Carry Me Home (75 page)

On December 26 Pewel Wapinski, suffering pleuritic chest pain, tachycardia, tachypnea, and dyspnea, was readmitted to St. Luke’s Hospital in Rock Ridge. By dark, after hours of tests and hours of waiting-room pacing, doctors told Bobby and Brian, Sara and Linda, that Pewel had a pulmonary embolism. For the time being he was confined to bed, attached to an oxygen mask, and injected (IV continuous) with an anticoagulant.

“I don’t believe it.” Bobby was angry. “How could it happen? Just like that? Like that!” All morning and into the afternoon Sara had paced the waiting room with him but she was now sitting with her legs up, letting Bobby pace alone. At times Brian popped up, paced too. At times Linda joined them.

“It can,” Linda said softly. “It can happen just like that. He’s still very strong. They’ll get it under control.”

“Yesterday he’s great,” Bobby said. “He brought Sara and me out to the barn to give us another present. Do you know what he’d done? He made a crib. He made the most beautiful crib from the maples up at the sugarbush. He’s eighty-five years old and when we called and told him Sara was pregnant, he took the tractor and the saws up to the sugarbush and chose a number of branches. He said he could see the crib in the branches before he cut. He said he wanted his grandchildren to grow up in a little bit of High Meadow even if they lived three thousand miles away.” Bobby fidgeted, shuffled, scuffed a heel into the floor tiles. “Damn it. Damn it!”

Then with the sky winter black, the doctor came again and said, “He’s stable. He’s resting. There’s nothing you can do here. Go home.”

“I think I should stay,” Bobby said.

“Take your wife home. Come back in the morning. We’ll call if anything happens.”

Friday, 27 December 1974, nine
A.M
.—“Helloohh!”

“Ah, hello. Can I help you?”

“I’m looking for Robert Wapinski.”

“Oh. Won’t you come in? He’s upstairs. Who should I say ...”

“Ah ... my wife and the kids are in the car.... I, ah ... I’m Phil Simpson. Tyrone Blackwell’s brother ... half-brother.”

“Ah ... oh ... ah ...” Sara recognized, then doubted, then felt confused. “Ty Mohammed, you mean?”

“Huh?” Phillip was equally confused. His tie to his brother had been reduced from a broken thread to a feeling.

“Why don’t you all come in. They’ll freeze out there. I’ll get Bob.”

A few minutes later, after Bobby repressed the frustration of being interrupted in the paramount task of going back to St. Luke’s—he’d called at five and eight and both times had been told Pewel was stable and resting—“This is Jessica?”

Phillip nodded. The little girl, almost six, sat on his lap. Phillip’s wife, Carol, held their son, twenty-five months, on her lap. And pregnant Sara held Phillip and Carol’s youngest, the baby Cecilia.

“And you named this guy Tyrone?” Bobby said.

“Yes.” Phillip nodded sheepishly. “The little stinker ... you know, I mean my brother.... Look, Mr. Wapinski ...”

“Please. Just Bob.”

“Look, it takes a man and a woman to make a baby,” Phillip said. “Two parents is jus natural. Maybe not necessary, but it’s a primary and a back-up system for raisin kids.”

“Umm.” Bobby wanted to speed Phillip’s plea. “You’re saying ...”

“Look now at this.” Phillip hoped his thoughts would be passed on. “See how vulnerable is a person if you remove the back-up? See? You wouldn’t go out an cut off everahbody’s left arm. But that just what we doin with quickie divorce and lettin men run out on their families. See? I know there are circumstances. But we approachin one-third single-parent households in this country. One third! Higher then that in the black community. We allowin ... like we approve of it ... we allowin the removal of the back-up system. That’s dangerous, Mr. Wapin—”

“Bob.”

“Bob. That makes the children and the country vulnerable. Half a all divorced women with children under five end up on welfare. Luwan been on welfare. That’s why Carol and me got Jess. But he her father.”

“You want him to come back, huh?”

“A course.”

“All I can do is tell im.”

“Give im this picture a Jess. Tell im I’ll pay his bus fare.”

Later that morning at St. Luke’s Hospital Bobby talked with his grandfather. Pewel was still propped in bed with oxygen and IV therapy but he was awake, alert, impatient with his condition yet physically tired. “They say you’re going to be okay,” Bobby said.

“One, two, three, four. Potatoes on your head.”

Bobby chuckled. “What?”

“That used to be one of your jokes.”

“One of my jokes ...”

“When you were little. Brigita’d be spoonin potatoes in your mouth and you’d make up those jokes.”

“Oh. I don’t rememb—”

Pewel cut in. “Or you’d ask, ‘Does being truthful mean not telling a lie even when Pinocchio would tell a lie?’”

