Kitabı oku: «One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest / Пролетая над гнездом кукушки»
© Берестова А. И., адаптация, сокращение, словарь, 2016
© ООО «Издательство «Антология», 2016
…one flew east, one flew west,
One flew over the cuckoo’s nest.
Children’s folkverse
Part I
Three black boys in white suits are mopping up the hall when I come out of the dorm.
They usually get up before me and commit sex acts in the hall before I can catch them. I feel their hate.
When they hate like this, it’s better if they don’t see me. I walk along the wall quietly as dust in my canvas shoes, but they somehow feel my fear and they all look up, all three at once, their eyes’re glittering out of the black faces.
“Here’s the Chief. The super Chief, fellows. Ol’ Chief Broom. Here you go, Chief Broom.”
One of them puts a mop in my hand and points to the spot where I must clean today, and I go.
They start talking behind me, heads close together. Hospital secrets, hate and death. They think I’m deaf and dumb, so they’re not afraid to talk about their hate secrets when I’m nearby. Everybody thinks I’m deaf and dumb. I’m cagey enough to fool them that much. I’m half Indian, and if this fact ever helped me in this dirty life, it helped me to be cagey, helped me all these years.
I’m mopping near the ward door when the Big Nurse opens it with a key. She comes in and locks the door behind her.
She’s carrying her wicker bag in the shape of a tool box. She’s had it during all the years I’ve been here. It’s of loose-weave and I can see inside it; there’s no compactor lipstick or woman things, that bag is full of the things she’s going to use in her duties today – wheels and cogs, tiny pills that gleam like porcelain, needles, forceps, watchmakers’ pliers, rolls of copperwire…
She nods at me as she goes past me. I push the mop back to the wall and smile and try not to let her see my eyes – they can’t tell so much about you if your eyes are closed.
In my dark I hear how the things in her wicker bag clash as she passes me in the hall. When I open my eyes she’s near the glass Nurses’ Station where she’ll spend the day sitting at her desk and looking out of her window and making notes on what goes on in front of her in the day room during the next eight hours. Her face looks pleased and peaceful with the thought.
Then… she sees those black boys. They’re still talking in the hall. They didn’t hear how she came into the ward. They sense that she’s glaring down at them now, but it’s too late. It was a mistake to group up and whisper together when she was expected on the ward. She bends and advances on where they’re trapped at the end of the corridor. She knows what they’ve been saying, and I can see that she’s furious. She’s going to tear the black bastards limb from limb, she’s so furious. She looks around her. Nobody up to see, just old Broom Bromden the half-breed Indian back there who is hiding behind his mop and can’t call for help because he can’t talk. So she really lets herself go and her painted mouth twists, stretches to an open snarl. I hold my breath. My God, this time they’re gonna do it! This time they let the hate build up too high and they’re gonna tear one another to pieces before they realize what they’re doing!
But right at that moment all the patients start coming out of the dorms to check on what’s the hullabaloo about and she has to change back before she’s caught in the shape of her hideous real self. The patients are still half asleep. They see the head nurse. She is smiling and calm and cold as usual. She is telling the black boys that they shouldn’t stand in a group and gossip when it is Monday morning and there is such a lot to get done on the first morning of the week…
“…old Monday morning, you know, boys…”
“Yeah, Miz Ratched…
“…and we have a number of appointments this morning, so perhaps, if your group talking isn’t too urgent…”
“Yeah, Miz Ratched…”
She stops and nods at some of the patients who stand around and stare out of eyes all red and puffy with sleep. She nods once to each. Her face is smooth, like an expensive baby doll, and baby-blue eyes, small nose, pink little nostrils – everything works perfectly together except the orange color on her lips and fingernails, and the size of her bosom. A mistake was made somehow in manufacturing when those big, womanly breasts were put on that otherwise perfect work, and you can see how bitter she is about it.
The men are still standing and waiting. They want to know what appointments she was telling the black boys about, so she remembers me and says, “And since it is Monday, boys, it will be a good start on the week if we shave poor Mr. Bromden first this morning, before breakfast, and see if we can’t avoid some of the noise he usually makes.”
