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I think McMurphy realized I figured out something was wrong with him when he caught me staring at him that night. Not something wrong in the conscious mind, I was already aware of that. No, something twisted and planted deep inside him that you couldn’t pry out even if he wanted you to. Hold him down, open him up, but you wouldn’t find it, it’d be buried too deep inside his brain. A little seed, a sprout, right by his brainstem. To remove it would be too risky, would kill him. It was too much a part of his soul.
I had just finished showering, towel wrapped around my waist when I stopped myself in the doorway of the bathroom. I took one look at McMurphy sitting on the bed and I froze like someone turned time off. It wasn’t the first time I had ever stared at him, I had done it so many times in the ward that I couldn’t count. But this time we were alone, and it was easy to catch me, so he did. I saw McMurphy undressing. He was stripping down, lazy in his motions, taking off his shirt slow-like. He undid the laces on his work boots and pulled them off his feet. His face looked tired as he dropped his shoes down next to the bed. He smoothed back his hair with one hand and let out a strained sigh, orange curls framing his face. At one point in our trip, he mentioned getting a haircut, but after the way I must’ve glared at him— unintentionally so— he promised he’d never bring it up again. Swore on it, even, knowing his promises had little value. But in my world, his promises were worth everything.
He rubbed his forehead, beginning to hum something to himself. Being alone with him, I found that he did that when he thought no one was around, or that no one was listening. Oftentimes he’d hum or sing to himself some chipper tune when he’d shave in the morning, thinking I was still asleep and couldn’t hear, and I’d be lying in bed listening to it like it was angels welcoming me to Heaven. But then there were times at night that I’d feign sleep, and he’d lie there with me or sneak out of bed and smoke instead, humming to himself a calmer, sadder song. Hum it like it was something that was stuck in his head, something he couldn’t remember the words to. I could never figure out what song it was with the way he made it sound. It was so desperate, so low. I sometimes thought he made it up himself, but I had to tell myself that McMurphy could never. He wasn’t the kind of person to make something so sad.
He turned to reach for his jacket that he tossed on the end of the bed. I stared at him, at his arm that reached out for the article. The fading tan, the hair, the scars, the scabs. How fresh they looked. He glanced up and saw me watching him and I swear his skeleton nearly jumped out of his skin when he noticed me there. I had been standing in the doorframe of the bathroom for God knows how long, just watching him.
“Christ, Chief,” he blurted out. That’s when my eyes, blown to hell, darted back up to his, and I met his eyes, and God, they looked so wide and so tired and so full of everything. Like the man was feeling everything at once, and he was still breathing despite it. “What’re you doin’?”
“Nothin’,” I heard myself say.
His brow furrowed, lips pursed. “How long’ve you been standing there?”
I was honest with him. “I don’t know.”
I kept looking into his eyes and my face grew hot and I dropped my gaze to the floor, watching the way my bare feet shuffled around the carpet, feeling the wiry texture against my soles. I held the doorframe, leaning my shoulder against the other side of it. My hair was still wet and made it so stray water droplets ran down my back, and the feeling made me shudder. After a beat, he sighed and grabbed his jacket, taking out his pack of cigarettes from its pocket.
“Get dressed or somethin’,” he told me, “you’ll get cold.”
I couldn’t help smiling, ‘cause he was right. He must’ve figured out I liked taking hot showers because I was standing there and I was cold.
I never got used to being naked in front of anybody. I never liked it. My entire life I felt like privacy was something that just didn’t exist, that I wasn’t allowed to have. Even before McMurphy, even before the Ward…
After a while, you become numb to it and start to not notice. The feeling of the open air on your body, it becomes nothing. You still get that sense that something is wrong. Even with McMurphy, I could feel him always watching me, least when I’d get out of the shower. I’d be dressing for the day, or dressing for bed, and I could feel his eyes on me, boring holes in my body. I could tell without even looking at him that he was thinking something perverted, something sexual, but it didn’t bother me none. Not McMurphy. That’s just who he was.