“Um.” Bobby paused. “They did say you’re going to be okay.”

“I know. The doctor came in earlier. Diuretics. Digitalis. Now they’re sayin somethin, cow manure.”

“Coumarin,” Bobby corrected. “It’s an anticoagulant.”

“Six months.” Pewel sighed. “Take it for six months.”

That evening Pewel’s spirits were a little better, and that night he slept well. On Saturday he was up twice, walking. Linda brought Gina and Michelle. His spirits soared. Jo, Isabella and Helen visited, as did Brian, Cheryl and Anton. Father Tom Niederkau from St. Ignatius came, followed by three women volunteers from St. Theresa’s Guild. Adolph Lutz brought a fruit cake his wife had made, and Stacy Carter, how she heard no one knew, sent a bouquet of flowers. Through it all Bobby and Sara sat, left briefly to eat, read Pewel the newspaper. There was a six-line note on fighting in the Mekong Delta, and separately, three paragraphs on the Khmer Rouge having launched an offensive in Cambodia. A page 1 story about Kinnard/Chassion closing one of its Yankee Rollers, a massive heated drum on which toilet paper is made, and laying off most of its third shift was positioned next to a large photograph showing the factory with its four-foot-high rooftop
SEASON’S GREETINGS
sign.

On Sunday Pewel was stronger. He held one of Sara’s hands, one of Bobby’s. “What do you want to do with your lives?” Pewel squeezed their hands. “Don’t tell me. Tell each other. Tell yourselves.”

“But I’d like to tell you,” Bobby said. For an hour he explained his massive design scheme for revolutionizing transportation in the North Bay area. He told Pewel of the lightweight car design, of the windmills. And he told him of Henry Alan Harrison’s reaction and of his “subsequent decision to start my own company.”

Pewel was excited by Bobby’s bold approach and Bobby’s decision to go out on his own. Between naps they talked about energy—sources, consumption, alternatives. “Oh, just think of the possibilities!” Pewel lay back. He was very happy, very tired. “They won’t let you do it out there, eh?”

“No. Not a chance.”

“So. How is Environmental Energy Systems going to make enough money to stay in business? Who’s going to buy your crop?”

“That’s the problem right now,” Bobby said. “It’s either huge foundations or one-man shops. There’s not much in between.”

“Bob, you can grow the best crop in the world, but, if nobody buys it, it sits and rots.”

On Monday, 30 December, Pewel was champing at the bit. “You stay with us until after the holiday, Mr. Wapinski,” his doctor had said. “Then we’ll see.”

“Sara’s school starts on the second,” Bobby said apologetically.

“Go.” Pewel waved him off.

“We’ll be back after the baby’s born, okay?”

“Yep.” Pewel pointed to the closet. “Go in there. In my jacket pocket in there.” Bobby fished into Pewel’s jacket. “My knife in there?”

“Yep.” Bobby pulled out a well-worn pocket knife.

“Take it with you,” Pewel said.

“Granpa, this is yours.”

“I know. But I want you to give it for me.”

“Give it?”

“To Tony. My present to him. Tell him I hope he gets a great deal of pleasure from it. Tell him a good knife is like a good woman. And vice versa.”

L
ITTLE BY LITTLE, SHIT
everywhere hit the fan.

“Ohhah!” Sara entered, kicked the door shut behind her, dropped her book bag with sets of papers to be corrected.

“What’s the matter, Sar?” Bobby had rarely seen her agitated.

“I can hardly believe it!” she blurted.

“What?”

“Two of my students ...” Her arms shot out, palms up, beseeching. “Second graders! With marijuana joints! In
my
classroom!”

“You’re kid—”

Bobby began to make light of what Sara had just said. She cut him off. “If you ever design a town’s school layout, separate the levels. That’s the problem. With the middle school next door, all their problems become ours. Joints in second grade!”

“Were they going to, you know, I mean, second graders ... They wouldn’t know how to smoke them, would they?”

“That’s not the point. Oh! This entire town is out of control.”

It was only their third full day back. Problems had begun immediately upon their returning to the Old Russia Road cottage.

“Where’s Ty?” Sara had asked Tony.

“Ah ...” Tony had stalled.

“We’ve got something very special for him,” Bobby had added. “And something for you from Granpa.”

“But Ty has to sit down for this,” Sara had said.

“He split,” Tony had said. “He freaked out. Some people from your old office, Al and Jane, dropped by and they recognized him. He freaked out and split.”

“Aw ...” Bobby had opened his suitcase, taken out the letter from Phillip, the picture of Ty’s little girl. “I need to get these to him.”

