Конкурс студенческих научных работ по проблемам профсоюзного движения, социального партнерства, трудовых отношений 13 страница

“Hell’s bells, listen at you,” McMurphy says. “All I hear is gripe, gripe, gripe. About the nurse or the staff or the hospital. Scanlon wants to bomb the whole outfit. Sefelt blames the drugs. Fredrickson blames his family trouble. Well, you’re all just passing the buck.”

He says that the Big Nurse is just a bitter, icy-hearted old woman, and all this business trying to get him to lock horns with her is a lot of bull—wouldn’t do anybody any good, especially him. Getting shut of her wouldn’t be getting shut of the real deep-down hang-up that’s causing the gripes.

“You think not?” Harding says. “Then since you are suddenly so lucid on the problem of mental health, what is this trouble? What is this deep-down hang-up, as you so cleverly put it.”

“I tell you, man, I don’t know. I never seen the beat of it.” He sits still for a minute, listening to the hum from the X-ray room; then he says, “But if it was no more’n you say, if it was, say, just this old nurse and her sex worries, then the solution to all your problems would be to just throw her down and solve her worries, wouldn’t it?”

Scanlon claps his hands. “Hot damn! That’s it. You’re nominated, Mack, you’re just the stud to handle the job.”

“Not me. No sir. You got the wrong boy.”

“Why not? I thought you’s the super-stud with all that whambam.”

“Scanlon, buddy, I plan to stay as clear of that old buzzard as I possibly can.”

“So I’ve been noticing,” Harding says, smiling. “What’s happened between the two of you? You had her on the ropes for a period there; then you let up. A sudden compassion for our angel of mercy?”

“No; I found out a few things, that’s why. Asked around some different places. I found out why you guys all kiss her ass so much and bow and scrape and let her walk all over you. I got wise to what you were using me for.”

“Oh? That’s interesting.”

“You’re blamed right it’s interesting. It’s interesting to me that you bums didn’t tell me what a risk I was running, twisting her tail that way. Just because I don’t like her ain’t a sign I’m gonna bug her into adding another year or so to my sentence. You got to swallow your pride sometimes and keep an eye out for old Number One.”

“Why, friends, you don’t suppose there’s anything to this rumor that our Mr. McMurphy has conformed to policy merely to aid his chances of an early release?”

“You know what I’m talking about, Harding. Why didn’t you tell me she could keep me committed in here till she’s good and ready to turn me loose?”

“Why, I had forgotten you were committed.” Harding’s face folds in the middle over his grin. “Yes. You’re becoming sly. Just like the rest of us.”

“You damn betcha I’m becoming sly. Why should it be me goes to bat at these meetings over these piddling little gripes about keeping the dorm door open and about cigarettes in the Nurses’ Station? I couldn’t figure it at first, why you guys were coming to me like I was some kind of savior. Then I just happened to find out about the way the nurses have the big say as to who gets discharged and who doesn’t. And I got wise awful damned fast. I said, ‘Why, those slippery bastards have conned me, snowed me into holding their bag. If that don’t beat all, conned ol’ R. P. McMurphy.’ “ He tips his head back and grins at the line of us on the bench. “Well, I don’t mean nothing personal, you understand, buddies, but screw that noise. I want out of here just as much as the rest of you. I got just as much to lose hassling that old buzzard as you do.”

He grins and winks down his nose and digs Harding in the ribs with his thumb, like he’s finished with the whole thing but no hard feelings, when Harding says something else.

“No. You’ve got more to lose than I do, my friend.”

Harding’s grinning again, looking with that skitterish sideways look of a jumpy mare, a dipping, rearing motion of the head. Everybody moves down a place. Martini comes away from the X-ray screen, buttoning his shirt and muttering, “I wouldn’t of believed it if I hadn’t saw it,” and Billy Bibbit goes to the black glass to take Martini’s place.

“You have more to lose than I do,” Harding says again. “I’m voluntary. I’m not committed.”

