One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest: 50th Anniversary Edition (41 page)

“Bibbit. Where’s Billy Bibbit?” His eyes were big. He was thinking Billy’d slipped out right under his nose and would he ever catch it. “Who saw Billy Bibbit go, you damn goons?”

This set people to remembering just where Billy was; there were whispers and laughing again.

The black boy went back into the station, and we saw him telling the nurse. She smashed the phone down in the cradle and came out the door with the black boy hot after her; a lock of her hair had broken loose from beneath her white cap and fell across her face like wet ashes. She was sweating between her eyebrows and under her nose. She demanded we tell her where the Eloper had gone. She was answered with a chorus of laughter, and her eyes went around the men.

“So? He’s not gone, is he? Harding, he’s still here—on the ward, isn’t he? Tell me. Sefelt, tell me!”

She darted the eyes out with every word, stabbing at the men’s faces, but the men were immune to her poison. Their eyes met hers; their grins mocked the old confident smile she had lost.

“Washington! Warren! Come with me for room check.”

We rose and followed as the three of them went along, unlocking the lab, the tub room, the doctor’s office…. Scanlon covered his grin with his knotty hand and whispered, “Hey, ain’t it gonna be some joke on ol’ Billy.” We all nodded. “And Billy’s not the only one it’s gonna be a joke on, now that I think about it; remember who’s in there?”

The nurse reached the door of the Seclusion Room at the end of the hall. We pushed up close to see, crowding and craning to peep over the Big Nurse and the two black boys as she unlocked it and swung it open. It was dark in the windowless room. There was a squeak and a scuffle in the dark, and the nurse reached out, flicked the light down on Billy and the girl where they were blinking up from that mattress on the floor like two owls from a nest. The nurse ignored the howl of laughter behind her.

“William Bibbit!” She tried so hard to sound cold and stern. “William … Bibbit!”

“Good morning, Miss Ratched,” Billy said, not even making any move to get up and button his pajamas. He took the girl’s hand in his and grinned. “This is Candy.”

The nurse’s tongue clucked in her bony throat. “Oh, Billy Billy Billy—I’m so ashamed for you.”

Billy wasn’t awake enough to respond much to her shaming, and the girl was fussing around looking under the mattress for her nylons, moving slow and warm-looking after sleep. Every so often she would stop her dreamy fumbling and look up and smile at the icy figure of the nurse standing there with her arms crossed, then feel to see if her sweater was buttoned, and go back to tugging for her nylon caught between the mattress and the tile floor. They both moved like fat cats full of warm milk, lazy in the sun; I guessed they were still fairly drunk too.

“Oh, Billy,” the nurse said, like she was so disappointed she might break down and cry. “A woman like
this
. A cheap! Low! Painted—”

“Courtesan?” Harding suggested. “Jezebel?” The nurse turned and tried to nail him with her eyes, but he just went on. “Not Jezebel? No?” He scratched his head in thought. “How about Salome? She’s notoriously evil. Perhaps ‘dame’ is the word you want. Well, I’m just trying to
help
.”

She swung back to Billy. He was concentrating on getting to his
feet. He rolled over and came to his knees, butt in the air like a cow getting up, then pushed up on his hands, then came to one foot, then the other, and straightened. He looked pleased with his success, as if he wasn’t even aware of us crowding at the door teasing him and hoorahing him.

The loud talk and laughter swirled around the nurse. She looked from Billy and the girl to the bunch of us behind her. The enamel-and-plastic face was caving in. She shut her eyes and strained to calm her trembling, concentrating. She knew this was it, her back to the wall. When her eyes opened again, they were very small and still.

“What worries me, Billy,” she said—I could hear the change in her voice—“is how your poor mother is going to take this.”

She got the response she was after. Billy flinched and put his hand to his cheek like he’d been burned with acid.

“Mrs. Bibbit’s always been so proud of your discretion. I know she has. This is going to disturb her terribly. You know how she is when she gets disturbed, Billy; you know how ill the poor woman can become. She’s very sensitive. Especially concerning her son. She always spoke so proudly of you. She al—”

“Nuh! Nuh!” His mouth was working. He shook his head, begging her. “You d-don’t n-n-need!”

