American Gods (33 page)

Hinzelmann pointed out the town’s two restaurants as they
passed them (a German restaurant and what he described as “part Greek, part
Norwegian, and a popover at every plate”); he pointed out the bakery and the
bookstore (“What I say is, a town isn’t a town without a bookstore. It may call
itself a town, but unless it’s got a bookstore, it knows it’s not fooling a
soul”). He slowed Tessie as they passed the library so Shadow could get a good
look at it. Antique gaslights flickered over the doorway—Hinzelmann proudly
called Shadow’s attention to them. “Built in the 1870s by John Henning, local
lumber baron. He wanted it called the Henning Memorial Library, but when he
died they started calling it the Lakeside Library, and I guess it’ll be the
Lakeside Library now until the end of time. Isn’t it a dream?” He couldn’t have
been prouder of it if he had built it himself. The building reminded Shadow of
a castle, and he said so. “That’s right,” agreed Hinzelmann. “Turrets and all.
Henning wanted it to look like that on the outside. Inside they still have all
the original pine shelving. Miriam Shultz wants to tear the insides out and
modernize, but it’s on some register of historic places, and there’s not a damn
thing she can do.”

They drove around the south side of the lake. The town
circled the lake, which was a thirty-foot drop below the level of the road.
Shadow could see the patches of white ice dulling the surface of the lake with,
here and there, a shiny patch of water reflecting the lights of the town.

“Looks like it’s freezing over,” he said.

“It’s been frozen over for a month now,” said Hinzelmann. “The
dull spots are snowdrifts and the shiny spots are ice. It froze just after
Thanksgiving in one cold night, froze smooth as glass. You do much ice-fishing,
Mr. Ainsel?”

“Never.” .

“Best thing a man can do. It’s not the fish you catch, it’s
the peace of mind that you take home at the end of the day.”

“I’ll remember that.” Shadow peered down at the lake through
Tessie’s window. “Can you actually walk on it already?”

“You can walk on it. Drive on it too, but I wouldn’t want to
risk it yet. It’s been cold up here for six weeks,” said Hinzelmann. “But you
also got to allow tiiat things freeze harder and faster up here in northern
Wisconsin than they do most anyplace else there is. I was outvhunting once—hunting
for deer, and this was oh, thirty, forty years back, and I shot at a buck,
missed him, and sent hjjm running off through the woods—this was over acrost
the north end of the lake, up near where you’ll be living, Mike. Now he was the
finest buck I ever did see, twenty point, big as a small horse, no lie. Now, I’m
younger and feistier back then dian I am now, and though it had started snowing
before Hal-loween that year, now it was Thanksgiving and diere was clean snow
on the ground, fresh as anything, and I could see the buck’s footprints. It
looked to me like the big fellow was heading for the lake in a panic.

“Well, only a damn fool tries to run down a buck, but there
am I, a damn fool, running after him, and there he is, standing in the lake, in
oh, eight, nine inches of water, and he’s just looking at me. That very moment,
the sun goes behind a cloud, and the freeze comes—temperature must have fallen
thirty degrees in ten minutes, not a word of a lie. And that old stag, he gets
ready to run, and he can’t movet He’s frozen into the ice.

“Me, I just walk over to him slowly. You can see he wants to
run, but he’s iced in and it just isn’t going to happen. But there’s no way I
can bring myself to shoot a defenseless critter when he can’t get away—what
kind of man would I be if I done that, heh? So I takes my shotgun and I fires
off one shell, straight up into the air.

“Well, the noise and the shock is enough to make that buck
just about jump out of his skin, and seein’ that his legs are iced in, that’s
just what he proceeds to do. He leaves his hide and his antlers stuck to the
ice, while he charges back into the woods, pink as a newborn mouse and
shivering fit to bust.

“I felt bad enough for that old buck that I talked the
Lakeside Ladies’ Knitting Circle into making him something warm to wear all the
winter, and they knitted him an all-over one-piece woolen suit, so he wouldn’t
freeze to death. ‘Course, the joke was on us, because they knitted him a suit
of bright orange wool, so no hunter ever shot at it. Hunters in these parts
wear orange at hunting season,” he added, helpfully. “And if you think there’s
a word of a lie in that, I can prove it to you. I’ve got the antlers up on my
rec room wall to this day.”