Before anybody can turn to look for me I hide in the mop closet, shut the door after me, hold my breath. Shaving before you get breakfast is the worst time. When you got something under your belt you’re stronger and more wide awake, and the bastards who work for the Combine can’t use one of their machines on you in place of an electric shaver. But when you shave before breakfast – six-thirty in the morning – then what chance you got against one of their machines?
I hide in the mop closet and listen, my heart is beating in the dark, and I try not to be afraid, try to think of something else – try to think back and remember things about the village and the big Columbia River, think about one time when Papa and me were hunting birds near The Dalles… But as always when I try to place my thoughts in the past and hide there, the fear of the present moment breaks the memory. I can feel that one black boy is coming up the hall. He is smelling out for my fear. He opens out his nostrils and he sniffs in fear from all over the ward. He’s smelling me now. He doesn’t know where I’m hiding, but he’s smelling and he’s hunting around. I try to keep still…
(Papa tells me to keep still, tells me that the dog senses a bird somewhere right close. We borrowed a pointer dog from a man in The Dalles. All the village dogs are mongrels, Papa says, no class at all; this here dog, he got instinct. I don’t say anything, but I already see the bird up in a tree, a gray knot of feathers. The dog is running in circles underneath. There is too much smell around, and he can’t point for sure. The bird is safe as long as he keeps still, but the dog is sniffing and circling, louder and closer. Then the bird breaks, spreads feathers, jumps out of the tree into the birdshot from Papa’s gun.)
The black boys catch me before I get ten steps out of the mop closet, and drag me back to the shaving room. I don’t fight or make any noise. If you yell it’s just tougher on you. I hold back the yelling till they get to my temples. I’m not sure it’s one of those substitute machines and not a shaver till it gets to my temples; then I can’t hold back. I yell so loudly that everybody puts their hands over their ears though they are behind a glass wall. Everybody yells at me, but no sound comes from the mouths. My sound soaks up all other sound. They start the fog machine again and it’s snowing down cold and white all over me like skim milk, so thick I might even be able to hide in it if they didn’t hold me. I can’t see six inches in front of me through the fog but I can hear over the noise I’m making that the Big Nurse is storming up the hall while she crashes patients out of her way with that wicker bag. I hear but I still can’t hush my yelling. I yell till she gets there. They hold me down while she jams wicker bag into my mouth and pushes it down with a mop handle.
When the fog clears and I can see, I’m sitting in the day room. They didn’t take me to the Shock Shop this time. I remember they took me out of the shaving room and locked me in Seclusion. I don’t remember if I got breakfast or not. Probably not. I can remember some mornings when I was locked in Seclusion, the black boys brought breakfast things there, but they didn’t give anything to me, they ate it themselves.
This morning I don’t remember. They got so many pills down me that I don’t know a thing till I hear that the ward door opens. The ward door opening means that it’s at least eight o’clock.
Since eight o’clock the ward door opens and closes a thousand times a day. Every morning we sit in the day room, mix jigsaw puzzles after breakfast. When a key hits the lock, we wait to see what’s coming in. There’s nothing else to do. Sometimes a young resident comes in early to watch what we’re like Before Medication. BM, they call it. Sometimes it’s a visiting wife on high heels, who holds her purse tight over her belly. Sometimes it’s a group of grade-school teachers on a tour with that fool Public Relation man who’s always clapping his wet hands together and saying how overjoyed he is that mental hospitals had put an end to all the old-fashioned cruelty. “What a cheerful atmosphere, don’t you agree?” He’ll bustle around the schoolteachers, who stay in a close group for safety, and clap his hands together. “Oh, when I think back on the old days, on the filth, the bad food, even, yes, brutality, oh, I realize, ladies, that we have come a long way in our campaign!” Whoever comes in the door is usually somebody disappointing, but there’s always a chance otherwise, and when a key hits the lock, all the heads come up at once.
This morning the sound of the key in the lock is strange; it’s not a regular visitor at the door. An Escort Man’s voice calls down impatiently, “Admission, come sign for him,” and the black boys go.
