One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest: 50th Anniversary Edition Read Free

you’d think he needed to if the black boys were anywhere near him. He sounds like he’s way above them, talking down, like he’s 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 don’t slide; he’s got iron on his heels and he rings it on the floor like horseshoes. He shows up in the door and stops andhitches his thumbs in his pockets, boots wide apart, and stands there with the guys looking at him.
    “Good
morn
in’, buddies.”
    There’s 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 doesn’t look like Papa; Papa was a full-blood Columbia Indian—a chief—and hard and shiny as a gunstock. This guy is red-headed with long red sideburns and a tangle of curls out from under his cap, been needing cut a long time, and he’s broad as Papa was tall, broad across the jaw and shoulders and chest, a broad white devilish grin, and he’s 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; there’s nothing funny going on. But it’s not the way that Public Relation laughs, it’s free and loud and it comes out of his wide grinning mouth and spreads in rings bigger and bigger till it’s lapping against the walls all over the ward. Not like that fat Public Relation laugh. This sounds real. I realize all of a sudden it’s the first laugh I’ve 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. There’s no move to stop him, no move to say anything. He laughs till he’s finished for a time, and he walks on into the day room. Even when he isn’t laughing, that laughing sound hovers around him, the way the sound hovers around a big bell just quit ringing—it’s in his eyes, in the way he smiles and swaggers, in the way he talks.
    “My name is McMurphy, buddies, R. P. McMurphy, and I’m 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 Acute’s cards up with a thick, heavy finger, and squints at the hand and shakes his head.
    “Yessir, that’s 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! I’ll trim you babies like little lambs.”
    Cheswick gathers his cards together. The redheaded man sticks his hand out for Cheswick to shake.
    “Hello, buddy; what’s that you’re playin’ Pinochle Jesus, no wonder you don’t care nothin’ about showing your hand. Don’t 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 don’t help his condition.
    “Easy now, don’t 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