McMurphy doesn’t say a word. He’s got that same puzzled look on his face like there’s something isn’t right, something he can’t put his finger on. He just sits there looking at Harding, and Harding’s rearing smile fades and he goes to fidgeting around from McMurphy staring at him so funny. He swallows and says, “As a matter of fact, there are only a few men on the ward who are committed. Only Scanlon and—well, I guess some of the Chronics. And you. Not many commitments in the whole hospital. No, not many at all.”

Then he stops, his voice dribbling away under McMurphy’s eyes. After a bit of silence McMurphy says softly, “Are you bullshitting me?” Harding shakes his head. He looks frightened. McMurphy stands up in the hall and says, “Are you guys bullshitting me!”

Nobody’ll say anything. McMurphy walks up and down in front of that bench, running his hand around in that thick hair. He walks all the way to the back of the line, then all the way to the front, to the X-ray machine. It hisses and spits at him.

“You, Billy—you must be committed, for Christsakes!”

Billy’s got his back to us, his chin up on the black screen, standing on tiptoe. No, he says into the machinery.

“Then why? Why? You’re just a young guy! You oughta be out running around in a convertible, bird-dogging girls. All of this”—he sweeps his hand around him again—”why do you stand for it?”

Billy doesn’t say anything, and McMurphy turns from him to another couple of guys.

“Tell me why. You gripe, you bitch for weeks on end about how you can’t stand this place, can’t stand the nurse or anything about her, and all the time you ain’t committed. I can understand it with some of those old guys on the ward. They’re nuts. But you, you’re not exactly the everyday man on the street, but you’re not nuts. ”

They don’t argue with him. He moves on to Sefelt.

“Sefelt, what about you? There’s nothing wrong with you but you have fits. Hell, I had an uncle who threw conniptions twice as bad as yours and saw visions from the Devil to boot, but he didn’t lock himself in the nuthouse. You could get along outside if you had the guts—”

“Sure!” It’s Billy, turned from the screen, his face boiling tears. “Sure!” he screams again. “If we had the g-guts! I could go outside to-today, if I had the guts. My m-m-mother is a good friend of M-Miss Ratched, and I could get an AMA signed this afternoon, if I had the guts!”

He jerks his shirt up from the bench and tries to pull it on, but he’s shaking too hard. Finally he slings it from him and turns back to McMurphy.

“You think I wuh-wuh-wuh- want to stay in here? You think I wouldn’t like a con-con-vertible and a guh-guh-girl friend? But did you ever have people l-l-laughing at you? No, because you’re so b-big and so tough! Well, I’m not big and tough. Neither is Harding. Neither is F-Fredrickson. Neither is SuhSefelt. Oh—oh, you—you t-talk like we stayed in here because we liked it! Oh—it’s n-no use …”

He’s crying and stuttering too hard to say anything else, and he wipes his eyes with the backs of his hands so he can see. One of the scabs pulls off his hand, and the more he wipes the more he smears blood over his face and in his eyes. Then he starts running blind, bouncing down the hall from side to side with his face a smear of blood, a black boy right after him.

McMurphy turns round to the rest of the guys and opens his mouth to ask something else, and then closes it when he sees how they’re looking at him. He stands there a minute with the row of eyes aimed at him like a row of rivets; then he says, “Hell’s bells,” in a weak sort of way, and he puts his cap back on and pulls it down hard and goes back to his place on the bench. The two technicians come back from coffee and go back in that room across the hall; when the door whooshes open you can smell the acid in the air like when they recharge a battery. McMurphy sits there, looking at that door.

“I don’t seem able to get it straight in my mind....”

Crossing the grounds back to the ward, McMurphy lagged back at the tail end of the bunch with his hands in the pockets of his greens and his cap tugged low on his head, brooding over a cold cigarette. Everybody was keeping pretty quiet. They’d got Billy calmed down, and he was walking at the front of the group with a black boy on one side and that white boy from the Shock Shop on the other side.

I dropped back till I was walking beside McMurphy and I wanted to tell him not to fret about it, that nothing could be done, because I could see that there was some thought he was worrying over in his mind like a dog worries at a hole he don’t know what’s down, one voice saying, Dog, that hole is none of your affair—it’s too big and too black and there’s a spoor all over the place says bears or something just as bad. And some other voice coming like a sharp whisper out of way back in his breed, not a smart voice, nothing cagey about it, saying, Sic ‘im, dog, sic ‘im!

