“Now, hold ‘er a minute, George; you talk like you know something about this fishin’ business.”
George turned and shuffled back to McMurphy, listing back so far it looked like his feet had navigated right out from under him.
“You bet, su-ure. Twenty-five year I work the Chinook trollers, all the way from Half Moon Bay to Puget Sound. Twenty-five year I fish—before I get so dirty.” He held out his hands for us to see the dirt on them. Everybody around leaned over and looked. I didn’t see the dirt but I did see scars worn deep into the white palms from hauling a thousand miles of fishing line out of the sea. He let us look a minute, then rolled the hands shut and drew them away and hid them in his pajama shirt like we might dirty them looking, and stood grinning at McMurphy with gums like brine-bleached pork.
“I had a good troller boat, joost forty feet, but she drew twelve feet water and she was solid teak and solid oak.” He rocked back and forth in a way to make you doubt that the floor was standing level. “She was one good troller boat, by golly!”
He started to turn, but McMurphy stopped him again.
“Hell, George, why didn’t you say you were a fisherman? I been talking up this voyage like I was the Old Man of the Sea, but just between you an’ me an’ the wall there, the only boat I been on was the battleship
Missouri
and the only thing I know about fish is that I like eatin’ ‘em better than cleanin’ ‘em.”
“Cleanin’ is
easy
, somebody show you how.”
“By God, you’re gonna be our captain, George; we’ll be your crew.”
George tilted back, shaking his head. “Those boats awful
dirty
any more—everything
awful
dirty.”
“The hell with that. We got a boat specially sterilized fore and aft, swabbed clean as a bound’s tooth. You won’t get dirty, George, ‘cause you’ll be the captain. Won’t even have to bait a hook; just be our captain and give orders to us dumb landlubbers—how’s that strike you?”
I could see George was tempted by the way he wrung his hands under his shirt, but he still said he couldn’t risk getting dirty. McMurphy did his best to talk him into it, but George was still shaking his head when the Big Nurse’s key hit the lock of the mess hall and she came jangling out the door with her wicker bag of surprises, clicked down the line with automatic smile-and-good-morning for each man she passed. McMurphy noticed the way George leaned back from her and scowled. When she’d passed, McMurphy tilted his head and gave George the one bright eye.
“George, that stuff the nurse has been saying about the bad sea, about how terrible dangerous this trip might be—what about that?”
“That ocean could be awful bad, sure, awful rough.”
McMurphy looked down at the nurse disappearing into the station, then back at George. George started twisting his hands around in his shirt more than ever, looking around at the silent faces watching him.
“By golly!” he said suddenly. “You think I let her scare me about that ocean? You think
that?”
“Ah, I guess not, George. I was thinking, though, that if you don’t come along with us, and if there
is
some awful stormy calamity, we’re every last one of us liable to be lost at sea, you know that? I said I didn’t know nothin’ about boating, and I’ll tell you something else: these two women coming to get us, I told the doctor was my two aunts, two widows of fishermen. Well, the only cruisin’ either one of them ever did was on solid cement. They won’t be no more help in a fix than me. We
need
you, George.” He took a pull on his cigarette and asked, “You got ten bucks, by the way?”
George shook his head.
“No, I wouldn’t suppose so. Well, what the devil, I gave up the idea of comin’ out ahead days ago. Here.” He took a pencil out of the pocket of his green jacket and wiped it clean on his shirttail, held it out to George. “You captain us, and we’ll let you come along for five.”
George looked around at us again, working his big brow over the predicament. Finally his gums showed in a bleached smile and he reached for the pencil. “By golly!” he said and headed off with the pencil to sign the last place on the list. After breakfast, walking down the hall, McMurphy stopped and printed C-A-P-T behind George’s name.
The whores were late. Everybody was beginning to think they weren’t coming at all when McMurphy gave a yell from the window and we all went running to look. He said that was them, but we didn’t see but one car, instead of the two we were counting on, and just one woman. McMurphy called to her through the screen when she stopped on the parking lot, and she came cutting straight across the grass toward our ward.
