American Gods (20 page)

Shadow rolled over on the foam rubber, in his sleep, finding
new places that hurt as he rolled.

Someone was shaking his shoulder.

He wanted to ask them not to wake him, to let him sleep and
leave him be, but it came out as a grunt.

“Puppy?” said Laura. “You have to wake up. Please wake up,
hon.”

And there was a moment’s gentle relief. He had had such a
strange dream, of prisons and con men and down-at-heel gods, and now Laura was
waking him to tell him it was time for work, and perhaps there would be time
enough before work to steal some coffee and a kiss, or more than a kiss; and he
put out his hand to touch her.

Her flesh was cold as ice, and sticky.

Shadow opened his eyes.

“Where did all the blood come from?” he asked.

“Other people,” she said. “It’s not mine. I’m filled with formaldehyde,
mixed with glycerin and lanolin.”

“Which other people?” he asked.

“The guards,” she said. “It’s okay. I killed them. You
better move. I don’t think I gave anyone a chance to raise the alarm. Take a
coat from out there, or you’ll freeze your butt off.”

“You killed them?”

She shrugged, and half smiled, awkwardly. Her hands looked
as if she had been finger-painting, composing a picture that had been executed
solely in crimsons, and there were splashes and spatters on her face and
clothes (the same blue suit in which she had been buried) that made Shadow think
of Jackson Pollock, because it was less problematic to think of Jackson Pollock
than to accept the alternative.

“It’s easier to kill people, when you’re dead yourself,” she
told him. “I mean, it’s not such a big deal. You’re not so prejudiced anymore.”

“It’s still a big deal to me,” said Shadow.

“You want to stay here until the morning crew comes?” she
said. “You can if you like. I thought you’d like to get out of here.”

“They’ll think I did it,” he said, stupidly.

“Maybe,” she said. “Put on a coat, hon. You’ll freeze.”

He walked out into the corridor. At the end of the corridor
was a guardroom. In the guardroom were four dead men: three guards, and the man
who had called himself Stone. His friend was nowhere to be seen. From the
blood-colored skid marks on the floor, two of them had been dragged into the
guardroom and dropped onto the floor.

His own coat was hanging from the coat rack. His wallet was
still in the inside pocket, apparently untouched. Laura pulled open a couple of
cardboard boxes filled with candy bars.

The guards, now he could see theni properly, were wearing
dark camouflage uniforms, but there were no official tags on them, nothing to
say who they, were working for. They might have been weekend duck hunters,
dressed for the shoot.

Laura reached out her cold hand and squeezed Shadow’s hand
in hers. She had the gold coin he had given her around her neck, on a golden
chain.

“That looks nice,” he said.

“Thanks.” She smiled, prettily.

“What about the others,” he asked. “Wednesday, and the rest
of them? Where are they?” Laura passed him a handful of candy bars, and he
filled his pockets with them.

“There wasn’t anybody else here. A lot of empty cells, and
one with you in it. Oh, and one of the men had gone into the cell down there to
jack off with a magazine. He got such a shock.”

“You killed him while he was jerking himself off?”

She shrugged. “I guess,” she said, uncomfortably. “I was worried
they were hurting you. Someone has to watch out for you, and I told you I
would, didn’t I? Here, take these.” They were chemical hand and foot warmers:
thin pads—you broke the seal and they heated up and stayed that way for hours.
Shadow pocketed them.

“Look out for me? Yes,” he said, “you did.”

She reached out a finger, stroked him above his left
eyebrow. “You’re hurt,” she said.

“I’m okay,” he said.

He opened a metal door in the wall. It swung open slowly.
There was a four-foot drop to the ground, and he swung himself down to what
felt like gravel. He picked up Laura by the waist, swung her down, as he used
to swing her, easily, without a second thought ....

The moon came out from behind a thick cloud. It was low on
the horizon, ready to set, but the light it cast onto the snow was enough to
see by.

They had emerged from what turned out to be the
black-painted metal car of a long freight train, parked or abandoned in a
woodland siding. The series of wagon cars went on as far as he could see, into
the trees and away. He had been on a train. He should have known.

“How the hell did you find me here?” he asked his dead wife.