I wanted to tell him not to fret about it, and I was just about to come out and say it when he raised his head and shoved his hat back and speeded up to where the least black boy was walking and slapped him on the shoulder and asked him, “Sam, what say we stop by the canteen here a second so I can pick me up a carton or two of cigarettes.”

I had to hurry to catch up, and the run made my heart ring a high, excited pitch in my head. Even in the canteen I still heard that sound my heart had knocked ringing in my head, though my heart had slowed back to normal. The sound reminded me of how I used to feel standing in the cold fall Friday night out on a football field, waiting for the ball to be kicked and the game to get going. The ringing would build and build till I didn’t think I could stand still any longer; then the kick would come and it would be gone and the game would be on its way. I felt that same Friday-night ringing now, and felt the same wild, stomping-up-and-down impatience. And I was seeing sharp and high-pitched too, the way I did before a game and the way I did looking out of the dorm window a while back: everything was sharp and clear and solid like I forgot it could be. Lines of toothpaste and shoelaces, ranks of sunglasses and ballpoint pens guaranteed right on them to write a lifetime on butter under water, all guarded against shoplifters by a big-eyed force of Teddy bears sitting high on a shelf over the counter.

McMurphy came stomping up to the counter beside me and hooked his thumbs in his pockets and told the salesgirl to give him a couple of cartons of Marlboros. “Maybe make it three cartons,” he said, grinning at her. “I plan to do a lot of smokin’.”

The ringing didn’t stop until the meeting that afternoon. I’d been half listening to them work on Sefelt to get him to face up to the reality of his problems so he could adjust (“It’s the Dilantin!” he finally yells. “Now, Mr. Sefelt, if you’re to be helped, you must be honest,” she says. “But, it’s got to be the Dilantin that does it; don’t it make my gums soft?” She smiles. “Jim, you’re forty-five years old …”) when I happened to catch a look at McMurphy sitting in his corner. He wasn’t fiddling with a deck of cards or dozing into a magazine like he had been during all the meetings the last two weeks. And he wasn’t slouched down. He was sitting up stiff in his chair with a flushed, reckless look on his face as he looked back and forth from Sefelt to the Big Nurse. As I watched, the ringing went higher. His eyes were blue stripes under those white eyebrows, and they shot back and forth just the way he watched cards turning up around a poker table. I was certain that any minute he was going to do some crazy thing to get him up on Disturbed for sure. I’d seen the same look on other guys before they’d climbed all over a black boy. I gripped down on the arm of my chair and waited, scared it would happen, and, I began to realize, just a little scared it wouldn’t.

He kept quiet and watched till they were finished with Sefelt; then he swung half around in his chair and watched while Fredrickson, trying some way to get back at them for the way they had grilled his friend, griped for a few loud minutes about the cigarettes being kept in the Nurses’ Station. Fredrickson talked himself out and finally flushed and apologized like always and sat back down. McMurphy still hadn’t made any kind of move. I eased up where I’d been gripping the arm of the chair, beginning to think I’d been wrong.

There was just a couple of minutes left in the meeting. The Big Nurse folded up her papers and put them in the basket and set the basket off her lap on the floor, then let her eyes swing to McMurphy for just a second like she wanted to check if he was awake and listening. She folded her hands in her lap and looked down at the fingers and drew a deep breath, shaking her head.

“Boys, I’ve given a great deal of thought to what I am about to say. I’ve talked it over with the doctor and with the rest of the staff, and, as much as we regretted it, we all came to the same conclusion—that there should be some manner of punishment meted out for the unspeakable behavior concerning the house duties three weeks ago.” She raised her hand and looked around. “We waited this long to say anything, hoping that you men would take it upon yourselves to apologize for the rebellious way you acted. But not a one of you has shown the slightest sign of remorse.”

Her hand went up again to stop any interruptions that might come—the movement of a tarot-card reader in a glass arcade case.