And the next evening, the call from Linda, after Tony had left with the photo of Jessica: “He’s developed another pulmonary embolism.” There was frustration and sympathy in her voice.

“I thought that couldn’t happen with the heparin. And coumarin.”

“Well, it shouldn’t but it can,” Linda said. “His doctor thinks they can control it. He said it may not even be a new one but the first one breaking apart. It’s very small on the X-ray.”

Bobby put his hand to his head. “I—I can’t come back right now. I mean, I will if ...”

“I don’t think it’s that serious, Bob. But they’re going to keep him in the hospital until it clears up.”

Bobby stayed within earshot of the phone on the fourth and fifth. He read, watched TV, tried to think of a way to sell his crop, tried to define to himself what was indeed his crop, dozed on and off. On the fourth CBS News told of the failure of the U.S. government’s clemency program for draft resisters, and of a Khmer Rouge massacre at Ang Snoul, Cambodia. Little else was mentioned about fighting in Southeast Asia. On the fifth NBC showed aerial views of Phuoc Long Province and Phuoc Binh and warned of the impending collapse of that besieged city only sixty miles northeast of Saigon. Then on the sixth came the announcement of the fall of the entire province including the provincial capital. To Bobby this was startling. Until the day before he had seen no mention of a major offensive, or even a major build up. Phuoc Binh was a provincial capital, a regional center. Not since the Nguyen Hue Offensive in the spring of 1972 had a major city been lost—and that one, Quang Tri, was 400 miles from Saigon.

Public and media debate erupted. Bobby talked to his grandfather. The old man was again doing well. Still Bobby stayed by the phone, by the TV. From the seventh to the tenth all the major networks carried stories about President Ford’s Viet Nam “concern,” then his “consideration” of emergency aid to South Viet Nam, then congressional opposition to that aid and State Department doomsday scenarios if the aid wasn’t forthcoming. Amid the electronic reportage there was little mention of the fate of the civilian or military human beings of Phuoc Long—province and city—who’d been pounded by tens of thousands of rounds of communist artillery, crushed by a hundred Soviet T-54 tanks. And there was little mention of the
three weeks
of intensive fighting in which the out-manned and outgunned South lost 4,550 soldiers and were finally overrun by the NVA’s 4th Corps infantry.

On the eleventh Sara said, “I can’t believe it. They’re not going to do anything.”

“Who?”

“The school. These kids have the school board completely buffaloed. We’re simply abdicating all responsibility.”

“Oh,” Bobby said, “I thought you meant Ford. And Congress. They’re not going to do anything either. They’re giving Hanoi a green light.”

And that evening, like buckshot coming from all angles, “Bobby”—in Linda Pisano’s voice there were tears—“he had a TIA. They don’t know why he’s throwing clots.”

“Oh geez. I don’t know what that—”

“Transient ischemic attack. It’s an obstruction in the blood flow to part of the brain. He’s had a stroke.”

“Oh no!”

“He’s resting,” Linda said. “His vital signs are stable but he’s lost all movement on his right side. And it’s ... it’s too early to tell.”

“I’ll try to get a flight tomorrow.”

“Ah ... unless you can stay ... call his doctor first. I had a patient when I was in Philadelphia that went through this. She regained most of her functions but it takes time. There’s nothing you can do right now except sit. And he’ll need help ... Can ... can you get Tony to come back? He might need someone full time.”

More calls. Brian. Miriam. Jo and John Sr. St. Luke’s. And to and from Linda, again and again. The twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth, on to the twentieth—Sara trying to prepare a nursery, working, worrying about Bobby, holding him, listening to him, talking, visiting her own grandparents and parents and brothers.

And mud! Mud everywhere. North Peak cloaked continually in cool mist or drizzle, the earth turning to mud through which Bobby walked Josh, “civilization” encroaching on “their” open space, the further expansion of North Peak CondoWorld, “Keep that animal on a leash.” Restless, unsettled, sell your crop, don’t leave me. Bobby slept like a turning wheel. There was Bowers left on Hamburger Hill, left wounded, the rain turning the hill into a snot-slick slope, attackers marching in unseen, he hiding behind the wall, the stone wall, the road, unseen assailants, mud, pigs, “You sound like a pig! When are you going to learn to eat?” Masked men probing, blood, the smell stuck in his nose, his head hurt, “This your dog? Nice looking animal. How come you haven’t been up to see me? There’s corn fritters and syrup waiting,” probing, eyes only seen in green shrouds, “I’m cold. God, I’m so cold.” “Next.” “And with 289,000 North Viet Namese soldiers in South Viet Nam, any emergency aid ...” “Next.” “But he’s still alive, Sir.” “Just push those brains back in and put him in the corner....”