Admission. Everybody stops playing cards and Monopoly, turns toward the day-room door. On most days I’m out of the day room and sweep the hall, and I can see who they’re signing in, but this morning the Big Nurse put a thousand pills down me and I can’t get out of the chair. Most days I can see how the Admission stands, full of fear, near the wall till the black boys come to sign for him and take him into the shower room, where they strip him and leave him shivering with the door open while they all three run to the Big Nurse. “We need that Vaseline,” they’ll tell the Big Nurse, “for the thermometer.” She looks from one to the other: “I’m sure you do,” and gives them a very big jar, “but, boys, don’t group up in there.” Then I see two, maybe all three of them in there, in that shower room with the Admission. They’re grinning and turning that thermometer around in Vaseline till it’s coated the size of your finger.Then they shut the door and turn all the showers up so that you can’t hear anything except, the hiss of water on the green tile. I’m out there most days, and I see it like that.
But this morning I can only listen as they bring him in. Still, even though I can’t see him, I know he’s no ordinary Admission. When they tell him about the shower, he doesn’t just say a weak little yes, he tells them right back in a loud voice that he’s already plenty damn clean, thank you.
“They showered me this morning at the courthouse and last night at the jail. And I swear I think they’d have washed my ears for me on the taxi ride over if they could have found the means. Hoo boy, seems like everytime they ship me someplace I’ve got to get scrubbed down before, after, and during the operation. So at the sound of water I start to gather up my belongings. And get back away from me with that thermometer, Sam, and give me a minute to look my new home over; I’ve never been in an Institute of Psychology before.”
The patients look at one another’s puzzled faces, then back to the door, where his voice is still coming in. He is talking louder than he needs. He sounds as if he’s high above the black boys, talking down, as if he’s sailing fifty yards overhead, yelling at those below on the ground. He sounds big. He’s coming down the hall, and he sounds big in the way he walks; he’s got iron on his heels and he rings it on the floor like horseshoes. He shows up in the door and stops and hitches his thumbs in his pockets, boots wide apart, and stands there, and the guys’re looking at him.
“Good mornin’, buddies.”
A paper Halloween bat’s hanging on a string above his head; he flicks it so it spins around.
“Mighty nice fall day.”
He talks a little like Papa, voice loud and strong, but he doesn’t look like Papa; Papa was a full-blood Columbia Indian – a chief – and hard and shiny as a gunbarrel. This guy is redheaded with long red sideburns and a tangle of curls out from under his cap, which haven’t been cut for 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 worn leather. A seam runs across his nose and one cheekbone where somebody hit him in a fight, and the stitches are still in the seam. He stands there and waits, and when nobody says anything to him, he begins 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 that it’s the first laugh I’ve heard in years.
He stands looking at us, rocking back in his boots, and he laughs and laughs. Everybody on the ward, patients, staff, can’t say a word. Nobody tries to stop him. He laughs till he’s finished for a time, and he walks on into the day room. Even when he isn’t laughing, that laughing sound is around him – it’s in his eyes, in the way he smiles, in the way he talks.
“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 of cards I lay… my money… down’,” and laughs again.
He walks to one of the card games, squints at an Acute’s cards, and shakes his head.
“Yes sir, that’s what I came to this establishment for, to bring you birds fun and entertainment around the gaming table. Nobody left in that Pendleton Work Farm to make my days interesting any more, so I asked for a transfer, you see. Needed some new blood. Hooee, look at the way this bird holds his cards, showing them to everybody; man! I’ll trim you babies like little lambs.”
Cheswick gathers his cards together. The redheaded man puts his hand out for Cheswick to shake.
“Hello, buddy; what’s that you’re playing? Pinochle? Jesus, no wonder you don’t care nothing about showing your hand. Don’t you have a straight deck around here? I brought along my own deck, just in case, it 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 doesn’t help his condition.
