The Fourth Hand (2 page)

What Wal ingford had noticed was that the nets themselves were in shocking disrepair. From where Patrick stood on the dry, hard-packed earth—on the “floor”

of the tent, looking up—he saw that the pattern of holes was ragged and torn. The damaged net resembled a colossal spiderweb that had been wrecked by a panicked bird. It was doubtful that the net could support the weight of a fal ing child, much less that of an adult.

Many of the performers
were
children, and these mostly girls. Their parents had sold them to the circus so they could have a better (meaning a safer) life. Yet the element of risk in the Great Ganesh was huge. The excitable ringmaster had told the truth: the audiences packed the tent every afternoon and night to see accidents happen. And often the victims of these accidents were children. As performers, they were talented amateurs—good little athletes—but they were spottily trained.
Why
most of the children were girls was a subject any good journalist would have been interested in, and Wal ingford—whether or not one believed his ex-wife’s assessment of his character—

was a good journalist. His intel igence lay chiefly in his powers of observation, and television had taught him the importance of quickly jumping ahead to what might go wrong.

The jumping-ahead part was both what was bril iant about and what was wrong with television. TV was driven by crises, not causes. What chiefly disappointed Patrick about his field assignments for the al -news network was how common it was to miss or ignore a more important story.

For example, the majority of the child performers in an Indian circus were girls because their parents had not wanted them to become prostitutes; at worst, the boys not sold to a circus would become beggars. (Or they would starve.)

But that wasn’t the story Patrick Wal ingford had been sent to India to report. A trapeze artist, a grown woman hurtling downward from eighty feet, had landed in her husband’s arms and kil ed him. The Indian government had intervened

—the result being that every circus in India was protesting the ruling that their aerialists now had to use a net. Even the recently widowed trapeze artist, the woman who’d fal en, joined in the protest.

Wal ingford had interviewed her in the hospital, where she was recovering from a broken hip and some nonspecific damage to her spleen; she told him that flying without a safety net was what made the flying special. Certainly she would mourn her late husband, but her husband had been an aerialist, too—he’d also fal en and had survived his fal .

Yet possibly, his widow implied, he’d not
really
escaped that first mistake; her fal ing on him had conceivably signified the true conclusion of the earlier, unfinished episode.

Now
that
was interesting, Wal ingford thought, but his news editor, who was cordial y despised by everyone, was disappointed in the interview. And al the people in the newsroom in New York thought that the widowed trapeze artist had seemed “too calm”; they preferred their disaster victims to be hysterical. Furthermore, the recovering aerialist had said her late husband was now “in the arms of the goddess he believed in”—an enticing phrase. What she meant was that her husband had believed in Durga, the Goddess of Destruction. Most of the trapeze artists believed in Durga—the goddess is general y depicted as having ten arms. The widow explained: “Durga’s arms are meant to catch and hold you, if you ever fal .”

That
was interesting to Wal ingford, too, but not to the people in the newsroom in New York; they said they were

“sick of religion.” Patrick’s news editor informed him that they had run too many religious stories lately. What a dick, Wal ingford thought. It didn’t help that the news editor’s name was Dick. He’d sent Patrick back to the Great Ganesh Circus to acquire “additional local color.” Dick had further reasoned that the ringmaster was more outspoken than the trapeze artist.

Patrick had protested. “Something about the child performers would make a better story,” he said. But apparently they were also “sick of children” in New York.

“Just get more of the ringmaster,” Dick advised Wal ingford. In tandem with the ringmaster’s excitement, the lions in their cage—the lions were the background for the last interview—grew restless and loud. In television terms, the piece that Wal ingford was filing from India was the intended “kicker,” the show-ender. The lions would make the story an even better kicker if they roared loudly enough.

It was meat day, and the Muslims who brought the meat had been delayed. The television truck and the camera and sound equipment—as wel as the cameraman and the female sound technician—had intimidated them. The Muslim meat wal ahs had been frozen in their tracks by so much unfamiliar technology. But primarily it was the sight of the female sound technician that had halted them. A tal blonde in tight blue jeans, she wore headphones and a tool belt with what must have struck the meat wal ahs as an assortment of male-looking accessories: either pliers or a pair of wire cutters, a bunch of clamps and cables, and what might have been a battery-tester. She was also wearing a T-shirt without a bra. Wal ingford knew that she was German because he’d slept with her the night before.

She’d told him about the first trip she took to Goa—she was on vacation, traveling with another German girl, and they’d both decided that they never wanted to live anywhere but India.

The other girl got sick and went home, but Monika had found a way to stay in India. That was her name—“Monika with a
k ,
” she’d told him. “Sound technicians can live anywhere,” she had declared. “Anywhere there’s sound.”

“You might like to try living in New York,” Patrick had suggested. “There’s a lot of sound there, and you can drink the water.” Unthinkingly, he’d added: “German girls are very popular in New York right now.”

“Why ‘right now’?” she’d asked.

This was symptomatic of the trouble Patrick Wal ingford got into with women; that he said things for no reason was not unlike the way he acquiesced to the advances women made to him. There’d been no reason for saying “German girls are very popular in New York right now,” except to keep talking. It was his feeble acquiescence to women, his tacit assent to their advances, that had infuriated Wal ingford’s wife, who’d just happened to cal him in his hotel room when he was fucking Monika with a
k.

There was a ten-and-a-half-hour time difference between Junagadh and New York, but Patrick pretended he didn’t know whether India was ten and a half hours ahead or behind. Al he ever said when his wife cal ed was, “What time is it there, honey?”

“You’re fucking someone, aren’t you?” his wife asked.

