American Gods (35 page)

Mabel chuckled. “We all tell him that,” she said.

Mulligan shrugged. “It’s a good town,” he said, simply. “Not
much trouble. You’ll always get someone speeding within city limits—which is a
good thing, as traffic tickets pay my wages. Friday, Saturday nights you get
some jerk who gets drunk and beats on a spouse—and that one can go both ways,
believe me. Men and women. But out here things are quiet. They call me out when
someone’s locked their keys in their vehicle. Barking dogs. Every year there’s
a couple of high school kids caught with weed behind the bleachers. Biggest
police case we’ve had here in five years was when Dan Schwartz got drunk and
shot up his own trailer, then he went on the run, down Main Street, in his
wheelchair, waving this darn shotgun, shouting that he would shoot anyone who
got in his way, that no one would stop him from getting to the interstate. I
think he was on his way to Washington to shoot the president. I still laugh
whenever I think of Dan heading down the interstate in that wheelchair of his
with the bumper sticker on the back. ‘My Juvenile Delinquent is Screwing Your
Honor Student.’ You remember, Mabel?”

She nodded, lips pursed. She did not seem to find it as
funny as Mulligan did.

“What did you do?” asked Shadow.

“I talked to him. He gave me the shotgun. Slept it off down
at the jail. Dan’s not a bad guy, he was just drunk and upset.”

Shadow paid for his own breakfast and, over Chad Mulligan’s
halfhearted protests, both hot chocolates.

Hennings Farm and Home Supplies was a warehouse-sized
building on the south of the town that sold everything from tractors to toys
(the toys, along with the Christmas ornaments, were already on sale). The store
was bustling with post-Christmas shoppers. Shadow recognized the younger of the
girls who had sat in front of him on the bus. She was trailing after her
parents. He waved at her and she gave him a hesitant, blue-rubber-banded smile.
Shadow wondered idly what she’d look like in ten years’ time.

Probably as beautiful as the girl at the Hennings Farm and
Home checkout counter, who scanned in his-purchases with a chattering hand-held
gun, capable, Shaded had no doubt, of ringing up a tractor if someone drove it
through.

‘Ten pairs of long underwear?” said the girl. “Stocking up,
huh?” She looked like a movie starlet.

Shadow felt fourteen again, and tongue-tiea and foolish. He
said nothing while she rang up the thermal boots, the gloves, the sweaters, and
the goose-down-filled coat.

He had no wish to put the credit card that Wednesday had
given him to the test, not with Chief of Police Mulligan standing helpfully
beside him, so he paid for everything in cash. Then he took his bags into the
men’s rest room, came out wearing many of his purchases.

“Looking good, big fella,” said Mulligan.

“At least I’m warm,” said Shadow, and outside, in the
parking lot, although the wind burned cold on the skin of his face, the rest of
him was warm enough. At Mulligan’s invitation, he put his shopping bags in the
back of the police car, arid rode in the passenger seat, in the front.

“So, what do you do, Mister Ainsel?” asked the chief of
police. “Big guy like you. What’s your profession, and will you be practicing
it in Lakeside?”

Shadow’s heart began to pound, but his voice was steady. “I
work for my uncle. He buys and sells stuff all over the country. I just do the
heavy lifting.”

“Does he pay well?”

“I’m family. He knows I’m not going to rip him off, and I’m
learning a little about the trade on the way. Until I figure out what it is I
really want to do.” It was coming out of him with conviction, smooth as a
snake. He knew everything about big Mike Ainsel in that moment, and he liked
Mike Ainsel. Mike Ainsel had none of the problems that Shadow had. Ainsel had
never been married. Mike Ainsel had never been interrogated on a freight train
by Mr. Wood and Mr. Stone. Televisions did not speak to Mike Ainsel (“You want
to see Lucy’s tits?” asked a voice in his head). Mike Ainsel didn’t have bad
dreams, or believe that there was a storm coming.

He filled his shopping basket at Dave’s Finest Food, doing
what he thought of as a gas-station stop—milk, eggs, bread, apples, cheese,
cookies. Just some food. He’d do a real one later. As Shadow moved around, Chad
Mulligan said hello to people and introduced Shadow to them. “This is Mike
Ainsel, he’s taken the empty apartment at the old Pilsen place. Up around the
back,” he’d say. Shadow gave up trying to remember names. He just shook hands
with people and smiled, sweating a little, uncomfortable in his insulated
layers in the hot store.

