American Gods (23 page)

“Shadow?” she said. “We need to talk.”

Shadow said nothing. She opened her purse and took out a
cigarette, lit it with an expensive silver lighter, put the lighter away. “I’m
talking to you,” she said. “Well?”

“This is crazy,” said Shadow.

“Like the rest of your life is sane? Give me a fucking
break.”

“Whatever. Lucille Ball talking to me from the TV is weirder
by several orders of magnitude than anything that’s happened to me so far,”
said Shadow.

“It’s not Lucille Ball. It’s Lucy Ricardo. And you know something—I’m
not even her. It’s just an easy way to look, given the context. That’s all.”
She shifted uncomfortably on the sofa.

“Who are you?” asked Shadow.

“Okay,” she said. “Good question. I’m the idiot box. I’m the
TV. I’m the all-seeing eye and the world of the cathode ray: I’m the boob tube.
I’m the little shrine the family gathers to adore.”

“You’re the television? Or someone in the television?”

“The TV’s the altar. I’m what people are sacrificing to.”

“What do they sacrifice?” asked Shadow.

“Their time, mostly,” said Lucy. “Sometimes each other.” She
raised two fingers, blew imaginary gunsmoke from the tips. Then she winked, a
big old / Love Lucy wink.

“You’re a god?” said Shadow.

Lucy smirked, and took a ladylike puff of her cigarette. “You
could say that,” she said.

“Sam says hi,” said Shadow.

“What? Who’s Sam? What are you talking about?”

Shadow looked at his watch. It was twenty-five past twelve. “Doesn’t
matter,” he said. “So, Lucy-on-the-TV. What do we need to talk about? Too many’people
have needed to talk recently. Normally it ends with someone hitting me.”

The camera moved in for a close-up: Lucji looked concerned,
her lips pursed. “I hate that. I hate that people were hurting you, Shadow. I’d
never do that, honey. No, I want to offer you a job.”

“Doing what?”

“Working for me. I heard about the trouble you had with the
Spookshow, and I was impressed with how you dealt with it. Efficient,
no-nonsense, effective. Who’d’ve thought you had it in you? They are really
pissed.”

“Really?”

“They underestimated you, sweetheart. Not a mistake I’m going
to make. I want you in my camp.” She stood up, walked toward the camera. “Look
at it like this, Shadow: we are the coming thing. We’re shopping malls—your
friends are crappy roadside attractions. Hell, we’re on-line malls, while your
friends are sitting by the side of the highway selling homegrown produce from a
cart. NQ—they aren’t even fruit sellers. Buggy-whip vendors. Whalebone-corset repairers.
We are now and tomorrow. Your friends aren’t even yesterday anymore.”

It was a strangely familiar speech. Shadow asked, “Did you
ever meet a fat kid in a limo?”

She spread her hands and rolled her eyes comically, funny
Lucy Ricardo washing her hands of a disaster. “The technical boy? You met the
technical boy? Look, he’s a good kid. He’s one of us. He’s just not good with
people he doesn’t know. When you’re working for us, you’ll see how amazing he
is.”

“And if I don’t want to work for you, I-Love-Lucy?”

There was a knock on the door of Lucy’s apartment, and Ricky’s
voice could be heard offstage, asking Loo-cy what was keepin’ her so long, they
was due down at the club in the next scene; a flash of irritation touched Lucy’s
cartoonish face. “Hell,” she said. “Look, whatever the old guys are paying you,
I can pay you double. Treble. A hundred times. Whatever they’re giving you, I
can give you so much more.” She smiled, a perfect, roguish, Lucy Ricardo smile.
“You name it, honey. What do you need?” She began to undo the buttons of her
blouse. “Hey,” she said. “You ever wanted to see Lucy’s tits?”

The screen went black. The sleep function had kicked in and
the set turned itself off. Shadow looked at his watch: it was half past
midnight. “Not really,” said Shadow.

He rolled over in bed and closed his eyes. It occurred to
him that the reason he liked Wednesday and Mr. Nancy and the rest of them
better than then: opposition was pretty straightforward: they might be dirty,
and cheap, and their food might taste like shit, but at least they didn’t speak
in cliches.

And he guessed he would take a roadside attraction, no
matter how cheap, how crooked, or how sad, over a shopping mall, any day.

