He dipped into his pocket for his cigarettes; when he couldn’t find any he borrowed one from Fredrickson, lit it with a stagey sweep of his match, and went on.
“I’ll admit I was confused by his actions at first. That window-breaking—Lord, I thought, here’s a man that seems to actually want to stay in this hospital, stick with his buddies and all that sort of thing, until I realized that McMurphy was doing it because he didn’t want to lose a good thing. He’s making the most of his time in here. Don’t ever be misled by his back-woodsy ways; he’s a very sharp operator, level-headed as they come. You watch; everything he’s done was done with reason.”
Billy wasn’t about to give in so easy. “Yeah. What about him teaching me to d-dance?” He was clenching his fists at his side; and on the backs of his hands I saw that the cigarette burns had all but healed, and in their place were tattoos he’d drawn by licking an indelible pencil. “What about that, Harding? Where is he making muh-muh-money out of teaching me to
dance?”
“Don’t get upset, William,” Harding said. “But don’t get impatient, either. Let’s just sit easy and wait—and see how he works it.”
It seemed like Billy and I were the only two left who believed in McMurphy. And that very night Billy swung over to Harding’s way of looking at things when McMurphy came back from making another phone call and told Billy that the date with Candy was on for certain and added, writing an address down for him, that it might be a good idea to send her a little
bread
for the trip.
“Bread? Muh-money? How muh-muh-much?” He looked over to where Harding was grinning at him.
“Oh,
you
know, man—maybe ten bucks for her and ten—”
“Twenty bucks! It doesn’t cost that muh-muh-much for bus fare down here.”
McMurphy looked up from under his hatbrim, gave Billy a slow grin, then rubbed his throat with his hand, running out a dusty tongue. “Boy, oh boy, but I’m terrible dry. Figure to be even drier by a week come Saturday. You wouldn’t begrudge her bringin’ me a little swallow, would you, Billy Boy?”
And gave Billy such an innocent look Billy had to laugh and shake his head, no, and go off to a corner to excitedly talk over the next Saturday’s plans with the man he probably considered a pimp.
I still had my own notions—how McMurphy was a giant come out of the sky to save us from the Combine that was networking the land with copper wire and crystal, how he was too big to be bothered with something as measly as money—but even I came halfway to thinking like the others. What happened was this: He’d helped carry the tables into the tub room before one of the group meetings and was looking at me standing beside the control panel.
“By God, Chief,” he said, “it appears to me you grooved ten inches since that fishing trip. And lordamighty, look at the size of that foot of yours; big as a flatcar!”
I looked down and saw how my foot was bigger than I’d ever remembered it, like McMurphy’s just saying it had blowed it twice its size.
“And that
arm!
That’s the arm of an ex-football-playing Indian if I ever saw one. You know what I think? I think you oughta give this here panel a leetle heft, just to test how you’re comin’.”
I shook my head and told him no, but he said we’d made a deal and I was obligated to give it a try to see how his
growth
system was working. I didn’t see any way out of it so I went to the panel just to show him I couldn’t do it. I bent down and took it by the levers.
“That’s the baby, Chief. Now just straighten up. Get those legs under your butt, there… yeah, yeah. Easy now… just straighten up. Hooeee! Now ease ‘er back to the deck.”
I thought he’d be real disappointed, but when I stepped back he was all grins and pointing to where the panel was off its mooring by half a foot. “Better set her back where she came from, buddy, so nobody’ll know. Mustn’t let anybody know yet.”
Then, after the meeting, loafing around the pinochle games, he worked the talk around to strength and gut-power and to the control panel in the tub room. I thought he was going to tell them how he’d helped me get my size back; that would prove he didn’t do everything for money.
But he didn’t mention me. He talked until Harding asked him if he was ready to have another try at lifting it and he said no, but just because he couldn’t lift it was no sign it couldn’t be done. Scanlon said maybe it could be done with a crane, but no
man
could lift that thing by himself, and McMurphy nodded and said maybe so, maybe so, but you never can tell about such things.
