“We might have to call IBM to rush one out for us; let me check back in Supply – ”
“Hey; bring out a bottle of that pure grain while you’re back there: it’s getting so I can’t install the simplest frigging component but what I need a bracer. Well, what the hell, it’s better’n garage work…”
Their voices are forced and too quick on the comeback to be real talk – more like cartoon comedy speech.
I sweep away before I’m caught eavesdropping.
The two big black boys catch Taber in the latrine and drag him to the mattress room. He gets one a good kick in the shins. He’s yelling bloody murder. I’m surprised how helpless he looks when they hold him, like he was wrapped with bands of black iron.
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. Before the black boy can close the door after her I see the one still sitting on Taber’s head, dabbing at him with a Kleenex[6]. They’re in there a long time before the door opens up again and they come out, carrying him across the hall to the lab. His greens are ripped clear off now and he’s wrapped up in a damp sheet…
Nine o’clock young residents wearing leather elbows talk to Acutes for fifty minutes about what they did when they were little boys. The Big Nurse is suspicious of the crew-cut looks of these residents, and that fifty minutes they are on the ward is a tough time for her. While they are around, the machinery goes to fumbling and she is scowling and making notes to check the records of these boys for old traffic violations and the like…
Nine-fifty the residents leave and the machinery hums up smooth again. The nurse watches the day room from her glass case; the scene before her takes on that blue-steel clarity again, that clean orderly movement of a cartoon comedy.
Taber is wheeled out of the lab on a Gurney bed.
“We had to give him another shot when he started coming up during the spine tap,” the technician tells her. “What do you say we take him right on over to Building One and buzz him with EST[7] while we’re at it – that way not waste the extra Seconal[8]?”
“I think it is an excellent suggestion. Maybe after that take him to the electroencephalograph and check his head – we may find evidence of a need for brain work.”
The technicians go trotting off, pushing the man on the Gurney, like cartoon men – or like puppets, mechanical puppets in one of those Punch and Judy acts[9] where it’s supposed to be funny to see the puppet beat up by the Devil and swallowed headfirst by a smiling alligator…
Ten o’clock the mail comes up. Sometimes you get the torn envelope…
Ten-thirty Public Relation comes in with a ladies’ club following him. He claps his fat hands at the day-room door. “Oh, hello guys; stiff lip, stiff lip… look around, girls; isn’t it clean, so bright? This is Miss Ratched. I chose this ward because it’s her ward. She’s, girls, just like a mother. Not that I mean age, but you girls understand…”
Public Relation’s shirt collar is so tight it bloats his face up when he laughs, and he’s laughing most of the time I don’t ever know what at, laughing high and fast like he wishes he could stop but can’t do it. And his face bloated up red and round as a balloon with a face painted on it. He got no hair on his face and none on his head to speak of; it looks like he glued some on once but it kept slipping off and getting in his cuffs and his shirt pocket and down his collar. Maybe that’s why he keeps his collar so tight, to keep the little pieces of hair from falling down in there.
Maybe that’s why he laughs so much, because he isn’t able to keep all the pieces out.
He conducts these tours – serious women in blazer jackets, nodding to him as he points out how much things have improved over the years. He points out the TV, the big leather chairs, the sanitary drinking fountains; then they all go have coffee in the Nurse’s Station. Sometimes he’ll be by himself and just stand in the middle of the day room and clap his hands (you can hear they are wet), clap them two or three times till they stick, then hold them prayer-like together under one of his chins and start spinning. Spin round and around there in the middle of the floor, looking wild and frantic at the TV, the new pictures on the walls, the sanitary drinking fountain. And laughing.
What he sees that’s so funny he don’t ever let us in on, and the only thing I can see funny is him spinning round and around out there like a rubber toy – if you push him over he’s weighted on the bottom and straightaway rocks back upright, goes to spinning again. He never, never looks at the men’s faces…
Ten-forty, -forty-five, -fifty, patients shuttle in and out to appointments in ET or OT or PT, or in queer little rooms somewhere where the walls are never the same size and the floors aren’t level. The machinery sounds about you reach a steady cruising speed.
The ward hums the way I heard a cotton mill hum once when the football team played a high school in California. After a good season one year the boosters in the town were so proud and carried away that they paid to fly us to California to play a championship high-school team down there. When we flew into the town we had to go visit some local industry. Our coach was one for convincing folks that athletics was educational because of the learning afforded by travel, and every trip we took he herded the team around to creameries and beet farms and canneries before the game. In California it was the cotton mill. When we went in the mill most of the team took a look and left to go sit in the bus over stud games on suitcases, but I stayed inside over in a corner out of the way of the Negro girls running up and down the aisles of machines. The mill put me in a kind of dream, all the humming and clicking and rattling of people and machinery, jerking around in a pattern. That’s why I stayed when the others left, that, and because it reminded me somehow of the men in the tribe who’d left the village in the last days to do work on the gravel crusher for the dam. The frenzied pattern, the faces hypnotized by routine… I wanted to go out in the bus with the team, but I couldn’t.
It was morning in early winter and I still had on the jacket they’d given us when we took the championship – a red and green jacket with leather sleeves and a football-shaped emblem sewn on the back telling what we’d won – and it was making a lot of the Negro girls stare. I took it off, but they kept staring. I was a whole lot bigger in those days.
One of the girls left her machine and looked back and forth up the aisles to see if the foreman was around, then came over to where I was standing. She asked if we was going to play the high school that night and she told me she had a brother played tailback for them. We talked a piece about football and the like and I noticed how her face looked blurred, like there was a mist between me and her. It was the cotton fluff sifting from the air.
I told her about the fluff. She rolled her eyes and ducked her mouth to laugh in her fist when I told her how it was like looking at her face out on a misty morning duck-hunting. And she said, “Now what in the everlovin’ world would you want with me out alone in a duck blind?” I told her she could take care of my gun, and the girls all over the mill went to giggling in their fists. I laughed a little myself, seeing how clever I’d been. We were still talking and laughing when she grabbed both my wrists and dug in. The features of her face snapped into brilliant focus; I saw she was terrified of something.