Carry Me Home

by John M. Del Vecchio

  The man was cool, efficient, no-nonsense. He didn’t hide his disdain for inmates. He was not openly hostile. “I’ll fill out the paperwork,” he’d said curtly. “They’ll tell you when and where.”

  “No big thing though,” Ty insisted. “Right?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not.”

  They had returned him to work and no more was said for two days. But Ty was afraid. Both nights he masturbated, making sure the equipment worked. Day and night, every time he went to the can, he checked. Every time he’d told himself, it’s smaller. Every time he knew he was lying. He was appalled at how quickly it expanded. Six thirty Monday morning they took him from the unit to the holding cell, shackled him, then brought him from the prison to the county hospital.

  He waited. Waited. The guard remained, happy to be outside, away. Ty would have been happy, too, except for the waiting, the fear.

  A doctor examined him. As Ty dressed the doctor made a few notes in the new file. “Most guys get a little embarrassed,” the man said when he closed the file. “They’re reluctant to tell anyone. And seminoma is one of the fastest spreading of all cancers.”

  Cancer! “I got ...?” The word was like being hit with an AK round.

  The doctor held up a hand. “I’m not saying that. It could be something else. I want you to understand a few things. We know a lot about testicular cancer, if that’s what this is. For the most part they’re ninety-five percent curable if they’re caught in time. But a lot of men don’t say anything until it’s too la—”

  “I jus found it on Monday,” Ty blurted. “Really!”

  The doctor smiled. He was in his fifties, gray, sympathetic. “Yes. That’s good,” he said. “If you hadn’t done something about it, it could have spread into your lymphatic system and up into your abdomen. From there it can spread throughout your body. There’s a number of different types of testicular cancer but seminoma ...”

  “Sem-a-no-ma,” Ty repeated. He had his full attention on the doctor. His eyes were wide open. His entire mind was shifting—away from the prison, away from prison jargon, away too from roof-rat lingo, from junkie prattle.

  “Yes. It’s a cancer that strikes men between twenty-five and thirty-five. During World War Two there were an awful lot of GIs in that range. I forget the figure, one in a thousand men develop it. Something like that. You’re not an isolated case. They used to handle all of this at Walter Reed. In Washington, D.C.?”

  Ty nodded. The doctor continued. “One of the reasons why the survival rate is so high is they had almost an unlimited number of men to work on between, oh, I guess, 1941 and ’45. Or ’46. That’s why we know it hits between twenty-five and thirty-five. Usually at twenty-eight or twenty-nine.”

  “I—I’m only twenty-six,” Ty said.

  “It’s a matter of the maturity of your body,” the doctor explained. “Perhaps you were exposed to something when you were small. We’re not sure exactly. It may be caused by a very slow-acting virus that everyone’s exposed to at some point.”

  “Herpes?” Ty asked quietly. He thought of Golden Gate Park, of the white girl, of his finger.

  The doctor eyed him. “No,” he said. “Something else. If you’re susceptible, if you have the genetic tendency toward it, at a certain point in your maturation it manifests itself. The stimulus might be chemical instead of viral. We don’t truly know.”

  Late that afternoon Ty had been admitted to the hospital. Then he had been examined by a urologist who straightforwardly announced, “It’s either a benign tumor or cancer. It’s not an infection and it’s not likely to be a cyst. We’ll operate tomorrow.”

  “Why, look here, Honey. Look what we got here.” She is an old black woman, as old as his mother, older, bigger.

  “What that there?” Another old black woman. This one has a mop in a rectangular bucket of dirty water. The bucket has four little wheels, casters, at the corners. The second woman is pushing the bucket toward him. He is in bed. The bed is small, low to the ground. Compared to the women he is tiny. They stare down at him. “Some big stud, huh, Sugar?” the second woman says.

  “See what happen,” the first says. “Your motha never tell you ‘Don’t touch yo’self’?”

  The two women laugh. Ty is small. He is flat on his back, unable to rise. “You know what they gowina do ta this big stud?” The second woman cackles and the first joins her. “They got this big tool. Bigger en my mop here. They gon take that big ol Black ’n’ Decker pecker wrecker, they gon make him sing soprano.”

  “Oh.” The first woman titters. “Don’t you go scarin this boy now. Don’t you go eyein his privates.” She can’t hold back her guffaws. She rocks up and down over him, her hands flailing like a gospel singer.

