Ellis and Ruckly are the youngest Chronics. Colonel Matterson is the oldest, an old, petrified cavalry soldier from the First War who is given to lifting the skirts of passing nurses with his cane, or teaching some kind of history out of the text of his left hand to anybody that’ll listen. He’s the oldest on the ward, but not the one’s been here longest—his wife brought him in only a few years back, when she got to where she wasn’t up to tending him any longer.
I’m the one been here on the ward the longest, since the Second World War. I been here on the ward longer’n anybody. Longer’n any of the other patients. The Big Nurse has been here longer’n me.
The Chronics and the Acutes don’t generally mingle. Each stays on his own side of the day room the way the black boys want it. The black boys say it’s more orderly that way and let everybody know that’s the way they’d like it to stay. They move us in after breakfast and look at the grouping and nod. “That’s right, gennulmen, that’s the way. Now you keep it that way.”
Actually there isn’t much need for them to say anything, because, other than me, the Chronics don’t move around much, and the Acutes say they’d just as leave stay over on their own side, give reasons like the Chronic side smells worse than a dirty diaper. But I know it isn’t the stink that keeps them away from the Chronic side so much as they don’t like to be reminded that here’s what could happen to
them
someday. The Big Nurse recognizes this fear and knows how to put it to use; she’ll point out to an Acute, whenever he goes into a sulk, that you boys be good boys and cooperate with the staff policy which is engineered for your
cure
, or you’ll end up over on
that
side.
(Everybody on the ward is proud of the way the patients cooperate. We got a little brass tablet tacked to a piece of maple wood that has printed on it:
Congratulations for Getting along with the Smallest Number of Personnel of Any Ward in the Hospital
It’s a prize for cooperation. It’s hung on the wall right above the log book, right square in the middle between the Chronics and Acutes.)
This new redheaded Admission, McMurphy, knows right away he’s not a Chronic. After he checks the day room over a minute, he sees he’s meant for the Acute side and goes right for it, grinning and shaking hands with everybody he comes to. At first I see that he’s making everybody over there feel uneasy, with all his kidding and joking and with the brassy way he hollers at that black boy who’s still after him with a thermometer, and especially with that big wide-open laugh of his. Dials twitch in the control panel at the sound of it. The Acutes look spooked and uneasy when he laughs, the way kids look in a schoolroom when one ornery kid is raising too much hell with the teacher out of the room and they’re all scared the teacher might pop back in and take it into her head to make them all stay after. They’re fidgeting and twitching, responding to the dials in the control panel; I see McMurphy notices he’s making them uneasy, but he don’t let it slow him down.
“Damn, what a sorry-looking outfit. You boys don’t look so crazy to me.” He’s trying to get them to loosen up, the way you see an auctioneer spinning jokes to loosen up the crowd before the bidding starts. “Which one of you claims to be the craziest? Which one is the biggest loony? Who runs these card games? It’s my first day, and what I like to do is make a good impression straight off on the right man if he can prove to me he
is
the right man. Who’s the bull goose loony here?”
He’s saying this directly to Billy Bibbit. He leans down and glares so hard at Billy that Billy feels compelled to stutter out that he isn’t the buh-buh-buh-bull goose loony yet, though he’s next in luh-luh-line for the job.
McMurphy sticks a big hand down in front of Billy, and Billy can’t do a thing but shake it. “Well, buddy,” he says to Billy, “I’m truly glad you’re next in luh-line for the job, but since I’m thinking about taking over this whole show myself, lock, stock, and barrel, maybe I better talk with the top man.” He looks round to where some of the Acutes have stopped their card-playing, covers one of his hands with the other, and cracks all his knuckles at the sight. “I figure, you see, buddy, to be sort of the gambling baron on this ward, deal a wicked game of blackjack. So you better take me to your leader and we’ll get it straightened out who’s gonna be boss around here.”
Nobody’s sure if this barrel-chested man with the, scar and the wild grin is play-acting or if he’s crazy enough to be just like he talks, or both, but they are all beginning to get a big kick out of going along with him. They watch as he puts that big red hand on Billy’s thin arm, waiting to see what Billy will say. Billy sees how it’s up to him to break the silence, so he looks around and picks out one of the pinochle-players: “Handing,” Billy says, “I guess it would b-b-be you. You’re p-president of Pay-Pay-Patient’s Council. This m-man wants to talk to you.”