Shadow laughed, and the old man smiled the satisfied smile
of a master craftsman. They pulled up outside a brick building with a large
wooden deck, from which golden holiday lights hung and twinkled invitingly.

“That’s five-oh-two,” said Hinzelmann. “Apartment three
would be on the top floor, around the other side, overlooking the lake. There
you go, Mike.”

“Thank you, Mr. Hinzelmann. Can I give you anything toward
gas?”

“Just Hinzelmann. And you don’t owe me a penny. Merry
Christmas from me and from Tessie.”

“Are you sure you won’t accept anything?”

The old man scratched his chin. “Tell you what,” he said. “Sometime
in the next week or so I’ll come by and sell you some tickets. For our raffle.
Charity. For now, young man, you can be getting onto bed.”

Shadow smiled. “Merry Christmas, Hinzelmann,” he said.

The old man shook Shadow’s hand with one red-knuckled hand.
It felt as hard and as callused as an oak branch. “Now, you watch the path as
you go up there, it’s going to be slippery. I can see your door from here, at
the side there, see it? I’ll just wait in the car down here until you’re safely
inside. You just give me the thumbs-up when you’re in okay, and I’ll drive off.”

He kept the Wendt idling until Shadow was safely up the
wooden steps on the side of the house and had opened the apartment door with
his key. The door to the apartment swung open. Shadow made a thumbs-up sign,
and the old man in the Wendt—Tessie, thought Shadow, and the thought of a car
with a name made him smile one more time—Hinzelmann and Tessie swung around and
made their way back across the bridge.

Shadow shut the front door. The room was freezing. It
smelled of people who had gone away to live other lives, and of all they had
eaten and dreamed. He found the thermostat and cranked it up to seventy
degrees. He went into the tiny kitchen, checked the drawers, opened the
avocado-colored refrigerator, but it was empty. No surprise there. At least the
fridge smelled clean inside, not musty.

There was a small bedroom with a bare mattress in it, beside
the kitchen, next to an even tinier bathroom that was mostly shower stall. An
aged cigarette butt sat in the toilet bowl, staining the water brown. Shadow
flushed it away. He found sheets and blankets in a closet, and made the bed.
Then he took off his shoes, his jacket, and his watch, and he climbed into the
bed fully dressed, wondering how long it would take him to get warm.

The lights were off, and there was silence, mostly, nothing
but the hum of the refrigerator, and, somewhere in the building, a radio
playing. He lay there in the darkness, wondering if he had slept himself out on
the Greyhound, if the hunger and the cold and the new bed and the craziness of
the last few weeks would combine to keep him awake that night.

In the stillness he heard something snap like a shot. A
branch, he thought, or the ice. It was freezing out there.

He wondered how long he would have to wait until Wednesday
came for him. A day? A week? However long he had, he knew he had to focus on
something in the meantime. He would start to work out again, he decided, and
practice his coin sleights and palms until he was smooth as anything (practice
all your tricks, somebody whispered inside his head, in a voice that was not
his own, all of them but one, not the trick that poor dead Mad Sweeney showed
you, dead of exposure and the cold and of being forgotten and surplus to
requirements, not that trick. Oh, not that one).

But this was a good town. He could feel it.

He thought of his dream, if it had been a dream, that first
night in Cairo. He thought of Zorya ... what the hell was her name? The
midnight sister.

And then he thought of Laura ...

It was as if thinking of her opened a window in his mind. He
could see her. He could, somehow, see her.

She was in Eagle Point, in the backyard outside her mother’s
big house.

She stood in the cold, which she did not feel anymore or
which she felt all the time, she stood outside the house that her mother had
bought in 1989 with the insurance money after Laura’s father, Harvey McCabe,
had passed on, a heart attack while straining on the can, and she was staring
in, her cold hands pressed against the glass, her breath not fogging it, not at
all, watching her mother, and her sister and her sister’s children and husband
in from Texas, home for Christmas. Out in the darkness, that was where Laura
was, unable not to look.

Tears prickled in Shadow’s eyes, and he rolled over in his
bed.

He felt like a Peeping Tom, turned his thoughts away, willed
them to come back to him: he could see the lake spread out below him as the
wind blew down from the arctic, prying jack-frost fingers a hundred times
colder than the fingers of any corpse.