“Please understand: We do not impose certain rules and restrictions on you without a great deal of thought about their therapeutic value. A good many of you are in here because you could not adjust to the rules of society in the Outside World, because you refused to face up to them, because you tried to circumvent them and avoid them. At some time—perhaps in your childhood—you may have been allowed to get away with flouting the rules of society. When you broke a rule you knew it. You wanted to be dealt with, needed it, but the punishment did not come. That foolish lenience on the part of your parents may have been the germ that grew into your present illness. I tell you this hoping you will understand that it is entirely for your own good that we enforce discipline and order.”

She let her head twist around the room. Regret for the job she has to do was worked into her face. It was quiet except for that high fevered, delirious ringing in my head.

“It’s difficult to enforce discipline in these surroundings. You must be able to see that. What can we do to you? You can’t be arrested. You can’t be put on bread and water. You must see that the staff has a problem; what can we do?”

Ruckly had an idea what they could do, but she didn’t pay any attention to it. The face moved with a ticking noise till the features achieved a different look. She finally answered her own question.

“We must take away a privilege. And after careful consideration of the circumstances of this rebellion, we’ve decided that there would be a certain justice in taking away the privilege of the tub room that you men have been using for your card games during the day. Does this seem unfair?”

Her head didn’t move. She didn’t look. But one by one everybody else looked at him sitting there in his corner. Even the old Chronics, wondering why everybody had turned to look in one direction, stretched out their scrawny necks like birds and turned to look at McMurphy—faces turned to him, full of a naked, scared hope.

That single thin note in my head was like tires speeding down a pavement.

He was sitting straight up in his chair, one big red finger scratching lazily at the stitchmarks run across his nose. He grinned at everybody looking at him and took his cap by the brim and tipped it politely, then looked back at the nurse.

“So, if there is no discussion on this ruling, I think the hour is almost over …”

She paused again, took a look at him herself. He shrugged his shoulders and with a loud sigh slapped both hands down on his knees and pushed himself standing out of the chair. He stretched and yawned and scratched the nose again and started strolling across the day-room floor to where she sat by the Nurses’ Station, heisting his pants with his thumbs as he walked. I could see it was too late to keep him from doing whatever fool thing he had in mind, and I just watched, like everybody else. He walked with long steps, too long, and he had his thumbs hooked in his pockets again. The iron in his boot heels cracked lightning out of the tile. He was the logger again, the swaggering gambler, the big redheaded brawling Irishman, the cowboy out of the TV set walking down the middle of the street to meet a dare.

The Big Nurse’s eyes swelled out white as he got close. She hadn’t reckoned on him doing anything. This was supposed to be her final victory over him, supposed to establish her rule once and for all. But here he comes and he’s big as a house!

She started popping her mouth and looking for her black boys, scared to death, but be stopped before he got to her. He stopped in front of her window and he said in his slowest, deepest drawl how he figured he could use one of the smokes he bought this mornin’, then ran his hand through the glass.

The glass came apart like water splashing, and the nurse threw her hands to her ears. He got one of the cartons of cigarettes with his name on it and took out a pack, then put it back and turned to where the Big Nurse was sitting like a chalk statue and very tenderly went to brushing the slivers of glass off her hat and shoulders.

“I’m sure sorry, ma’am,” he said. “Gawd but I am. That window glass was so spick and span I com- pletely forgot it was there.”

It took just a couple of seconds. He turned and left her sitting there with her face shifting and jerking and walked back across the day room to his chair, lighting up a cigarette.

The ringing that was in my head had stopped.

Part 3

After that, McMurphy had things his way for a good long while. The nurse was biding her time till another idea came to her that would put her on top again. She knew she’d lost one big round and was losing another, but she wasn’t in any hurry. For one thing, she wasn’t about to recommend release; the fight could go on as long as she wanted, till he made a mistake or till he just gave out, or until she could come up with some new tactic that would put her back on top in everybody’s eyes.

A good lot happened before she came up with that new tactic. After McMurphy was drawn out of what you might call a short retirement and had announced he was back in the hassle by breaking out her personal window, he made things on the ward pretty interesting. He took part in every meeting, every discussion—drawling, winking, joking his best to wheedle a skinny laugh out of some Acute who’d been scared to grin since he was twelve. He got together enough guys for a basketball team and some way talked the doctor into letting him bring a ball back from the gym to get the team used to handling it. The nurse objected, said the next thing they’d be playing soccer in the day room and polo games up and down the hall, but the doctor held firm for once and said let them go. “A number of the players, Miss Ratched, have shown marked progress since that basketball team was organized; I think it has proven its therapeutic value.”

