The Fourth Hand (38 page)

“Are they stil there? Do you see them?” Doris asked.

“Yes,” he answered.

She once again positioned the flashlight so that the beam was cast out over the lake. He swam out from under the dock, into the beam of light, where he found her waiting for him; she was floating on her back with her breasts above the surface. Mrs. Clausen didn’t say anything. Wal ingford remained silent with her. He speculated that, one winter, the ice could be especial y thick; it might grind against the boathouse dock and the rings might be lost. Or a winter storm could sweep the boathouse away. Whatever, the wedding rings were where they belonged—that was what Mrs. Clausen had wanted to show him.

Across the lake, the newly arrived Peeping Tom had the lights on in his cabin. His radio was playing; he was listening to a basebal game, but Patrick couldn’t tel which teams were playing.

They swam back to the boathouse, with both the flashlight on the dock and the gas lamps shining from the two bedroom windows to guide them. This time Wal ingford remembered to pee in the lake so that later he wouldn’t have to go in the woods, with the mosquitoes.

They both kissed Otto junior good night, and Doris extinguished the gaslight in the boy’s room and closed his curtains. Then she turned off the lamp in the other bedroom, where she lay naked and cool from the lake, under just the top sheet, with her and Wal ingford’s hair stil wet and cold in the moonlight. She’d not closed their curtains on purpose; she wanted to wake up early, before the baby.

Both she and Patrick fel instantly asleep in the moonlit room. That night, the moon didn’t set until almost three in the morning.

The sunrise was a little after five on Monday, but Mrs.

Clausen was up wel before then. When Wal ingford woke, the room was a pearl-gray or pewter color and he was aware of being aroused; it was not unlike one of the more erotic moments in the blue-capsule dream.

Mrs. Clausen was putting the second condom on him. She had found what was, even for Wal ingford, a novel way to do it—she was unrol ing it on his penis with her teeth. For someone with no previous experience with condoms, she was surpassingly innovative, but Doris confessed that she had read about this method in a book.

“Was it a novel?” Wal ingford wanted to know. (Of course it was!)

“Give me your hand,” Mrs. Clausen commanded.

He natural y thought that she meant the right one—it was his only hand. But when he extended his right hand to her, she said, “No, the fourth one.”

Patrick thought he’d misheard her. Surely she’d said, “No, the other one”—the nohand or the nonhand, as almost everyone cal ed it.

“The what?” Wal ingford asked, just to be sure.

“Give me your hand, the fourth one,” Doris said. She seized his stump and gripped it tightly between her thighs, where he could feel his missing fingers come to life.

“There were the two you were born with,” Mrs. Clausen explained. “You lost one. Otto’s was your third. As for
this
one,” she said, clenching her thighs for emphasis,

“this is the one that wil never forget me. This one is mine.

It’s your fourth.”

“Oh.” Perhaps that was why he could feel it, as if it were real. They swam naked again after they made love, but this time one of them stood at the window in little Otto’s bedroom, watching the other swim. It was during Mrs.

Clausen’s turn that Otto junior woke up with the sunrise.

Then they were busy packing up; Doris did al the things that were necessary to close the cottage. She even found the time to take the last of their trash across the lake to the Dumpster on the dock. Wal ingford stayed with Otto. Doris drove the boat a lot faster when the baby wasn’t with her.

They had al their bags and the baby gear assembled on the big dock when the floatplane arrived. While the pilot and Mrs. Clausen loaded the smal plane, Wal ingford held Otto junior in his right arm and waved no-handed across the lake to the Peeping Tom. Every so often, they could see the sun reflected in the lens of his telescope.

When the floatplane took off, the pilot made a point of passing low over the newcomer’s dock. The Peeping Tom was pretending that his telescope was a fishing pole and he was fishing off his dock; the sil y asshole kept making imaginary casts. The tripod for the telescope stood incriminatingly in the middle of the dock, like the mounting for a crude kind of artil ery. There was too much noise in the cabin for Wal ingford and Mrs. Clausen to talk without shouting. But they looked at each other constantly, and at the baby, whom they passed back and forth between them.

