The Fourth Hand (13 page)

—he thought of other things. For example, how exactly do you
wait
for a hand when you’ve been without one for five years?

His recent experience with sake notwithstanding, he was not a drinker; but he grew strangely fond of sitting alone in an unfamiliar bar—always a different bar—in the late afternoon. A kind of lassitude compel ed him to play this game. As the cocktail hour came, and the place fil ed with people intent on becoming more and more companionable, Patrick Wal ingford sat sipping a beer; his objective was to project an aura of such unapproachable sadness that no one would intrude on his solitude.

They would al recognize him, of course; possibly he would overhear a whispered

“lion guy” or “disaster man,” but no one would speak to him.

That was the game—it was an actor’s exercise in finding the right look. (
Pity me,
the look said.
Pity me, but leave
me alone.
) It was a game at which he became pretty good.

Then, one late afternoon—shortly before the cocktail hour—

Wal ingford went to a bar in his old New York neighborhood. It was too early for the night doorman in Patrick’s former apartment building to start his shift, but Wal ingford was surprised to see the doorman in the bar—

al the more so because he wasn’t wearing his doorman’s uniform.

“Hi, Mr. O’Neil ,” Vlad or Vlade or Lewis greeted him. “I saw you was in Japan. They play pretty good basebal over there, don’t they? I suppose it’s an alternative for you, if things don’t work out here.”

“How are you, Lewis?” Wal ingford asked.

“It’s Vlade,” Vlad said gloomily. “This here’s my brother.

We’re just kil in’ some time before I go to work. I don’t enjoy the night shift no more.”

Patrick nodded to the nice-looking young man standing at the bar with the depressed-looking doorman. His name was Loren or Goran, or possibly Zorbid; the brother was shy and he’d mumbled his name.

But when Vlad or Vlade or Lewis went off to the men’s room—he’d been drinking glass after glass of cranberry juice and soda—the shy brother confided to Patrick, “He doesn’t mean any harm, Mr. Wal ingford. He’s just a little confused about things. He doesn’t know you’re not Paul O’Neil , even though he
does
know it. I honestly believed that, after the lion thing, he would final y get it. But he doesn’t. Most of the time, you’re just Paul O’Neil to him. I’m sorry. It must be a nuisance.”

“Please don’t apologize,” Patrick said. “I like your brother. If I’m Paul O’Neil to him, that’s fine. At least I’ve left Cincinnati.”

They both looked a little guilty, just sitting there at the bar, when Vlad or Vlade or Lewis returned from the men’s room. Patrick regretted that he hadn’t asked the normal brother what the confused doorman’s real name was, but the moment had passed. Now the three-named doorman was back; he looked more like his old self because he’d changed into his uniform in the men’s room.

The doorman handed his regular clothes to his brother, who put them in a backpack resting against the footrail at the bar. Patrick hadn’t seen the backpack until now, but he realized that this was part of a routine with the brothers.

Probably the normal brother came back in the morning to take Vlad or Vlade or Lewis home; he looked like that kind of good brother.

Suddenly the doorman put his head down on the bar as if he wanted to go to sleep on the spot. “Hey, come on—don’t do that,” his brother said affectionately to him.

“You don’t want to do that, especial y not in front of Mr.

O’Neil .”

The doorman lifted his head. “I just get tired of workin’ so late, sometimes,” he said. “No more night shifts, please. No more night shifts.”

“Look—you have a job, don’t you?” the brother said, trying to cheer him up. Miraculously—that quickly!—Vlad or Vlade or Lewis broke into a grin. “Gosh, look at me,” he said. “I’m feelin’ sorry for myself while I’m sittin’ with the best right fielder I can think of, and he’s got no left hand! And he bats left and throws left, too. I’m very sorry, Mr. O’Neil . I got no business feelin’ sorry for myself in front of
you.
”

Natural y Wal ingford felt sorry for himself, too, but he wanted to be Paul O’Neil for a little while longer. It was the beginning of getting away from being the
old
Patrick Wal ingford.

Here he was, disaster man, cultivating a look for the cocktail hour. The look was just an act, the lion guy knew, but the
pity-me
part was true.

An Accident on Super Bowl Sunday

A
LTHOUGH MRS. CLAUSENhad written to Schatzman, Gingeleskie, Mengerink & Associates that she was from Appleton, Wisconsin, she meant only that she’d been born there. By the time of her marriage to Otto Clausen, she was living in Green Bay, the home of the celebrated professional footbal team. Otto Clausen was a Packer fan; he drove a beer truck for a living, and the only bumper sticker he permitted was in Green Bay green on a field of gold.

