American Gods (26 page)

“Did the Irish come to America in the dark ages, you ask me?
Of course they did, and the Welsh, ,and the Vikings, while the Africans from
the West Coast—what in later days they called the Slave Coast or the Ivory
Coasts—they were trading with South America, and the Chinese visited Oregon a
couple of times—they called it Fu Sang. The Basque established their secret
sacred fishing grounds off the coast of Newfoundland twelve hundred years back.
Now, I suppose you’re going to say, but Mister Ibis, these people were
primitives, they didn’t have radio controls and vitamin pills and jet
airplanes.”

Shadow hadn’t said anything, and hadn’t planned to say anything,
but he felt it was required of him, so he said, “Well, weren’t they?” The last
dead leaves of fall crackled underfoot, winter-crisp.

“The misconception is that men didn’t travel long distances
in boats before the days of Columbus. Yet New Zealand and Tahiti and countless
Pacific Islands were settied by people in boats whose navigation skills would
have put Columbus to shame; and the wealth of Africa was from trading, although
that was mostly to the east, to India and China. My people, the Nile folk, we
discovered early on that a reed boat will take you around the world, if you
have the patience and enough jars of sweet water. You seet the biggest problem
with coming to America in the old days was that there wasn’t a lot here that
anyone wanted to trade, and it was much too far away.”

They had reached a large house, built in the style people
called Queen Anne. Shadow wondered who Queen Anne was, and why she had been so
fond of Addams Family-style houses. It was the only building on the block that
wasn’t locked up with boarded-over windows. They went through the gate and
walked around the back of the building.

Through large double doors, which Mr. Ibis unlocked with a
key from his key chain, and they were in a large, un-heated room, occupied by
two people. They were a very tall, dark-skinned man, holding a large metal
scalpel, and a dead girl in her late teens, lying on a long, porcelain table
that resembled both a slab and a sink.

There were several photographs of the dead girl pinned up on
a corkboard on the wall above the body. She was smiling in one, a high school
head shot. In another she was standing in a line with three other girls; they
were wearing what might have been prom dresses, and her black hair was tied
above her head in an intricate knotwork.

Cold on the porcelain, her hair was down, loose around her
shoulders, and matted with dried blood.

“This is my partner, Mister Jacquel,” said Ibis.

“We met already,” said Jacquel. “Forgive me if I don’t shake
hands.”

Shadow looked down at the girl on the table. “What happened
to her?” he asked.

“Poor taste in boyfriends,” said Jacquel.

“It’s not always fatal,” said Mr. Ibis, with a sigh. “This
time it was. He was drunk, and he had a knife, and she told him that she
thought she was pregnant He didn’t believe it was his.”

“She was stabbed ...” said Mr. Jacquel, and he counted.
There was a click as he stepped on a foot switch, turning on a small Dictaphone
on a nearby table, “Five times. There are three knife wounds in the left
anterior chest wall. The first is between the fourth and fifth intercostal
spaces at the medial border of the left breast, two point two centimeters in
length; the second and third are through the inferior portion of the left
mid-breast penetrating at the sixth interspace, overlapping, and measuring
three centimeters. There is one wound two centimeters long in the upper
anterior left chest in the second interspace, and one wound five centimeters
long and a maximum of one point six centimeters deep in the anteromedial left
deltoid, a slashing injury. All the chest wounds are deep penetrating injuries.
There are no other visible wounds externally.” He released pressure from the
foot switch. Shadow noticed a small microphone—dangling above the embalming
table by its cord.

“So you’re the coroner as well?” asked Shadow.

“Coroner’s a political appointment around here,” said Ibis. “His
job is to kick the corpse. If it doesn’t kick him back, he signs the death
certificate. Jacquel’s what they call a prosector. He works for the county
medical examiner. He does autopsies and saves tissue samples for analysis. He’s
already photographed her wounds.”

Jacquel ignored them. He took a big scalpel and made a deep
incision in a large V that began at both collarbones and met at the bottom of
her breastbone, and then he turned the V into a Y, another deep incision that
continued from her breastbone to her pubis. He picked up what looked like a
small, heavy chrome drill with a medallion-sized round saw blade at the business
end. He turned it on, and cut through the ribs at both sides of her breastbone.

