One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest Read Online Free PDF Page A

meeting everybody, but it’s better’n 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 ain’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. Still strapped in the chair in the corner. McMurphy stops when he gets to me and hooks his thumbs in his pockets again and leans back to laugh, like he sees something funnier about me than about anybody else. All of a sudden I was scared he was laughing because he knew the way I was sitting there with my knees pulled up and my arms wrapped around them, staring 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 real clear. I remember the way he closed one eye and tipped his head back and looked down across that healing wine-colored scar on his nose, laughing at me. I thought at first that he was laughing because of how funny it looked, an Indian’s face and black, oily Indian’s hair on somebody like me. I thought maybe he was laughing at how weak I looked. But then’s when I remember thinking that he was laughing because he wasn’t fooled for one minute by my deaf-and-dumb act; it didn’t make any difference
how
cagey the act was, he was onto me and was laughing and winking to let me know it.
    “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-name is Bromden. Chief Bromden. Everybody calls him Chief Buh-Broom, though, because the aides have him sweeping a l-large part of the time. There’s not m-much else he can do, I guess. He’s deaf.” Billy put his chin in hands. “If I was d-d-deaf”—he sighed—“I would kill myself.”
    McMurphy kept looking at me. “He gets his growth, he’ll be pretty good-sized, won’t he? 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 scared 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 ain’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 believe. That’s a defunct Columbia Gorge tribe. The doctor said 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 lore doesn’t cover that.”
    McMurphy leaned his head down near mine where I had to look at him. “Is that right? You deef, Chief?”
    “He’s de-de-deef and dumb.”
    McMurphy puckered his lips and looked at my face a long time. Then he straightened back up and stuck his hand out. “Well, what the hell, he can shake hands can’t he? Deef or whatever. By God, Chief, you may be big, but you shake my hand or I’ll consider it an insult. And it’s not a good idea to insult the new bull goose loony of the hospital.”
    When he said that he looked back over to Harding and Billy and made a face, but he left that hand in front of me, big as a dinner plate.
    I remember real clear 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; there was a dirty Band-Aid on the middle knuckle, peeling up at the edge. All the rest of the knuckles were covered with scars and cuts, old and new. I