  The second is laughing louder than the first, shrieking with glee. “He aint gowina have no privates.”

  “Fuck You!” he screamed. The anesthesia was wearing off. The morphine was inadequate. He was disoriented, paranoid. His arms were lashed, his legs restrained. There was an IV needle in his arm, and it hurt. His violent jouncing made the entire gurney tip. “I hate it,” he shouted. “They made me. I never done nothin. AaaahhH! OW!” The pain was immense. His entire abdomen hurt. It was worse than the through-and-through of his ass when he’d been shot.

  “You’re going to be all right,” the surgeon said. Ty had no idea who he was, where the voice was coming from. “We had to take it out,” the surgeon said. “It was cancerous.”

  Ty’s eyes flared. The pain was continuous. From the pain he knew they hadn’t just split the scrotum, snipped out the nut and closed him back up. They’d gone in from above. It felt like they’d gone in from his lungs. “I already paid, Mothafucka. Here ...” He tried to jerk his hand up, to show he’d paid a finger for a finger—but his arm was lashed flat. He twisted his head to show his ear, raised his lip to show his teeth.

  “How long has he been like this?” Doctor Fenton turned to the postop nurses.

  “Oh—” one checked her watch, “let’s see, they rolled him in at nine thirty. He came around the first time twenty minutes later, then drifted back out.”

  Fenton turned back to Ty, put his hand on Ty’s hand. “It’s three hours,” he said. “Most of the anesthesia should be out of your system.”

  Ty stared at him. He couldn’t have been angrier, more afraid. Incarcerated. Restrained. Mutilated. He twisted his hand, grabbed Fenton’s fingers. Snarled.

  “Ow! Hey! I’m the doctor.” He pulled his hand away.

  Now Ty was in an even deeper funk. “What’d you do?”

  “It’s called a radical inguinal dissection,” Fenton said. His voice was cold, that of an apathetic lecturer. “We took the testicle and all the lymph nodes on the left. To protect you from the spread of the malignancy. I’ll call on you when we’ve got the pathology report.”

  Ty’s postoperative recovery was quick. In a day the constant pain ceased, replaced by stabs anytime he coughed, sneezed, jarred his abdomen. In three days even that was tolerable. In a week he was back in prison, in two, back to his unit. He refused to talk about the operation. It was bad enough he had to shower—exposed, scars on his ass from Nam, now single hung—with seventy inmates, with a rotation of guards. His counselor, Billy Jo Trippan, Ph.D., wanted to know how it felt! What it meant! What changes Ty saw in himself! Fuck you, Billy Jo Bedpan. That was as far as Ty would go. Fuck you, all of you, he felt. I’m nothing. You control me totally. And I’m tired of this shit. They should of left me behind on Hamburger Hill.

  The ordeal was not over. From the lymphangiogram they—the doctors, the warden, the state, they owned his body as much as they had owned his body when he’d been in the army—decided the proper course of follow-up treatment was 30,000 roentgens of radiation—15,000 from the navel down, 15,000 from navel to larynx, to be delivered 1,000 per day five days per week for six weeks, with a two-week break between the first and second sets. Or was it a 15,000 roentgen bolt each time? He wasn’t certain and the doctors and technicians
weren’t into explanations. Again there was the fear, the leverage they used to prod him into acquiescence. “You’ve got a ninety percent chance of recovery,” he was told, “if you complete the series.”

  “You mean,” he’d countered, shy, concerned, revolted, all at once, “I’m either dead or alive.”

  “It might be higher. Probably ninety-five percent.”

  “That’s same-same fifty-fifty.” Ty hated them, hated this mealy mouthed probability shit. “Either you here or you aint.”

  The radiation treatment center was adjacent to the county hospital. On his first “visit” Ty was carefully, semipermanently, marked, diagramed, the graph pattern from the X-ray machine light traced onto his chest. Then he was zapped, ionized, irradiated, blasted, fried. No feeling. Little noise. Each time thereafter, it took only a minute to line him up, zap him, draw blood (to check his white-cell count), and send him back. The first zapping took place at eleven A.M., Monday, 1 August. By one o’clock he was ill. Not severely; he felt as if he’d eaten bad meat—something rotten from Fast-food Freddie’s or something typical from the prison kitchen. By three he was nauseous but there was nothing in his stomach to vomit. Then it passed and he felt fine, felt like he was finally getting over on the entire system because they’d brought him back to the prison and put him in a private cell next to the infirmary. By comparison it was almost like being in a motel. No one bothered him. He was excused from details, work calls.

