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

remember the palm was smooth and hard as bone from hefting the wooden handles of axes and hoes, not the hand you’d think could deal cards. The palm was callused, and the calluses were cracked, and dirt was worked in the cracks. A road map of his travels up and down the West. That palm made a scuffing sound against my hand. I remember the fingers were thick and strong closing over mine, and my hand commenced to feel peculiar and went to swelling up out there on my stick of an arm, like he was transmitting his own blood into it. It rang with blood and power: It blowed up 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 got her. She stands there tapping that thermometer against her wrist watch, eyes whirring while she tries to gauge this new man. Her lips are in that triangle shape, like a doll’s lips ready for a fake nipple.
    “Aide Williams tells me, Mr. McMurry, that you’ve been somewhat difficult about your admission shower. Is this true? Please understand, I appreciate the way you’ve taken it upon yourself to orient with the other patients on the ward, but everything in its own good time, Mr. McMurry. I’m sorry to interrupt you and Mr. Bromden, but you do understand:
everyone
… must follow the rules.”
    He tips his head back and gives that wink that she isn’t fooling him any more than I did, that he’s onto her. He looks up at her with one eye for a minute.
    “Ya know, ma’am,” he says, “ya know—that is the ex-
act
thing somebody
always
tells me about the rules…”
    He grins. They both smile back and forth at each other, sizing each other up.
    “…just when they figure I’m about to do the dead opposite.”
    Then he lets go my hand.

4
    In the glass Station the Big Nurse has opened a package from a foreign address and is sucking into hypodermic needles the grass-and-milk liquid that came in vial in the package. One of the little nurses, a girl with one wandering eye that always keeps looking worried over her shoulder while the other one goes about its usual business, picks up the little tray of filled needles but doesn’t carry them away just yet.
    “What, Miss Ratched, is your opinion of this new patient? I mean, gee, he’s good-looking and friendly and everything, but in my humble opinion he certainly takes
over
.”
    The Big Nurse tests a needle against her fingertip. “I’m afraid”—she stabs the needle down in the rubber-capped vial and lifts the plunger—“that is exactly what the new patient is planning: to take over. He is what we call a ‘manipulator,’ Miss Flinn, a man who will use everyone and everything to his own ends.”
    “Oh. But. I mean, in a mental hospital? What could his ends be?”
    “Any number of things.” She’s calm, smiling, lost in the work of loading the needles. “Comfort and an easy life, for instance; the feeling of power and respect, perhaps; monetary gain—perhaps all of these things. Sometimes a manipulator’s own ends are simply the actual
disruption
of the ward for the sake of disruption. There are such people in our society. A manipulator can influence the other patients and disrupt them to such an extent that it may take months to get everything running smooth once more. With the present permissive philosophy in mental hospitals, it’s easy for them to get away with it. Some years back it was quite different. I recall some years back we had a man, a Mr. Taber, on the ward, and he was an
intolerable
Ward Manipulator. For a while.” She looks up from her work, needle half filled in front of her face like a little wand. Her eyes get far-off and pleased with the memory. “Mistur Tay-bur,” she says.
    “But, gee,” the other nurse says, “what on earth would
make
a man want to do something like disrupt the ward for, Miss Ratched? What possible motive…?”
    She cuts the little nurse off by