AN: This work engages in canon-typical depictions of struggles with mental health for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Therefore, if you feel you would be disturbed by depictions of suicide and mental health treatments from the 1960s, this fic may not be for you. This concept came about during discussion with a friend that Jason has distinct Randle McMurphy vibes, and Willie has distinct Billy Bibbit vibes. I felt it might be a good way to explore how these two characters share such a close bond that they never explain to anyone else.
i. The bet
I eyeball the kid perched on the industrial basin. He's fixed me with this entirely too sincere look, like this malarkey plan I have sketched out wasn't hatched on the fly, largely for my own amusement and bravado. How many times have I come up slightly better on a bet than I started out in the evening, with enough of a whopper of a tale to ratchet up the disbelief. The boy doesn't know this yet. It isn't an obstacle, just a momentary pause.
He's skinny. The kid is entirely too skinny. He looks years younger than he is, and it does something to my heart that I hadn't been prepared to face walking through these decrepit doors. I'd expected palaver and bullshitting, sure, but not to be faced with a kid whose blue eyes swallow up his face and a good helping of unwarranted concern. And ribs. Those ribs swooping across the thin stripe of his side, the fabric of the t-shirt worn so thin I can see the knobs of the bone rise and fall with his breath.
He could snap in half if I held him the slightest bit wrong. He reminded me of a bird. A sick bird. I anchored my hands around his ribs, feeling my fingers span around to his back, and his eyebrows lift the smallest bit, like he realizes I'm not going to be swayed. His heart beats under my fingers, and I lower him to the ground, till I feel his feet touch the cold tiles. I turn back to the basin.
"Watch this, lads," I say, and spit into my palms, a ghost of a habit to bring me luck. In the corner of my eye, I watch the boy fold into himself, crossing his skinny arms over the hollow drum of his chest, watching me. I fold my arms around the basin, drop to my haunches, and pull.
ii. The dance
He wants to learn how to dance. I slide a glimmer of a smile on my mouth, weirdly touched that the boy doesn't know. Where has he been all these years?
He tells me snippets. In the main room, with the streaky tile under our feet, and the smell of men and disinfectant clouding the air, he tells me snippets that remind me of me in ways. How he fought the law, but to such desperate lengths to remain free they settled him here. He tells me how he'd rather die than see sunlight behind bars, and told the prison doctor as much after they peeled him off the floor of his cell. His head is level with my chest as he mumbles part of a story, and I pick up one of his hands, thin and pale and bony in the anemic light, and ghost a hand around the small of his back.
His head jerks up, his blue eyes flashing with uncertainty, a touch of fear, and I grin at him. I can't help it. He looks more like a girl at her first dance than a boy. I tell him that making room for Jesus is for suckers, and if it's to feel a girl he wants, to bring her close. I pull his hips closer to me, and for a second I feel the knobs of his hips graze below mine. He feels like the men in the camp, an unwelcome association, but all too place is painted with the underpinnings of the Chinese camp, the stark fear and total helplessness. The only thing lacking is that the orderlies don't have guns and speak passable English.
"Willie my boy," I say, the cadence of my tone the mirror of my father and uncles, the boys back at home, as I rock Willie back and forth in the ghost of a dance, "Just hold off on doin' yourself in until you've held a girl in your arms, a'right?"
He flushes scarlet and directs that blue gaze past my shoulder, but he doesn't try to pry himself out of my grip. I laugh, knowing I've saved his soul with the promise of, well... something soft and lovely. "That's a good lad." I pat the small of his back lightly, and for a second, he relaxes in my grip, like a child who's being comforted by a parent. I remember the Chinese camp again, and he doesn't fight me when I pull him closer to me. I don't remember gripping him as though in a death embrace, but one of the orderlies peels us apart.
iii. The incident
Christmas dawns entirely too bright and ugly to be Christian. I haven't sat mass for Christmas since the war, and that was only to avoid extra duty. Rather sat in a cold, drafty tent than fire watch. I've since lost the appetite to honor the holiday, or really any other, in any substantial way. The morphine cough syrup mingled with the port wine was plenty celebratory, in my own estimation.
