The Fourth Hand

by John Winslow Irving

  He was in a delivery room, and a man who was just a pair of eyes above a surgical mask was standing in a corner. A female obstetrician was delivering his wife’s baby, and a nurse whom he was certain he’d never seen before was helping. The obstetrician was Mrs. Clausen’s regular OB-GYN; the Clausens had been to see her together, many times.

  Although Otto hadn’t recognized the man in the corner the first time he’d had the dream, he now knew in advance who the man was, thus giving him a sense of foreboding.

  When the baby was born, the joy on his wife’s face was so overwhelming that Otto always cried in his sleep. That was when the other man removed his mask. It was that playboy TV reporter—the lion guy, disaster man. What the fuck was his name? Anyway, the joy in Mrs. Clausen’s expression was directed at him, not at Otto; it was as if Otto weren’t really in the delivery room, or as if only Otto knew he was there.

  What was wrong with the dream was that the lion guy had two hands and was holding the newborn baby in both of them. Suddenly Otto’s wife reached up and stroked the back of his left hand.

  Then Otto saw himself. He was staring at his own body, looking for his hands. The left one was gone—his own left hand was gone!

  That was when he woke up, sobbing. This time, at the sports bar in Green Bay, with under two minutes remaining in the Super Bowl, a fellow Packer fan misunderstood his anguish and patted Otto on the shoulder. “Lousy game,” he said with gruff sympathy.

  Drunk as he was, Otto had to make a concerted effort not to doze off again. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to miss the end of the game; he didn’t want to have that dream again, not if he could help it.

  Naturally he knew where the dream came from, and he was so ashamed of its source that he’d never told his wife about the dream.

  As a beer-truck driver, Otto believed himself to be a role model for Green Bay’s youth—not once had he been a drunk driver. Otto hardly drank at all; and when he drank, he drank nothing stronger than beer. He was instantly as ashamed of his own inebriation as he was of his dream and the outcome of the game.

  “I’m too drunk to drive,” Otto confessed to the bartender, who was a decent man and a trusted friend. The bartender wished that there were more drunks like Otto Clausen, meaning responsible ones.

  They quickly agreed on the best way for Otto to get himself home, which was not by accepting a ride with any of several drunken and despondent friends. Otto could easily move the beer truck the mere fifty yards from the delivery entrance to the bar’s main parking lot so that it would not be in the way of any Mondaymorning deliveries. Since the parking lot and the delivery entrance were adjacent to each other, he wouldn’t even have to cross a public sidewalk or a street. The bartender would then call Otto a taxi to take him home.

  No, no, no—the phone call wasn’t necessary, Otto had mumbled. He had a cell phone in his truck. He would move the beer truck first and call the taxi himself. He would wait in his truck for the taxi. Besides, he wanted to call his wife—just to see how she was feeling and to commiserate with her about Green Bay’s tragic loss. Furthermore, the cold air would do him good.

  He may have been less certain about the effect of the cold air than he was about the rest of his plan, but Otto also wanted to escape the televised postgame show. The sight of those lunatic Denver fans in the multiple frenzies of their celebrations would be truly revolting, as would the replays of Terrell Davis slicing through the Packers’ secondary. The Broncos’ running back had made the Green Bay defense look as soft as… well, yes, cheese.

  The thought of those Denver running plays made Otto feel like throwing up, or else he was coming down with his wife’s flu. He’d not felt as awful since he’d seen that pretty-boy journalist have his hand eaten by lions. What was the peckerhead’s name?

  Mrs. Clausen knew the unfortunate reporter’s name. “I wonder how that poor Patrick Wallingford is doing,” she would say, apropos of nothing, and Otto would shake his head and feel like throwing up.

  After a reverential pause, his wife would add: “I’d give that poor man my own hand, if I knew I was dying. Wouldn’t you, Otto?”

  “I don’t know—I don’t even know him,” Otto had replied. “It’s not like giving a stranger one of your organs. They’re just organs. Who ever sees them? But your hand… well, gee, it’s a recognizable part of you, if you know what I mean.”

  “When you’re dead, you’re dead,” Mrs. Clausen had said.

