way and let everybody know thats the way theyd like it to stay. They move us in after breakfast and look at the grouping and nod. Thats right, gennulmen, thats the way. Now you keep it that way.
Actually there isnt much need for them to say anything, because, other than me, the Chronics dont move around much, and the Acutes say theyd just as leave stay over on their own side, give reasons like the Chronic side smells worse than a dirty diaper. But I know it isnt the stink that keeps them away from the Chronic side so much as they dont like to be reminded that heres what could happen to them someday. The Big Nurse recognizes this fear and knows how to put it to use; shell point out to an Acute, whenever he goes into a sulk, that you boys be good boys and cooperate with the staff policy which is engineered for your cure, or youll end up over on that side.
(Everybody on the ward is proud of the way the patients cooperate. We got a little brass tablet tacked to a piece of maple wood that has printed on it: CONGRATULATIONS FOR GETTING ALONG WITH THE SMALLEST NUMBER OF PERSONNEL OF ANY WARD IN THE HOSPITAL. Its a prize for cooperation. Its hung on the wall right above the log book, right square in the middle between the Chronics and Acutes.)
This new redheaded Admission, McMurphy, knows right away hes not a Chronic. After he checks the day room over a minute, he sees hes meant for the Acute side and goes right for it, grinning and shaking hands with everybody he comes to. At first I see that hes making everybody over there feel uneasy, with all his kidding and joking and with the brassy way he hollers at that black boy whos still after him with a thermometer, and especially with that big wide-open laugh of his. Dials twitch in the control panel at the sound of it. The Acutes look spooked and uneasy when he laughs, the way kids look in a schoolroom when one ornery kid is raising too much hell with the teacher out of the room and theyre all scared the teacher might pop back in and take it into her head to make them all stay after. Theyre fidgeting and twitching, responding to the dials in the control panel; I see McMurphy notices hes making them uneasy, but he dont let it slow him down.