There's as much commotion as the war. There are men draped over the linoleum of the floor, as though we're a casualty ward. Good. Good for us. And serves those tight bastards right, the sullen glances of the orderlies, the tap tap tap of the nurse's heels as she stares her cold, dead stare out from that rigid mask of a face.
My hazy appreciation of the chaos I've helped wreak is dampened by the orderlies rousting me from my spot on the couch. But my blood freezes when I hear the boy's stuttering words, marked with sobs, like the ding of a lone buoy off the shore of some vast, implacable sea.
I look over, trying to sharpen my eyes from their narcotic haze, and see his wretched, tapering form half kneeling on the floor. Abject. Groveling. My mind transposes another cold, bright morning, a soldier wearing the rotten tatters of his rags, begging before the upright form of a Chinese soldier, his gaze upon the towhead below him remarkably like the nurse's I see now.
"P-p-puh-please-" His stutter is so bad he's nearly incoherent. He's shirtless, and the pallor of his skin is the brightest thing around us, tinged only by the ugly red of the flush creeping from his face as he weeps. The thin white scars on his forearms are whiter still.
The nurse tells him she has no choice but to inform the jail warden that he had been involved with a near escape attempt. Her voice is the hardness of a schoolmarm, with the cruelty of an executioner. He crumples with the force of a sob, those thin ribs arcing in on themselves like he's been blown to pieces.
I can't breathe. I can't breathe and I can't move, as I watch this boy get torn apart before my eyes. He lifts a hand and cracks it against his face with a sound that makes me jump, like he's trying to summon the righteousness of God himself to strike him down.
An orderly wraps his hands around the boy's arms and drags him to the doctors office as he weeps, a sound so disconsolate that I feel what's left of my breath get pulled from my chest.
A flat gray haze seems to settle around me, and I can't move while it arrests me, while I watch the men muddle around me, while I listen to the nurse snap orders. The scene is shattered like a window when I hear the scream of the younger nurse.
I draw in a breath, the first I've managed since watching the boy get keelhauled, a reflexive, mechanical thing as though my body has realized it's still alive. My feet move of their own accord to the cluster of men at the doctor's door, and I push between two to look, to see the streamers of arterial crimson etched down the walls like so much tinsel.
There is an expanding puddle of red forming around the boy's blonde head, like the halo of a bloody saint. His blue eyes had been jittering across the ceiling, but they dive to me, and hold me whole, sightless. There is nothing in his eyes. They are almost ecstatic with a frenzied fear that I recognize. I am transfixed with his gaze, a dawning horror and despair bubbling up in the bottom of my chest.
I watch as he takes a strange, spasmodic breath, another jet of warm blood spills from that thin neck, and it fills the air with a sickly sweet copper. One hand is over his head, two fingers extended like a saint in benediction, the other two curled around a jagged shard of glass. His legs are twisted under him, feet pulled together like he's been crucified, peeking out from below his too-long pants. He's solved his freedom problem; if he can't stay from behind bars, he won't stay alive.
I have to do something. We're all stood around, staring at the boy, and no one is doing anything. I can't hear anything, not the men, not the nurses, not the orderlies. But I seem to be able to hear the blood hitting the linoleum.
I am on my knees beside the boy, the warmth of his blood soaking my pants and coating my skin, and I wrap one hand around his neck like I watched the medics do on the frontlines, and clamp my hand against the wound. His eyes have found me, dim and wondering. He isn't afraid anymore, but that in a way has hammered the fear more into my soul. "Open your eyes," I hiss at him, and he bats his eyes, like a tired child trying to fight sleep. "Open your eyes," I say again, and this time I hear the pleading in my own voice, a sob drawn into words.
The blood has soaked into the back of his head, making the mess of his blond hair framing his face a strange arc of gold. His face is white, the white of the dead, and I choke on a breath I cannot draw in, the agony of this bending me over his form. "Willie, stay awake," I say, and my voice is thin as glass.
I cannot lift my hand when I feel them surround me. Even as the doctor has appeared by the boy's head with a pack of gauze, and I feel the orderlies yanking at my arms, my back, I cannot move. It is only through force they remove me from my station, and my hand slips from his neck, and I watch another sluggish trickle of blood spilling across his skin.