As the floatplane was descending for its landing, Patrick told her again—without a sound, just by moving his lips—“I love you.”

Doris did not at first respond, and when she did so—also without actual y saying the words, but by letting him read her lips—it was that same sentence, longer than

“I love you,” which she had spoken before. (“I’m stil thinking about it.”) Wal ingford could only wait and see.

From where the seaplane docked, they drove to Austin Straubel Airport in Green Bay. Otto junior fussed in his car seat while Wal ingford made an effort to amuse him. Doris drove. Now that they could hear each other talk, it seemed they had nothing to say.

At the airport, where he kissed Mrs. Clausen good-bye, and then little Otto, Patrick felt Mrs. Clausen put something in his right front pocket. “Please don’t look at it now. Please wait until later,” she asked him. “Just think about this: my skin has grown back together, the hole has closed. I couldn’t wear that again if I wanted to. And besides, if I end up with you, I know I don’t need it. I know
you
don’t need it.

Please give it away.”

Wal ingford knew what it was without looking at it—the fertility doohickey he’d once seen in her navel, the body ornament that had pierced her bel y button. He was dying to see it.

He didn’t have to wait long. He was thinking about the ambiguity of Mrs. Clausen’s parting words—“if I end up with you”—when the thing she’d put in his pocket set off the metal-detection device in the airport. He had to take it out of his pocket and look at it then. An airport security guard took a good look at it, too; in fact, the guard had the first long look at it.

It was surprisingly heavy for something so smal ; the grayish-white, metal ic color gleamed like gold. “It’s platinum,” the security guard said. She was a dark-skinned Native American woman with jet-black hair, heavyset and sad-looking. The way she handled the bel y-button ornament indicated she knew something about jewelry.

“This must have been expensive,” she said, handing the doohickey back to him.

“I don’t know—I didn’t buy it,” Wal ingford replied. “It’s a body-piercing item, for a woman’s navel.”

“I know,” the security guard told him. “They usual y set the metal detector off when they’re in someone’s bel y button.”

“Oh,” Patrick said. He was only beginning to grasp what the good-luck charm was. A tiny hand—a left one.

In the body-piercing trade, it was what they cal ed a barbel

—a rod with a bal that screws on and off one end, just to keep the ornament from fal ing off, not unlike an earring post. But at the other end of the rod, which served the design as a slender wrist, was the most delicate, most exquisite little hand that Patrick Wal ingford had ever seen.

The middle finger was crossed over the index finger in that near-universal symbol of good luck. Patrick had expected a more specific fertility symbol—maybe a miniature god or something tribal. Another security guard came over to the table where Wal ingford and the first security guard were standing. He was a smal , lean black man with a perfectly trimmed mustache. “What is it?” he asked his col eague.

“A body ornament, for your bel y button,” she explained.

“Not for mine!” the man said, grinning.

Patrick handed him the good-luck charm. That was when the Windbreaker slipped off Wal ingford’s left forearm and the guards saw that his left hand was gone.

“Hey, you’re the lion guy!” the male guard said. He’d scarcely glanced at the smal platinum hand with the crossed fingers, resting in the palm of his bigger hand.

The female guard instinctively reached out and touched Patrick’s left forearm.

“I’m sorry I didn’t recognize you, Mr. Wal ingford,” she said.

What kind of sadness was it that showed in her face?

Wal ingford had instantly known she was sad, but he’d not (until now) considered the possible reasons. There was a smal , fishhook-shaped scar on her throat; it could have come from anything, from a childhood accident with a pair of scissors to a bad marriage or a violent rape.

Her col eague—the smal , lean black man—was now looking at the body ornament with new interest. “Wel , it’s a hand. A left one. I get it!” he said excitedly. “I guess that
would
be your good-luck charm, wouldn’t it?”

“Actual y, it’s for fertility. Or so I was told.”

“It
is
?” the Native American woman asked. She took the doohickey out of her fel ow guard’s hand. “Let me see that again. Does it work?” she asked Patrick. He could tel she was serious.

