The Toll
Lito had ignored the bloody streaks on the toilet paper for months. Probably just hemorrhoids. He only agreed to the surgery because of Marilín and because he loathed the thought of leaving his mutt, Cholo, behind.
It had been five years since “the day of the inconvenience”, as he called it, but Lito had made it to his fifty-fourth birthday. That was the day Marilín called us. Your cousin will not be discharged. They can’t find him a Hospice bed in time. Lito and I had lived in the same house through high school.
My cousin Loreta and her husband Manolo pulled into the hospital parking lot just as we arrived. Loreta broke the silence. It doesn’t look good, does it? We walked collectively towards the main entrance. Manolo wore a Cubavera shirt over khaki Bermuda shorts, army-dress shoes and white tube socks. Under his arm was a worn Bible. A tattoo of Jesus on a barbed-wire cross adorned his forearm.
This was Lito’s last lap. His liver, larger than a basketball had more tumor in it than liver cells. The cancerous fluid in his abdomen made him look pregnant. But he kept his sense of humor, Marilin said, as she walked us towards Lito’s room. He joked to his doctor this morning that the purple veins beneath the taught skin on his belly were the tentacles of the alien inside him.
The doctor had told Marilin that Lito had fifty or sixty “tumor balls” in both lungs, slowly growing, compressing his air sacs, which is why he had so much air hunger. The alien indeed.
Entering the room, we were disarmed by the figure of a yellow, cachectic man with clumps of chemotherapy-singed hairs clinging delicately onto a balding, flaking scalp. He gasped for breath like a guppy out of water, and his sunken eyes roamed. Lips were fissured. He was either too weak or too sedated to keep his eyelids open. But he recognized me, squeezed my hand when I called his name.
Manolo and Loreta had stepped in behind us into the already crowded hospital room. The lunch tray lay undisturbed. The room smelled of once-boiled, twice-reheated Salisbury steak and hospital disinfectant. I gazed at the “get-well” cards posted on the wall when Manolo abruptly asked we step out. I have an important issue to discuss with Lito. Manolo’s back to me, he was unaware I lingered. Arms held over Lito, Manolo swayed, mumbling biblical passages. He paused, leaned close to Lito and in a low, sanctimonious voice said,
Your sins brought you this cancer, repent. Seek cleansing for an everlasting life...
It was as if the epinephrine rush brought on by Manolo’s utterance had jolted Lito into a full state of wakefulness. His eyes flared wide open. His life’s wish was to have been a teacher but coming from a military legacy, he was given little choice but to follow suit. Six months after boot camp, he crumbled, burned his uniform in the barbecue grill, and took his marksmanship medals to Goodwill. The depression, the migraines, the medication side-effects, had made him an inconvenience to those around him, so he just resigned himself to the purgatory of eight-hour days processing toll tickets on the turnpike. Then the cancer. Now God wanted him to beg for forgiveness? For a cancer and a life he never asked for and fucking didn’t deserve? Happy fucking birthday! Anger incinerated, then exhausted him.
Manolo continued swaying, waving the good book like an amulet in ritual over Lito.
By now back to a place of incoherence, Lito grunted, lifted his head slightly off the pillow, then ever so gently, he lay back. The trinity of near-death, Dehydration, Delirium and Dyspnea had finally descended. A pause, a last salvo breath, and it was done.
Every now and then I think of Lito. I never told Marilín what happened that day. Kids are now grown and Cholo was buried in the back yard. Marilín never re-married. On days like this I wish to curse Manolo, but it’s like God holds me back. I just clench my teeth and pay the toll.
An academic physician and scientific writer, Ricardo has had his work featured in the U.S. and in the U.K., in Acentos Review, Hispanic Culture Review, Biostories, Foliate Oak, Lunch Ticket, The Bellingham Review, Molotov Cocktail, Star 82 Review, Wingless Dreamer, Litro and others. Born and raised in Cuba, he came to the United States as a refugee in his teens and now resides in North Florida.