That's it, I think, He's dead, as they drag me out of the room. His eyes are fixed on nothing, wide and glassy, and it is the last image of him I have before the edge of the door eclipses my view.
I don't remember much of that morning. In fact, I don't remember anything except for sitting numbly in the main room, staring at my hands, which at some point had been cleaned of the boy's blood. I kept turning them over, looking at the nails and the creases of my palms for some sign that I had tried to stem the tide of that boy's life as it ebbed out of him.
It was like nothing had happened. It was as though Willie Loomis had never existed, for all that anyone was acting about his not being there.
He's gone for a week. His name passes no one's lips. The murmur and din of meals, of the circle sessions, wash through my ears like the sound of the tide. The errant thought to wrap my hands around that woman's neck inches into my mind in idle moments, the whisper of a devil promising indistinct rewards if only I choke the life out of her.
I never seem to be able to get past the initial urge. I fear they've added something to the cocktail they're slipping me. They've become vigilant about me swallowing the pills in front of them rather than letting me cart them off and squirrel them away.
He comes back to the ward in a winter evening, right before lights out. He's wheeled in on a chair, and my breath stops in my throat when I catch sight of his form. He's thinner than he was, in a way that pulls at my heart. His eyes have sunk into his skull, and through the open neck of his shirt, I can see the architecture of his collarbones in stark relief, the orderly stack of his sternum rising to meet it.
He rises, wobbles slightly before the attending orderly, not one of the men on our floor, steadies him with a hand on his back. Willie steps awkwardly away from the chair, fingers touching the frame as he makes his way around it, and he more collapses than sits on the bed. The orderly bundles his legs up onto the mattress, resettles him as though he were a bag rather than a man, and then wheels the empty chair out.
No one says a word. Sitting up in bed, I can see across the room to Willie's form, which hasn't moved. I see the fabric of his shirt rise and fall with his breathing. I cast my blankets away from me, moving through the deafening silence of the bay. The urge to touch him, to feel the warmth of his skin, the bound of his blood, the brush of his breath is overwhelming. I need to know the boy is alive, that he's real, that I haven't invented this entire apparition, conjured from my own guilt.
I have stolen to the edge of his bedside, my fingers hovering just barely over his bedclothes. His eyes meet mine in the half dark of the ward. A barest twitch of a smile curls at the corners of his lips, but it doesn't reach his eyes.
Willie's chuckle is tinged horrifically with a crackle of pneumonia, and he coughs as he whispers, "I guess the Epiphany was right after all." I just manage to stifle a laugh, and I know then I'm resolved to get this boy out of this place.
"Sacrilegious little shit," I whisper, laughing, and sit gingerly on the patch of bed made by the hollow of his belly, half turned as he is on his side. "I was sure you died, kiddo." I cannot mask the unexpected grief in my voice, forcing my voice into a rasping, thin sound that mingles with the rumble of his breathing.
Another hint of a smile, a tad bitter. "Was sure I did, too." He swallows, smacking his mouth against what I know to be the medicated dryness of whatever ungodly combination they have him hooked up on. "Didn't… didn't wanna go back to jail," he says simply, and I feel a jolt of pity lance my heart. He's too young to realize the staying power of perseverance and patience, how you can wait out a prison, but you have to conquer your fear of being trapped. You can survive a prison; you can't survive your fear of it.
I put my hand on his head in a semblance of a pat, flattening the unruly curves of hair. His face crumples unexpectedly, the line of his mouth pulling in to stop his lips from trembling, and those huge eyes slam shut, trying and failing to stop the tears from sliding down the bones of his face. I realize then he had been surviving on the last thread of his own apathy, and it was the unexpected kindness that broke him. Jesus.
I'm climbing into the bed behind him before I realize what I'm doing, arching to crab walk over his body and settle my chest against his back. He smells of lye soap and clothes that haven't been washed in days, but it's somehow comforting to me, as though this last bit of detail is what affirms I'm not imagining him.
Willie doesn't stiffen or shift, merely allows me to wrap my arms around his chest and belly. My hands cannot stay themselves, and I find them briefly touching his forehead, the skin above the pack of dressing on his neck. After a few moments of this, I settle for pressing his shoulder against my chest, firm enough so I can feel the bony outlines of his shoulder blades, and more horrifyingly the ribs through his back pressing against my stomach.