“It worked once,” Wal ingford replied.

It was tempting to guess what her sadness was. The female security guard was in her late thirties or early forties; she was wearing a wedding ring on her left ring finger and a turquoise ring on the ring finger of her right hand. Her ears were pierced—more turquoise. Perhaps her bel y button was pierced, too. Maybe she couldn’t get pregnant.

“Do you want it?” Wal ingford asked her. “I have no further use for it.”

The black man laughed. He walked away with a wave of his hand. “Oooh-oooh!

You don’t want to go there!” he said to Patrick, shaking his head. Maybe the poor woman had a dozen children; she’d been begging to get her tubes tied, but her nogood husband wouldn’t let her.

“You be quiet!” the female guard cal ed after her departing col eague. He was stil laughing, but she was not amused.

“You can have it, if you want it,” Wal ingford told her. After al , Mrs. Clausen had asked him to give it away.

The woman closed her dark hand over the fertility charm. “I would very much like to have it, but I’m sure I can’t afford it.”

“No, no! It’s free! I’m giving it to you. It’s already yours,”

Patrick said. “I hope it works, if you want it to.” He couldn’t tel if the woman guard wanted it for herself or for a friend, or if she just knew somewhere to sel it. At some distance from the security checkpoint, Wal ingford turned and looked at the Native American woman. She was back at work— to al other eyes, she was just a security guard—but when she glanced in Patrick’s direction, she waved to him and gave him a warm smile. She also held up the tiny hand.

Wal ingford was too far away to see the crossed fingers, but the ornament winked in the bright airport light; the platinum gleamed again like gold.

It reminded Patrick of Doris’s and Otto Clausen’s wedding rings, shining in the flashlight’s beam between the dark water and the underside of the boathouse dock. How many times since she’d nailed the rings there had Doris swum under the dock to look at them, treading water with a flashlight in her hand? Or had she never looked? Did she only see them—as Wal ingford now would—in dreams or in the imagination, where the gold was always brighter and the rings’

reflection in the lake more everlasting?

If he had a chance with Mrs. Clausen, it was not real y a matter that would be decided upon the discovery of whether or not Mary Shanahan was pregnant. More important was how brightly those wedding rings under the dock stil shone in Doris Clausen’s dreams, and in her imagination.

When his plane took off for Cincinnati, Wal ingford was—at that moment, literal y—as up in the air as Doris Clausen’s thoughts about him. He would have to wait and see.

That was Monday, July 26, 1999. Wal ingford would long remember the date; he wouldn’t see Mrs. Clausen again for ninety-eight days.

Lambeau Field

H
E WOULD HAVE TIME TO HEAL. The bruise on his shin (the glass-topped table in Mary’s apartment) first turned yel ow and then light brown; one day it was gone. Likewise the burn (the hot-water faucet in Mary’s shower) soon disappeared. Where his back had been scratched (Angie’s nails), there was suddenly no evidence of Patrick’s thrashing encounter with the makeup girl from Queens; even the sizable blood blister on his left shoulder (Angie’s love-bite) went away. Where there’d been a purplish hematoma (the love-bite again), there was nothing but Wal ingford’s new skin, as innocent-looking as little Otto’s shoulder—that bare, that unmarked.

Patrick remembered rubbing sunscreen on his son’s smooth skin; he missed touching and holding his little boy.

He missed Mrs. Clausen, too, but Wal ingford knew better than to press her for an answer.

He also knew that it was too soon to ask Mary Shanahan if she was pregnant. Al he said to her, as soon as he got back from Green Bay, was that he wanted to take her up on her suggestion to renegotiate his contract. There were, as Mary had pointed out, eighteen months remaining on Patrick’s present contract. Hadn’t it been her idea that he ask for three years, or even five?

Yes, it had. (She’d said, “Ask for three years—no, make that five.”) But Mary seemed to have no memory of their earlier conversation. “I think three years would be a lot to ask for, Pat,” was al she said.