One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest / Пролетая над гнездом кукушки. Книга для чтения на английском языке

Failures, we are – feeble, stunted, weak little creatures in a weak little race. Rabbits, sans whambam; a pathetic notion.”

“Wait a minute; you keep twistin’ what I say – ”

“No. You were right. You remember, it was you that drew our attention to the place where the nurse was concentrating her pecking? That was true. There’s not a man here that isn’t afraid he is losing or has already lost his whambam. We comical little creatures can’t even achieve masculinity in the rabbit world, that’s how weak and inadequate we are.

Hee. We are – the rabbits, one might say, of the rabbit world!”

He leans forward again, and that strained, squeaking laugh of his that I been expecting begins to rise from his mouth, his hands flipping around, his lace twitching.

“Harding! Shut your damned mouth!”

It’s like a slap. Harding is hushed, chopped off cold with his mouth still open in a drawn grin, his hands dangling in a cloud of blue tobacco smoke. He freezes this way a second; then his eyes narrow into sly little holes and he lets them slip over to McMurphy, speaks so soft that I have to push my broom up right next to his chair to hear what he says.

“Friend… you… may be a wolf.”

“Goddammit, I’m no wolf and you’re no rabbit. Hoo, I never heard such – ”

“You have a very wolfy roar.”

With a loud hissing o: breath McMurphy turns from Harding to the rest of the Acutes standing around. “Here; all you guys. What the hell is the matter with you? You ain’t as crazy as all this, thinking you’re some animal.

”

“No,” Cheswick says and steps in beside McMurphy. “No, by God, not me. I’m not any rabbit.”

“That’s the boy, Cheswick. And the rest of you, let’s just knock it off. Look at you, talking yourself into running scared from some fifty-year-old woman. What is there she can do to you, anyway?”

“Yeah, what?” Cheswick says and glares around at the others.

“She can’t have you whipped.

She can’t burn you with hot irons. She can’t tie you to the rack. They got laws about that sort of thing nowadays; this ain’t the Middle Ages. There’s not a thing in the world that she can – ”

“You s-s-saw what she c-can do to us! In the m-m-meeting today.” I see Billy Bibbit has changed back from a rabbit. He leans toward McMurphy, trying to go on, his mouth wet with spit and his face red. Then he turns and walks away. “Ah, it’s n-no use.