He's so thin. He could break, like a branch in a storm.
He drifts off to sleep like that, but I wait until I know the night watch changes for the day watch, sleepless. I steal back to my own bed when I hear Turkle shuffling around in the staff room, the clang of doors and the rattle of keys.
iv. The treatment
It was a few weeks after that it happened. I can't remember the instigating incident. It was probably a slow accumulation of things, as it always was in that fucking place. Death by a thousand tiny fucking cuts, while you're in your tenth round and they finally pull out the knockout punch.
And of course, it was the kid who stood up for me. Perhaps stood up for is too meager a way to put it. He's incandescent with rage, and I suspect he's been harboring a certain amount of resentment that they've managed to keep him alive. I'm just the rough patch he used to light his own fuse.
Perhaps I'm still resentful of them myself, as well. Not for keeping him alive, but for dangling the prospect of damnation in front of him, and then giving him the knife to cut his own throat. For proclaiming themselves a place to heal the sick, they were doing a piss poor job of it. Devils work in all disguises and all that, I suppose.
I just remember the satisfaction that washed through me when the impact of my knuckles slammed on the orderly's chin, dropping him like a sack of potatoes. It's near instantaneous that I feel another set of arms behind me, grappling and contorting my arms to pressure me to the ground, another orderly barking and cursing as he struggles to control me. I'm working my way to free myself of him when I hear Willie's loud, indignant cry, a street cry that could cut clear across rumbling traffic. Past the ring of feet that has formed around us, in my field of vision I see one pair fight their way through the ring and dart past me.
Willie is cursing and yelling incoherently, and I feel the weight of the orderly lessen abruptly, enough for me to dive forward and wriggle away. I flipped onto my back to see that Willie has latched onto the orderly's arms, straining backward to pull him off.
Our moment of victory is snuffed out almost instantly, as a couple more orderlies dogpile us, and we're strapped into a padded leather belly strap, yoked to each other. When Willie spits, "What, no chains?" I'm reminded that he'd spent some time in jail himself. Ratched, standing above us like some monolith, her calm, pale face as immovable as porcelain, shakes her head minutely, dismissing and disapproving of our chaos.
We have no idea what's happening as they wrench us out of the Acute ward, bundling us off to another section of the hospital. It's Willie who gets the first inkling, and he starts bucking against his restraints and swearing, balking like cattle unwilling to go to slaughter. He gets an unceremonious blow to the small of his back, which makes him cry out and nearly pitch to the ground, almost dragging me with him.
"Lay off him, for Chrissakes," I snap, stumbling and leaning while the orderly snatches the boy back up. "It wasn't so long ago you fuckers nearly killed him, you want to give it a second go?"
"Shut the fuck up, McGuire," one of the ordlerlies says, and we're both hauled through a door set into the bars across the hallway and deposited roughly onto a bench. The men in this section are different from the Acute ward. I see a few huddled in corners or lying on the floor, while most of the others mill about, aimless, eyes blank.
"Where the fuck are we," I grind out, struggling against the leather straps. "The dunce's corner?"
Willie scoffs a laugh, and as he arcs against his own bonds, I see the hunk of scar tissue on his neck where he'd carved into his throat. It stretches with his movement and I'm weirdly suddenly panicked it'll split open again. Even as I try to placate him, muttering softly, "Settle down, boy, settle down," he spits at no one, "We're in fuckin' Disturbed."
For a second, I have no idea what he's talking about, the word not making sense for a place, but an echo of a memory rises, one of the other men warning me about being labeled Hostile and being sent for corrective therapy in Disturbed. I sigh in disgust, slumping slightly against my bonds. Who knows what tedious shit they'll do to me here. I flash a look at Willie, who's warring between anger and fear, the former more constant since he tried sincerely to kill himself. I hush him again, this time the wordless sound of a parent shushing their child. If nothing else, his own fear is starting to worry me.
