And that neat, silent line of nude men changed into a yelling circle, limbs and bodies knitting in a ring of flesh.
The black arms stabbed in at the lowered red head and bull neck, chipped blood off the brow and the cheek. The black boy danced away. Taller, arms longer than McMurphy’s thick red arms, punches faster and sharper, he was able to chisel at the shoulders and the head without getting in close. McMurphy kept walking forward — trudging, flatfooted steps, face down and squinting up between those tattooed fists on each side of his head — till he got the black boy against the ring of nude men and drove a fist square in the center of the white, starched chest. That slate face cracked pink, ran a tongue the color of strawberry ice cream over the lips. He ducked away from McMurphy’s tank charge and got in another couple of licks before that fist laid him another good one. The mouth flew open wider this time, a blotch of sick color.
McMurphy had red marks on the head and shoulders, but he didn’t seem to be hurt. He kept coming, taking ten blows for one. It kept on this way, back and forth in the shower room, till the black boy was panting and staggering and working mainly at keeping out of the way of those clubbing red arms. The guys were yelling for McMurphy to lay him out. McMurphy didn’t act in any hurry.
The black boy spun away from a blow on his shoulder and looked quick to where the other two were watching. “Williams… Warren… damn you!” The other big one pulled the crowd apart and grabbed McMurphy around the arms from behind. McMurphy shook him off like a bull shaking off a monkey, but he was right back.
So I picked him off and threw him in the shower. He was full of tubes; he didn’t weigh more’n ten or fifteen pounds.
The least black boy swung his head from side to side, turned, and ran for the door. While I was watching him go, the other one came out of the shower and put a wrestling hold on me — arms up under mine from behind and hands locked behind my neck — and I had to run backward into the shower and mash him against the tile, and while I was lying there in the water trying to watch McMurphy bust some more of Washington’s ribs, the one behind me with the wrestling hold went to biting my neck and I had to break the hold. He laid still then, the starch washing from the uniform down the choking drain.
And by the time the least black boy came running back in with straps and cuffs and blankets and four more aides from Disturbed, everybody was getting dressed and shaking my hand and McMurphy’s hand and saying they had it coming and what a rip-snorter of a fight it had been, what a tremendous big victory. They kept talking like that, to cheer us up and make us feel better, about what a fight, what a victory — as the Big Nurse helped the aides from Disturbed adjust those soft leather cuffs to fit our arms.
27
Up on Disturbed there’s an everlasting high-pitched machine-room clatter, a prison mill stamping out license plates. And time is measured out by the di-dock, di-dock of a Ping-pong table. Men pacing their personal runways get to a wall and dip a shoulder and turn and pace back to another wall, dip a shoulder and turn and back again, fast short steps, wearing crisscrossing ruts in the tile floor, with a look of caged thirst. There’s a singed smell of men scared berserk and out of control, and in the corners and under the Ping-pong table there’s things crouched gnashing their teeth that the doctors and nurses can’t see and the aides can’t kill with disinfectant. When the ward door opened I smelled that singed smell and heard that gnash of teeth.
A tall bony old guy, dangling from a wire screwed in between his shoulder blades, met McMurphy and me at the door when the aides brought us in. He looked us over with yellow, scaled eyes and shook his head. “I wash my hands of the whole deal,” he told one of the colored aides, and the wire drug him off down the hall.
We followed him down to the day room, and McMurphy stopped at the door and spread his feet and tipped his head back to look things over: he tried to put his thumbs in his pockets, but the cuffs were too tight. “It’s a scene,” he said out of the side of his mouth. I nodded my head. I’d seen it all before.
A couple of the guys pacing stopped to look at us, and the old bony man came dragging by again, washing his hands of the whole deal. Nobody paid us much mind at first. The aides went off to the Nurses’ Station, leaving us standing in the dayroom door. Murphy’s eye was puffed to give him a steady wink, and I could tell it hurt his lips to grin. He raised his cuffed hands and stood looking at the clatter of movement and took a deep breath.
“McMurphy’s the name, pardners,” he said in his drawling cowboy actor’s voice, “an’ the thing I want to know is who’s the peckerwood runs the poker game in this establishment?”
The Ping-pong clock died down in a rapid ticking on the floor.
“I don’t deal blackjack so good, hobbled like this, but I maintain I’m a fire-eater in a stud game.”
He yawned, hitched a shoulder, bent down and cleared his throat, and spat something at a wastepaper can five feet away; it rattled in with a ting and he straightened up again, grinned, and licked his tongue at the bloody gap in his teeth.
“Had a run-in downstairs. Me an’ the Chief here locked horns with two greasemonkeys.”
All the stamp-mill racket had stopped by this time, and everybody was looking toward the two of us at the door. McMurphy drew eyes to him like a sideshow barker. Beside him, I found that I was obliged to be looked at too, and with people staring at me I felt I had to stand up straight and tall as I could. That made my back hurt where I’d fallen in the shower with the black boy on me, but I didn’t let on. One hungry looker with a head of shaggy black hair came up and held his hand like he figured I had something for him. I tried to ignore him, but he kept running around in front of whichever way I turned, like a little kid, holding that empty hand cupped out to me.
McMurphy talked a while about the fight, and my back got to hurting more and more.. I’d hunkered in my chair in the corner for so long that it was hard to stand straight very long. I was glad when a little lap nurse came to take us into the Nurses’ Station and I got a chance to sit and rest.
She asked if we were calm enough for her to take off the cuffs, and McMurphy nodded. He had slumped over with his head hung and his elbows between his knees and looked completely exhausted — it hadn’t occurred to me that it was just as hard for him to stand straight as it was for me.
The nurse — about as big as the small end of nothing whittled to a fine point, as McMurphy put it later — undid our cuffs and gave McMurphy a cigarette and gave me a stick of gum. She said she remembered that I chewed gum. I didn’t remember her at all. McMurphy smoked while she dipped her little hand full of pink birthday candles into a jar of salve and worked over his cuts, flinching every time he flinched and telling him she was sorry. She picked up one of his hands in both of hers and turned it over and salved his knuckles. “Who was it?” she asked, looking at the knuckles. “Was it Washington or Warren?”
McMurphy looked up at her. “Washington,” he said and grinned. “The Chief here took care of Warren.”
She put his hand down and turned to me. I could see the little bird bones in her face. “Are you hurt anywhere?” I shook my head.
“What about Warren and Williams?”
McMurphy told her he thought they might be sporting some plaster the next time she saw them. She nodded and looked at her feet. “It’s not all like her ward,” she said. “A lot of it is, but not all. Army nurses, trying to run an Army hospital. They are a little sick themselves. I sometimes think all single nurses should be fired after they reach thirty-five.”