The Fourth Hand

by John Winslow Irving

  Otto Clausen didn’t carry a loaded .38 in his glove compartment because he was a beer-truck driver and beer trucks were commonly broken into. Otto wouldn’t have dreamed of shooting anyone, not even in defense of beer. But Otto was a gun guy, as many of the good people of Wisconsin are. He liked all kinds of guns. He was also a deer hunter and a duck hunter. He was even a bow hunter, in the bow season for deer, and although he’d never killed a deer with a bow and arrow, he had killed many deer with a rifle—most of them in the vicinity of the Clausens’ cottage. Otto was a fisherman, too—he was an all-around outdoorsman. And while it was illegal for him to keep a loaded .38 in his glove compartment, not a single beertruck driver would have faulted him for this; in all probability, the brewery he worked for would have applauded his spirit, at least privately. Otto would have needed to take the gun from the glove compartment with his right hand—because he couldn’t have reached into the compartment, from behind the steering wheel, with his left—and, because he was left-handed, he almost certainly would have transferred the weapon from his right to his left hand before investigating the burglary-in-progress at the rear of his truck. Otto was still very drunk, and the subfreezing coldness of the Smith & Wesson might have made the gun a little unfamiliar to his touch. (And he’d been startled out of a dream as disturbing as death itself—his wife having sex with disaster man, who’d been touching her with Otto’s left hand!) Whether he cocked the revolver with his right hand before attempting to transfer it to his left, or whether he’d cocked the weapon inadvertently when he removed it from the glove compartment, we’ll never know.

  The gun fired—we know that much—and the bullet entered Otto’s throat an inch under his chin. It followed an undeviating path, exiting the good man’s head at the crown of his skull, taking with it flecks of blood and bone and a briefly blinding bit of brain matter, the evidence of which would be found on the upholstered ceiling of the truck’s cab. The bullet itself also exited the roof. Otto was dead in an instant.

  The gunshot scared the bejesus out of the young thieves at the back of the truck. A patron leaving the sports bar heard the gunshot and the plaintive appeals for mercy by the frightened teenagers, even the clang of the crowbar they dropped in the parking lot as they raced into the night. The police would soon find them, and they would confess everything—their entire life stories, up to the moment of that earsplitting gunshot. Upon their capture, they didn’t know where the shot had come from or that anyone had actually been shot.

  While the alarmed patron returned to the sports bar, and the bartender called the police—reporting only that there’d been a gunshot, and someone had seen teenagers running away—the taxi driver arrived in the parking lot. He had no difficulty spotting the beer truck, but when he approached the cab, knocked on the driver’s-side window, and opened the door, there was Otto Clausen slumped against the steering wheel, the .38 in his lap.

  Even before the police notified Mrs. Clausen, who was sound asleep when they called, they already felt sure that Otto’s death wasn’t a suicide—at least it wasn’t what the cops called a “planned suicide.” Clearly, to the police, the beer-truck driver hadn’t meant to kill himself.

  “He wasn’t that kind of guy,” the bartender said.

  Granted, the bartender had no idea that Otto Clausen had been trying to get his wife pregnant for more than a decade; the bartender didn’t know diddly-squat about Otto’s wife wanting Otto to bequeath his left hand to Patrick Wallingford, the lion guy, either. The bartender only knew that Otto Clausen would never have killed himself because the Packers lost the Super Bowl.

  It’s anybody’s guess how Mrs. Clausen was composed enough to make the call to Schatzman, Gingeleskie, Mengerink & Associates that same Super Bowl Sunday night. The answering service reported her call to Dr. Zajac, who happened to be at home.

  Zajac was a Broncos fan. Just to clarify that: Dr. Zajac was a New England Patriots fan, God help him, but he’d been rooting for the Broncos in the Super Bowl because Denver was in the same conference as New England. In fact, at the time of the phone call from his answering service, Zajac had been trying to explain the tortured logic of why he’d wanted the Broncos to win to his six-year-old son. In Rudy’s opinion, if the Patriots weren’t in the Super Bowl, and they weren’t, what did it matter who won?