I watched the way he played them, got them to come around to him and say,
No
, by Jesus, not a man alive could lift it—finally even suggest the bet themselves. I watched how reluctant he looked to bet. He let the odds stack up, sucked them in deeper and deeper till he had five to one on a sure thing from every man of them, some of them betting up to twenty dollars. He never said a thing about seeing me lift it already.
All night I hoped he wouldn’t go through with it. And during the meeting the next day, when the nurse said all the men who participated in the fishing trip would have to take special showers because they were suspected of vermin, I kept hoping she’d fix it somehow, make us take our showers right away or something—anything to keep me from having to lift it.
But when the meeting was over he led me and the rest of the guys into the tub room before the black boys could lock it up, and had me take the panel by the levers and lift. I didn’t want to, but I couldn’t help it. I felt like I’d helped him cheat them out of their money. They were all friendly with him as they paid their bets, but I knew how they were feeling inside, how something had been kicked out from under them. As soon as I got the panel back in place, I ran out of the tub room without even looking at McMurphy and went into the latrine. I wanted to be by myself. I caught a look at myself in the mirror. He’d done what he said; my arms were big again, big as they were back in high school, back at the village, and my chest and shoulders were broad and hard. I was standing there looking when he came in. He held out a five-dollar bill.
“Here you go, Chief, chewin’-gum money.”
I shook my head and started to walk out of the latrine. He caught me by the arm.
“Chief, I just offered you a token of my appreciation. If you figure you got a bigger cut comin’—”
“No! Keep your money, I won’t have it.”
He stepped back and put his thumbs in his pockets and tipped his head up at me. He looked me over for a while.
“Okay,” he said. “Now what’s the story? What’s everybody in this place giving me the cold nose about?”
I didn’t answer him.
“Didn’t I do what I said I would? Make you man-sized again? What’s wrong with me around here all of a sudden? You birds act like I’m a traitor to my country.”
“You’re always…
winning
things!”
“Winning things! You damned moose, what are you accusW me of? All I do is hold up my end of the deal. Now what’s so all-fired—”
“We thought it wasn’t to be
winning
things…”
I could feel my chin jerking up and down the way it does before I start crying, but I didn’t start crying. I stood there in front of him with my chin jerking. He opened his mouth to say something, and then stopped. He took his thumbs out of his pockets and reached up and grabbed the bridge of his nose between his thumb and finger, like you see people do whose glasses are too tight between the lenses, and he closed his eyes.
“Winning, for Christsakes,” he said with his eyes closed. ‘‘Hoo boy, winning.”
So I figure what happened in the shower room that afternoon was more my fault than anybody else’s. And that’s why the only way I could make any kind of amends was by doing what I did, without thinking about being cagey or safe or what would happen to me—and not worrying about anything else for once but the thing that needed to be done and the doing of it.
Just after we left the latrine the three black boys came around, gathering the bunch of us for our special shower. The least black boy, scrambling along the baseboard with a black, crooked hand cold as a crowbar, prying guys loose leaning there, said it was what the Big Nurse called a
cautionary
cleansing. In view of the company we’d had on our trip we should get cleaned before we spread anything through the rest of the hospital.
We lined up nude against the tile, and here one black boy came, a black plastic tube in his hand, squirting a stinking salve thick and sticky as egg white. In the hair first, then turn around an’ bend over an’ spread your cheeks!
The guys complained and kidded and joked about it, trying not to look at one another or those floating slate masks working down the line behind the tubes, like nightmare faces in negative, sighting down soft, squeezy nightmare gunbarrels. They kidded the black boys by saying things like “He, Washington, what do you fellas do for fun the
other
sixteen hours?” “Hey, Williams, can you tell me what I had for breakfast?”
Everybody laughed. The black boys clenched their jaws and didn’t answer; this wasn’t the way things used to be before that damned redhead came around.
When Fredrickson spread his cheeks there was such a sound I thought the least black boy’d be blown clear off his feet.
“Hark!” Harding said, cupping his hand to his ear. “The lovely voice of an angel.”