She shook her head slowly, amused. “You shine like a beacon
in a dark world,” she told him. “It wasn’t that hard. Now, just go. Go as far
and as fast as you can. Don’t use your credit cards and you should be fine.”

“Where should I go?”

She pushed a hand through her matted hair, flicking it back
out of her eyes. “The road’s that way,” she told him. “Do whatever you can.
Steal a car if you have to. Go south.”

“Laura,” he said, and hesitated. “Do you know what’s going
on? Do you know who these people are? Who you killed?”

“Yeah,” she said. “I think I do know.”

“I owe you,” said Shadow. “I’d still be in there if it wasn’t
for you. I don’t think they had anything good planned for me.”

“No,” she said. “I don’t think they did.”

They walked away from the empty train cars. Shadow wondered
about the other trains he’d seen, blank window-less metal cars that went on for
mile after mile, hooting their lonely way through the night. His fingers closed
around the Liberty dollar in his pocket, and he remembered Zorya Polunochnaya,
and the way she had looked at him in the moonlight. Did you ask her what she wanted?
It is the wisest thing to ask the dead. Sometimes they will tell you.

“Laura ... What do you want?” he asked.

“You really want to know?”

“Yes. Please.”

Laura looked up at him with dead blue eyes. “I want to be
alive again,” she said. “Not in this half-life, f want to be really alive. I
want to feel my heart pumpitigln my chest again. I want to feel blood moving
through me—hot, and salty, and real. It’s weird, you don’t think you can feel
it, the blood, but believe me, when it stops flowing, you’ll know.” She rubbed
her eyes, smudging her face with red from the mess on her hands. “Look, it’s
hard. You know why dead people only go out at night, puppy? Because it’s easier
to pass for real, in the dark. And I don’t want to have to pass. I want to be
alive.”

“I don’t understand what you want me to do.”

“Make it happen, hon. You’ll figure it out. I know you will.”

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll try. And if I do figure it out, how
do I find you?”

But she was gone, and there was nothing left in the woodland
but a gentle gray in the sky to show him where east was, and on the bitter
December wind a lonely wail that might have been the cry of the last nightbird
or the call of the first bird of dawn.

Shadow set his face to the south, and he began to walk.

As the Hindu gods are “immortal” only in a very particular
sense—for they are born and they die—they experience most of the great human
dilemmas and often seem to differ from mortals in a few trivial details,.. and
from demons even less. Yet they are regarded by the Hindus as a class of beings
by definition totally different from any other; they are symbols in a way that
no human being, however “archetypal” his life story, can ever be. They are
actors playing parts that are real only for us; they are the masks behind which
we see our own faces.

—Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty,
Introduction, Hindu Myths
(Penguin Books, 1975)

Shadow had been walking south, or what’he hoped was more or
less south, for several hours, heading along a narrow and unmarked road through
the woods somewhere in, he imagined, southern Wisconsin. A couple of jeeps came
down the road toward him at one point, headlights blazing, and he ducked into
the trees until they had passed. The early morning mist hung at waist level.
The cars were black.

When, thirty minutes later, he heard the noise of distant
helicopters coming from the west, he struck out away from the timber trail and
into the woods. There were two helicopters, and he lay crouched in a hollow
beneath a fallen tree and listened to them pass over. As they moved away, he
looked out and looked up for one hasty glance at the gray winter sky. He was
satisfied to observe that the helicopters were painted a matte black. He waited
beneath the tree until the noise of the helicopters was completely gone.

Under the trees the snow was little more than a dusting,
which crunched underfoot. He was deeply grateful for the chemical hand and feet
warmers, which kept his extremities from freezing. Beyond that, he was numb:
heart-numb, mind-numb, soul-numb. And the, numbness, he realized, went a long
way down, and a long way back.

So what do I want? he asked himself. He couldn’t answer, so
he just kept on walking, a step at a time, on and on through the woods. Trees
looked familiar, moments of landscape were perfectly deja-vued. Could he be
walking in circles? Maybe he would just walk and walk and walk until the
warmers and the candy bars ran out and then sit down and never get up again.