  Tuesday was a repeat. And Wednesday. Leave early, get fried, return, get sick, do nothing, feel better, sleep. Except the “get sick” part got worse. By Thursday he was nearly broken. He had no idea how he could continue. He wandered about the cell, begged a guard to get him a book, some music, something to distract him. He lay down on the floor, piled blankets atop himself, focused on the ceiling for hours. Friday morning he felt better. Then they blasted his guts, took blood, returned him, and he was sick all night.

  The next week was a repeat. Bbzzzzzzzzttt. Blood. Sick. Radiation is cumulative. Pzzzzaaa-oopp. Blood. Sick. Sicker. Intestines, liver, bone marrow, the last of his reproductive equipment, and suddenly he was no longer bitter but only depressed and he wanted to see Jessica, his daughter, his baby, what had Wapinski written, he hadn’t paid attention—the letter coming when it had, Wapinski referring to Luwan, Luwan dumb ignorant so desperate to have a baby she’d of had anyone’s ... Needs my mothafuckin help, huh? Oh God, just to see my baby once before I die. What I do with that letter?

  The third week was worse. He could not think about Wapinski’s letter. In the can he had seen the lining, like sausage casing, the lining of his intestines, his stomach. Take my other fuckin nut, he’d prayed. Just stop this. He couldn’t even drink water without pain. Take my johnso—No! Not that. Just let me see my Jessica.

  Then came the two-week break and he felt fine. The radiation was something he could weather. Hell, he’d been through half of it. It couldn’t get worse.

  But it did. Trippan visited him in the infirmary. It hurt to talk. Knutsen came. Other guys from the unit. “How ya doin, Man?”

  “Whatda you care?”

  “We care, Brother. We always cared. We didn’t leave that on the outside.”

  Ty stared at them.

  “Hey, I got this cool book, Man. Bippo said you was askin for a book. My old lady sent it to me. You take it.”

  “Yeah. Me too. I got a cassette player from my brother. En some bad tunes, Bro. You listen to em. Tell me what ya think.”

  Ty shook his head. A sheepish smile cracked his lips.

  “Funny, huh, Bro?”

  “Yeah,” Ty said.

  “What’s funny?” a second inmate said.

  “You,” Ty answered. He gestured with his chin at each. “I must mean more to you than I do to me.”

  His unit-mates laughed. “Yeah,” one said. “We all do.”

  “Eh.” Ty looked away, looked back. “I was thinkin about friends I lost. In Nam. Things we went through. We were one body. Suffered together.”

  “You in that bad mothafucka?!”

  “Yeah. I don’t know why I made it back.”

  “Me too! One Seventy-Third.”

  “I got a little girl,” Ty said.

  The last week of the high zapping, of his lungs, heart, esophagus, brought a new level of pain and discomfort. It was Thursday, the twenty-second of September 1977. Today, he thought, today, tomorrow and Monday, and I’m home free. Just three more little blips. Just one foot in front of the other, Sir, Airborne, All the Way, Sir, Can Do! There’s an end to this. There’s an end to it.

  “Hurts, huh, Man?”

  Ty looked at Stiler. Stiler had killed his own father. Had shot him three times in the stomach. Stiler had been on shit, on dust, bad shit, stoned crazy. He hadn’t even known he’d killed his father for three days. Ty did not speak, only nodded. His throat was so sore it hurt to breathe. His nose was running, he had a fever, the shakes.

  “Ya know, in some countries, they do that to people, you know, political prisoners, as torture.”

  Ty nodded slightly. Burn the lining outta their throats, he thought.

  “I never thought”—Stiler squirmed on the stool next to TV’s bed—“like nothin bout it when I read it. Now I see you bein fried. Microwaved from the inside out. Now I understand.”

  Ty nodded again, thought, Monday. That’s it. And 95 percent chance ... Shee-it. Jus so there an end to it.

