One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest / Пролетая над гнездом кукушки. Кен КизиЧитать онлайн книгу.
and bum before the Army took him and taught him what his natural bent was; they taught him to play poker. Since then he has 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 calling I’ve done time in so many small-town jails I could write a brochure. They say I like to fight too much. They didn’t mind so much when I was a dumb logger and got into a fight; that’s excusable, they say, that’s a hard-working feller blowing off steam, they say. But if you’re a gambler, if they know that you play a back-room game now and then, all you have to do is spit slantwise and you’re a goddamned criminal.”
He shakes his head and puffs out his cheeks.
“But that was just for a period of time. I learned the rules. To tell the truth, this fight I was doing in Pendleton was the first one in close to a year. I was out of practice. That’s why 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. And when he finishes shaking hands with the last Acute he comes right on over to the Chronics. 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 that a lot of them don’t even know their names.
Nobody can understand why he’s trying to get acquainted with everybody, but it’s better than 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 isn’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. McMurphy stops when he gets to me and starts to laugh again. All of a sudden I was afraid that he was laughing because he knew the truth about me: that the way I was sitting there with my knees pulled up and my arms wrapped around them, looking 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 very well. I remember the way he closed one eye and laughed at me. I thought that he was winking at me because he wasn’t fooled for one minute by my deaf-and-dumb act. “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-nme is Bromden. Chief Bromden. Everybody calls him Chief Buh-Broom because he sweeps a l-large part of the time. There’s not m-much else he can do, I guess. He’s deaf.”
McMurphy kept looking at me. “ 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 afraid 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 isn’t an Indian name. What tribe is he?”
“I don’t know,” Billy said. “He was here wh-when I c-came.”
“I have information from the doctor,” Harding said, “that he is only half Indian, a Columbia Indian, I think. The doctor said that his father was the tribal leader, hence this fellow’s title, Chief. As to the Bromden part of the name, I’m afraid my knowledge in Indian language doesn’t cover that.”
McMurphy leaned his head down near mine where I had to look at him. “Is that right? You deaf, Chief?”
“He’s de-de-deaf and dumb.”
McMurphy looked at my face a long time. Then he straightened back up and put his hand out. “Well, what the hell, he can shake hands can’t he? Deaf or whatever. By God, Chief, you may be big, but you shake my hand or I’ll think it an insult. And it’s not a good idea to insult the new boss loony of the hospital.”
When he said that he looked at Harding and Billy and made a face, but he left that hand in front of me, big as a dinner plate.
I remember very clearly the way that hand looked: there was carbon under the fingernails where he’d worked once in a garage; there was an anchor tattooed back from the knuckles; the knuckles were covered with scars and cuts, old and new. I remember the palm was smooth and hard as bone, not the hand you’d think could deal cards. The palm was callused, and the calluses were cracked, and dirt was in the cracks. A road map of his travels up and down the West.
When that palm touched my hand, I felt his strength coming into it. It rang with blood and power: it grew near as big as his, I remember…
“Mr. McMurry.”
It’s the Big Nurse.
“Mr. McMurry, could you come here please?”
It’s the Big Nurse. That black boy with the thermometer has gone and told her. She’s tapping that thermometer against her wrist watch. She tries to size up this new man.
“Aide Williams tells me, Mr. McMurry, that you’ve been somewhat difficult about your admission shower. Is this true? I’m sorry to interrupt you and Mr. Bromden, but you do understand: everyone… must follow the rules.”
He gives that wink that she isn’t fooling him any more than I did. He looks up at her with one eye for a minute.
“Ya know, ma’am,” he says, “ya know – that is the exact thing somebody always tells me about the rules…”
He grins. They both smile, sizing each other up.
“…just when they think that I’m going to do something absolutely opposite.”
Then he lets my hand go.
In the glass Station the Big Nurse is filling hypodermics with some medication. One of the little nurses picks up the little tray of filled hypodermics but doesn’t carry them away just yet.
“What, Miss Ratched, do you think about this new patient? He’s good-looking and friendly and everything, but I think that he certainly wants to be a leader.”
The Big Nurse tests a needle against her fingertip. “I’m afraid that is exactly what the new patient is planning: to be a leader. He is what we call a ’manipulator’, Miss Flinn, a man who will use everyone and everything to his own ends.”
“Oh. But in a mental hospital? What could his ends be?”
“Any number of things.” She smiles and continues to fill the hypodermics. “Comfort and an easy life, for example; the feeling of power and respect, perhaps; monetary profit – perhaps all of these things. Sometimes a manipulator’s own ends are simply the disorder in the ward for the sake of disorder. There are such people in our society. A manipulator can influence the other patients and lead to such great disorder that it may take months to get everything running smooth once more. With the present liberal philosophy in mental hospitals, a manipulator can do his work easily. Some years ago it was quite different. I remember some years ago we had a man, a Mr. Taber, on the ward, and he was a strong Ward Manipulator. For a while.” She looks up from her work. Her eyes get pleased with the memory. “Mistur Tay-bur,” she says.
“But, Miss Ratched,” the other nurse says, “what possible motive can such man have?”
“You forget, Miss Flinn, that this is an institution for the insane.”
The Big Nurse gets really furious because of the slightest disorder on the ward. She walks around with that same doll smile, but down inside of her she’s tense as steel. I know, I can feel it. And she doesn’t relax a bit till she gets the things in order again and a man responsible for that disorder “adjusted to surroundings,” as she calls it.
Under her rule the ward Inside is almost completely adjusted to surroundings. But