Shadow’s breath came shallowly now. He could hear a wind
rising, a bitter screaming around the house, and for a moment he thought he
could hear words on the wind.

If he was going to be anywhere, he might as well be here, he
thought, and then he slept.

MEANWHILE. A CONVERSATION.

V

Dingdong.

“MizCrow?”

“Yes.”

“Miz Samantha Black Crow?”

“Yes.”

“Do you mind if we ask you a few questions, ma’am?”

“Are you cops? What are you?”

“My name is Town. My colleague here is Mister Road. We’re
investigating the disappearance of two of our associates.”

“What were their names?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Tell me their names. I want to know what they were called.
Your associates. Tell me their names and maybe I’ll help you.”

“... Okay. Their names were Mister Stone and Mister Wood.
Now, can we ask you some questions?”

“Do you guys just see things and pick names? ‘Oh)4you be
Mister Sidewalk, he’s Mister Carpet, say hello to Mister Airplane’?”

“Very funny, young lady. First question: we need to know if
you’ve seen this man. Here. You can hold the photograph.”

“Whoah. Straight on and profile, with numbers on the bottom
... And big. He’s cute, though. What did he do?”

“He was mixed up in a small-town bank robbery, as a driver,
some years ago. His two colleagues decided to keep all the loot for themselves
and ran out on him. He got angry. Found them. Came close to killing them with
his hands. The state cut a deal with the men he hurt: they testified against
him. Shadow here got six years. He served three. You ask me, guys like that,
they should just lock them up and throw away the key.”

“I’ve never heard anyone say that in real life, you know.
Not out loud.”

“Say what, Miz Crow?”

“ ‘Loot.’ It’s not a word you ever hear people say. Maybe in
movies people say it. Not for real.”

‘This isn’t a movie, Miz Crow.”

“Black Crow. It’s Miz Black Crow. My friends call me Sam.”

“Got it, Sam. Now about this man—”

“But you aren’t my friends. You can call me Miz Black Crow.”

“Listen, you snot-nosed little—”

“It’s okay, Mister Road. Sam here—pardon, ma’am—I mean, Miz
Black Crow wants to help us. She’s a law-abiding citizen.”

“Ma’am, we know you helped Shadow. You were seen with him, in
a white Chevy Nova. He gave you a ride. He bought you dinner. Did he say
anything that could help us in our investigation? Two of our best men have
vanished.”

“I never met him.”

“You met him. Please don’t make the mistake of thinking we’re
stupid. We aren’t stupid.”

“Mm. I meet a lot of people. Maybe I met him and forgot already.”

“Ma’am, it really is to your advantage to cooperate with us.”

“Otherwise, you’ll have to introduce me to your friends
Mister Thumbscrews and Mister Pentothal?”

“Ma’am, you aren’t making this any easier on yourself.”

“Gee. I’m sorry. Now, is there anything else? ‘Cos I’m going
to say ‘Buh-bye now’ and close the door and I figure you two are going to go
and get into Mister Car and drive away.”

“Your lack of cooperation has been noted, ma’am.”

“Buh-bye now.”

Click.

I’ll tell you all my secrets

But I lie about my past

So send me off to bed for evermore

—Tom Waits, “Tango Till They’re Sore”

A whole life in darkness, surrounded by filth, that was what
Shadow dreamed, his first night in Lakeside. A child’s life, long ago and far
away, in a land across the ocean, in the lands where the sun rose. But this
life contained no sunrises, only dimness by day and blindness by night.

Nobody spoke to him. He heard human voices, from outside,
but could understand human speech no better than he understood the howling of
the owls or the yelps of dogs.

He remembered, or thought he remembered, one night, half a
lifetime ago, when one of the big people had entered, quietly, and had not
cuffed him or fed him, but had picked him up to her breast and embraced him.
She smelled good. Hot drops of water had fallen from her face to his. He had
been scared, and had wailed loudly in his fear.

She put him down on the straw, hurriedly, and left the hut,
fastening the door behind her.

He remembered that moment, and he treasured it, just as he
remembered the sweetness of a cabbage heart, the tart taste of plums, the
crunch of apples, the greasy delight of roastedfish.