  But at the radiation center they did not zap him. His blood count was too low, or too high—how could he concentrate? Only three to go. “Come back tomorrow.” Postponed. Not canceled. Postponed. There would be no end. He was a prisoner. A political prisoner. Incarcerated because he was black. Because ... he’d ... sure, he’d committed fraud. But that was because he was black. Not being black caused it, but being black, way back in the army, even earlier, caused him to be stigmatized, caused the undesirable discharge, caused his drug problem. They done it to him because he was black. He’d given his left nut to their cause, to their bureaucratic disenfranchisement machine. It was the same as being politically prosecuted!

  Friday, the twenty-third: “Ah, Mr. Mohammed, would you like me to put this lead shield over your Adam’s apple?”

  “No.” His voice was thin, raspy. “I’m fine.”

  “Okay.” Bbzzzzzz-it. “You know, you’re doing very well. Usually by the eighth or ninth treatment we have to put that block on.”

  Ty stared. “You usually put—” He did not finish, but thought, Fuck it. Give me the whole thing. Two to go. I got this far. Don’t you go ruinin my chances.

  On Monday, the twenty-sixth, the machine broke down and there was a back up in the waiting room: a young white girl, maybe eight, in a wheelchair; four senior citizens, all white; plus an assortment of parents and spouses; and Ty and his guard. All the patients, victims, were weak, quiet. It was so obvious who was who. But except for Ty, the sufferers were all frail. Old or young. There was no one in their twenties or thirties; no one who’d been strong, healthy, in the prime of life. Drug addict or not, Ty had begun treatment much stronger than these people. And they were being zapped just like him. They were suffering just like him. And they weren’t quitting. He glanced at the little girl. Her mother was reading a story to her. Heidi. His eyes shot to an old man with a curved spine and sunken chest. He seemed to be praying. His wife was doing a crossword puzzle. To Ty they all seemed alike, seemed weak, doomed. He was weak. The guard helped him to the changing cubicle, helped him remove his clothes, helped him to the deep-fry chamber. But he did not feel doomed. There was an end. Two more treatments.

  “Get that little guy out of the way ...”

  Ty grabbed his privates. Most of the nurses and technicians had been nice, sympathetic, or cool and efficient. This one was bitchy. How many zapped people, people you’ve zapped into anguish, into pain, can one handle? He laughed. She gave him a dirty look. “Mr. Shrively,” he hoarsed out.

  Pzzzaaa-oopp. Needle. Blood. Ty rolled, pushed
himself up, slid to the floor.

  “Um.” Not quite so bitchy. “You’re the first person we haven’t had to help up from the table today.”

  Ty forced a smile. “I ...” The pain in his throat was intense but he wanted to joke with her. “Wife and I ...” He looked at the nurse. What did he give a shit if his story was bullshit, was off the top of his head, just something to say. “... want to start a family ... but Mr. Shriv—”

  “Oh!” The technician was truly surprised. “Why don’t you wait a little ...”

  “Mr. Shrively ...” Ty smiled.

  “You’ll get it back,” the technician said quickly. “But hold off on the family for about three years.”

  “Deformities?” Ty asked.

  “Ah ...” She turned cold again. “No. No sense saddling your wife with kids if you don’t make it.”

  She was not there the next day, the last day, his last day of treatment! If he were not so sick he would have been overjoyed. His blood count was marginal. “Please ...” He wanted to beg. He couldn’t speak the words. Please. Just end it.

  Pzzbzzz-aatt-ooppt. Never exactly the same noise twice.

  “I’m impressed, Mr. Mohammed.” This technician was one of the nice ones. Gentle. Empathetic. “We didn’t think you’d make it this far.”

  “I ... I had to. Didn’t I?”

  “Oh, not really. We take you to your limit but you could have stopped last week. We had a lottery going to see which day you’d quit. No one picked today.”

  Friday, October 7—Ty was back in the unit, back to his cot, back among the eyes and the ears. At lights-out they teased him about glowing in the dark. And the next day Knutsen told him to make sure the Classification Team had a full report because they would be more apt to transfer him to a minimum security facility because of his suffering. “Maybe even move up your parole date,” Knutsen said.

  “Yeah,” Ty said. Yeah, he thought. But if I hadn’t been in the house there’d a been no operation. I’d be dead. I’d be ... Where’s the Captain’s letter? He said he needed my motherfuckin help. Didn’t understand! Mill, huh? My chance. My piece a the pie. Golden Rule: He who got the gold, make the rule. Enough for a hundred operations.