When she posted work
assignments on the bulletin board, and McMurphy read that she’d given him latrine
duty, he went to her office and knocked on that window of hers and personally
thanked her for the honor, and told her he’d think of her every time he swabbed
out a urinal. She told him that wasn’t necessary; just do his work and that
would be sufficient, thank you.
The most work he did on
them was to run a brush around the bowls once or twice apiece, singing some
song as loud as he could in time to the swishing brush; then he’d splash in
some Clorox and he’d be through. “That’s clean enough,” he’d tell the black boy
who got after him for the way he hurried through his job, “maybe not clean
enough for some people, but myself I plan to piss in ‘em, not eat lunch out of
‘em.” And when the Big Nurse gave in to the black boy’s frustrated pleading and
came in to check McMurphy’s cleaning assignment personally, she brought a
little compact mirror and she held it under the rim of the bowls. She walked
along shaking her head and saying, “Why, this is an outrage … an outrage …” at
every bowl. McMurphy sidled right along beside her, winking down his nose and
saying in answer, “No; that’s a toilet bowl ... a toilet bowl.”
But she didn’t lose
control again, or even act at all like she might. She would get after him about
the toilets, using that same terrible, slow, patient pressure she used on
everybody, as he stood there in front of her, looking like a little kid getting
a bawling out, hanging his head, and the toe of one boot on top of the other,
saying, “I try and try, ma’am, but I’m afraid I’ll never make my mark as head
man of the crappers.”
Ken Kesey, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest
No comments:
Post a Comment