  They’d had a reasonably healthy snack during the game—chilled celery stalks and carrot sticks, dipped in peanut butter. Irma had suggested to Dr. Zajac that he try the “peanut-butter trick,” as she called it, to get Rudy to eat more raw vegetables. Zajac was making a mental note to thank Irma for her suggestion when the phone rang.

  The phone startled Medea, who was in the kitchen. The dog had just eaten a roll of duct tape. She was not yet feeling sick, but she was feeling guilty, and the phone call must have convinced her that she’d been caught in the act of eating the duct tape, although Rudy and his father wouldn’t know she’d eaten it until she threw it up on Rudy’s bed after everyone had gone to sleep.

  The duct tape had been left behind by the man who’d come to install the new DogWatch system, an underground electric barrier designed to keep Medea in her yard. The invisible electric fence meant that Zajac (or Rudy or Irma) didn’t have to be outside with the dog. But because no one had been outside with her, Medea had found and eaten the duct tape.

  Medea now wore a new collar with two metal prods turned inward against her throat. (There was a battery in the collar.) If the dog strayed across the invisible electric barrier in her yard, these prods would zap her a good one. But before Medea could get shocked, she would be warned; when she got too close to the unseen fence, her collar made a sound.

  “What does it sound like?” Rudy had asked.

  “We can’t hear it,” Dr. Zajac explained. “Only dogs can.”

  “What does the zap feel like?”

  “Oh, nothing much—it doesn’t really hurt Medea,” the hand surgeon lied.

  “Would it hurt me, if I put the collar around my neck and walked out of the yard?”

  “Don’t you ever do that, Rudy! Do you understand?” Dr. Zajac asked a little too aggressively, as was his fashion.

  “So it hurts,” the boy said.

  “It doesn’t hurt Medea, ” the doctor insisted.

  “Have you tried it around your neck?”

  “Rudy, the collar isn’t for people—it’s for dogs!”

  Then their conversation turned to the Super Bowl, and why Zajac had wanted Denver to win.

  When the phone rang, Medea scurried under the kitchen table, but the message from Dr. Zajac’s answering service—“Mrs. Clausen called from Wisconsin”—caused Zajac to forget all about the stupid dog. The eager surgeon called the new widow back immediately. Mrs. Clausen wasn’t yet sure of the condition of the donor hand, but Dr. Zajac was nonetheless impressed by her composure.

  Mrs. Clausen had been a little less composed in her dealings with the Green Bay police and the examining physician. While she seemed to grasp the particulars of her husband’s “presumably accidental death by gunshot,” there was almost immediately the expression of a new doubt upon her tear-streaked face.

  “He’s really dead?” she asked. Her strangely futuristic look was nothing the police or the examining physician had ever seen before. Upon establishing that her husband was “really dead,” Mrs. Clausen paused only briefly before inquiring,

  “But how is Otto’s hand ? The left one.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Strings Attached

  IN BOTH THE Green Bay Press-Gazette and The Green Bay News-Chronicle, Otto Clausen’s postgame, self-inflicted shooting was relegated to the trivial end of Super Bowl coverage. One Wisconsin sportscaster was gauche enough to say,

  “Hey, there are a lot of Packer fans who probably considered shooting themselves after Sunday’s Super Bowl, but Otto Clausen of Green Bay actually pulled the trigger.” Yet even the most tactless, insensitive reporting of Otto’s death did not seriously label it a suicide.


  When Patrick Wallingford first heard about Otto Clausen—he saw the minute-anda-half story on his very own international channel in his hotel room in Mexico City—he vaguely wondered why that dick Dick hadn’t sent him to interview the widow. It was the kind of story he was usually assigned.

  But the all-news network had sent Stubby Farrell, their old sports hack, who’d been at the Super Bowl in San Diego, to cover the event. Stubby had been in Green Bay many times before, and Patrick Wallingford had never even watched a Super Bowl on TV.

  When Wallingford saw the news that Monday morning, he was already rushing to leave his hotel to catch his flight to New York. He scarcely noticed that the beertruck driver had a widow. “Mrs. Clausen couldn’t be reached for comment,” the ancient sports hack reported.

  Dick would have made me reach her, Wallingford thought, as he bolted his coffee; yet his mind registered the ten-second image of the beer truck in the near-empty parking lot, the light snow covering the abandoned vehicle like a gauzy shroud.