  Otto remembered the paternity suit against Patrick Wallingford—it had been on TV, and in all the magazines and newspapers. Mrs. Clausen had been riveted to the case; she’d been noticeably disappointed when the DNA test proved that Wallingford wasn’t the father.

  “What do you care who the father is?” Otto had asked.

  “He just looked like he was the father,” Mrs. Clausen answered. “He looks like he should be, I mean.”

  “He’s good-looking enough—is that what you’re saying?” Otto asked.

  “He looks like a paternity suit waiting to happen.”

  “Is that the reason you want me to give him my hand?”

  “I didn’t say that, Otto. I just said, ‘When you’re dead, you’re dead.’”

  “I got that part,” Otto had told her. “But why my hand? Why him ?”

  Now, there’s something you should know about Mrs. Clausen, even before you know what she looks like: when she wanted to, there was something about her tone of voice that could give her husband a hard-on. It didn’t take long, either.

  “Why your hand?” she’d asked him, in that tone of voice. “Why… because I love you, and I’ll never love anyone else. Not in the same way.” This had weakened Otto to the degree that he felt too near death to speak; all the blood from his brain, his heart, and his lungs was going to his erection. It happened that way every time.

  “Why him ?” Mrs. Clausen had continued, knowing that Otto was entirely hers from this point on. “Why… because he clearly needs a hand. Nothing could be plainer.”

  It had taken all of Otto’s strength to summon a weak response to her. “I suppose there’s other guys who’ve lost their hands.”

  “But we don’t know them.”

  “We don’t know him, either.”

  “He’s on TV, Otto. Everyone knows him. Besides, he looks nice.”

  “You said he looked like a paternity suit waiting to happen!”

  “That doesn’t mean he isn’t nice,” Mrs. Clausen replied.

  “Oh.”

  The “Oh” exhausted the last of his failing power. Otto knew what was coming next. Once more it was her tone of voice that killed him.

  “What are you doing right now?” she’d asked him. “Want to make a baby?”

  Otto could scarcely nod his head.

  But there was still no baby. When Mrs. Clausen wrote to Schatzman, Gingeleskie, Mengerink & Associates, she included a typed statement, which she’d asked Otto to sign. He hadn’t protested. He felt that his fingers had lost all circulation and that he was watching another man’s hand sign his name. “What are you doing right now?” she’d asked him that time, too.

  Then the dreams had begun. Now, on that miserable Super Bowl Sunday, Otto was not only stupendously drunk; he was also burdened by the weight of an implausible jealousy. And moving the beer truck a mere fifty yards was not as simple as it had seemed. Otto’s clumsy efforts to engage the ignition with the key convinced him; he was not only too drunk to drive—he might be too drunk to start the truck. It took a while, as it did for the truck’s defroster to melt the ice under the snow on the windshield. It had snowed only another two inches since the kickoff. Otto may have skinned the knuckles of his left hand while brushing the snow off the side-view mirrors. (This is a guess. We’ll never know how he skinned the knuckles of that hand, just that they were skinned.) And by the time he’d slowly turned and backed the beer truck the short distance between the delivery entrance and the parking lot, most of the bar’s Super Bowl patrons had gone home. It wasn’t e
ven nine-thirty, but not more than four or five cars shared the lot with him. He had the feeling that their owners had done what he was doing—called for a taxi to take them home. All the other drunks, lamentably, had driven themselves. Then Otto remembered that he hadn’t yet called a cab. At first the number, which the bartender had written out for him, was busy. (On that Super Bowl Sunday night in Green Bay, how many people must have been calling for taxis to take them home?) When Otto finally got through, the dispatcher warned him that there would be a wait of at least half an hour. “Maybe forty-five minutes.” The dispatcher was an honest man.

  What did Otto care? It was a seasonably mild twenty-five degrees outside, and running the defroster had partially heated the cab of the truck. Although it would soon get cold in there, what was twenty-five degrees with light snow falling to a guy who’d downed eight or nine beers in under four hours?

  Otto called his wife. He could tell he’d woken her up. She’d seen the fourth quarter; then, because she was both depressed and sick, she’d fallen back to sleep.

