Carry Me Home (89 page)

He could barely concentrate. He was angry, angry at them all. “Caputo sent a patrol illegally into a village to seize two Viet Cong suspects. ‘It was my secret and savage desire that the two men die,’ he writes. The suspects were indeed killed, found innocent, and Caputo was court-martialed on charges of murder. The Marines, however, were embarrassed by the affair and dropped the case, allowing Caputo to float back into the real world, where he now wins prizes for his journalism.”

Not angry, incensed! Fucka been black, Ty thought, they won’t be no journalism prize. They’d hang his ass out on the firin range.

His thoughts tumbled. Billy Jo Trippan, his readjustment counselor, wanted him to admit to “the opportunities of incarceration.” Ty thought, hang that Uncle Tom’s ass out there too! “Opportunities!” Prison sucked. Worse than LBJ—Long Binh Jail. Not physically worse; this was a breeze. But here he had no links. The brothers weren’t combat brothers. Maybe some were. But they didn’t talk, except for Fats Knutsen, who wanted to organize a chapter of IVA, Incarcerated Veterans of America. A scam! That’s how Ty saw it. Maybe had Knutsen been black ... Ty had never had a visitor, never a letter. Except the one he’d just received from Wapinski.

“Take your frustrations,” Trippan had said virtually every session, “and convert them. Make them work for you.”

Every session, like a kowtowing Uncle Tom, Ty Mohammed bowed his head and agreed. Every session his thoughts blasted manically. You don’t know nothin. You ain’t ever goina know nothin. You no idea what I done. How it come back on me. Payback. Payback’s a mothafucka. When I took an ear, He seen. When I snatched a ring, He watched. He a’ready punished me. You got no right. No right. I get out of here, it goin be payback time. You just write down how passive I am.

“There are a few others,” a woman called in. She came into his room. Behind her were three young white men. “I don’t think you can get a Negro’s to transilluminate,” she said to them. “None of the others’ did.”

“Do you mind?” one of the young men said politely to Ty.

The young men were all in loose white summer uniforms. The woman, the resident on duty, in a white lab coat and dark blue skirt.

Ty stared at them. He didn’t answer. They didn’t really look at him. Resignedly he sat up, swung his feet to the floor, grabbed the back of the hospital gown to keep it shut. Then he went into the closet and two of the interns and the resident entered with him and shut the door. God damn, how he hated this. He lifted the front of the gown, held his penis up and to one side. Two of them, he didn’t look to see who, grabbed his scrotum. Immediately they had the skin pulled taut over a flashlight. “You can feel it right there,” one said.

“Yeah, but you can’t—”

“Oh yeah! I’m getting it to transilluminate.”

“The light’s got to come through the lump,” the resident said. “Not through the sack.”

“It is,” said one intern.

“No it’s not,” said the other.

“Sure, look at it,” said the first.

The resident bent down, tried to see what the first intern was seeing. “No,” she said. “Even if the lump isn’t so dense as to be opaque, I don’t think—”

“But look ...”

“Not with his skin pigment,” the resident insisted. She stood up, turned on her flashlight, looked at Ty and said, “Sorry. I just don’t think anyone can tell this way.”

It had all begun a week earlier, on the Fourth. They’d been given the day off and Ty had lingered in the unit—a seventy-bed dormitory—a little longer than most of his unit-mates, had taken the time to fiddle with himself—not a lot, just a quick hand passed into his pants, a little friendly self-caress. With seventy of them on a floor designed for thirty—damn place was like living in an overcrowded fishbowl—there weren’t many opportunities. He’d felt it immediately, an acorn cap, a half filbert, stuck to his left testicle. Right on the bottom. It was hard, maybe like half a marble, and securely attached. What the fuck, he’d thought. With one hand he’d maneuvered the ball so it was tight to the sack, with thumb and forefinger of the other he’d grabbed the lump, squeezed. It didn’t hurt and immediately he’d thought that that was good. If he’d been sick, if the testicle had been swollen or sore, he’d reasoned, then it would be time to worry. Some sort of infection, he’d thought. But this was just a hard lump. He’d put himself away, caught up to the others. The thought had nagged at him but in the afternoon, playing basketball in the prison yard, he’d forgotten about it. At lights-out he rechecked. He wasn’t certain he’d find it again but it was there—hard, secure—maybe, he thought, a little smaller.

On the fifth they were back to work, he in the woodshop making three-block ducks—a cube body, a thick dowel neck and a triangular head—for no one and no reason he could imagine. In the back of his mind it nagged him—something’s not right, but he felt fine, healthy, clean. Indeed, he’d been clean, drug-free, since being rearrested. And he’d been warm, and fed, and clothed. He had not gotten his piece of the pie but he could bide his time, waste his time, waste these years, and still formulate his plan. Prison isn’t forever. If he could stay clean on the outside, there’d be no holding him down.

On the sixth, in the showers, “Whatcha got there, Ty?” Laughs, other guys waiting, fuckin fishbowl, he’d checked himself again, breathed easier. It’s a little smaller, he’d told himself. It’s going away. But he knew he was lying. It was bigger. On the morning of the seventh he’d reported to the infirmary. “Just a cyst,” he said to the doctor. “Huh?”

“I’m going to send you to a specialist,” the man retorted.

“Just some pills, right Doc?”

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.