  “Where the party ended, for this Packer fan,” Stubby intoned. Cheesy, Patrick Wallingford thought. (No pun intended—he as yet had no idea what a cheesehead was.)

  Patrick was almost out the door when the phone rang in his hotel room; he very nearly let it ring, worried as he was about catching his plane. It was Dr. Zajac, all the way from Massachusetts. “Mr. Wallingford, this is your lucky day,” the hand surgeon began.

  As he awaited his subsequent flight to Boston, Wallingford watched himself on the twenty-four-hour news; he saw what remained of the story he’d been sent to Mexico City to cover. On Super Bowl Sunday, not everyone in Mexico had been watching the Super Bowl.

  The family and friends of renowned sword-swallower José Guerrero were gathered at Mary of Magdala Hospital to pray for his recovery; during a performance at a tourist hotel in Acapulco, Guerrero had tripped and fallen onstage, lancing his liver. They’d risked flying him from Acapulco to Mexico City, where he was now in the hands of a specialist—liver stab wounds bleed very slowly. More than a hundred friends and family members had assembled at the tiny private hospital, which was surrounded by hundreds more well-wishers. Wallingford felt as if he’d interviewed them all. But now, about to leave for Boston to meet his new left hand, Patrick was glad that his three-minute report had been edited to a minute and a half. He was impatient to see the rerun of Stubby Farrell’s story; he would pay closer attention this time.

  Dr. Zajac had told him that Otto Clausen was left-handed, but what did that mean, exactly? Wallingford was right-handed. Until the lion, he’d always held the microphone in his left hand so that he would be free to shake hands with his right. Now that he had only one hand in which to hold the microphone, Wallingford had largely dispensed with shaking hands.

  What would it be like to be right-handed and then get a left-handed man’s left hand? Hadn’t the left-handedness been a function of Clausen’s brain? Surely the predetermination to left-handedness was not in the hand. Patrick kept thinking of a hundred such questions he wanted to ask Dr. Zajac.

  On the telephone, all the doctor had said was that the medical authorities in Wisconsin had acted quickly enough to preserve the hand because of the “prompt consideration of Mrs. Clausen.” Dr. Zajac had been mumbling. Normally he didn’t mumble, but the doctor had been up most of the night, administering to the vomiting dog, and then—with Rudy’s overzealous assistance—he had attempted to analyze the peculiar-looking substance (in her vomit) that had made Medea sick. Rudy’s opinion was that the partially digested duct tape looked like the remains of a seagull. If so, Zajac thought to himself, the bird had been long dead and sticky when the dog ate it. But the analytically minded father and son wouldn’t really get to the bottom of what Medea had eaten until the DogWatch man called on Monday morning to inquire how the invisible barrier was working, and to apologize for leaving behind his roll of duct tape.

  “You were my last job on Friday,” the DogWatch man said, as if he were a detective. “I must have left my duct tape at your place. I don’t suppose you’ve seen it around.”

  “In a manner of speaking, yes—we have,” was all Dr. Zajac could manage to say. The doctor was still recovering from the sight of Irma, fresh from her morning shower. The girl had been naked and toweling dry her hair in the kitchen. She’d come back from the weekend early Monday morning, gone for a run, and then taken a shower. She was naked in the kitchen because she’d assumed she was alone in the house—but don’t forget that she wanted Zajac to see her naked, anyway.

  Normally at that time Monday morning, Dr. Zajac had already returned Rudy to his mother’s house—in time for Hildred to take the boy to school. But Zajac and Rudy had both overslept, the result of their being up most of the night with Medea. Only after Dr. Zajac’s ex-wife called and accused him of kidnapping Rudy did Zajac stumble into the kitchen to make some coffee. Hildred went on yelling after he put Rudy on the phone.

  Irma didn’t see Dr. Zajac, but he saw her—everything but her head, which was largely hidden from view because she was toweling dry her hair. Great abs! the doctor thought, retreating.