The Acutes are grinning now, not so uneasy any more, and glad that something out of the ordinary’s going on. They all razz Harding, ask him if he’s bull goose loony. He lays down his cards.
Harding is a flat, nervous man with a face that sometimes makes you think you seen him in the movies, like it’s a face too pretty to just be a guy on the street. He’s got wide, thin shoulders and he curves them in around his chest when he’s trying to hide inside himself. He’s got hands so long and white and dainty I think they carved each other out of soap, and sometimes they get loose and glide around in front of him free as two white birds until he notices them and traps them between his knees; it bothers him that he’s got pretty hands.
He’s president of the Patient’s Council on account of he has a paper that says he graduated from college. The paper’s framed and sits on his nightstand next to a picture of a woman in a bathing suit who also looks like you’ve seen her in the moving pictures—she’s got very big breasts and she’s holding the top of the bathing suit up over them with her fingers and looking sideways at the camera. You can see Harding sitting on a towel behind her, looking skinny in his bathing suit, like he’s waiting for some big guy to kick sand on him. Harding brags a lot about having such a woman for a wife, says she’s the sexiest woman in the world and she can’t get enough of him nights.
When Billy points him out Harding leans back in his chair and assumes an important look, speaks up at the ceiling without looking at Billy or McMurphy. “Does this… gentleman have an appointment, Mr. Bibbit?”
“Do you have an appointment, Mr. McM-m-murphy? Mr. Harding is a busy man, nobody sees him without an ap-appointment.”
“This busy man Mr. Harding, is he the bull goose loony?” He looks at Billy with one eye, and Billy nods his head up and down real fast; Billy’s tickled with all the attention he’s getting.
“Then you tell Bull Goose Loony Harding that R. P. McMurphy is waiting to see him and that this hospital ain’t big enough for the two of us. I’m accustomed to being top man. I been a bull goose catskinner for every gyppo logging operation in the Northwest and bull goose gambler all the way from Korea, was even bull goose pea weeder on that pea farm at Pendleton—so I figure if I’m bound to be a loony, then I’m bound to be a stompdown dadgum good one. Tell this Harding that he either meets me man to man or he’s a yaller skunk and better be outta town by sunset.”
Harding leans farther back, hooks his thumbs in his lapels. “Bibbit, you tell this young upstart McMurphy that I’ll meet him in the main hall at high noon and we’ll settle this affair once and for all, libidos a-blazin’.” Harding tries to drawl like McMurphy; it sounds funny with his high, breathy voice. “You might also warn him, just to be fair, that I have been bull goose loony on this ward for nigh onto two years, and that I’m crazier than any man alive.”
“Mr. Bibbit, you might warn this Mr. Harding that I’m so crazy I admit to voting for Eisenhower.”
“Bibbit! You tell Mr. McMurphy I’m so crazy I voted for Eisenhower
twice!”
“And you tell Mr. Harding right back”—he puts both hands on the table and leans down, his voice getting low—“that I’m so crazy I plan to vote for Eisenhower again this
November
.”
“I take off my hat,” Harding says, bows his head, and shakes hands with McMurphy. There’s no doubt in my mind that McMurphy’s won, but I’m not sure just what.
All the other Acutes leave what they’ve been doing and ease up close to see what new sort this fellow is. Nobody like him’s ever been on the ward before. They’re asking him where he’s from and what his business is in a way I’ve never seen them do before. He says he’s a dedicated man. He says he was just a wanderer and logging bum before the Army took him and taught him what his natural bent was; just like they taught some men to goldbrick and some men to goof off, he says, they taught him to play poker. Since then he’s settled down and devoted himself to gambling on all levels. Just play poker and stay single and live where and how he wants to, if people would let him, he says, “but you know how society persecutes a dedicated man. Ever since I found my callin’ I done time in so many small-town jails I could write a brochure. They say I’m a habitual hassler. Like I fight some. Sheeut. They didn’t mind so much when I was a dumb logger and got into a hassle; that’s
excusable
, they say, that’s a hard-workin’ feller blowing off steam, they say. But if you’re a gambler, if they know you to get up a back-room game now and then, all you have to do is spit slantwise and you’re a goddamned criminal. Hooee, it was breaking up the budget drivin’ me to and from the pokey for a while there.”