  “I couldn’t watch the postgame stuff, either,” he admitted.

  “Poor baby,” his wife said. It was what they said to console each other, but lately—given Mrs. Clausen’s as-yet-unsuccessful struggle to get pregnant—they’d been considering a new endearment. The phrase stuck like a dagger in Otto’s inebriated heart.

  “It’ll happen, honey,” Otto suddenly promised her, because the dear man, even drunk and despondent, was sensitive enough to know that his wife’s principal distress was that she had the flu when she wanted morning sickness. The meaningless postgame stuff, even the Packers’ heartbreaking defeat, wasn’t what was really bothering her.

  It made perfect sense that Mrs. Clausen’s regular OB-GYN had found her way into Otto’s dream; she was not only the physician whom Mrs. Clausen regularly consulted about her difficulties in getting pregnant, but she’d also told Otto and his wife that he should have himself “checked.” (She meant the sperm-count thing, as Otto unspokenly thought of it.) Both the doctor and Mrs. Clausen suspected that Otto was the problem, but his wife loved him to such a degree that she’d been afraid to find out. Otto had been afraid to find out, too—he’d not had himself “checked.”

  Their complicity had drawn the Clausens even closer than they already were, but now there was something complicitous in the silences between them. Otto couldn’t stop thinking about the first time they’d made love. This was not merely romantic of him, although he was a deeply romantic man. In the Clausens’ case, that first act of lovemaking had itself been the proposal. Otto’s family had a summer cottage on a lake. There are lots of small lakes in northern Wisconsin, and the Clausens owned a quarter of the shoreline of one of them. When Mrs. Clausen first went there, the misnamed “cottage” turned out to be a cluster of cabins, with a nearby boathouse bigger than any of them. There was room for a small apartment in the unfinished space above the boats, and although there was no electricity on the property, there was a fridge (actually two) and a stove and hot-water heaters (all propane) for the main cabin. The water for the plumbing came from the lake; the Clausens didn’t drink the water, but they could take a hot bath, and there were two flush toilets. They pumped the water out of the lake by means of a gasoline engine of the kind that can run a lawn mower, and they had their own septic tank—quite a large one. (The Clausens were religious about not polluting their little lake.) One weekend when his mom and dad weren’t able to go there, Otto brought his future wife to the lake. They swam off the dock just before sunset, and their wet bathing suits leaked through the planks. It was so quiet, except for the loons, and they sat so still that the water dripping off their bathing suits sounded as if someone had not quite shut off a faucet. The sun, which had departed only minutes before, had warmed the wooden planks all day; Otto and his bride-to-be could feel its warmth when they took off their wet bathing suits. They lay down on a dry towel together. The towel smelled like the sun, and the water drying on their bodies smelled like the lake and the sun, too.

  There was no “I love you,” no “Will you marry me?” In each other’s arms on the towel on the warm dock, with their skin still wet and cool, it was a moment that called for more of a commitment than that. This was the first time the future Mrs. Clausen let Otto hear her special tone of voice, and her arousing question: “What are you doing right now?” This was the first time Otto discovered he was too weak to speak. “Do you want to make a baby?” she’d asked. That was the first time they’d tried.

  That had been the marriage proposal. He’d said “yes” with his hard-on, an erection with the blood of a thousand words.

