“And what I deduce you marks need is a big fat pot to temptate you. Here’s ten packages on the next deal. Hey-yah, comin’ at you, guts ball from here on out. …”

And throws back his head and laughs out loud at the way the guys hustled to get their bets down.

That laugh banged around the day room all evening, and all the time he was dealing he was joking and talking and trying to get the players to laugh along with him. But they were all afraid to loosen up; it’d been too long. He gave up trying and settled down to serious dealing. They won the deal off him a time or two, but he always bought it back or fought it back, and the cigarettes on each side of him grew in bigger and bigger pyramid stacks.

Then just before nine-thirty he started letting them win, lets them win it all back so fast they don’t hardly remember losing. He pays out the last couple of cigarettes and lays down the deck and leans back with a sigh and shoves the cap out of his eyes, and the game is done.

“Well, sir, win a few, lose the rest is what I say.” He shakes his head so forlorn. “I don’t know — I was always a pretty shrewd customer at twenty-one, but you birds may just be too tough for me. You got some kinda uncanny knack, makes a man leery of playing against such sharpies for real money tomorrow.”

He isn’t even kidding himself into thinking they fall for that. He let them win, and every one of us watching the game knows it. So do the players. But there still isn’t a man raking his pile of cigarettes — cigarettes he didn’t really win but only won back because they were his in the first place — that doesn’t have a smirk on his face like he’s the toughest gambler on the whole Mississippi.

The fat black boy and a black boy named Geever run us out of the day room and commence turning lights off with a little key on a chain, and as the ward gets dimmer and darker the eyes of the little birthmarked nurse in the station get bigger and brighter. She’s at the door of the glass station, issuing nighttime pills to the men that shuffle past her in a line, and she’s having a hard time keeping straight who gets poisoned with what tonight. She’s not even watching where she pours the water. What has distracted her attention this way is that big redheaded man with the dreadful cap and the horrible-looking scar, coming her way. She’s watching McMurphy walk away from the card table in the dark day room, his one horny hand twisting the red tuft of hair that sticks out of the little cup at the throat of his work-farm shirt, and I figure by the way she rears back when he reaches the door of the station that she’s probably been warned about him beforehand by the Big Nurse. (“Oh, one more thing before I leave it in your hands tonight, Miss Pilbow; that new man sitting over there, the one with the garish red sideburns and facial lacerations — I’ve reason to believe he is a sex maniac.”)

McMurphy sees how she’s looking so scared and big-eyed at him, so he sticks his head in the station door where she’s issuing pills, and gives her a big friendly grin to get acquainted on. This flusters her so she drops the water pitcher on her foot. She gives a cry and hops on one foot, jerks her hand, and the pill she was about to give me leaps out of the little cup and right down the neck of her uniform where that birthmark stain runs like a river of wine down into a valley.

“Let me give you a hand, ma’am.”

And that very hand comes through the station door, scarred and tattooed and the color of raw meat.

“Stay back! There are two aides on the ward with me!”

She rolls her eyes for the black boys, but they are off tying Chronics in bed, nowhere close enough to help in a hurry. McMurphy grins and turns the hand over so she can see he isn’t holding a knife. All she can see is the light shining off the slick, waxy, callused palm.

“All I mean to do, miss, is to—”

“Stay back! Patients aren’t allowed to enter the — Oh, stay back, I’m a Catholic!” and straightaway jerks at the gold chain around her neck so a cross flies out from between her bosoms, slingshots the lost pill up in the air! McMurphy strikes at the air right in front of her face. She screams and pops the cross in her mouth and clinches her eyes shut like she’s about to get socked, stands like that, paper-white except for that stain which turns darker than ever, as though it sucked the blood from all the rest of her body. When she finally opens her eyes again there’s that callused hand right in front of her with my little red capsule sitting in it.

“— was to pick up your waterin’ can you dropped.” He holds that out in the other hand.

Her breath comes out in a loud hiss. She takes the can from him. “Thank you. Good night, good night,” and closes the door in the next man’s face, no more pills tonight.

In the dorm McMurphy tosses the pill on my bed. “You want your sourball, Chief?”

I shake my head at the pill, and he flips it off the bed like it was a bug pestering him. It hops across the floor with a cricket scrabble. He goes to getting ready for bed, pulling off his clothes. The shorts under his work pants are coal black satin covered with big white whales with red eyes. He grins when he sees I’m looking at the shorts. “From a co-ed at Oregon State, Chief, a Literary major.” He snaps the elastic with his thumb. “She gave them to me because she said I was a symbol.”

His arms and neck and face are sunburned and bristled with curly orange hairs. He’s got tattoos on each big shoulder; one says “Fighting Leathernecks” and has a devil with a red eye and red horns and an M-1 rifle, and the other is a poker hand fanned out across his muscle — aces and eights. He puts his roll of clothes on the nightstand next to my bed and goes to punching at his pillow. He’s been assigned the bed right next to mine.

He gets between the sheets and tells me I better hit the sack myself, that here comes one of those black boys to douse the lights on us. I look around, and the black boy named Geever is coming, and I kick off my shoes and get in bed just as he walks up to tie a sheet across me. When he’s finished with me he takes a last look around and giggles and flips the dorm lights off.

Except for the white powder of light from the Nurses’ Station out in the hall, the dorm is dark. I can just make out McMurphy next to me, breathing deep and regular, the covers over him rising and falling. The breathing gets slower and slower, till I figure he’s been asleep for a while. Then I hear a soft, throaty sound from his bed, like the chuckle of a horse. He’s still awake and he’s laughing to himself about something.

He stops laughing and whispers, “Why, you sure did give a jump when I told you that coon was coming, Chief. I thought somebody told me you was deef.”

7

First time for a long, long time I’m in bed without taking that little red capsule (if I hide to keep from taking it, the night nurse with the birthmark sends the black boy named Geever out to hunt me down, hold me captive with his flashlight till she can get the needle ready), so I fake sleep when the black boy’s coming past with his light.

When you take one of those red pills you don’t just go to sleep; you’re paralyzed with sleep, and all night long you can’t wake, no matter what goes on around you. That’s why the staff gives me the pills; at the old place I took to waking up at night and catching them performing all kinds of horrible crimes on the patients sleeping around me.

I lie still and slow my breathing, waiting to see if something is going to happen. It is dark my lord and I hear them slipping around out there in their rubber shoes; twice they peek in the dorm and run a flashlight over everybody. I keep my eyes shut and keep awake. I hear a wailing from up on Disturbed, loo loo looo — got some guy wired to pick up code signals.