He shakes his head and puffs out his cheeks.
“But that was just for a period of time. I learned the ropes. To tell the truth, this ‘sault and battery I was doing in Pendleton was the first hitch in close to a year. That’s why I got busted. I was outa practice; this guy was able to get up off the floor and get to the cops before I left town. A very tough individual…”
He laughs again and shakes hands and sits down to arm wrestle every time that black boy gets too near him with the thermometer, till he’s met everybody on the Acute side. And when he finishes shaking hands with the last Acute he comes right on over to the Chronics, like we aren’t no different. You can’t tell if he’s really this friendly or if he’s got some gambler’s reason for trying to get acquainted with guys so far gone a lot of them don’t even know their names.
He’s there pulling Ellis’s hand off the wall and shaking it just like he was a politician running for something and Ellis’s vote was good as anybody’s. “Buddy,” he says to Ellis in a solemn voice, “my name is R. P. McMurphy and I don’t like to see a full-grown man sloshin’ around in his own water. Whyn’t you go get dried up?”
Ellis looks down at the puddle around his feet in pure surprise. “Why, I thank you,” he says and even moves off a few steps toward the latrine before the nails pull his hands back to the wall.
McMurphy comes down the line of Chronics, shakes hands with Colonel Matterson and with Ruckly and with Old Pete. He shakes the hands of Wheelers and Walkers and Vegetables, shakes hands that he has to pick up out of laps like picking up dead birds, mechanical birds, wonders of tiny bones and wires that have run down and fallen. Shakes hands with everybody he comes to except Big George the water freak, who grins and shies back from that unsanitary hand, so McMurphy just salutes him and says to his own right hand as he walks away, “Hand, how do you suppose that old fellow knew all the evil you been into?”
Nobody can make out what he’s driving at, or why he’s making such a fuss with meeting everybody, but it’s better’n mixing jigsaw puzzles. He keeps saying it’s a necessary thing to get around and meet the men he’ll be dealing with, part of a gambler’s job. But he must know he ain’t going to be dealing with no eighty-year-old organic who couldn’t do any more with a playing card than put it in his mouth and gum it awhile. Yet he looks like he’s enjoying himself, like he’s the sort of guy that gets a laugh out of people.
I’m the last one. Still strapped in the chair in the corner. McMurphy stops when he gets to me and hooks his thumbs in his pockets again and leans back to laugh, like he sees something funnier about me than about anybody else. All of a sudden I was scared he was laughing because he knew the way I was sitting there with my knees pulled up and my arms wrapped around them, staring straight ahead as though I couldn’t hear a thing, was all an act.
“Hooeee,” he said, “look what we got here.”
I remember all this part real clear. I remember the way he closed one eye and tipped his head back and looked down across that healing wine-colored scar on his nose, laughing at me. I thought at first that he was laughing because of how funny it looked, an Indian’s face and black, oily Indian’s hair on somebody like me. I thought maybe he was laughing at how weak I looked. But then’s when I remember thinking that he was laughing because he wasn’t fooled for one minute by my deaf-and-dumb act; it didn’t make any difference
how
cagey the act was, he was onto me and was laughing and winking to let me know it.
“What’s your story, Big Chief? You look like Sittin’ Bull on a sitdown strike.” He looked over to the Acutes to see if they might laugh about his joke; when they just sniggered he looked back to me and winked again. “What’s your name, Chief?”
Billy Bibbit called across the room. “His n-n-name is Bromden. Chief Bromden. Everybody calls him Chief Buh-Broom, though, because the aides have him sweeping a l-large part of the time. There’s not m-much else he can do, I guess. He’s deaf.” Billy put his chin in hands. “If I was d-d-deaf”—he sighed—“I would kill myself.”
McMurphy kept looking at me. “He gets his growth, he’ll be pretty good-sized, won’t he? I wonder how tall he is.”
“I think somebody m-m-measured him once at s-six feet seven; but even if he is big, he’s scared of his own sh-sh-shadow. Just a bi-big deaf Indian.”
“When I saw him sittin’ here I
thought
he looked some Indian. But Bromden ain’t an Indian name. What tribe is he?”