She looked at him a while in amazement. So he was doing a little muscle-flexing too. She marked the tone of his voice for later, for when her time came again, and just nodded and went to sit in her Nurses’ Station and fiddle with the controls on her equipment. The janitors had put a cardboard in the frame over her desk till they could get another window pane cut to fit, and she sat there behind it every day like it wasn’t even there, just like she could still see right into the day room. Behind that square of cardboard she was like a picture turned to the wall.

She waited, without comment, while McMurphy continued to run around the halls in the mornings in his white-whale shorts, or pitched pennies in the dorms, or ran up and down the hall blowing a nickel-plated ref’s whistle, teaching Acutes the fast break from ward door to the Seclusion Room at the other end, the ball pounding in the corridor like cannon shots and McMurphy roaring like a sergeant, “Drive, you puny mothers, drive!”

When either one spoke to the other it was always in the most polite fashion. He would ask her nice as you please if he could use her fountain pen to write a request for an Unaccompanied Leave from the hospital, wrote it out in front of her on her desk, and handed her the request and the pen back at the same time with such a nice, “Thank you,” and she would look at it and say just as polite that she would “take it up with the staff”—which took maybe three minutes—and come back to tell him she certainly was sorry but a pass was not considered therapeutic at this time. He would thank her again and walk out of the Nurses’ Station and blow that whistle loud enough to break windows for miles, and holler, “Practice, you mothers, get that ball and let’s get a little sweat rollin’.”

He’d been on the ward a month, long enough to sign the bulletin board in the hall to request a hearing in group meeting about an Accompanied Pass. He went to the bulletin board with her pen and put down under TO BE ACCOMPANIED BY: “A twitch I know from Portland named Candy Starr.”—and ruined the pen point on the period. The pass request was brought up in group meeting a few days later, the same day, in fact, that workmen put a new glass window in front of the Big Nurse’s desk, and after his request had been turned down on the grounds that this Miss Starr didn’t seem like the most wholesome person for a patient to go pass with, he shrugged and said that’s how she bounces I guess, and got up and walked to the Nurses’ Station, to the window that still had the sticker from the glass company down in the corner, and ran his fist through it again—explained to the nurse while blood poured from his fingers that he thought the cardboard had been left out and the frame was open. “When did they sneak that danged glass in there? Why that thing is a menace!”

The nurse taped his hand in the station while Scanlon and Harding dug the cardboard out of the garbage and taped it back in the frame, using adhesive from the same roll the nurse was bandaging McMurphy’s wrist and fingers with. McMurphy sat on a stool, grimacing something awful while he got his cuts tended, winking at Scanlon and Harding over the nurse’s head. The expression on her face was calm and blank as enamel, but the strain was beginning to show in other ways. By the way she jerked the adhesive tight as she could, showing her remote patience wasn’t what it used to be.

We got to go to the gym and watch our basketball team—Harding, Billy Bibbit, Scanlon, Fredrickson, Martini, and McMurphy whenever his hand would stop bleeding long enough for him to get in the game—play a team of aides. Our two big black boys played for the aides. They were the best players on the court, running up and down the floor together like a pair of shadows in red trunks, scoring basket after basket with mechanical accuracy. Our team was too short and too slow, and Martini kept throwing passes to men that nobody but him could see, and the aides beat us by twenty points. But something happened that let most of us come away feeling there’d been a kind of victory, anyhow: in one scramble for the ball our big black boy named Washington got cracked with somebody’s elbow, and his team had to hold him back as he stood straining to where McMurphy was sitting on the ball—not paying the least bit of heed to the thrashing black boy with red pouring out of his big nose and down his chest like paint splashed on a blackboard and hollering to the guys holding him, “He beggin’ for it! The sonabitch jus’ beggin’ for it!”