PROUD

TO

BE

A

CHEESEHEAD!

Otto and his wife had made plans to go to their favorite sports bar in Green Bay on Sunday night, January 25, 1998. It was the night of Super Bowl XXXI , and the Packers were playing the Denver Broncos in San Diego.

But Mrs. Clausen had felt sick to her stomach al day; she would say to her husband, as she often did, that she hoped she was pregnant. She wasn’t—she had the flu. She quickly developed a fever and threw up twice before kickoff. Both the Clausens were disappointed that it wasn’t morning sickness. (Even if she were pregnant, she’d had her period only two weeks ago; it would have been too soon for her to have had morning sickness.)

Mrs. Clausen’s moods were very readable—at least Otto believed that he usual y knew what his wife was thinking.

She wanted to have a baby more than anything in the world.

Her husband wanted her to have one, too—she couldn’t fault him for that. She just felt awful about having no children, and she knew that Otto felt awful about it, too.

Regarding this particular case of the flu, Otto had never seen his wife so sick; he volunteered to stay home and take care of her. They could watch the game on the TV in the bedroom. But Mrs. Clausen was so il that she couldn’t imagine watching the game, and she was a virtual cheesehead, too; that she’d been a Packer fan al her life was a principal bond between her and Otto. She even worked for the Green Bay Packers. She and Otto could have had tickets to the game in San Diego, but Otto hated to fly.

Now it touched her deeply: Otto loved her so much that he would give up seeing the Super Bowl at the sports bar. Mrs.

Clausen wouldn’t hear of his staying home. Although she felt too nauseated to talk, she summoned her strength and declared, in a complete sentence, one of those oft-repeated truths of the sports world that render footbal fans mute with agreement (at the same time striking everyone indifferent to footbal as a colossal stupidity). “There’s no guarantee of returning to the Super Bowl,” Mrs. Clausen stated.

Otto was childishly moved. Even on her sickbed, his wife wanted him to have fun. But one of their two cars was in the body shop, the result of a fender-bender in a supermarket parking lot. Otto didn’t want to leave his wife home sick without a car.

“I’l take the beer truck,” he told her. The truck was empty, and Otto was friends with everyone at the sports bar; they would let him park the truck at the delivery entrance. There weren’t going to be any deliveries on a Super Bowl Sunday.

“Go, Packers!” his wife said weakly—she was already fal ing asleep. In a gesture of unspoken physical tenderness that she would long remember, Otto put the TV

remote on the bed beside her and made sure that the television was on the correct channel.

Then he was off to the game. The beer truck was lighter than he was used to; he kept checking his speed while he maneuvered the big vehicle through the nearempty Sunday streets. Not since he was six or seven had Otto Clausen missed the kickoff of a Packer game, and he wouldn’t miss this one. He may have been only thirty-nine, but he’d seen al thirty-one previous Super Bowls. He would see Super Bowl XXXI from the opening kickoff to the bitter end.

Most sportswriters would concede that the thirty-second Super Bowl was among the best ever played—a close, exciting game that the underdog won. It is common knowledge that most Americans love underdogs, but not in Green Bay, Wisconsin, in the case of Super Bowl XXXI , where the upstart Denver Broncos beat the Packers, rendering al cheeseheads despondent.

Green Bay fans were borderline suicidal by the end of the fourth quarter—not necessarily Otto, who was despondent but also very drunk. He’d fal en sound asleep at the bar during a beer commercial in the final two minutes of the game, and while he woke up the moment play resumed, he had suffered another unabridged edition of his worst recurring dream, which seemed to be hours longer than the commercial.

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 real y 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 fel ow 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.

Natural y 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 al ; 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 cal Otto a taxi to take him home.

No, no, no—the phone cal wasn’t necessary, Otto had mumbled. He had a cel phone in his truck. He would move the beer truck first and cal the taxi himself. He would wait in his truck for the taxi. Besides, he wanted to cal 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 Terrel Davis slicing through the Packers’ secondary. The Broncos’ running back had made the Green Bay defense look as soft as . . . wel , 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?

M rs.
Clausen knew the unfortunate reporter’s name. “I wonder how that poor Patrick Wal ingford 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
. . . wel , gee, it’s a recognizable part of you, if you know what I mean.”