“Easy now, don’t smudge them; we got lots of time, lots of games ahead of us. I like to use my deck here because it takes the other players at least a week to even see the suit…”
He’s wearing faded work-farm pants and shirt. His face and neck and arms are the color of oxblood leather from working long in the fields. He’s got a black motorcycle cap on his head and a leather jacket over one arm, and his boots are gray and dusty and heavy. He walks away from Cheswick and takes off the cap and starts to beat a dust storm out of his thigh. One of the black boys circles him with the thermometer, but he’s too quick for them; he moves among the Acutes and shakes hands before the black boy can take good aim.
“You see, I got in a couple of fights at the work farm, to tell the pure truth, and the court ruled that I’m a psychopath. And do you think I’m going to argue with the court? Sure, I’m not. If it gets me out of those damned pea fields I’ll be whatever their little heart wants, be it psychopath or mad dog or werewolf, because I don’t care if I never see another weeding hoe to my dying day. 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? Hello, buddy, what do they call you? My name’s McMurphy and I’ll bet you two dollars here and now that you can’t tell me how many spots are in that pinochle hand you’re holding. Two dollars; what d’ya say? God damn, Sam! can’t you wait half a minute to prod me with that damn thermometer of yours?”
The new man stops for a minute to get the organization of the day room.
On one side of the room younger patients, known as Acutes because the doctors think that they’re still sick enough and must be cured, practice arm wrestling and card tricks. Billy Bibbit tries to learn to roll a cigarette, and Martini walks around, discovering things under the tables and chairs. The Acutes move around a lot. They tell jokes to each other and laugh in their fists (nobody ever dares laugh aloud, the whole staff would be in with notebooks and a lot of questions) and they write letters with yellow, chewed pencils.
They spy on each other. Sometimes one man says something about himself that he didn’t aim to let slip, and one of his buddies at the table where he said it yawns and gets up and goes over to the big logbook by the Nurses’ Station and writes down the piece of information he heard.The Big Nurse says the book is of therapeutic interest to the whole ward, but I know that she just wants to get enough evidence and to send some guy to the Main Building where they’ll recondition him, overhaul him in the head and straighten out the trouble.
The guy that wrote the piece of information in the logbook gets a star by his name on the list and gets to sleep late the next day.
Across the room from the Acutes are the culls of the Combine’s product, the Chronics. They keep them in the hospital not to cure them, but just to keep them from walking around the streets giving the product a bad name. Chronics will stay in the hospital for ever, the staff concedes. Chronics are divided into Walkers like me, who can still get around if you feed them, and Wheelers and Vegetables. Most of Chronics are machines with flaws inside that can’t be repaired. Some of them are born with these flaws, others got the flaws after very bad beatings.
But there are some of us Chronics that are the result of the staff’s mistakes that were made a couple of years back, some of us who were Acutes when we came in, and got changed over. Ellis is a Chronic who came in as an Acute and became Chronic when they overloaded him in that 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, with the same horror on his face.They pull the nails when it’s time to eat or time to drive him in to bed, or when they want to move so that I can mop the puddle where he stands. At the old place he stood so long in one spot the piss ate the floor and beams away under him and he kept falling through to the ward below, giving them all kinds of census headaches down there when list check came around.
Ruckly is another Chronic who came in a few years ago 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 nuisance all over the place: he kicked the black boys and bit the student nurses on the legs, so they took him away to cure. They strapped him to that table and shut the door on him; he winked, just before the door closed, and told the black boys as they backed away from him, “You’ll pay for this, you damn tar babies.”
And they brought him back to the ward two weeks later. He was bald and the front of his face was an oily purple bruise and two little button-sized plugs were stitched above his eyes. You can see by his eyes how they burned him out over there; there’s no life, no light in his eyes. All day now he just holds an old photograph up in front of that burned-out face, turns it over and over in his cold fingers, and the picture became gray as his eyes on both sides, so that you can’t tell any more what it used to be.
