We all left the tub room and came out in the hall to meet her, to ask about McMurphy. She jumped back two steps when we approached, and I thought for a second she might run. Her face was bloated blue and out of shape on one side, closing one eye completely, and she had a heavy bandage around her throat. And a new white uniform. Some of the guys grinned at the front of it; in spite of its being smaller and tighter and more starched than her old uniforms, it could no longer conceal the fact that she was a woman.
Smiling, Harding stepped up close and asked what had become of Mack.
She took a little pad and pencil from the pocket of her uniform and wrote, “He will be back,” on it and passed it around. The paper trembled in her hand. “Are you sure?” Harding wanted to know after he read it. We’d heard all kinds of things, that he’d knocked down two aides on Disturbed and taken their keys and escaped, that he’d been sent back to the work farm — even that the nurse, in charge now till they got a new doctor, was giving him special therapy.
“Are you quite positive?” Harding repeated.
The nurse took out her pad again. She was stiff in the joints, and her more than ever white hand skittered on the pad like one of those arcade gypsies that scratch out fortunes for a penny. “Yes, Mr. Harding,” she wrote. “I would not say so if I was not positive. He will be back.”
Harding read the paper, then tore it up and threw the pieces at her. She flinched and raised her hand to protect the bruised side of her face from the paper. “Lady, I think you’re full of so much bullshit,” Harding told her. She stared at him, and her hand wavered over the pad a second, but then she turned and walked into the Nurses’ Station, sticking the pad and pencil back down in the pocket of her uniform.
“Hum,” Harding said. “Our conversation was a bit spotty, it seemed. But then, when you are told that you are full of bullshit, what kind of written comeback can you make?”
She tried to get her ward back into shape, but it was difficult with McMurphy’s presence still tromping up and down the halls and laughing out loud in the meetings and singing in the latrines. She couldn’t rule with her old power any more, not by writing things on pieces of paper. She was losing her patients one after the other. After Harding signed out and was picked up by his wife, and George transferred to a different ward, just three of us were left out of the group that had been on the fishing crew, myself and Martini and Scanlon.
I didn’t want to leave just yet, because she seemed to be too sure; she seemed to be waiting for one more round, and I wanted to be there in case it came off. And one morning, after McMurphy’d been gone three weeks, she made her last play.
The ward door opened, and the black boys wheeled in this Gurney with a chart at the bottom that said in heavy black letters, MCMURPHY, RANDLE P. POST-OPERATIVE. And below this was written in ink, LOBOTOMY.
They pushed it into the day room and left it standing against the wall, along next to the Vegetables. We stood at the foot of the Gurney, reading the chart, then looked up to the other end at the head dented into the pillow, a swirl of red hair over a face milk-white except for the heavy purple bruises around the eyes.
After a minute of silence Scanlon turned and spat on the floor. “Aaah, what’s the old bitch tryin’ to put over on us anyhow, for crap sakes. That ain’t him.”
“Nothing like him,” Martini said.
“How stupid she think we are?”
“Oh, they done a pretty fair job, though,” Martini said, moving up alongside the head and pointing as he talked. “See. They got the broken nose and that crazy scar — even the sideburns.”
“Sure,” Scanlon growled, “but hell!”
I pushed past the other patients to stand beside Martini. “Sure, they can do things like scars and broken noses,” I said. “But they can’t do that look. There’s nothin’ in the face. Just like one of those store dummies, ain’t that right, Scanlon?”
Scanlon spat again. “Damn right. Whole thing’s, you know, too blank. Anybody can see that.”
“Look here,” one of the patients said, peeling back the sheet, “tattoos.”
“Sure,” I said, “they can do tattoos. But the arms, huh? The arms? They couldn’t do those. His arms were big!”
For the rest of the afternoon Scanlon and Martini and I ridiculed what Scanlon called that crummy sideshow fake lying there on the Gurney, but as the hours passed and the swelling began subsiding around the eyes I saw more and more guys strolling over to look at the figure. I watched them walk by acting like they were going to the magazine rack or the drinking fountain, so they could sneak another look at the face. I watched and tried to figure out what he would have done. I was only sure of one thing: he wouldn’t have left something like that sit there in the day room with his name tacked on it for twenty or thirty years so the Big Nurse could use it as an example of what can happen if you buck the system. I was sure of that.
I waited that night until the sounds in the dorm told me everybody was asleep, and until the black boys had stopped making their rounds. Then I turned my head on the pillow so I could see the bed next to mine. I’d been listening to the breathing for hours, since they had wheeled the Gurney in and lifted the stretcher onto the bed, listening to the lungs stumbling and stopping, then starting again, hoping as I listened they would stop for good — but I hadn’t turned to look yet.
There was a cold moon at the window, pouring light into the dorm like skim milk. I sat up in bed, and my shadow fell across the body, seeming to cleave it in half between the hips and the shoulders, leaving only a black space. The swelling had gone down enough in the eyes that they were open; they stared into the full light of the moon, open and undreaming, glazed from being open so long without blinking until they were like smudged fuses in a fuse box. I moved to pick up the pillow, and the eyes fastened on the movement and followed me as I stood up and crossed the few feet between the beds.
The big, hard body had a tough grip on life. It fought a long time against having it taken away, flailing and thrashing around so much I finally had to lie full length on top of it and scissor the kicking legs with mine while I mashed the pillow into the face. I lay there on top of the body for what seemed days. Until the thrashing stopped. Until it was still a while and had shuddered once and was still again. Then I rolled off. I lifted the pillow, and in the moonlight I saw the expression hadn’t changed from the blank, dead-end look the least bit, even under suffocation. I took my thumbs and pushed the lids down and held them till they stayed. Then I lay back on my bed.
I lay for a while, holding the covers over my face, and thought I was being pretty quiet, but Scanlon’s voice hissing from his bed let me know I wasn’t.
“Take it easy, Chief,” he said. “Take it easy. It’s okay.”
“Shut up,” I whispered. “Go back to sleep.”
It was quiet a while; then I heard him hiss again and ask, “Is it finished?”
I told him yeah.
“Christ,” he said then, “she’ll know. You realize that, don’t you? Sure, nobody’ll be able to prove anything — anybody coulda kicked off in post-operative like he was, happens all the time — but her, she’ll know.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Was I you, Chief, I’d breeze my tail outa here. Yessir. I tell you what. You leave outa here, and I’ll say I saw him up and moving around after you lift and cover you that way. That’s the best idea, don’t you think?”
“Oh, yeah, just like that. Just ask ‘em to unlock the door and let me out.”
“No. He showed you how one time, if you think back. That very first week. You remember?”
I didn’t answer him, and he didn’t say anything else, and it was quiet in the dorm again. I lay there a few minutes longer and then got up and started putting on my clothes. When I finished dressing I reached into McMurphy’s nightstand and got his cap and tried it on. It was too small, and I was suddenly ashamed of trying to wear it. I dropped it on Scanlon’s bed as I walked out of the dorm. He said, “Take it easy, buddy,” as I walked out.