I folded my towel up and put it on the top of the room’s dresser. After I threw on a shirt and some pajama pants, I walked over to the bed and crawled into it. I had to curl up a bit to fully fit on the mattress, and McMurphy instinctively scoffed when he first saw my feet dangling off the end before I bent my legs. Laying on my side, I made little notes to myself on McMurphy’s tattoos, even though I’ve seen them what must be a hundred times by now. McMurphy, smoking a cigarette, takes his free hand and reaches behind himself for me, rubbing along his space on the bed, searching for a piece of me. I didn’t say a thing, just extended my arm and placed a hand over his, and his movements stilled. He was slowly nursing that cigarette, cradling it close to his mouth like it’d up and leave him any second. Disappear from this world if it had the choice.
I let my thumb run across his hand, feeling the dryness of his skin and the calloused knuckles of his fingers. Take in the texture of his skin that rubs off on my fingerprints. I feel him tense up on me when my fingers slide up his hand and to his wrist, wrapping my hand around it and just feeling up and down. The bumps, the unevenness, the new skin versus the old. The damaged skin and tissue. I tried not to think about how funny I looked as I scooted forward in the bed and leaned my head forward to give the front of his wrist a kiss. He wasn’t looking at me, so it didn’t count. I could do it as much as I pleased.
McMurphy coughed a little. He turned his upper body a bit so I could flip his hand over and kiss the underside of his wrist, the bottom of his forearm. Closed, flattened lips gliding along all the imperfections on him. His shoulders began to shiver a bit, and he leaned to his side and snuffed out the cigarette in the ashtray on his end table; he always got the end table with the ashtray.
I glance up and I see him turn around, and there’s a smile, a smile on his face. His eyes are still tired, but there’s some semblance of happiness in them.
I kept my hand floating in the air for a bit while he laid down on his side, back to me, and adjusted himself before lying still. My hand fell and slipped underneath his arm, pressing against his side. That magic touch. If I dug my fingers in hard enough I could feel the ridges where his ribs would be. But I didn’t. I only listened to him exhale in the way he does when he starts to get excited.
“Hey,” he mumbled to me, his voice light. I could sense he was still smiling, wider now. I heard it in his voice. I let my hand slide down, over his stomach and up his chest, and planted my palm against it, fingers splayed out over the whole thing. Bdmp, bdmp , bdmp… his heart was going, and I felt my hand begin to burn from the feeling of his heart bashing into it. McMurphy said nothing about it, only rubbed his legs together like a cricket and laid his arm on top of mine, following my position and placing his hand atop mine that was on his chest. I inched closer and pulled him further into me. Hips to hips, back to midsection. He didn’t mean nothing by it, only as a mean joke when he subtly ground himself against my hips. I tried to keep myself quiet by busying my mouth with him.
I could tell he was holding back a laugh when I gave a little peck behind his ear, and it tickled him. He tried to bury his face into his pillow to hide his grin. I got to thinking he was feeling a little better.
I licked my lips, they were a bit dry, and reached over and pulled on the string of the lamp. It turned off with a klik and left the both of us in darkness.
Bdmp … bdmp… bdmp…
“Chief.” His voice was low like we was still in the Ward and he didn’t want us getting caught. Caught like this, God! That’d be something. They’d have strung us up and beat us for sure. Make an example of us.
Before all of this, I’d think McMurphy would’ve found a way to wiggle out of the binds and help me escape, all the while puffing out his chest and telling everyone “ Well, they won’t get me, no sir! And they won’t get my —“ I shook my head, hair falling in my face— “ they won’t get Chief here, either! I’ll tell you what, this is what they get for bunchin’ all these birds together. What do they expect? A man’s gonna get bored. A man’s gotta ex perience .” And that’d be McMurphy. RP McMurphy, not a care in the world and not giving a damn about what anyone else thinks of him.
I could see his red hair in front of me, even in the darkness. I made out his faint shape.
Now I think we’d just hang there together, strung up, and he’d look at me bleeding and look at himself bruised, and he wouldn’t be able to work up the nerve to say anything. We’d swing, we’d sway, and I’d have to convince McMurphy to look at me. And he’d have that same exhausted look on his face that he gets when he enters that place in his mind that brings him down. I wondered if that place looked anything like mine.
I have to make the effort to not start rocking back and forth right where I’m laying.
“Yeah?” I finally answered.
Bdmp bdmp bdmp…
“I want to go somewhere.”