“Billy Billy Billy,” she said. “Your mother and I are old friends.”

“No!” he cried. His voice scraped the white, bare walls of the Seclusion Room. He lifted his chin so he was shouting at the moon of light in the ceiling. “N-n-
no
!”

We’d stopped laughing. We watched Billy folding into the floor, head going back, knees coming forward. He rubbed his hand up and down that green pant leg. He was shaking his head in panic like a kid that’s been promised a whipping just as soon as a willow is cut. The nurse touched his shoulder to comfort him. The touch shook him like a blow.

“Billy, I don’t want her to believe something like this of you—but what am I to think?”

“Duh-duh-don’t t-tell, M-M-M-Miss Ratched. Duh-duh-duh—”

“Billy, I have to tell. I hate to believe you would behave like this, but, really, what else can I think? I find you alone, on a mattress, with this sort of woman.”

“No! I d-d-didn’t. I was—” His hand went to his cheek again and stuck there. “She did.”

“Billy, this girl could not have pulled you in here forcibly.” She shook her head. “Understand, I would like to believe something else—for your poor mother’s sake.”

The hand pulled down his cheek, raking long red marks. “She d-did.” He looked around him. “And M-M-McMurphy! He did. And Harding! And the-the-the rest! They t-t-teased me,
called
me things!”

Now his face was fastened to hers. He didn’t look to one side or the other, but only straight ahead at her face, like there was a spiraling light there instead of features, a hypnotizing swirl of cream white and blue and orange. He swallowed and waited for her to say something, but she wouldn’t; her skill, her fantastic mechanical power flooded back into her, analyzing the situation and reporting to her that all she had to do was keep quiet.

“They m-m-made me! Please, M-Miss Ratched, they may-may-
MAY
—!”

She checked her beam, and Billy’s face pitched downward, sobbing with relief. She put a hand on his neck and drew his cheek to her starched breast, stroking his shoulder while she turned a slow, contemptuous look across the bunch of us.

“It’s all right, Billy. It’s all right. No one else is going to harm you. It’s all right. I’ll explain to your mother.”

She continued to glare at us as she spoke. It was strange to hear that voice, soft and soothing and warm as a pillow, coming out of a face hard as porcelain.

“All right, Billy. Come along with me. You can wait over here in the doctor’s office. There’s no reason for you to be submitted to sitting out in the day room with these … friends of yours.”

She led him into the office, stroking his bowed head and saying, “Poor boy, poor little boy,” while we faded back down the hall silently and sat down in the day room without looking at one another or speaking. McMurphy was the last one to take a seat.

The Chronics across the way had stopped milling around and were settling into their slots. I looked at McMurphy out of the corner of my eye, trying not to be obvious about it. He was in his chair in the corner, resting a second before he came out for the next round—in a long
line of next rounds. The thing he was fighting, you couldn’t whip it for good. All you could do was keep on whipping it, till you couldn’t come out any more and somebody else had to take your place.

There was more phoning going on in the Nurses’ Station and a number of authorities showing up for a tour of the evidence. When the doctor himself finally came in, every one of these people gave him a look like the whole thing had been planned by him, or at least condoned and authorized. He was white and shaky under their eyes. You could see he’d already heard about most of what had gone on here, on his ward, but the Big Nurse outlined it for him again, in slow, loud details so we could hear it too. Hear it in the proper way, this time, solemnly, with no whispering or giggling while she talked. The doctor nodded and fiddled with his glasses, batting eyes so watery I thought he must be splashing her. She finished by telling him about Billy and the tragic experience we had put the poor boy through.

“I left him in your office. Judging from his present state, I suggest you see him right away. He’s been through a terrible ordeal. I shudder to think of the damage that must have been done to the poor boy.”

She waited until the doctor shuddered too.

“I think you should go see if you can speak with him. He needs a lot of sympathy. He’s in a pitiful state.”

The doctor nodded again and walked off toward his office. We watched him go.

“Mack,” Scanlon said. “Listen—you don’t think any of us are being taken in by this crap, do you? It’s bad, but we know where the blame lies—we ain’t blaming you.”

