![]() Now that McMurphy was around to back them up, the guys started letting fly at everything that had ever happened on the ward they didn't like. In the group meetings there were gripes coming up that had been buried so long the thing being griped about had already changed. Har-ding!" Then Cheswick goes and gets him a chair, and then Billy Bibbit goes, and then Scanlon and then Fredrickson and Sefelt, and then we all put down our mops and brooms and scouring rags and we all go pull us chairs up. Harding! You return to your scheduled duties!" I think how her voice sounds like it hit a nail, and this strikes me so funny I almost laugh. "Under jurisdiction and control-" Harding shuts off the buffer, and leaves it in the hall, and goes pulls him a chair up alongside McMurphy and sits down and lights him a cigarette too. the staff." She's holding up a fist, all those red-orange fingernails burning into her palm. She looks around her, then takes a step out of the Nurses' Station toward McMurphy. McMurphy, I'm warning you!" Everybody's stopped what he was doing. McMurphy, that you are supposed to be working during these hours." Her voice has a tight whine like an electric saw ripping through pine. ![]() "I sure don't want to go against that goddamned policy." (1.9.8-12) Harding nods his head, so McMurphy shrugs and goes back to his chair. McMurphy stares at him like he can't believe he's hearing right, then turns and looks at Harding. When McMurphy finishes his last banana he slaps his belly and gets up and heads for the door, and the big black boy blocks the door and tells him the rule that patients sit in the mess hall till they all leave at seven-thirty. "Against ward policy?" "Tha's right." "Tough luck"-and peels three bananas right under the black boy's nose and eats one after the other, tells the boy that any time you want one snuck outa the mess hall for you, Sam, you just give the word. There's bananas for the corn flakes, and he gets a handful, tells the black boy that he'll filch him one 'cause he looks so starved, and the black boy shifts his eyes to look down the hall to where the nurse is sitting in her glass case, and says it ain't allowed for the help to eat with the patients. He gets seconds on everything and makes a date with the girl pours coffee in the kitchen for when he gets discharged, and he compliments the N**** cook on sunnysiding the best eggs he ever ate. Six-forty-five the shavers buzz and the Acutes line up in alphabetical order at the mirrors, A, B, C, D. The Vegetables piss the bed, activating an electric shock and buzzer, rolls them off on the tile where the black boys can hose them down and get them in clean greens. The Wheelers swing dead log legs out on the floor and wait like seated statues for somebody to roll chairs in to them. At the beginning of each day the properly dated OD card is inserted in a slot in the steel door and the walls hum up: Lights flash on in the dorm at six-thirty: the Acutes up out of bed quick as the black boys can prod them out, get them to work buffing the floor, emptying ash trays, polishing the scratch marks off the wall where one old fellow shorted out a day ago, went down in an awful twist of smoke and smell of burned rubber. ![]() A number of Order Daily Cards are returned, punched with a pattern of little square holes. ![]() This is typed and fed into the machine I hear humming behind the steel door in the rear of the Nurses' Station. Everything the guys think and say and do is all worked out months in advance, based on the little notes the nurse makes during the day. So after the nurse gets her staff, efficiency locks the ward like a watchman's clock.
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