The girl opened like a purse.

Shadow suddenly was aware of a mild but unpleasantly penetrating,
pungent, meaty smell.

“I thought it would smell worse,” said Shadow.

“She’s pretty fresh,” said Jacquel. “And the intestines
weren’t pierced, so it doesn’t smell of shit.”

Shadow found himself looking away, not from revulsion, as he
would have expected, but from a strange desire to give the girl some privacy.
It would be hard to be nakeder than this open thing.

Jacquel tied off the intestines, glistening and snakelike in
her belly, below the stomach and deep in the pelvis. He ran them through his
fingers, foot after foot of them, described them as “normal” to the microphone,
put them in a bucket on the floor. He sucked all the blood out of her chest
with a vacuum pump, and measured the volume. Then he inspected the inside of
her chest. He said to the microphone, “There are three lacerations in the pericardium,
which is filled with clotted and liquefying blood.”

Jacquel grasped her heart, cut it at its top, turned it
about in his hand, examining it. He stepped on his switch and said, “There are
two lacerations of the myocardium; a one-point-five-centimeter laceration in
the right ventricle and a one-point-eight-centimeter laceration penetrating the
left ventricle.”

Jacquel removed each lung. The left lung had been stabbed
and was half collapsed. He weighed them, and the heart, and he photographed the
wounds. From each lung he sliced a small piece of tissue, which he placed into
ajar.

“Formaldehyde,” whispered Mr. Ibis helpfully.

Jacquel continued to talk to the microphone, describing what
he was doing, what he saw, as he removed the girl’s liver, the stomach, spleen,
pancreas, both kidneys, the uterus and the ovaries. He weighed each organ,
reported them as normal and uninjured. From each organ he took a small slice
and put it into a jar of formaldehyde.

From the heart, the liver, and from one of the kidneys, he
cut an additional slice. These pieces he chewed, slowly, making them last,
while he worked.

Somehow it seemed to Shadow a good thing for him to do: respectful,
not obscene.

.”So you want to stay here with us for a spell?” said
Jacquel, masticating the slice of the girl’s heart.

“If you’ll have me,” said Shadow.

“Certainly we’ll have you,” said Mr. Ibis. “No reasons why
not and plenty of reasons why. You’ll be under our protection as long as you’re
here.”

“I hope you don’t mind sleeping under the same roof as the
dead,” said Jacquel.

Shadow thought of the touch of Laura’s lips, bitter and
cold. “No,” he said. “Not as long as they stay dead, anyhow.”

Jacquel turned and looked at him with dark brown eyes as
quizzical and cold as a desert dog’s. ‘They stay dead here” was all he said.

“Seems to me,” said Shadow, “seems to me that the dead come
back pretty easy.”

“Not at all,” said Ibis. “Even zombies, they make them out
of the living, you know. A little powderia little chanting, a little push, and
you have a zombie. They live, but they believe they are dead. But to truly
bring the dead back to life, in their bodies. That takes power.” He hesitated,
then, “In the old land, in the old days, it was easier then.”

“You could bind the ka of a man to his body for five
thousand years,” said Jacquel. “Binding or loosing. But that was a long time
ago.” He took all the organs that he had removed and replaced them,
respectfully, in the body cavity. He replaced the intestines and the breastbone
and pulled the skin edges near each other. Then he took a thick needle and
thread and, with deft, quick strokes, he sewed it up, like a man stitching a
baseball: the cadaver transformed from meat into girl once again.

“I need a beer,” said Jacquel. He pulled off his rubber
gloves and dropped them into the bin. He dropped his dark brown overalls into a
hamper. Then he took the cardboard tray of jars filled with little red and
brown and purple slices of the organs. “Coming?”

They walked up the back stairs to the kitchen. It was brown
and white, a sober and respectable room that looked to Shadow as if it had last
been decorated in 1920. There was a huge Kelvinator rattling to itself by one
wall. Jacquel opened the Kelvinator door, put the plastic jars with their
slivers of spleen, of kidney, of liver, of heart, inside. He took out three
brown bottles. Ibis opened a glass-fronted cupboard, removed three tall
glasses. Then he gestured for Shadow to sit down at the kitchen table.