"Settle down now, lad," I cajole, darting my eyes around what I could see of the ward, but still not understanding what's provoked the boy's fear. Then the strangest thing happens. I listen to the distant clump of a man's shoes strike the linoleum, different from the bare feet or the slippers of the patients, or the crepe soles of the nurses or orderlies. The footfalls strike a discordant note in the mass of men around us, and they creep into corners and unseen rooms as the footsteps near. I see a doctor, sans white coat but imbued with the arrogance and unconcern of his station, stride past us into a nearby room.
A small nurse comes by with a tray littered with small cups. "Take these, gentlemen," she pipes as she places the rattling cups in our hands. I see an assortment of pills I don't recognize. I'm tempted to ignore her, but she stands there patiently and waits until both of us have swallowed them, and then another attendant has us both stand and shuffle into the room the doctor had gone into.
The room is cramped from staff and equipment, the doctor fussing over some console with dials and switches, with two orderlies stationed at either ends of a bed. I flash a grin at the nurse to show her this doesn't phase me, and airily suggest the orderlies take a smoke break. Beside me, Willie whimpers like a kicked dog, and I cut a glance over to him to see any anger he's held onto has been washed away by abject terror. I've seen that look before, when a man knows he's about to be tortured.
It's an association so immediate and so compelling I'm almost shocked. His eyes are fixed on the bed, hands balled up in fear, and he flinches when they reach between us to unhook his straps from me, gradually tearing us apart.
He's so afraid that he barely moves as the orderlies push him toward the bed, but their effortless handling of a human body sees that Willie is pushed and prodded forward, crumpling him at his hips so he sits on the bed, then sliding him flat, anchoring a small pillow at the base of his spine.
I'm more confused than anything; who knows what bizarre form of therapy they'll enact on us. Pelt us with questions until we break down crying? Maybe they have him lying flat because that's the best way to administer a bolus of whatever godawful cocktail they're going to jam into our veins. Whatever I had envisioned, it wasn't what happened. Nothing could have prepared me for what happened. I hadn't seen anything like that since the Chinese prison camp.
I watch as they strap down his legs, putting his arms into a new set of padded restraints. The small nurse has taken up a station behind Willie's head, as she dabs some clear goo on either sides of his temples. His eyes, which had been boring holes into the ceiling cut for a moment to me, and then flick away again. I watch a spasm of fear go through him. "Don't worry," murmurs one of the attendants, putting a large hand above Willie's knee and patting his leg. "We're not gonna hurt you."
The doctor finally speaks, first to the nurse to ask if she's finished, and then briefly to Willie when he says, "This will be over in a moment, you won't remember a thing." I watch, apprehensive, as the doctor takes some kind of metal prong, two wads of cotton stuck on the ends, and affixes it to either side of Willie's head. The nurse slides a massive rubber guard into Willie's mouth, and maybe it's the familiar allusion to boxers that finally makes me realize what's going to happen. I listen to the boy gag around the size of the guard, hum in distress around it. The nurse clamps her hand around Willie's narrow jaw, her other hand hovering in the air over Willie's forehead, above the metal prong.
"Ready?" asks the doctor, and the attendants and nurse affirms. I hear him flip a switch, and a sound is wrenched out of the boy like someone has yanked it from the bottom of his belly. His face clamps into a grimace, and then the life cuts from him like a marionette's strings. His eyes slide back into his head, and a full body jutter suffuses him. Terrible gulping sounds emit around the gag, in tandem with the sudden, rhythmic jerks that ripple across his frame. He twists like a drowning man, even under the restraints, his arms rising off the bed, and I watch him drown through my own haze of fear. The men around him have their hands on him, pressing down on the jerking limbs, the rise of a shoulder, pressing him back under the depths of the fit. Finally, it seems to taper off, and he is contorted in an angle I have seen in bodies washed up on shores. The nurse deftly turns his head to the side, pulling out the gag and putting a pack of gauze by his mouth. "Help him," the doctor says, and I realize suddenly that the boy isn't breathing. The orderly by his shoulders places his hands across the bottom of Willie's chest, pushing and squeezing until I see the boy's chest hitch in a ragged breath. His eyes are still back in his head, and I want nothing more than to approach him and say his name, touch him and make sure he's alive.