He reached a large stream, of the kind the locals called a
creek and pronounced crick, and decided to follow it. Streams led to rivers,
rivers all led to the Mississippi, and if he kept walking, or stole a boat or
built a raft, eventually he’d get to New Orleans, where it was warm, an idea
that seemed both comforting and unlikely.

There were no more helicopters. He had the feeling that the
ones that had passed overhead had been cleaning up the mess at the freight
train siding, not hunting for him, otherwise they would have returned; there
would have been tracker dogs and sirens and the whole paraphernalia of pursuit.
Instead, there was nothing.

What did he want? Not to get caught. Not to get blamed for
the deaths of the men on the train. “It wasn’t me,” he heard himself saying, “it
was my dead wife.” He could imagine the expressions on the faces of the law
officers. Then people could argue about whether he was crazy or not while he
went to the chair ...

He wondered whether Wisconsin had the death penalty. He
wondered whether that would matter. He wanted to understand what was going on—and
to find out how it was all going to end. And finally, producing a half-rueful
grin, he realized that most of all he wanted everything to be normal. He wanted
never to have gone to prison, for Laura still to be alive, for none of this
ever to have happened.

“I’m afraid that’s not exactly an option, m’boy,” he thought
to himself, in Wednesday’s gruff voice, and he nodded agreement. Not an option.
You burned your bridges. So keep walking. Do your own time ...

A distant woodpecker drummed against a rotten tree.

Shadow became aware of eyes on him: a handful of red cardinals
stared at him from a skeletal elder bush, then returned to pecking at the
clusters of black elderberries. They looked like the illustrations in the
Songbirds of North America calendar. He heard the birds’ video-arcade trills
and zaps and whoops follow him along the side of the creek. Eventually, they
faded away.

The dead fawn lay in a glade in the shadojw of a hill, and a
black bird the size of a small dog was picking, at its side with a large,
wicked beak, rending and tearing~g6bbets of red meat from the corpse. The
animal’s eyes were gone, but its head was untouched, and white fawn spots were
visible on its rump. Shadow wondered how it had diqil.

The black bird cocked its head onto one side, and then said,
in a voice like stones being struck, “You shadow man.”

“I’m Shadow,” said Shadow. The bird hopped up onto the fawn’s
rump, raised its head, ruffled its crown and neck feathers. It was enormous and
its eyes were black beads. There was something intimidating about a bird that
size, this close.

“Says he will see you in Kay-ro,” tokked the raven. Shadow
wondered which of Odin’s ravens this was: Huginn or Muninn, Memory or Thought.

“Kay-ro?” he asked.

“In Egypt.”

“How am I going to go to Egypt?”

“Follow Mississippi. Go south. Find Jackal.”

“Look,” said Shadow, “I don’t want to seem like I’r Jesus,
look ...” he paused. Regrouped. He was cold, standing in a wood, talking to a
big black bird who was currently branching on Bambi. “Okay. What I’m trying to
say is I don’t want mysteries.”

“Mysteries,” agreed the bird, helpfully,

“What I want is explanations. Jackal in Kay-ro. This does
not help me. It’s a line from a bad spy thriller.”

“Jackal. Friend. Tok. Kay-ro.”

“So you said. I’d like a little more information than that.”

The bird half turned, and pulled another strip of raw
venison from the fawn’s ribs. Then it flew off into the trees, the red strip
dangling from its beak like a long, bloody worm.

“Hey! Can you at least get me back to a real road?” called
Shadow.

The raven flew up and away. Shadow looked at the corpse of
the baby deer. He decided that if he were a real woodsman, he would slice off a
steak and grill it over a wood fire. Instead, he sat on a fallen tree and ate a
Snickers bar and knew that he really wasn’t a real woodsman.

The raven cawed from the edge of the clearing.

“You want me to follow you?” asked Shadow. “Or has Timmy
fallen down another well?” The bird cawed again, impatiently. Shadow started
walking toward it. It waited until he was close, then flapped heavily into
another tree, heading somewhat to the left of the way Shadow had originally
been going.

“Hey,” said Shadow. “Huginn or Muninn, or whoever you are.”

The bird turned, head tipped, suspiciously, on one side, and
it stared at him with bright eyes.