  After the wedding, Otto had built two separate rooms off a shared hallway above the boats in the boathouse. They were two unusually long, thin rooms—“like bowling alleys,” Mrs. Clausen had teased him—but he’d done it that way so that the occupants of both rooms could see the lakefront. One was their room—their bed took up almost its entire width and was elevated to window level to give them the optimum view. The other room had twin beds; it was for the baby. It made Otto cry to think of that unoccupied room above the gently rocking boats. The sound he had loved most at night, which was the barely heard sound of the water lapping against the boats in the boathouse and the dock where they’d first made love, now only reminded him of the emptiness of that unused room. The feeling, at the end of the day—of a wet bathing suit, and of taking it off; the smell of the sun and the lake on his wife’s wet skin—now seemed ruined by unfulfilled expectations. The Clausens had been married for more than a decade, but in the last two or three summers they’d all but stopped going to the cottage on the lake. Their life together in Green Bay had grown busier; it seemed harder and harder to get away. Or so they said. But in truth, it was even harder for them both to accept that the smell of pine trees was a thing of the past. Then the Packers had to lose to the fucking Broncos! Otto grieved. The unhappy, drunken man could scarcely remember what had started him crying in the cold, parked beer truck. Oh, yes, it had been his wife saying, “Poor baby.” Lately those words had a devastating effect on him. And when she said them in that tone of voice of hers… well, what a merciless world! What had possessed her to do that when they were not physically together, when they were only talking on the phone? Now Otto was crying and he had a hard-on. He was further frustrated that he couldn’t remember how the phone call with his wife had ended, or when. It had already been half an hour since he’d told the taxi dispatcher to have the driver look for him in the parking lot behind the bar. (“I’ll be in the beer truck—you can’t miss it.”) Otto stretched to reach the glove compartment, where he had put his cell phone—carefully, so as not to disturb the beer coasters and stickers, which he also kept there. He handed them out to the kids who surrounded him when he made his deliveries. In Otto’s neighborhood, the kids called him

  “Coaster Man” or “Sticker Man,” but what they really sought were the beer posters. Otto kept the posters in the back of the truck, with the beer. He saw nothing wrong in these boys displaying beer posters in their bedrooms, years before they were old enough to drink. Otto would have been wounded to his core if anyone had accused him of leading young men down the road to alcoholism; he simply liked to make the kids happy, and he handed out the coasters and stickers and posters with the same concern for their welfare as he expressed by not driving when he was drunk.

  But how had he managed to fall asleep while reaching for the glove compartment? That he was too drunk to have dreams was a blessing, or so he thought. Otto had been dreaming—he was just too drunk to know it. Also the dream was a new one, too new for him to know it was a dream.

  He felt the warm, sweat-slick back of his wife’s neck in the crook of his right arm; he was kissing her, his tongue deep inside her mouth, while with his left hand—Otto was left-handed—he touched her again and again. She was very wet, her abdomen pressing upward against the heel of his hand. His fingers touched her as lightly as possible; he was trying his best t
o touch her barely at all. (She’d had to teach him how to do that.)

  Suddenly, in the dream that Otto didn’t know was a dream, Mrs. Clausen seized her husband’s left hand and brought it to her lips; she took his fingers into her mouth, where he was kissing her, and they both tasted her sex as he rolled on top and entered her. As he held her head lightly against his throat, the fingers of his left hand, in her hair, were close enough for him to smell. On the bed, by her left shoulder, was Otto’s right hand; it was gripping the bedsheet. Only Otto didn’t recognize it—it was not his hand! It was too small, too fine-boned; it was almost delicate. Yet the left hand had been his—he would know it anywhere. Then he saw his wife under him, but from a distance. It wasn’t Otto she was under; the man’s legs were too long, his shoulders too narrow. Otto recognized the lion guy’s face in profile—Patrick Wallingford was fucking his wife!

  Only seconds later, and in reality not more than a couple of minutes after he’d passed out in his truck, Otto woke up lying on his right side. His body was bent across the gear box, the stick shift nudging his ribs; his head rested on his right arm, his nose touching the cold passenger seat. As for his erection, for quite naturally his dream had given him a hard-on, he had a firm hold of it with his left hand. In a parking lot! he thought, ashamed. He quickly tucked in his shirt and cinched his belt.

  Otto stared into the open glove compartment. There was his cell phone—also there, in the far right corner, was his snub-nosed .38 revolver, a Smith & Wesson, which he kept fully loaded with the barrel pointed in the general direction of the truck’s right front tire.

  Otto must have propped himself up on his right elbow, or else he came nearly to a sitting position, before he heard the sound of the teenagers breaking into the back of his truck. They were just kids, but they were a little older than the neighborhood boys to whom Otto Clausen gave the beer coasters, stickers, and posters—and these teenagers were up to no good. One of them had positioned himself near the entrance to the sports bar; if a patron had emerged and made his (or her) way to the parking lot, the lookout could have warned the two boys breaking into the back of the truck.