One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest

ranting and raving

what the racket’s about,

what the racket’s about,

Their faces bob apart,

But it’s the truth even if it didn’t happen.

Doesn’t need to any more. They are in contact on a high-voltage wave length of hate, and the black boys are out there performing her bidding before she even thinks it.

It's for fixing up mistakes made in the neighborhoods and in the schools and in the churches, the hospital is. When a completed product goes back out into society, all fixed up good as new, better than new sometimes, it brings joy to the Big Nurse's heart; something that came in all twisted different is now a functioning, adjusted component, a credit to the whole outfit and a marvel to behold.

They push him face down on the mattress. One sits on his head, and the other rips his pants open in back and peels the cloth until Taber's peach-colored rear is framed by the ragged lettuce-green. He's smothering curses into the mattress and the black boy sitting on his head saying, “Tha's right, Mistuh Taber, tha's right…” The nurse comes down the hall, smearing Vaseline on a long needle, pulls the door shut so they're out of sight for a second, then comes right back out, wiping the needle on a shred of Taber's pants. She's left the Vaseline jar in the room.

But I don't like to swallow something without knowing what it is, neither. How do I know this isn't one of those funny pills that makes me something I'm not?”

“Don't get upset, Mr. Taber—”

“Upset? All I want to know, for the lova Jesus—”

But the Big Nurse has come up quietly, locked her hand on his arm, paralyzes him all the way to the shoulder. “That's all right, Miss Flinn,” she says. “If Mr. Taber chooses to act like a child, he may have to be treated as such. We've tried to be kind and considerate with him. Obviously, that's not the answer. Hostility, hostility, that's the thanks we get. You can go, Mr. Taber, if you don't wish to take your medication orally.”

“All I wanted to know, for the—”

“You can go.”

He goes off, grumbling, when she frees his arm, and spends the morning moping around the latrine, wondering about those capsules.

“Just swallow it all, shall we, Mr. Taber—just for me?” She takes a quick look at the Big Nurse to see how the little flirting technique she is using is accepted, then looks back at the Acute.