She was younger and prettier than any of us’d figured on. Everybody had found out that the girls were whores instead of aunts, and were expecting all sorts of things. Some of the religious guys weren’t any too happy about it. But seeing her coming lightfooted across the grass with her eyes green all the way up to the ward, and her hair, roped in a long twist at the back of her head, jouncing up and down with every step like copper springs in the sun, all any of us could think of was that she was a girl, a female who wasn’t dressed white from head to foot like she’d been dipped in frost, and how she made her money didn’t make any difference.
She ran right up against the screen where McMurphy was and hooked her fingers through the mesh and pulled herself against it. She was panting from the run, and every breath looked like she might swell right through the mesh. She was crying a little.
“McMurphy, oh, you damned McMurphy…”
“Never mind that. Where’s Sandra?”
“She got tied up, man, can’t make it. But you, damn it, are you okay?”
“She got tied up!”
“To tell the truth”—the girl wiped her nose and giggled”—ol’ Sandy got
married
. You remember Artie Gilfillian from Beaverton? Always used to show up at the parties with some gassy thing, a gopher snake or a white mouse or some gassy thing like that in his pocket? A real maniac—”
“Oh, sweet Jesus!” McMurphy groaned. “How’m I supposed to get ten guys in one stinkin’ Ford, Candy sweetheart? How’d Sandra and her gopher snake from Beaverton figure on me swinging
that?”
The girl looked like she was in the process of thinking up an answer when the speaker in the ceiling clacked and the Big Nurse’s voice told McMurphy if he wanted to talk with his lady friend it’d be better if she signed in properly at the main door instead of disturbing the whole hospital. The girl left the screen and started toward the main entrance, and McMurphy left the screen and flopped down in a chair in the corner, his head hanging. “Hell’s
bells
,” he said.
The least black boy let the girl onto the ward and forgot to lock the door behind her (caught hell for it later, I bet), and the girl came jouncing up the hall past the Nurses’ Station, where all the nurses were trying to freeze her bounce with a united icy look, and into the day room just a few steps ahead of the doctor. He was going toward the Nurses’ Station with some papers, looked at her, and back at the papers, and back at her again, and went to fumbling after his glasses with both hands.
She stopped when she got to the middle of the day-room floor and saw she was circled by forty staring men in green, and it was so quiet you could hear bellies growling, and, all along the Chronic row, hear catheters popping off.
She had to stand there a minute while she looked around to find McMurphy, so everybody got a long look at her. There was a blue smoke hung near the ceiling over her bead; I think apparatus burned out all over the ward trying to adjust to her come busting in like she did—took electronic readings on her and calculated they weren’t built to handle something like this on the ward, and just burned out, like machines committing suicide.
She had on a white T-shirt like McMurphy’s only a lot smaller, white tennis shoes and Levi pants snipped off above her knees to give her feet circulation, and it didn’t look like that was near enough material to go around, considering what it had to cover. She must’ve been seen with lots less by lots more men, but under the circumstances she began to, fidget around self-consciously like a schoolgirl on a stage. Nobody spoke while they looked. Martini did whisper that you could read the dates of the coins in her Levi pockets, they were so tight, but he was closer and could see better’n the rest of us.
Billy Bibbit was the first one to say something out loud, not really a word, just a low, almost painful whistle that described how she looked better than anybody else could have. She laughed and thanked him very much and he blushed so red that she blushed with him and laughed again. This broke things into movement. All the Acutes were coming across the floor trying to talk to her at once. The doctor was pulling on Harding’s coat, asking who
is
this. McMurphy got up out of his chair and walked through the crowd to her, and when she saw him she threw her arms around him and said, “You damned McMurphy,” and then got embarrassed and blushed again. When she blushed she didn’t look more than sixteen or seventeen, I swear she didn’t.
McMurphy introduced her around and she shook everybody’s hand. When she got to Billy she thanked him again for his whistle. The Big Nurse came sliding out of the station, smiling, and asked McMurphy how he intended to get all ten of us in one car, and he asked could he maybe
borrow
a staff car and drive a load himself, and the nurse cited a rule forbidding this, just like everyone knew she would. She said unless there was another driver to sign a Responsibility Slip that half of the crew would have to stay behind. McMurphy told her this’d cost him fifty goddam bucks to make up the difference; he’d have to pay the guys back who didn’t get to go.