Ibis poured the beer and passed a glass to Shadow, a glass
to Jacquel. It was a fine beer, bitter and dark.

“Good beer,” said Shadow.

“We brew it ourselves,” said Ibis. “In the old days the
women did the brewing. They were better brewers than we are. But now it is only
the three of us here. Me, him, and her.” He gestured toward the small brown
cat, fast asleep in a cat-basket in the corner of the room. “There were more of
us, in the beginning. But Set left us to explore, what, two. hundred years ago?
Must be, by now. We got a postcard from him from San Francisco in 1905,1906.
Then nothing. While poor Horus ...” he trailed off, in a sigh, and shook his
head.

“I still see him, on occasion,” said Jacquel. “On my way to
a pickup.” He sipped his beer.

“I’ll work for my keep,” said Shadow. “While I’m here. You
tell me what you need doing, and I’ll do it.”

“We’ll find work for you,” agreed Jacquel.

The small brown cat opened her eyes and stretched to her
feet. She padded across the kitchen floor and pushed at Shadow’s boot with her
head. He put down his left hand and scratched her forehead and the back of her
ears and the scruff of her neck. She arched, ecstatically, then sprang into his
lap, pushed herself up against his chest, and touched her cold nose to his.
Then she curled up in his lap and went back to sleep. He put his hand down to
stroke her: her fur was soft, and she was warm and pleasant in his lap; she
acted like she was in the safest place in the world, and Shadow felt comforted.

The beer left a pleasant buzz in Shadow’s head.

“Your room is at the top of the stairs, by the bathroom,”
said Jacquel. “Your work clothes will be hanging in the closet—you’ll see. You’ll
want to wash up and shave first, I guess.”

Shadow did. He showered standing in the cast-iron tub and he
shaved, very nervously, with a straight razor that Jacquel loaned him. It was
obscenely sharp, and had a mother-of-pearl handle, and Shadow suspected it was
usually used to give dead men their final shave. He had never used a straight
razor before, but he did not cut himself. He washed off the shaving cream,
looked at himself naked in the fly-specked bathroom mirror. He was “btiu’sed:
fresh bruises on his chest and arms overlaying the fading bruises that Mad
Sweeney had left him. His eyes looked back mistrustfully from the mirror at
him.

And then, as if someone else were holding his hand, he
raised the straight razor, placed it, blade open, against his throat.

It would be a way out, he thought. An easy way out. And if
there’s anyone who’d simply take it in their stride, who’d just clean up the
mess and get on with things, it’s the two guys sitting downstairs at the
kitchen table drinking their beer. No more worries. No more Laura. No more
mysteries and conspiracies. No more bad dreams. Just peace and quiet and rest
forever. One clean slash, ear to ear. That’s all it’ll take.

He stood there with the razor against his throat. A tiny
smudge of blood came from the place where the blade touched the skin. He had
not even noticed a cut. See, he told himself, and he could almost hear the
words being whispered in his ear. It’s painless. Too sharp to hurt. I’ll be
gone before I know it.

Then the door to the bathroom swung open, just a few inches,
enough for the little brown cat to put her head around the door frame and “Mrr?”
up at him curiously.

“Hey,” he said to the cat. “I thought I locked that door.”

He closed the cutthroat razor, put it down on the side of
the sink, dabbed at his tiny cut with a toilet paper swab. Then he wrapped a
towel around his waist and went into the bedroom next door.

His bedroom, like the kitchen, seemed to have been decorated
some time in the 1920s: there was a washstand and a pitcher beside the chest of
drawers and mirror. Someone had already laid out clothes for him on the bed: a
black suit, white shirt, black tie, white undershirt and underpants, black
socks. Black shoes sat on the worn Persian carpet beside the bed.

He dressed himself. The clothes were of good quality,
although none of them was new. He wondered who they had belonged to. Was he
wearing a dead man’s socks? Would he be stepping into a dead man’s shoes? He
adjusted the tie in the mirror and now it seemed to him that his reflection was
smiling at him, sardonically.

Now it seemed inconceivable to him that he had ever thought
of cutting his throat. His reflection continued to smile as he adjusted his
tie.

“Hey,” he said to it. “You know something that I don’t?” and
immediately felt foolish.