Morning found Shadow back on the road, driving through a
gently undulating brown landscape of winter grass and leafless trees. The last
of the snow had vanished. He filled up the tank of the piece of shit in a town
that was home to the runner-up of the state women’s under 16s
three-hundred-meter dash, and, hoping that the dirt wasn’t all that was holding
it together, he ran the car through the gas station car wash. He was surprised
to discover that the car was, when clean—against all reason—white, and pretty
much free of rust. He drove on.

The sky was impossibly blue, and white industrial smoke
rising from factory chimneys was frozen in the sky, like a photograph. A hawk
launched itself from a dead tree and flew toward him, wings strobing in the
sunlight like a series of stop-motion photographs.

At some point he found himself heading, into East St. Louis.
He attempted to avoid it and instead found himself driving through what
appeared to be a red-ljght district in an industrial park. Eighteen-wheelers
and bjuge rigs were parked outside buildings that looked like temporary warehouses,
that claimed to be 24 HOUR NITE CLUBS and, in one case, THE BEST PEAP SHOW IN
TOWN. Shadow shook his head, and drove on. Laura had loved to dance, clothed or
naked (and, on several memorable evenings, moving from one state to the other),
and he had loved to watch her.

Lunch was a sandwich and a can of Coke in a town called Red
Bud.

He passed a valley filled with the wreckage of thousands of
yellow bulldozers, tractors, and Caterpillars. He wondered if this was the
bulldozers’ graveyard, where the bulldozers went to die.

He drove past the Pop-a-Top Lounge. He drove through Chester
(“Home of Popeye”). He noticed that the houses had started to gain pillars out
front, that even the shabbiest, thinnest house now had its white pillars,
proclaiming it, in someone’s eyes, a mansion. He drove over a big, muddy river,
and laughed out loud when he saw that the name of it, according to the sign,
was the Big Muddy River. He saw a covering of brown kudzu over three
winter-dead trees, twisting them into strange, almost human shapes: they could
have been witches, three bent old crones ready to reveal his fortune.

He drove alongside the Mississippi. Shadow had never seen
the Nile, but there was a blinding afternoon sun burning on the wide brown
river that made him think of the muddy expanse of the Nile: not the Nile as it
is now, but as it was long ago, flowing like an artery through the papyrus
marshes, home to cobra and jackal and wild cow ...

A road sign pointed to Thebes.

The road was built up about twelve feet, so he was driving
above the marshes. Clumps and clusters of birds in flight were questing back
and forth, black dots against the blue sky, moving in some desperate Brownian
motion.

In the late afternoon the sun began to lower, gilding the
world in elf-light, a thick warm custardy light that made the world feel
unearthly and more than real, and it was in this light that Shadow passed the
sign telling him he was Now Entering Historical Cairo. He drove under a bridge
and found himself in a small port town. The imposing structures of the Cairo
courthouse and the even more imposing customs house looked like enormous
freshly baked cookies in the syrupy gold of the light at the end of the day.

He parked his car in a side street and walked to the embankment
at the edge of a river, unsure whether he was gazing at the Ohio or the
Mississippi. A small brown cat nosed and sprang among the trash cans at the
back of a building, and the light made even the garbage magical.

A lone seagull was gliding along the river’s edge, flipping
a wing to correct itself as it went.

Shadow realized that he was not alone. A small girl, wearing
old tennis shoes on her feet and a man’s gray woolen sweater as a dress, was
standing on the sidewalk, ten feet away from him, staring at him with the somber
gravity of a six-year-old. Her hair was black, and straight, and long; her skin
was as brown as the river.

He grinned at her. She stared back at him, defiantly.

There was a squeal and a yowl from the waterfront, and the
little brown cat shot away from a spilled garbage can, pursued by a
long-muzzled black dog. The cat scurried under a car.

“Hey,” said Shadow to the girl. “You ever seen invisible powder
before?”

She hesitated. Then she shook her head.

“Okay,” said Shadow. “Well, watch this.” Shadow pulled out a
quarter with his left hand, held it up, tiitingTtfrom one side to another, then
appeared to toss it into his right hand, closing his hand hard on nothing, and
putting the hand forward. “Now,” he said, “I just take some inv&ible powder
from my pocket ...” and he reached his left nand into his breast pocket, dropping
the quarter into the pocket as he did so, “... and I sprinkle it on the hand
with the coin ...” and he mimed sprinkling, “... and look—now the quarter’s
invisible too.” He opened his empty right hand, and, in astonishment, his empty
left hand as well.

