John Irving - The Fourth Hand

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.

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.