McMurphy composed more notes for the nurse to find in the latrine with her mirror. He wrote long outlandish tales about himself in the log book and signed them Anon. Sometimes he slept till eight o’clock. She would reprimand him, without heat at all, and he would stand and listen till she was finished and then destroy her whole effect by asking something like did she wear a B cup, he wondered, or a C cup, or any ol’ cup at all?

The other Acutes were beginning to follow his lead. Harding began flirting with all the student nurses, and Billy Bibbit completely quit writing what he used to call his “observations” in the log book, and when the window in front of her desk got replaced again, with a big X across it in whitewash to make sure McMurphy didn’t have any excuse for not knowing it was there, Scanlon did it in by accidentally bouncing our basketball through it before the whitewashed X was even dry. The ball punctured, and Martini picked it off the floor like a dead bird and carried it to the nurse in the station, where she was staring at the new splash of broken glass all over her desk, and asked couldn’t she please fix it with tape or something? Make it well again? Without a word she jerked it out of his hand and stuffed it in the garbage.

So, with basketball season obviously over, McMurphy decided fishing was the thing. He requested another pass after telling the doctor he had some friends at the Siuslaw Bay at Florence who would like to take eight or nine of the patients out deep-sea fishing if it was okay with the staff, and he wrote on the request list out in the hall that this time he would be accompanied by “two sweet old aunts from a little place outside of Oregon City.” In the meeting his pass was granted for the next weekend. When the nurse finished officially noting his pass in her roll book, she reached into her wicker bag beside her feet and drew out a clipping that she had taken from the paper that morning, and read out loud that although fishing off the coast of Oregon was having a peak year, the salmon were running quite late in the season and the sea was rough and dangerous. And she would suggest the men give that some thought.

“Good idea,” McMurphy said. He closed his eyes and sucked a deep breath through his teeth. “Yes sir! The salt smell o’ the poundin’ sea, the crack o’ the bow against the waves—braving the elements, where men are men and boats are boats. Miss Ratched, you’ve talked me into it. I’ll call and rent that boat this very night. Shall I sign you on?”

Instead of answering she walked to the bulletin board and pinned up the clipping.

 

The next day he started signing up the guys that wanted to go and that had ten bucks to chip in on boat rent, and the nurse started steadily bringing in clippings from the newspapers that told about wrecked boats and sudden storms on the coast. McMurphy pooh-poohed her and her clippings, saying that his two aunts had spent most of their lives bouncing around the waves in one port or another with this sailor or that, and they both guaranteed the trip was safe as pie, safe as pudding, not a thing to worry about. But the nurse still knew her patients. The clippings scared them more than McMurphy’d figured. He’d figured there would be a rush to sign up, but he’d had to talk and wheedle to get the guys he did. The day before the trip he still needed a couple more before he could pay for the boat.

I didn’t have the money, but I kept getting this notion that I wanted to sign the list. And the more he talked about fishing for Chinook salmon the more I wanted to go. I knew it was a fool thing to want; if I signed up it’d be the same as coming right out and telling everybody I wasn’t deaf. If I’d been hearing all this talk about boats and fishing it’d show I’d been hearing everything else that’d been said in confidence around me for the past ten years. And if the Big Nurse found out about that, that I’d heard all the scheming and treachery that had gone on when she didn’t think anybody was listening, she’d hunt me down with an electric saw, fix me where she knew I was deaf and dumb. Bad as I wanted to go, it still made me smile a little to think about it: I had to keep on acting deaf if I wanted to hear at all.

I lay in bed the night before the fishing trip and thought it over, about my being deaf, about the years of not letting on I heard what was said, and I wondered if I could ever act any other way again. But I remembered one thing: it wasn’t me that started acting deaf; it was people that first started acting like I was too dumb to hear or see or say anything at all.

It hadn’t been just since I came in the hospital, either; people first took to acting like I couldn’t hear or talk a long time before that. In the Army anybody with more stripes acted that way toward me. That was the way they figured you were supposed to act around someone looked like I did. And even as far back as grade school I can remember people saying that they didn’t think I was listening, so they quit listening to the things I was saying. Lying there in bed, I tried to think back when I first noticed it. I think it was once when we were still living in the village on the Columbia. It was summer....