One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

by Ken Kesey

They don’t bother not talking out loud about their hate secrets when I’m nearby because they think I’m deaf and dumb. Everybody think so. I’m cagey enough to fool them that much.If my being half Indian ever helped me in any way in this dirty life, it helped me being cagey, helped me all these years.

I know it’s the Big Nurse by the way the lockworks cleave to the key, soft and swift and familiar she been around locks so long.

tip of each finger the same color as her lips. Funny orange. Like the tip of a soldering iron.

They should of knew better’n to group up and mumble together when she was due on the ward.

Nobody up to see, just old Broom Bromden the half-breed Indian back there hiding behind his mop and can’t talk to call for help.

she has to change back before she’s caught in the shape of her hideous real self.

all they see is the head nurse, smiling and calm and cold as usual, telling the black boys they’d best not stand in a group gossiping when it is Monday morning and there is such a lot to get done on the first morning of the week…. “… mean old Monday morning, you know, boys …” “Yeah, Miz Ratched …”

Her face is smooth, calculated, and precision-made, like an expensive baby doll, skin like flesh-colored enamel, blend of white and cream and baby-blue eyes, small nose, pink little nostrils

Description of Nurse Ratched

everything working together except the color on her lips and fingernails, and the size of her bosom. A mistake was made somehow in manufacturing, putting those big, womanly breasts on what would of otherwise been a perfect work, and you can see how bitter she is about it.

poor Mr. Bromden

Chief

still hard for me to have a clear mind thinking on it. But it’s the truth even if it didn’t happen.

They got enough of those things they call pills down me so I don’t know a thing till I hear the ward door open.

This morning the lockworks rattle strange; it’s not a regular visitor at the door. An Escort Man’s voice calls down, edgy and impatient, “Admission, come sign for him,” and the black boys go. Admission. Everybody stops playing cards and Monopoly, turns toward the day-room door. Most days I’d be out sweeping the hall and see who they’re signing in, but this morning, like I explain to you, the Big Nurse put a thousand pounds down me and I can’t budge out of the chair. Most days I’m the first one to see the Admission,

turn all the showers up to where you can’t hear anything but the vicious hiss of water on the green tile.

Still, even though I can’t see him, I know he’s no ordinary Admission. I don’t hear him slide scared along the wall,

when they tell him about the shower he don’t just submit with a weak little yes, he tells them right back in a loud, brassy voice that he’s already plenty damn clean, thank you.

give me a minute to look my new home over; I never been in a Institute of Psychology before.”

He shows up in the door and stops and hitches his thumbs in his pockets, boots wide apart, and stands there with the guys looking at him. “Good mornin’, buddies.” There’s a paper Halloween bat hanging on a string above his head; he reaches up and flicks it so it spins around. “Mighty nice fall day.”

This guy is red-headed with long red sideburns and a tangle of curls out from under his cap, been needing cut a long time, and he’s broad as Papa was tall, broad across the jaw and shoulders and chest, a broad white devilish grin, and he’s hard in a different kind of way from Papa, kind of the way a baseball is hard under the scuffed leather. A seam runs across his nose and one cheekbone where somebody laid him a good one in a fight, and the stitches are still in the seam.

He stands there waiting, and when nobody makes a move to say anything to him he commences to laugh. Nobody can tell exactly why he laughs; there’s nothing funny going on. But it’s not the way that Public Relation laughs, it’s free and loud and it comes out of his wide grinning mouth and spreads in rings bigger and bigger till it’s lapping against the walls all over the ward. Not like that fat Public Relation laugh. This sounds real. I realize all of a sudden it’s the first laugh I’ve heard in years.

“My name is McMurphy, buddies, R. P. McMurphy, and I’m a gambling fool.” He winks and sings a little piece of a song: “‘… and whenever I meet with a deck a cards I lays … my money … down,“’ and laughs again.

Don’t you have a straight deck around here? Well say, here we go, I brought along my own deck, just in case, has something in it other than face cards—and check the pictures, huh? Every one different. Fifty-two positions.” Cheswick is pop-eyed already, and what he sees on those cards don’t help his condition.

He’s got on work-farm pants and shirt, sunned out till they’re the color of watered milk. His face and neck and arms are the color of oxblood leather from working long in the fields. He’s got a primer-black motorcycle cap stuck in his hair and a leather jacket over one arm, and he’s got on boots gray and dusty and heavy enough to kick a man half in two.

Now they tell me a psychopath’s a guy fights too much and fucks too much, but they ain’t wholly right, do you think? I mean, whoever heard tell of a man gettin’ too much poozle?