Everyone was roaring, laughing and kidding one another, until the black boy moved on and stopped in front of the next man, and the room was suddenly absolutely quiet. The next man was George. And in that one second, with the laughing and kidding and complaining stopped, with Fredrickson there next to George straightening up and turning around and a big black boy about to ask George to lean his head down for a squirt of that stinking salve—right at that time all of us had a good idea about everything that was going to happen, and why it had to happen, and why we’d all been wrong about McMurphy.
George never used soap when he showered. He wouldn’t even let somebody hand him a towel to dry himself with. The black boys on the evening shift who supervised the usual Tuesday and Thursday evening showers had learned it was easier to leave it go like this, and they didn’t force him to do any different. That was the way it’d been for a long time. All the black boys knew it. But now everybody knew—even George, leaning backward, shaking his head, covering himself with big oakleaf hands—that this black boy, with his nose busted and his insides soured and his two buddies standing behind him waiting to see what he would do, couldn’t afford to pass up the chance.
“Ahhhh, bend you head down here, Geo’ge…”
The guys were already looking to where McMurphy stood a couple of men down the line.
“Ahhhh, c’mon, Geo’ge…”
Martini and Sefelt were standing in the shower, not moving. The drain at their feet kept choking short little gulps of air and soapy water. George looked at the drain a second, as if it were speaking to him. He watched it gurgle and choke. He looked back at the tube in the black hand before him, slow mucus running out of the little hole at the top of the tube down over the pig-iron knuckles. The black boy moved the tube forward a few inches, and George listed farther back, shaking his head.
“No—none that stoof.”
“You gonna have to do it, Rub-a-dub,” the black boy said, sounding almost sorry. “You gonna
have
to. We can’t have the place crawlin’ with
bugs
, now, can we? For all I know you got bugs on you a good
inch deep!”
“No!” George said.
‘Ahhh, Geo’ge, you jes’ don’t have no
idea
. These bugs, they very, very teeny—no bigger’n a
pinpoint
. An’, man, what they
do
is get you by the short hair an’ hang on, an’ drill, down inside you, Geo’ge.”
“No bugs!” George said.
“Ahhh, let me tell you, Geo’ge: I seen cases where these awful bugs achually—”
“Okay, Washington,” McMurphy said.
The scar where the black boy’s nose had been broken was a twist of neon. The black boy knew who’d spoken to him, but he didn’t turn around; the only way we knew he’d even heard was by the way he stopped talking and reached up a long gray finger and drew it across the scar he’d got in that basketball game. He rubbed his nose a second, then shoved his hand out in front of George’s face, scrabbling the fingers around. “A
crab
, Geo’ge, see? See here? Now you know what a
crab
look like, don’t you? Sure now, you get crabs on that
fishin’
boat. We can’t have crabs drillin’ down into you, can we, Geo’ge?”
“No crabs!”
George yelled. “No!” He stood straight and his brow lifted enough so we could see his eyes. The black boy stepped back a ways. The other two laughed at him. “Somethin’ the matter, Washington, my man?” the big one asked. “Somethin’ holding up this end of the pro-ceedure, my man?”
He stepped back in close. “Geo’ge, I’m tellin’ you: bend down! You either bend down and take this stuff—or I lay my
hand
on you!” He held it up again; it was big and black as a swamp. “Put this black! filthy! stinkin’! hand all over you!”
“No hand!” George said and lifted a fist above his head as if he would crash the slate skull to bits, splatter cogs and nuts and bolts all over the floor. But the black boy just ran the tube up against George’s belly-button and squeezed, and George doubled over with a suck of air. The black boy squirted a load in his whispy white hair, then rubbed it in with his hand, smearing black from his hand all over George’s head. George wrapped both arms around his belly and screamed.
“No! No!”
“Now turn around, Geo’ge—”
“I said that’s enough, buddy.” This time the way his voice sounded made the black boy turn and face him. I saw the black boy was smiling, looking at McMurphy’s nakedness—no hat or boots or pockets to hook his thumbs into. The black boy grinned up and down him.