Snake eyes again. Hoo boy, these dice are cold.

After Grandma’s funeral me and Papa and Uncle Runningand-Jumping Wolf dug her up. Mama wouldn’t go with us; she never heard of such a thing. Hanging a corpse in a tree! It’s enough to make a person sick.

Uncle R & J Wolf and Papa spent twenty days in the drunk tank at The Dalles jail, playing rummy, for Violation of the Dead.

But she’s our goddanged mother!

It doesn’t make the slightest difference, boys. You shoulda left her buried. I don’t know when you blamed Indians will learn. Now, where is she? you’d better tell.

Ah go fuck yourself, paleface, Uncle R & J said, rolling himself a cigarette. I’ll never tell.

High high high in the hills, high in a pine tree bed, she’s tracing the wind with that old hand, counting the clouds with that old chant: … three geese in a flock…

What did you say to me when you winked?

Band playing. Look — the sky, it’s the Fourth of July.

Dice at rest.

They got to me with the machine again… I wonder…

What did he say?

… wonder how McMurphy made me big again.

He said Guts ball.

They’re out there. Black boys in white suits peeing under the door on me, come in later and accuse me of soaking all six these pillows I’m lying on! Number six. I thought the room was a dice. The number one, the snake eye up there, the circle, the white light in the ceiling… is what I’ve been seeing… in this little square room… means it’s after dark. How many hours have I been out? It’s fogging a little, but I won’t slip off and hide in it. No… never again…

I stand, stood up slowly, feeling numb between the shoulders. The white pillows on the floor of the Seclusion Room were soaked from me peeing on them while I was out. I couldn’t remember all of it yet, but I rubbed my eyes with the heels of my hands and tried to clear my head. I worked at it. I’d never worked at coming out of it before.

I staggered toward the little round chicken-wired window in the door of the room and tapped it with my knuckles. I saw an aide coming up the hall with a tray for me and knew this time I had them beat.

28

There had been times when I’d wandered around in a daze for as long as two weeks after a shock treatment, living in that foggy, jumbled blur which is a whole lot like the ragged edge of sleep, that gray zone between light and dark, or between sleeping and waking or living and dying, where you know you’re not unconscious any more but don’t know yet what day it is or who you are or what’s the use of coming back at all — for two weeks. If you don’t have a reason to wake up you can loaf around in that gray zone for a long, fuzzy time, or if you want to bad enough I found you can come fighting right out of it. This time I came fighting out of it in less than a day, less time than ever.

And when the fog was finally swept from my head it seemed like I’d just come up after a long, deep dive, breaking the surface after being under water a hundred years. It was the last treatment they gave me.

They gave McMurphy three more treatments that week. As quick as he started coming out of one, getting the click back in his wink, Miss Ratched would arrive with the doctor and they would ask him if he felt like he was ready to come around and face up to his problem and come back to the ward for a cure. And he’d swell up, aware that every one of those faces on Disturbed had turned toward him and was waiting, and he’d tell the nurse he regretted that he had but one life to give for his country and she could kiss his rosy red ass before he’d give up the goddam ship. Yeh!

Then stand up and take a couple of bows to those guys grinning at him while the nurse led the doctor into the station to phone over to the Main Building and authorize another treatment.

Once, as she turned to walk away, he got hold of her through the back of her uniform, gave her a pinch that turned her face red as his hair. I think if the doctor hadn’t been there, hiding a grin himself, she would’ve slapped McMurphy’s face.

I tried to talk him into playing along with her so’s to get out of the treatments, but he just laughed and told me Hell, all they was doin’ was chargin’ his battery for him, free for nothing. “When I get out of here the first woman that takes on ol’ Red McMurphy the ten-thousand-watt psychopath, she’s gonna light up like a pinball machine and pay off in silver dollars! No, I ain’t scared of their little battery-charger.”

He insisted it wasn’t hurting him. He wouldn’t even take his capsules. But every time that loudspeaker called for him to forgo breakfast and prepare to walk to Building One, the muscles in his jaw went taut and his whole face drained of color, looking thin and scared — the face I had seen reflected in the windshield on the trip back from the coast.

I left Disturbed at the end of the week and went back to the ward. I had a lot of things I wanted to say to him before I went, but he’d just come back from a treatment and was sitting following the ping-pong ball with his eyes like he was wired to it. The colored aide and the blond one took me downstairs and let me onto our ward and locked the door behind me. The ward seemed awful quiet after Disturbed. I walked to our day room and for some reason stopped at the door; everybody’s face turned up to me with a different look than they’d ever given me before. Their faces lighted up as if they were looking into the glare of a sideshow platform. “Here, in fronta your very eyes,” Harding spiels, “is the Wildman who broke the arm… of the black boy! Hey-ha, lookee, lookee.” I grinned back at them, realizing how McMurphy must’ve felt these months with these faces screaming up at him.

All the guys came over and wanted me to tell them everything that had happened: how was he acting up there? What was he doing? Was it true, what was being rumored over at the gym, that they’d been hitting him every day with EST and he was shrugging it off like water, makin’ book with the technicians on how long he could keep his eyes open after the poles touched.

I told them all I could, and nobody seemed to think a thing about me all of a sudden talking with people — a guy who’d been considered deaf and dumb as far back as they’d known him, talking, listening, just like anybody. I told them everything that they’d heard was true, and tossed in a few stories of my own. They laughed so hard about some of the things he’d said to the nurse that the two Vegetables under their wet sheets on the Chronics’ side grinned and snorted along with the laughter, just like they understood.

When the nurse herself brought the problem of Patient McMurphy up in group the next day, said that for some unusual reason he did not seem to be responding to EST at all and that more drastic means might be required to make contact with him, Harding said, “Now, that is possible, Miss Ratched, yes— but from what I hear about your dealings upstairs with McMurphy, he hasn’t had any difficulty making contact with you.”

She was thrown off balance and flustered so bad with everybody in the room laughing at her, that she didn’t bring it up again.

She saw that McMurphy was growing bigger than ever while he was upstairs where the guys couldn’t see the dent she was making on him, growing almost into a legend. A man out of sight can’t be made to look weak, she decided, and started making plans to bring him back down to our ward. She figured the guys could see for themselves then that he could be as vulnerable as the next man. He couldn’t continue in his hero role if he was sitting around the day room all the time in a shock stupor.

The guys anticipated this, and that as long as he was on the ward for them to see she would be giving him shock every time he came out of it. So Harding and Scanlon and Fredrickson and I talked over how we could convince him that the best thing for everybody concerned would be his escaping the ward. And by the Saturday when he was brought back to the ward — footworking into the day room like a boxer into a ring, clasping his hands over his head and announcing the champ was back — we had our plan all worked out. We’d wait until dark, set a mattress on fire, and when the firemen came we’d rush him out the door. It seemed such a fine plan we couldn’t see how he could refuse.