  Later he found he couldn’t speak to Irma, except in an uncustomary stammer. He haltingly tried to thank her for her peanut-butter idea, but she couldn’t understand him. (Nor did she meet Rudy.) And as Dr. Zajac drove Rudy to his angry mother’s house, he noticed that there was a special spirit of camaraderie between him and his little boy—they had both been yelled at by Rudy’s mother. Zajac was euphoric when he called Wallingford in Mexico, and much more than Otto Clausen’s suddenly available left hand was exciting him—the doctor had spent a terrific weekend with his son. Nor had his view of Irma, naked, been unexciting, although it was typical of Zajac to notice her abs. Was it only Irma’s abs that had reduced him to stammering? Thus the “prompt consideration of Mrs. Clausen” and similar formalities were all the soon-to-be-celebrated hand surgeon could manage to impart to Patrick Wallingford over the phone. What Dr. Zajac didn’t tell Patrick was that Otto Clausen’s widow had demonstrated unheard-of zeal on behalf of the donor hand. Mrs. Clausen had not only accompanied her husband’s body from Green Bay to Milwaukee, where (in addition to most of his organs) Otto’s left hand was removed; she’d also insisted on accompanying the hand, which was packed in ice, on the flight from Milwaukee to Boston.

  Wallingford, of course, had no idea that he was going to meet more than his new hand in Boston; he was also going to meet his new hand’s widow. This development was less upsetting to Dr. Zajac and the other members of the Boston team than a more unusual but no less spur-of-the-moment request of Mrs. Clausen’s. Yes, there were some strings attached to the donor hand, and Dr. Zajac was only now learning of them. He had probably been wise in not telling Patrick about the new demands.

  With time, everyone at Schatzman, Gingeleskie, Mengerink & Associates hoped, Wallingford might warm to the widow’s seemingly last-minute ideas. Apparently not one to beat around the bush, she had requested visitation rights with the hand after the transplant surgery.

  How could the one-handed reporter refuse?

  “She just wants to see it, I suppose,” Dr. Zajac suggested to Wallingford in the doctor’s office in Boston.

  “Just see it?” Patrick asked. There was a disconcerting pause. “Not touch it, I hope—not hold hands or anything.”

  “Nobody can touch it! Not for a considerable period of time after the surgery,” Dr. Zajac answered protectively.

  “But does she mean one visit? Two? For a year ?”

  Zajac shrugged. “Indefinitely—those are her terms.”

  “Is she crazy?” Patrick asked. “Is she morbid, grief-stricken, deranged?”

  “You’ll see,” Dr. Zajac said. “She wants to meet you.”

  “Before the surgery?”

  “Yes, now. That’s part of her request. She needs to be sure that she wants you to have it.”

  “But I thought her husband wanted me to have it!” Wallingford cried. “It was his hand!”
r />   “Look—all I can tell you is, the widow’s in the driver’s seat,” Dr. Zajac said.

  “Have you ever had to deal with a medical ethicist?” (Mrs. Clausen had been quick to call a medical ethicist, too.)

  “But why does she want to meet me?” Patrick wanted to know. “I mean before I get the hand.”

  This part of the request and the visitation rights struck Dr. Zajac as the kind of thing only a medical ethicist could have thought up. Zajac didn’t trust medical ethicists; he believed that they should keep out of the area of experimental surgery. They were always meddling—doing their best to make surgery “more human.”

  Medical ethicists complained that hands were not necessary to live, and that the anti-rejection drugs posed many risks and had to be taken for life. They argued that the first recipients should be those who had lost both hands; after all, doublehand amputees had more to gain than recipients who’d lost only one hand. Unaccountably, the medical ethicists loved Mrs. Clausen’s request—not just the creepy visitation rights, but also that she insisted on meeting Patrick Wallingford and deciding if she liked him before permitting the surgery. (You can’t get “more human” than that.)

  “She just wants to see if you’re… nice,” Zajac tried to explain. This new affront struck Wallingford as both an insult and a dare; he felt simultaneously offended and challenged. Was he nice? He didn’t know. He hoped he was, but how many of us truly know?

  As for Dr. Zajac, the doctor knew he himself wasn’t especially nice. He was cautiously optimistic that Rudy loved him, and of course he knew that he loved his little boy. But the hand specialist had no illusions concerning himself in the niceness department; Dr. Zajac, except to his son, had never been very lovable. With a pang, Zajac recalled his brief glimpse of Irma’s abs. She must do sit-ups and crunches all day!