The staff, they consider Ruckly one of their failures, but I think that he’s better off than if the installation had been perfect. The installations they do nowadays are generally successful. The technicians got more skill and experience. No more of the button holes in the forehead, no cutting at all – they go in through the eye sockets. Sometimes a guy goes over for an installation, leaves the ward mean and mad and snapping at the whole world and comes back a few weeks later with black-and-blue eyes like he’d been in a fist-fight, and he’s the sweetest, nicest, best-behaved thing you ever saw. He’ll maybe even go home in a month or two, with a hat pulled low over the face of a sleepwalker wandering round in a simple, happy dream. A success, they say, but I say he’s just another robot for the Combine and might be better off as a failure, like Ruckly with his picture. He never does much else. The dwarf black boy gets a rise out of him from time to time by asking, “Say, Ruckly, what you figure your little wife is doing in town tonight?” Ruckly’s head comes up. Memory whispers some place in that broken machinery. He turns red and at first he can just make a little whistling sound in his throat. He’s trying so hard to say something. When he finally does get to where he can say his few words it’s a low, choking noise that makes your skin crawl – “Fffffffuck da wife! Fffffffuck da wife!” and passes out on the spot from the effort.
Ellis and Ruckly are the youngest Chronics. Colonel Matterson is the oldest, an old cavalry soldier from the First War who likes to lift the skirts of passing nurses with his cane, or to teach some kind of history out of the text of his left hand to anybody that’ll listen. He’s the oldest on the ward, but not the one who’s been here longest – his wife brought him in only a few years ago, when she wasn’t able to look after him herself any longer.
I’m the one who’s been here on the ward the longest, longer than anybody, since the Second World War. The Big Nurse has been here longer than me.
The Chronics and the Acutes don’t generally mingle. Each stays on his own side of the day room. The black boys want it that way. The black boys say that it’s more orderly that way. They move us in after breakfast and look at the grouping and nod. “That’s right, gennulmen, that’s the way. Now you keep it that way.”
But there is no need to say it because the Chronics don’t move around much, and the Acutes stay on their own side because they’re afraid that they may become Chronics someday. The Big Nurse recognizes this fear and knows how to put it to use; she’ll say to an Acute, whenever he goes into a bad mood, that you boys be good boys and cooperate with the staff policy which is planned for your cure, or you’ll end up over on that side.
(Everybody on the ward is proud that the patients cooperate so well. There’s a little brass tablet on the wall right above the logbook, with the words on it: CONGRATULATIONS FOR COOPERATING WITH THE SMALLEST NUMBER OF PERSONNEL OF ANY WARD IN THE HOSPITAL. It’s a prize for cooperation.)
This new redheaded Admission, McMurphy, knows right away that he’s not a Chronic. He goes right to the Acute side, grinning and shaking hands with everybody. At first I see that he’s making everybody there feel uneasy, especially with that big laugh of his. I see that McMurphy notices that he’s making them uneasy, but he doesn’t change his behavior.
“Damn, you boys don’t look so crazy to me.” He’s trying to relax them. “Which one of you is the craziest? Which one is the biggest loony? Who runs these card games? It’s my first day, and I want to make a good impression on the right man if he can prove to me that he is the right man. Who’s the boss loony here?”
He looks round to where some of the Acutes have stopped their card-playing “I’m thinking about taking over this whole show myself, so I want to talk with the top man. I’m gonna be sort of the gambling baron on this ward. So you better take me to your leader and we’ll get it straightened out who’s gonna be boss around here.”
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 the Acutes are grinning now, not so uneasy any more, and glad that something out of the ordinary’s going on. They ask Harding if he’s boss loony. He lays down his cards.
Harding is a flat, nervous man with a face that sometimes makes you think that you’ve seen him in the movies, a face too pretty for just 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 fine hands, so long and white. Sometimes they fly around in front of him free as two white birds until he notices them and hides them between his knees; it worries him that he’s got pretty hands.
He’s president of the Patient’s Council because he has a paper that says he graduated from college. This paper in a frame sits on his nightstand next to a picture of a woman in a bathing suit who also looks like you’ve seen her in the moving pictures. You can see Harding sitting on a towel behind her. Harding brags a lot about having such a woman for a wife, says she’s the sexiest woman in the world and she can’t get enough of him nights.
Harding assumes an important look, speaks up at the ceiling without looking at McMurphy. “Does this… gentleman have an appointment, Mr. Bibbit?” he asks Billy Bibbit.