"You can take him out," says the doctor, and I suddenly remember the fear of the men in the hallway, the way they crept into doors and huddled against walls. The orderlies remove the bed, and Willie along with it, his body slumped in a laxity I've never seen.
I want to curse them, but my mouth is too dry to summon words. I feel an orderly freeing me from the restraints we'd been brought in with, and I'm a hair's breadth away from knocking him on his ass. Another bed is spirited in, and I sit on it and swing my legs up without their aid. I'm almost vibrating with rage as they strap me down, and I meet the nurse's eyes as she places another gag into my mouth. She blinks at me placidly, either ignoring or not seeing my misplaced rage. The goo is dabbed on my head, and somehow this only deepens my anger. I can hear myself breathing deeply through my nose, like I'm in respite during my third round in the ring, like I'm waiting for the stick of the Chinese prison guard to come down on my back.
The boy wasn't used to this. I am.
I realize, then, that was why I was angry. They're torturing a sick kid, so frightened of the world he'd rather take himself out of it than wait for whatever hideous shit it had in mind for him. I bite against the guard, feeling the muscles in my jaw ache.
I hear the doctor say, "This will be over in a moment." The padded prongs loom over my head, and I feel them touch my temples. I would rip them all to pieces, if I could.
"Ready?"
"Yes," says the nurse.
The switch flips.
v. The escape
I know that they're never going to let the either of us go of their own accord. It's a fact that's been made plainer with each passing hour of every day, and so I've put my mind to discovering how in fact we're going to leave this shit storm of a place. I've plenty of contacts in Oregon, enough men to harangue an overworked medical staff until they release me out of fatigue. But the boy makes it more difficult.
At some point over the passing weeks, they give me visiting privileges again. Which was a fair sight better than it had been, I'd been keen simply to get mail privileges after they split my skull open by the touch of God himself. The boy had had more sessions than I over the weeks, a fact that did not escape me and only served to compound my steadily mounting rage. But what the staff failed to realize was that I could indeed bide my time; that while for all the world my criminal record made it seem I had no more the self control of a wild dog, this was more of a choice than an aspect of my nature. I could wait. Until I decided I wanted to dismantle the bloody place brick by brick.
I meet with an old buddy of mine, a Ned Calder, who crewed a freighter with me after the war, who's flexible enough in his morals to not care quite so much about the legality or ethics of extracting me from this place, so long as he's promised a fair enough recompense. I have plans for this, I tell him, my breath streaming out in the cold winter air, as we talk through the fence of the yard. Calder's eyes cut left and right, regarding the wandering men around me, and I see the doubt in his gaze. I've a friend coming with me, I tell him, and he squints up at the sky for a minute before he nods. "Alright," he says. "I've a plan."
I can't stop the grin on my face. "Which is?"
Calder grins back. "You'll be seeing me. Gotta get a few guys together, first. You got a time frame this needs to happen?"
"At your leisure, my good friend." I send him a flourish of my hand through the fence, and he snorts.
"Well, the next ship to South America departs in two weeks. I can get you and your friend spots on it. Is he, uh… he screwy?" He mimics a circle next to his head, eyeing me through the links.
I shake my head. "No more than any other bastard on those ships."
Calder shrugs. "Good enough. And uh, don't tell your friend. The less people who know about this, the better."
It would be for the better indeed. Willie is looking worse by the half-week; the last thing I wanted was to promise him freedom, only for us to be anchored here even more firmly. His skin has taken on a yellowish cast that I'm not sure is from the medication or something else, and his eyes have gone cloudy. He still smiles when I make jabs during the circle meetings, but he's all but silent now. It worries me. It reminds me of the silence where he lay in a pool of his own blood, just that maybe it took him a longer time to die.
Our departure is entirely unexpected. I'd told my pal that my mail was being read, so it's not like we can arrange a playdate beforehand. So when a group of men in state police uniforms and a medico looking fella shows up at the hospital, I don't realize right away they're here for me and Willie.
We're summoned to Dr. Spivey's office, where another older, rheumy looking gent sniffs and introduces himself as Dr. Langmore, and he's the consulting doctor to transport us to a nearby county jail where we're going to be transferred. Right away, I see the spark in Willie's eyes go out, and they turn as flat and opaque as the windows of a house. He only crumples a little further in his chair, his chin settling on his chest, and sputters in the persistent cough he hasn't been able to shake since December. He doesn't speak another word, or look at anyone.