“No, Marilyn, I am
not,
” he lied. Under him, the German girl held stil . Wal ingford tried to hold himself stil , too, but holding stil in the act of lovemaking is arguably more difficult for a man.

“I just thought you’d like to know the results of your paternity test,” Marilyn said. This helped Patrick to hold stil . “Wel , it’s negative—you’re not the father. I guess you dodged that bul et, didn’t you?”

Al Wal ingford could think of saying was: “That was improper—that they gave you the results of my blood test. It was
my
blood test.”

Under him, Monika with a
k
went rigid; where she’d been warm, she felt cool.

“
What
blood test?” she whispered in Patrick’s ear.

But Wal ingford was wearing a condom—the German sound technician was protected from most things, if not everything. (Patrick always wore a condom, even with his wife.)

“Who is she this time?” Marilyn hol ered into the phone.

“Who are you fucking at this very minute?”

Two things were clear to Wal ingford: that his marriage could not be saved and that he didn’t want to save it. As always, with women, Patrick acquiesced. “Who
is
she?” his wife screamed again, but Wal ingford wouldn’t answer her.

Instead he held the mouthpiece of the phone to the German girl’s lips. Patrick needed to move a wisp of the girl’s blond hair away from her ear before he whispered into it. “Just tel her your name.”

“Monika . . . with a
k,
” the German girl said into the phone.

Wal ingford hung up, doubting that Marilyn would cal back

— she didn’t. But after that, he had a lot to say to Monika with a
k;
they hadn’t had the best night’s sleep.

In the morning, at the Great Ganesh, the way everything had started out seemed a little anticlimactic. The ringmaster’s repeated complaints about the Indian government were not nearly so sympathetic as the fal en trapeze artist’s description of the ten-armed goddess in whom al the aerialists believed. Were they deaf and blind in the newsroom in New York? That widow in her hospital bed had been great stuff! And Wal ingford stil wanted to tel the story of the
context
of the trapeze artist fal ing without a safety net. The child performers were the context, those children who’d been sold to the circus. What if the trapeze artist herself had been sold to the circus as a child? What if her late husband had been rescued from a no-future childhood, only to meet his fate—his wife fal ing into his arms from eighty feet—under the big top?
That
would have been interesting.

Instead, Patrick was interviewing the repetitive ringmaster in front of the lions’

cage—this commonplace circus image being what New York had meant by

“additional local color.”

No wonder the interview seemed anticlimactic compared to Wal ingford’s night with the German sound technician.

Monika with a
k,
in her T-shirt without a bra, was making a noticeable impression on the Muslim meat wal ahs, who had taken offense at the German girl’s clothes, or lack thereof. In their fear, their curiosity, their moral outrage, they would have given a better and truer depiction of additional local color than the tiresome ringmaster.

Near the lions’ cage, but appearing either too afraid or too dumbfounded or too offended to come any closer, the Muslims stood as if in shock. Their wooden carts were piled high with the sweet-smel ing meat, which was a source of infinite disgust to the largely vegetarian (Hindu) community of the circus. Natural y the lions could smel the meat, too, and were vexed at the delay. When the lions began roaring, the cameraman zoomed in on them, and Patrick Wal ingford—recognizing a moment of genuine spontaneity—extended his microphone to within reach of their cage. He got a better kicker than he’d bargained for.

A paw flicked out; a claw caught Wal ingford’s left wrist. He dropped the microphone. In less than two seconds, his left arm, up to his elbow, had been snatched inside the cage.

His left shoulder was slammed against the bars; his left hand, including an inch or more above his wrist, was in a lion’s mouth. In the ensuing hul abaloo, two other lions competed with the first for Patrick’s wrist and hand. The lion tamer, who was never far from his lions, intervened; he struck them in their faces with a shovel. Wal ingford retained consciousness long enough to recognize the shovel—it was used principal y as a lion pooper-scooper.

(He’d seen it in action only minutes before.) Patrick passed out somewhere in the vicinity of the meat carts, not far from where Monika with a
k
had sympathetical y fainted. But the German girl had fainted
in
one of the meat carts, to the considerable consternation of the meat wal ahs; and when she came to, she discovered that her tool belt had been stolen while she’d lain unconscious in the wet meat.

The German sound technician further claimed that, while she was passed out, someone had fondled her breasts—

she had fingerprint bruises on both breasts to prove it. But there were no handprints among the bloodstains on her Tshirt. (The bloodstains were from the meat.) It was more likely that the bruises on her breasts were the result of her nightlong lovemaking with Patrick Wal ingford. Whoever had been bold enough to swipe her tool belt had probably lacked the courage to touch her breasts. No one had touched her headphones.

Wal ingford, in turn, had been dragged away from the lions’

cage without realizing that his left hand and wrist were gone; yet he was aware that the lions were stil fighting over something. At the same moment that the sweet smel of the mutton reached him, he realized that the Muslims were transfixed by his dangling left arm. (The force of the lion’s pul had separated his shoulder.) And when he looked, he saw that his watch was missing. He was not that sorry to have lost it—it had been a gift from his wife. Of course there was nothing to keep the watch from slipping off; his left hand and the big joint of his left wrist were missing, too.

Not finding a familiar face among the Muslim meat wal ahs, Wal ingford had doubtless hoped to locate Monika with a
k,
stricken but no less adoring. Unfortunately, the German girl was flat on her back in one of the mutton carts, her face turned away.

Patrick took some bitter consolation from seeing, if not the face, at least the profile of his unfazed cameraman, who had never wavered from his foremost responsibility. The determined professional had moved in close to the lions’