Billy stutters when he speaks.“Do you have an appointment, Mr. McM-m-murphy? Mr. Harding is a busy man, nobody sees him without an ap-appointment.”
“This busy man Mr. Harding, is he the boss loony?” He looks at Billy with one eye, and Billy nods his head up and down real fast.
“Then you tell Boss Loony Harding that R. P. McMurphy is waiting to see him and that this hospital isn’t big enough for the two of us. I’m always top man everywhere. I was even boss pea weeder on that pea farm at Pendleton – so I think if I’m to be a loony, then I must be a good one. Tell this Harding that he either meets me man to man or he’s a yellow skunk and better be out of town by sunset.”
Harding leans back in his chair. “Bibbit, you tell this young upstart McMurphy that I’ll meet him in the main hall at high noon and we’ll settle this affair once and for all.” Harding tries to drawl like McMurphy; it sounds funny with his high voice. “You might also warn him, just to be fair, that I have been boss loony on this ward for almost two years, and that I’m crazier than any man alive.”
“Mr. Bibbit, you might warn this Mr. Harding that I’m so crazy that I admit to voting for Eisenhower.”
“Bibbit! You tell Mr. McMurphy I’m so crazy I voted for Eisenhower twice!”
“And you tell Mr. Harding right back” – he puts both hands on the table and leans down – “that I’m so crazy I plan to vote for Eisenhower again this November.”
“I take off my hat,” Harding says, bows his head, and shakes hands with McMurphy. There’s no doubt in my mind that McMurphy’s won, but I’m not sure just what.
All the other Acutes come up close to see what new sort this fellow is. Nobody like him has ever been on the ward before. They’re asking him with great interest where he’s from and what his business is. He says he’s a dedicated man. He says he was just a wanderer and bum before the Army took him and taught him what his natural bent was; they taught him to play poker. Since then he has settled down and devoted himself to gambling on all levels. Just play poker and stay single and live where and how he wants to, if people would let him, he says, “but you know how society persecutes a dedicated man. Ever since I found my calling I’ve done time in so many small-town jails I could write a brochure. They say I like to fight too much. They didn’t mind so much when I was a dumb logger and got into a fight; that’s excusable, they say, that’s a hard-working feller blowing off steam, they say. But if you’re a gambler, if they know that you play a back-room game now and then, all you have to do is spit slantwise and you’re a goddamned criminal.”
He shakes his head and puffs out his cheeks.
“But that was just for a period of time. I learned the rules. To tell the truth, this fight I was doing in Pendleton was the first one in close to a year. I was out of practice. That’s why this guy was able to get up off the floor and get to the cops before I left town. A very tough individual…”
He laughs again and shakes hands and sits down to arm wrestle every time that black boy gets too near him with the thermometer. And when he finishes shaking hands with the last Acute he comes right on over to the Chronics. You can’t tell if he’s really this friendly or if he’s got some gambler’s reason for trying to get acquainted with guys so far gone that a lot of them don’t even know their names.
Nobody can understand why he’s trying to get acquainted with everybody, but it’s better than mixing jigsaw puzzles. He keeps saying it’s a necessary thing to get around and meet the men he’ll be dealing with, part of a gambler’s job. But he must know he isn’t going to be dealing with no eighty-year-old organic who couldn’t do any more with a playing card than put it in his mouth and gum it awhile. Yet he looks like he’s enjoying himself, like he’s the sort of guy that gets a laugh out of people.
I’m the last one. McMurphy stops when he gets to me and starts to laugh again. All of a sudden I was afraid that he was laughing because he knew the truth about me: that the way I was sitting there with my knees pulled up and my arms wrapped around them, looking straight ahead as though I couldn’t hear a thing, was all an act.
“Hooeee,” he said, “look what we got here.”
I remember all this part very well. I remember the way he closed one eye and laughed at me. I thought that he was winking at me because he wasn’t fooled for one minute by my deaf-and-dumb act. “What’s your story, Big Chief? You look like Sittin’ Bull on a sitdown 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?”