I figured he wanted to leave. Maybe we stayed here too long, and he was getting bored. Or someone around here said something to him and he wanted to wise up and get going before something bad happened. That was all it was. “Yeah, Mac?”
“Let’s go somewhere, Chief,” he told me again.
I couldn’t help pressing my lips against the back of his neck, humming and letting my voice my breathing brush along his skin. I noticed a couple moles on the back of his neck; I’d forgotten they were there, usually hidden by parts of his hair. “We can go anywhere you wanna go.”
Bdmpbdmpbdmp—
That got him going.
“Let’s find a nice place, then. We can keep driving, and then at some point, we’ll stop at some fine town, and I’ll look at you and go ‘ boy, Chief, this place sure is nice, ain’t it? ’ You’d stand there, arms crossed, humming and hawing, and I’d go ‘c’mon, Chief, it ain’t that bad! Let’s settle down for a little bit.’ And it can be someplace where we can go fishin’, and you can do whatever you wanna do. And—”
He begins to turn in my grip, and I can’t touch him anymore, can’t feel his heart no more, ‘cause he’s turned over now and looking right at me. He’s looking into my eyes and they’re wide and his brow furrowed and nose crinkled like he’s thinking so hard about all of this that his brain could short circuit. I have my hands in front of me and he has his hand on my bicep, digging his nails in. I don’t mean for it but my eyes narrow and I start to piece everything together.
Settle… “Mac—”
“And we can—”
Settle down? “Mac.” He stops talking for long enough I can get a word out. “You wanna stay someplace?”
He huffs at me. “Maybe. Yes. Chrissakes, let me finish.” He starts to unbutton his pants and slides out of them, pulling them off his legs and kicking them off onto the floor. It’s getting warm at night, so he lays back down without moving any of the blankets. “We could rent a room somewhere. Just a room; we don’t need anything big.”
My eyes dart off to the corner, and my voice thrums in my throat. “No, we don’t.”
“It’s just us, after all,” he reasoned.
I closed my eyes. “Mmhmm.”
“You’ll think about it, won’t you? I mean, if you’d like to.”
I put my hand back to his other side, and he molded into my touch. “‘Course, Mac.”
He stopped talking after that, probably thought I fell asleep. I didn’t, I just had to think about everything he said. Everything he wanted to do; the fishing, the room, the talking, the “humming and hawing”. It got my heart beating fast. I laid there faking it and listened to him breathe for a long while, but I never heard him get up that whole night.
I woke up to his singing. Proud singing while he washed off his toothbrush and let the sink run. I sat up in bed and scratched at my shoulder. He came out of the bathroom, already dressed for the day and his hat rested top his head. He held his toothbrush and toothpaste in one hand and took one look at me sitting in bed and gave me a genuine grin, a grin that only McMurphy could do.
“Mornin’, Chief,” he said to me. I sat there and bent my legs, resting my forearms across my knees. He cleared his throat, tugging on the brim of his cap. “Say, uh, about last night. I don’t really know what got into me, I was just sayin’ all sorts a crazy stuff. So, you can forget about it, you know?”
My head quirked over to the side and I smiled at him. I sort of knew what he was doing. I understood him a bit, the things you say but don’t really want to say when you get in a mood like that. At the same time, just thinking about what he said got my whole body feeling light.
“I don’t know, Mac. I’ve been thinking about it.”
His eyes light up and he looks away and lets out a nervous-sounding laugh, lowering his head so I can’t get a clear view of his face. “Oh, yeah? Huh. Alright.” Even hiding his face, his ears are turning a cute little vivid red, as red as his hair. “Then you, uh, keep thinking about it, then. Fine with me.”
I ain’t gonna tell him, but I checked the map we bought a while back while he was busy packing our bags into the car, and we’re coming up on a nice town long a river. It’s not too much of a drive from here to there, if I checked the measurements right, and I figure if it’s a nice-looking town I can hint at him some. Ask him if he likes the place. I’m hoping that we could walk down the sidewalk and pass a well-off house with a sign saying there’re rooms for rent, and I can stop and stand in front of it and cross my arms, and hum like I’m thinking to myself. Just like he wants. I’m already shaking, no idea how he’ll react to any of that, but it’s worth trying.