The Fourth Hand

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 even 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