One side of the room younger patients, known as Acutes because the doctors figure them still sick enough to be fixed, practice arm wrestling and card tricks where you add and subtract and count down so many and it’s a certain card.

Billy Bibbit tries to learn to roll a tailor-made cigarette,

Martini walks around, discovering things under the t...

The Acutes move around a lot. They tell jokes to each other and snicker in their fists (nobody ever dares let loose and laugh, the whole staff’d be in with notebooks and a lot of questions) and t...

he said it yawns and gets up and sidles over to the big log book by the Nurses’ Station and writes down the piece of information he heard—of therapeutic interest to the whole ward, is what the Big Nurse says the book is for, but I know she’s just waiting to get enough evidence to have some guy reconditioned at the Main Building, overhauled

Across the room from the Acutes are the culls of the Combine’s product, the Chronics. Not in the hospital, these, to get fixed, but just to keep them from walking around the streets giving the product a bad name. Chronics are in for good, the staff concedes. Chronics are divided into Walkers like me, can still get around if you keep them fed, and Wheelers and Vegetables. What the Chronics are—or most of us—are machines with flaws inside that can’t be repaired, flaws born in, or flaws beat in over so many years of the guy running head-on into solid things that by the time the hospital found him he was bleeding rust in some vacant lot.

Ellis is a Chronic came in an Acute and got fouled up bad when they overloaded him in that filthy brain-murdering room that the black boys call the “Shock Shop.” Now he’s nailed against the wall in the same condition they lifted him off the table for the last time, in the same shape, arms out, palms cupped, with the same horror on his face.

Ruckly is another Chronic came in a few years back as an Acute, but him they overloaded in a different way: they made a mistake in one of their head installations. He was being a holy nuisance all over the place, kicking the black boys and biting the student nurses on the legs, so they took him away to be fixed.

dwarf black boy gets a rise out of him from time to time by leaning close and asking, “Say, Ruckly, what you figure your little wife is doing in town tonight?” Ruckly’s head comes up. Memory whispers someplace in that jumbled machinery. He turns red and his veins clog up at one end. This puffs him up so he can just barely make a little whistling sound in his throat.

When he finally does get to where he can say his few words it’s a low, choking noise to make your skin crawl—“C;Fffffffuck da wife! Fffffffuck da wife!“D; and passes out on the spot from the effort.

Ellis and Ruckly are the youngest Chronics.

Colonel Matterson is the oldest, an old, petrified cavalry soldier from the First War who is given to lifting the skirts of passing nurses with his cane, or teaching some kind of history out of the text of his left hand to anybody that’ll listen...

I’m the one been here on the ward the longest, since the Second World War. I been here on the ward longer’n anybody. Longer’n any of the other patients. The Big Nurse has been here longer’n me.

The Chronics and the Acutes don’t generally mingle.

This new redheaded Admission, McMurphy, knows right away he’s not a Chronic. After he checks the day room over a minute, he sees he’s meant for the Acute side and goes right for it, grinning and shaking hands with everybody he comes to.

Who’s the bull goose loony here?” He’s saying this directly to Billy Bibbit.

Nobody’s sure if this barrel-chested man with the scar and the wild grin is play-acting or if he’s crazy enough to be just like he talks, or both, but they are all beginning to get a big kick out of going along with him.

“Harding,” Billy says, “I guess it would b-b-be you. You’re p-president of Pay-Pay-Patient’s Council. This m-man wants to talk to you.”

Harding is a flat, nervous man with a face that sometimes makes you think you seen him in the movies, like it’s a face too pretty to just be a guy on the street. He’s got wide, thin shoulders and he curves them in around his chest when he’s trying to hide inside himself. He’s got hands so long and white and dainty I think they carved each other out of soap, and sometimes they get loose and glide around in front of him free as two white birds until he notices them and traps them between his knees; it bothers him that he’s got pretty hands.

He’s president of the Patient’s Council on account of he has a paper that says he graduated from college.

And when he finishes shaking hands with the last Acute he comes right on over to the Chronics, like we aren’t no different.

shakes hands that he has to pick up out of laps like picking up dead birds, mechanical birds, wonders of tiny bones and wires that have run down and fallen.

Shakes hands with everybody he comes to except Big George the water freak, who grins and shies back from that unsanitary hand, so McMurphy just salutes him and says to his own right hand as he walks away, “Hand, how do you suppose that old fellow knew all the evil you been into?”

“What’s your story, Big Chief? You look like Sittin’ Bull on a sit-down 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.”

“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.”

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.