I get the funniest feeling that the sun is turned up brighter than before on the three of them. Everything else looks like it usually does—the chickens fussing around in the grass on top of the ‘dobe houses, the grasshoppers batting from bush to bush, the flies being stirred into black clouds around the fish racks by the little kids with sage flails, just like every other summer day. Except the sun, on these three strangers, is all of a sudden way the hell brighter than usual and I can see the…
seams
where they’re put together. And, almost, see the apparatus inside them take the words I just said and try to fit the words in here and there, this place and that, and when they find the words don’t have any place ready-made where they’ll fit, the machinery disposes of the words like they weren’t even spoken.
The three are stock still while this goes on. Even the swing’s stopped, nailed out at a slant by the sun, with the fat man petrified in it like a rubber doll. Then Papa’s guinea hen wakes up in the juniper branches and sees we got strangers on the premises and goes to barking at them like a dog, and the spell breaks.
The fat man hollers and jumps out of the swing and sidles away through the dust, holding his hat up in front of the sun so’s he can see what’s up there in the juniper tree making such a racket. When he sees it’s nothing but a speckled chicken he spits on the ground and puts his hat on.
“I, myself, sincerely
feel
,” he says, “that whatever offer we make on this… metropolis will be quite sufficient.”
“Could be. I still think we should make some effort to speak with the Chief—”
The old woman interrupts him by taking one ringing step forward. “No.” This is the first thing she’s said. “No,” she says again in a way that reminds me of the Big Nurse. She lifts her eyebrows and looks the place over. Her eyes spring up like the numbers in a cash register; she’s looking at Mamma’s dresses hung so careful on the line, and she’s nodding her head.
“No. We don’t talk with the Chief today. Not yet. I think. that I agree with Brickenridge for once. Only for a different reason. You recall the record we have shows the wife is not Indian but white? White. A woman from town. Her name is Bromden. He took her name, not she his. Oh, yes, I think if we just leave now and go back into town, and, of course, spread the word with the townspeople about the government’s plans so they understand the advantages of having a hydroelectric dam and a lake instead of a cluster of shacks beside a falls,
then
type up an offer—and mail it to the wife, you see, by mistake? I feel our job will be a great deal easier.”
She looks off to the men on the ancient, rickety, zigzagging scaffolding that has been growing and branching out among the rocks of the falls for hundreds of years.
“Whereas if we meet now with the husband and make some abrupt offer, we may run up against an un
told
amount of Navaho stubbornness and love of—I suppose we must call it home.”
I start to tell them he’s
not
Navaho, but think what’s the use if they don’t listen? They don’t care what tribe he is.
The woman smiles and nods at both the men, a smile and a nod to each, and her eyes ring them up, and she begins to move stiffly back to their car, talking in a light, young voice.
“As my sociology professor used to emphasize, ‘There is generally one person in every situation you must never underestimate the power
of.’
”
And they get back in the car and drive away, with me standing there wondering if they ever even
saw
me.
I was kind of amazed that I’d remembered that. It was the first time in what seemed to me centuries that I’d been able to remember much about my childhood. It fascinated me to discover I could still do it. I lay in bed awake, remembering other happenings, and just about that time, while I was half in a kind of dream, I heard a sound under my bed like a mouse with a walnut. I leaned over the edge of the bed and saw the shine of metal biting off pieces of gum I knew by heart. The black boy named Geever had found where I’d been hiding my chewing gum; was scraping the pieces off into a sack with a long, lean pair of scissors open like jaws.
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 Bawd 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 was about to laugh—not at McMurphy’s singing, but at my own self.
“ ‘This question’s got me goin’, won’t somebody set me right; does the Spearmint lose its flavor on the bedpost o-ver niiiite?’ ”
He held out that last note and twiddled it down me like a feather. I couldn’t help but start to chuckle, and this made me scared I’d get to laughing and not be able to stop. But just then McMurphy jumped off his bed and went to rustling through his nightstand, and I hushed. I clenched my teeth, wondering what to do now. It’d been a long time since I’d let anyone hear me do any more than grunt or bellow. I heard him shut the bedstand, and it echoed like a boiler door. I heard him say, “Here,” and something lit on my bed. Little. Just the size of a lizard or a snake…
“Juicy Fruit is the best I can do for you at the moment, Chief. Package I won off Scanlon pitchin’ pennies.” And he got back in bed.
And before I realized what I was doing, I told him Thank you.
He didn’t say anything right off. He was up on his elbow, watching me the way he’d watched the black boy, waiting for me to say something else. I picked up the package of gum from the bedspread and held it in my hand and told him Thank you.
It didn’t sound like much because my throat was rusty and my tongue creaked. He told me I sounded a little out of practice and laughed at that. I tried to laugh with him, but it was a squawking sound, like a pullet trying to crow. It sounded more like crying than laughing.
He told me not to hurry, that he had till six-thirty in the morning to listen if I wanted to practice. He said a man been still long as me probably had a considerable lot to talk about, and he lay back on his pillow and waited. I thought for a minute for something to say to him, but the only thing that came to my mind was the kind of thing one man can’t say to another because it sounds wrong in words. When he saw I couldn’t say anything he crossed his hands behind his head and started talking himself.
“Ya know, Chief, I was just rememberin’ a time down in the Willamette Valley—I was pickin’ beans outside of Eugene and considering myself damn lucky to get the job. It was in the early thirties so there wasn’t many kids able to get jobs. I got the job by proving to the bean boss I could pick just as fast and clean as any of the adults. Anyway, I was the only kid in the rows. Nobody else around me but grown-ups. And after I tried a time or two to talk to them I saw they weren’t for listening to me—scrawny little patchquilt redhead anyhow. So I hushed. I was so peeved at them not listening to me I kept hushed the livelong four weeks I picked that field, workin’ right along side of them, listening to them prattle on about this uncle or that cousin. Or if somebody didn’t show up for work, gossip about him. Four weeks and not a peep out of me. Till I think by God they forgot I
could
talk, the mossbacked old bastards. I bided my time. Then, on the last day, I opened up and went to telling them what a petty bunch of farts they were. I told each one just how his buddy had drug him over the coals when he was absent. Hooee, did they listen then! They finally got to arguing with each other and created such a shitstorm I lost my quarter-cent-a-pound bonus I had comin’ for not missin’ a day because I already had a bad reputation around town and the bean boss claimed the disturbance was likely my fault even if he couldn’t prove it. I cussed him out too. My shootin’ off my mouth that time probably cost me twenty dollars or so. Well worth it, too.”
He chuckled a while to himself, remembering, then turned his head on his pillow and looked at me.
“What I was wonderin’, Chief, are you biding your time towards the day you decide to lay into them?”
“No,” I told him. “I couldn’t.”
“Couldn’t tell them off? It’s easier than you think.”
“You’re… lot bigger, tougher’n I am,” I mumbled.
“How’s that? I didn’t get you, Chief.”
I worked some spit down in my throat. “You are bigger and tougher than I am. You can do it.”
“Me? Are you kidding? Criminy, look at you: you stand a head taller’n any man on the ward. There ain’t a man here you couldn’t turn every way but loose, and that’s a fact!”
“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 any more and he gave up.”