This Langmore fella calls in one of the officers, and I nearly cackle when I recognize a guy from the freighter crew. He casts an unimpressed eye over me, nods at the doctor when he's told to produce the necessary paperwork, and hands over a sheaf of papers that look and smell so official I'm almost concerned.
Dr. Spivey glances over the papers with some consternation, but seems to realize everything is in order. There's a notarized court order and everything, and the vagaries of the justice system are neither for him nor anyone to guess. He signs the papers releasing us, and Langmore tells my docker-turned-cop pal to escort us out to the transport.
We're even strapped in joined chains, to add some dramatic and somber flair to the effect, I suspect, and shuffled out to an unmarked van. I resist the urge to elbow our escorts in the ribs and hoot, and once I'd been shoveled into the back of the van, I turn to help the guys mount Willie into the back. My crewmate climbs in the back with us, seats us on the built in bench, which seems more adequate for a maintenance crew than a prison bus. Hopefully none of the hospital staff will give enough of a fuck to come out and cast professional doubts on the suitability of our chariot.
Willie resumes his boneless slump on the bench, but his fingers are playing with the chain like he's itching to wrap it around his neck, and every once in a while, he digs his nails ferociously into the skin of his wrists. I wince at this and reach over to close his hands in one of mine, to still their abuse, and when he finally looks up to meet my gaze, I give him a wink. He blinks at me, slowly, almost uncomprehendingly, but I see something pass behind his eyes, far back in his mind.
Through the back window, I can see Langmore walking up the drive, back to our van, the other two officers with him. They seem unbothered, unhurried, when for all the world I want for nothing more than for them to break into a run, and we all go peeling out of the hospital driveway like we'd pulled off a daring heist, rather than breaking out a pair of hoodlums.
One of the officers opens the back door and climbs in the back with us, while the other officer and Langmore climb into the front. "All good?" My crewmate squints at his compatriot in the half gloom of the van. Finally, as the van's engine turns over and sputters into life, the other "officer" breaks into a wide grin and starts to laugh. "They didn't suspect a fucking thing."
My crewmate and I break into stifled laughter as the van pulls away, out onto the road. The laughter rouses Willie enough to look up from his lap, passing a glance between the other officers and me.
"Willie, m'lad," I say, and clap a hand on his leg. "I told you I would get you out of that shite." We are far enough away from the hospital that I'm not concerned when Langmore even joins in the laughter, Willie still glancing around him dazedly.
"You owe us, McGuire," the other 'officer' gripes as he leans over and begins unlocking the chains with a key from his belt. "I'm told you've got treasures smuggled away in the Shanghai tunnels, so I expect to be richly rewarded for this ass-ache."
I shake the chains from my wrists and turn to pull them off Willie. "And so you shall," I assure him. "After my brief vacation in that resort, I'm more than happy to resume my evil ways."
My crewmate snorted. "I'll bet you are. There's no widow safe within a fifty mile radius, with you out on the town. Calder's told me about some of your antics in Maine."
It was my turn to snort, even as I bent to untangle Willie's waist from the chains. He is still speechless, staring at me like I've grown another head. "And why're ye gawpin' now, Willie, haven't ye ever been broken out of a hospital by a gang of thugs before, lad," I ask airily, and this finally startles a high, almost hysterical laugh from the boy.
"Jason Fucking McGuire," he finally says, the astonishment in his tone so pleasing to me that I can't stop a broad grin from spreading over my face. I shook my finger at him in fake admonishment, cheerfully telling him, "I told ye, Willie. Stick with me, and I'd take care of ye, didn't I, now?" He sinks his head into his hands, and I can't fault him for crying, but to his credit, he comes apart absolutely silently. I rest a hand gently on the back of his neck, and look at the other men in the back of the van with me, whose faces are mixed between humor and pity.
"We've had a bit of a time of it, men," I disclaim as way of explanation. "But that's a story to be told while fifty miles off into the Pacific. And don't ye worry, you'll be paid before we've even shoved off."