“Then it may be,” the nurse said, “that the trip will have to be canceled—and
all
the money refunded.”
“I’ve already rented the boat; the man’s got seventy bucks of mine in his pocket right now!”
“Seventy dollars? So? I thought you told the patients you’d need to collect a hundred dollars plus ten of your own to finance the trip, Mr. McMurphy.”
“I was putting gas in the cars over and back.”
“That wouldn’t amount to thirty dollars, though, would it?”
She smiled so nice at him, waiting. He threw his hands in the air and looked at the ceiling.
“Hoo
boy
, you don’t miss a chance do you, Miss District Attorney. Sure; I was keepin’ what was left over. I don’t think any of the guys ever thought any different. I figured to make a little for the trouble I took get—”
“But your plans didn’t work out,” she said. She was still smiling at him, so full of sympathy. “Your little financial speculations can’t
all
be successes, Randle, and, actually, as I think about it now, you’ve had more than your share of victories.” She mused about this, thinking about something I knew we’d hear more about later. “Yes. Every Acute on the ward has written you an IOU for some ‘deal’ of yours at one time or another, so don’t you think you can bear up under this one small defeat?”
Then she stopped. She saw McMurphy wasn’t listening to her any more. He was watching the doctor. And the doctor was eying the blond girl’s T-shirt like nothing else existed. McMurphy’s loose smile spread out on his face as he watched the doctor’s trance, and he pushed his cap to the back of his head and strolled to the doctor’s side, startling him with a hand on the shoulder.
“By God, Doctor Spivey, you ever see a Chinook salmon hit a line? One of the fiercest sights on the seven seas. Say, Candy honeybun, whyn’t you tell the doctor here about deep-sea fishing and all like that…”
Working together, it didn’t take McMurphy and the girl but two minutes and the little doctor was down locking up his office and coming back up the hall, cramming papers in a brief case.
“Good deal of paper work I can get done on the boat,” he explained to the nurse and went past her so fast she didn’t have a chance to answer, and the rest of the crew followed, slower, grinning at her standing in the door of that Nurses’ Station.
The Acutes who weren’t going gathered at the day-room door, told us don’t bring our catch back till it’s cleaned, and Ellis pulled his hands down off the nails in the wall and squeezed Billy Bibbit’s hand and told him to be a fisher of men.
And Billy, watching the brass brads on that woman’s Levis wink at him as she walked out of the day room, told Ellis to hell with that fisher of
men
business. He joined us at the door, and the least black boy let us through and locked the door behind us, and we were out, outside.
The sun was prying up the clouds and lighting the brick front of the hospital rose bed. A thin breeze worked at sawing what leaves were left from the oak trees, stacking them neatly against the wire cyclone fence. There was little brown birds occasionally on the fence; when a puff of leaves would hit the fence the birds would fly off with the wind. It looked at first like the leaves were hitting the fence and turning into birds and flying away.
It was a fine woodsmoked autumn day, full of the sound of kids punting footballs and the putter of small airplanes, and everybody should’ve been happy just being outside in it. But we all stood in a silent bunch with our hands in our pockets while the doctor walked to get his car. A silent bunch, watching the townspeople who were driving past on their way to work slow down to gawk at all the loonies in green uniforms. McMurphy saw how uneasy we were and tried to work us into a better mood by joking and teasing the girl, but this made us feel worse somehow. Everybody was thinking how easy it would be to return to the ward, go back and say they decided the nurse had been right; with a wind like this the sea would’ve been just too rough.
The doctor arrived and we loaded up and headed off, me and George and Harding and Billy Bibbit in the car with McMurphy and the girl, Candy; and Fredrickson and Sefelt and Scanlon and Martini and Tadem and Gregory following in the doctor’s car. Everyone was awfully quiet. We pulled into a gas station about a mile from the hospital; the doctor followed. He got out first, and the service-station man came bouncing out, grinning and wiping his hands on a rag. Then he stopped grinning and went past the doctor to see just what was
in
these cars. He backed off, wiping his hands on the oily rag, frowning. The doctor caught the man’s sleeve nervously and took out a ten-dollar bill and tucked it down in the man’s hands like setting out a tomato plant.