The little girl just stared.

Shadow shrugged, and put his hands back in his pockets, loading
a quarter in one hand, a folded up five-dollar bill in the other. He was going
to produce them from the air, and then give the girl the five bucks: she looked
like she needed it. “Hey,” he said. “We’ve got an audience.”

The black dog and the little brown cat were watching him as
well, flanking the girl, looking up at him intently. The dog’s huge ears were
pricked up, giving it a comically alert expression. A cranelike man with
gold-rimmed spectacles was coming up the sidewalk toward them, peering from
side to side as if he were looking for something. Shadow wondered if he was the
dog’s owner.

“What did you think?” Shadow asked the dog, trying to put
the little girl at her ease. “Was that cool?”

The black dog licked its long snout. Then it said, in a
deep, dry voice, “I saw Harry Houdini once, and believe me, man, you are no
Harry Houdini.”

The little girl looked at the animals, she looked up at
Shadow, and then she ran off, her feet pounding the sidewalk as if all the
powers of hell were after her. The two animals watched her go. The cranelike
man had reached the dog. He reached down and scratched its high, pointed ears.

“Come on,” said the man in the gold-rimmed spectacles to the
dog, “it was only a coin trick. It’s not like he was doing an underwater
escape.”

“Not yet,” said the dog. “But he will.” The golden light was
done, and the gray of twilight had begun.

Shadow dropped the coin and the folded bill back into his
pocket. “Okay,” he said. “Which one of you is Jackal?”

“Use your eyes,” said the black dog with the long snout. It
began to amble along the sidewalk, beside the man in the gold glasses, and,
after a moment’s hesitation, Shadow followed them. The cat was nowhere to be
seen. They reached a large old building on a row of boarded-up houses. The sign
beside the door said IBIS AND JACQUEL. A FAMILY FIRM.

FUNERAL PARLOR. SINCE 1863.

“I’m Mr. Ibis,” said the man in the gold-rimmed glasses. “I
think I should buy you a spot of supper. I’m afraid my friend here has some
work that needs doing.”

New York scares Salim, and so he clutches his sample case
protectively with both hands, holding it to his chest. He is scared of black
people, the way they stare at him, and he is scared of the Jews—the ones
dressed all in black with hats and beards and side curls he can identify, and
how many others that he cannot—he is scared of the sheer quantity of the
people, all shapes and sizes of people, as they spill from their high, high,
filthy buildings onto the sidewalks; he is scared of the honking hullabaloo of
the traffic, and he is even scared of the air, which smells both dirty and
sweet, and nothing at all like the air of Oman.

Salim has been in New York, in America, for a week. Each day
he visits two, perhaps three different offices, opens his sample case, shows
them the copper trinkets, the rings and bottles and tiny flashlights, the
models of the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, the Eiffel Tower,
gleaming in copper inside; each night he writes a fax to his brother-in-law,
Fuad, at home in Muscat, telling him that he has taken no orders, or, on one
happy day, that he had taken several orders (but, as Salim is painfully awate,
not yet enough even to cover his airfare and hotel bill).

For reasons Salim does not understand, his brother-in-law’s
business partners have booked ttim into the Paramount Hotel on 46th Street. He
finds it confusing, claustrophobic, expensive, alien.

Fuad is Salim’s sister’s husband. He is not a rich man, but
he is the co-owner of a small trinket factory. Everything is made for export,
to other Arab countries, to Europe, to America. Salim has been working for Fuad
for six months. Fuad scares him a little. The tone of Fuad’s faxes is becoming
harsher. In the evening, Salim sits in his hotel room, reading his Qur’an, telling
himself that this will pass, that his stay in this strange world is limited and
finite.

His brother-in-law gave him a thousand dollars for miscellaneous
traveling expenses and the money, which seemed so huge a sum when first he saw
it, is evaporating faster than Salim can believe. When he first arrived, scared
of being seen as a cheap Arab, he tipped everyone, handing extra dollar bills
to everyone he encountered; and then he decided that he was being taken
advantage of, that perhaps they were even laughing at him, and he stopped
tipping entirely.