“No,” I said, “none of us blame you.” And wished I’d had my tongue pulled out as soon as I saw the way he looked at me.

He closed his eyes and relaxed. Waiting, it looked like. Harding got up and walked over to him and had just opened his mouth to say something when the doctor’s voice screaming down the hall smashed a common horror and realization onto everybody’s face.

“Nurse!” he yelled. “Good lord,
nurse
!”

She ran, and the three black boys ran, down the hall to where the doctor was still calling. But not a patient got up. We knew there wasn’t anything for us to do now but just sit tight and wait for her to come to the day room to tell us what we all had known was one of the things that was bound to happen.

She walked straight to McMurphy.

“He cut his throat,” she said. She waited, hoping he would say something. He wouldn’t look up. “He opened the doctor’s desk and found some instruments and cut his throat. The poor miserable, misunderstood boy killed himself. He’s there now, in the doctor’s chair, with his throat cut.”

She waited again. But he still wouldn’t look up.

“First Charles Cheswick and now William Bibbit! I hope you’re finally satisfied. Playing with human lives—gambling with human lives—as if you thought yourself to be a
God
!”

She turned and walked into the Nurses’ Station and closed the door behind her, leaving a shrill, killing-cold sound ringing in the tubes of light over our heads.

First I had a quick thought to try to stop him, talk him into taking what he’d already won and let her have the last round, but another, bigger thought wiped the first thought away completely. I suddenly realized with a crystal certainty that neither I nor any of the half-score of us could stop him. That Harding’s arguing or my grabbing him from behind, or old Colonel Matterson’s teaching or Scanlon’s griping, or all of us together couldn’t rise up and stop him.

We couldn’t stop him because we were the ones making him do it. It wasn’t the nurse that was forcing him, it was our need that was making him push himself slowly up from sitting, his big hands driving down on the leather chair arms, pushing him up, rising and standing like one of those moving-picture zombies, obeying orders beamed at him from forty masters. It was us that had been making him go on for weeks, keeping him standing long after his feet and legs had given out, weeks of making him wink and grin and laugh and go on with his act long after his humor had been parched dry between two electrodes.

We made him stand and hitch up his black shorts like they were horsehide chaps, and push back his cap with one finger like it was a ten-gallon Stetson, slow, mechanical gestures—and when he walked across the floor you could hear the iron in his bare heels ring sparks out of the tile.

Only at the last—after he’d smashed through that glass door, her face swinging around, with terror forever ruining any other look she might ever try to use again, screaming when he grabbed for her and ripped her uniform all the way down the front, screaming again when
the two nippled circles started from her chest and swelled out and out, bigger than anybody had ever even imagined, warm and pink in the light—only at the last, after the officials realized that the three black boys weren’t going to do anything but stand and watch and they would have to beat him off without their help, doctors and supervisors and nurses prying those heavy red fingers out of the white flesh of her throat as if they were her neck bones, jerking him backward off of her with a loud heave of breath, only then did he show any sign that he might be anything other than a sane, willful, dogged man performing a hard duty that finally just had to be done, like it or not.

He gave a cry. At the last, falling backward, his face appearing to us for a second upside down before he was smothered on the floor by a pile of white uniforms, he let himself cry out:

A sound of cornered-animal fear and hate and surrender and defiance, that if you ever trailed coon or cougar or lynx is like the last sound the treed and shot and falling animal makes as the dogs get him, when he finally doesn’t care any more about anything but himself and his dying.

I hung around another couple of weeks to see what was to come. Everything was changing. Sefelt and Fredrickson signed out together Against Medical Advice, and two days later another three Acutes left, and six more transferred to another ward. There was a lot of investigation about the party on the ward and about Billy’s death, and the doctor was informed that his resignation would be accepted, and he informed them that they would have to go the whole way and can him if they wanted him out.

The Big Nurse was over in Medical for a week, so for a while we had the little Jap nurse from Disturbed running the ward; that gave the guys a chance to change a lot of the ward policy. By the time the Big Nurse came back, Harding had even got the tub room back open and was in there dealing blackjack himself, trying to make that airy, thin voice of his sound like McMurphy’s auctioneer bellow. He was dealing when he heard her key hit the lock.