Chad Mulligan drove Shadow across the street to Lakeside Realty.
Missy Gunther, her hair freshly set and lacquered, did not need an
introduction—she knew exactly who Mike Ainsel was. Why, that nice Mr. Borson,
his uncle Emerson, such a nice man, he’d been by, what, about six, eight weeks
ago now, and rented the apartment up at the old Pilsen Place, and wasn’t the
view just to die for up there? Well, honey, just wait until the spring, and we’re
so lucky, so many of the lakes in this part of the world go bright green from
the algae in the summer, it would turn your stomach, but our lake, well, come
fourth of July you could still practically drink it, and Mr. Borson had paid
for a whole year’s lease in advance, and as for the Toyota 4-Run-ner, she
couldn’t believe that Chad Mulligan still remembered it, and yes, she’d be
delighted to get rid of it. Tell the truth, she’d pretty much resigned herself
to giving it to Hinzelmann as this year’s klunker and just taking the tax
write-off, not that the car was a klunker, far from it, no, it was her son’s
car before he went to school in Green Bay, and, well, he’d painted it purple
one day and, ha-ha, she certainly hoped that Mike Ainsel liked purple, that was
all she had to say, and if he didn’t she wouldn’t blame him ...

Chief of Police Mulligan excused himself near the middle of
this litany. “Looks like they need me back at the office. Good meeting you,
Mike,” he said, and he moved Shadow’s shopping bags into the back of
Missy»€hmther’s station wagon.

Missy drove Shadow back to her place,’where, in the drive,
he saw an elderly SUV. The blown snow had bleached half of it to a blinding
white, while the rest of it was painted the kind of drippy purple that someone
would need to be very stoned, very often, to even begin to be able to find
attractive.

Still, the car started up on the first try, and the heater
worked, although it took almost ten minutes of running the engine with the
heater on full before the interior of the car changed from unbearably cold to
merely chilly. While this was happening, Missy Gunther took Shadow into her
kitchen—excuse the mess, but the little ones just leave their toys all over
after Christmas and she just didn’t have the heart, would he care for some
leftover turkey dinner? Well, coffee then, won’t take a moment to brew a fresh
pot—and Shadow took a large red toy car off a window seat and sat down, while
Missy Gunther asked if he had met his neighbors yet, and Shadow confessed that
he hadn’t.

There were, he was informed while the coffee djipped, four
other inhabitants of his apartment building—-back when it was the Pilsen place
the Pilsens lived in the downstairs flat and rented out the upper two flats,
now their apartment, which was taken by a couple of young men, Mr. Holz and Mr.
Neiman, they actually are a couple and when she said couple, Mr. Ainsel,
Heavens, we have all kinds here, more than one kind of tree in the forest,
although mostly those kind of people wind up in Madison or the Twin Cities, but
truth to tell, nobody here gives it a second thought. They’re in Key West for
the winter, they’ll be back in April, he’ll meet them then. The thing about
Lakeside is that it’s a good town. Now next door to Mr. Ainsel, that’s
Marguerite Olsen and her little boy, a sweet lady, sweet, sweet lady, but she’s
had a hard life, still sweet as pie, and she works for the Lakeside News. Not
the most exciting newspaper in the world, but truth to tell Missy Gunther
thought that was probably the way most folk around here liked it.

Oh, she said, and poured him coffee, she just wished that
Mr. Ainsel could see the town in the summer or late in the spring, when the
lilacs and the apple and the cherry blossoms were out, she thought there was nothing
like it for beauty, nothing like it anywhere in the world.

Shadow gave her a five-hundred-dollar deposit, and he
climbed up into the car and started to back it up, out of her front yard and
onto the driveway proper. Missy Gunther tapped on his front window. “This is
for you,” she said. “I nearly forgot.” She handed him a buff envelope. “It’s
kind of a gag. We had them printed up a few years back. You don’t have to look
at it now.”

He thanked her, and drove, cautiously, back into the town.
He took the road that ran around the lake. He wished he could see it in the
spring, or the summer, or the fall: it would be very beautiful, he had no doubt
of that.

In ten minutes he was home.

He parked the car out on the street and walked up the
outside steps to his cold apartment. He unpacked his shopping, put the food
into the cupboards and the fridge, and then he opened the envelope Missy
Gunther had given him.

It contained a passport. Blue, plasticated cover and,
inside, a proclamation that Michael Ainsel (his name handwritten in Missy
Gunther’s precise handwriting) was a citizen of Lakeside. There was a map of
the town on the next page. The rest of it was filled with discount coupons for
various local stores.

“I think I may like it here,” said Shadow, aloud. He looked
out of the icy window at the frozen lake. “If it ever warms up.”

There was a bang at the front door at around 2:00 P.M.
Shadow had been practicing the Sucker Vanish with a quarter, tossing it from
one hand to the other undetectably. His hands were cold enough and clumsy
enpuglHftat he kept dropping the coin onto the tabletop, and the knock at the
door made him drop it again.

He went to the door and opened it.

A moment of pure fear: the man at the door wore a black mask
which covered the lower half of his face. It was the kind of mask that a bank
robber might wear on TV, or a serial killer from a cheap movie might wear to
scare his victims. The top of the man’s head was covered by a black knit cap.

Still, the man was smaller and slighter than Shadow, and he
did not appear to be armed. And he wore a bright plaid coat, of the kind that
serial killers normally avoid.

“Ih hihelhan,” said the visitor.

“Huh?”

The man pulled the mask downward to reveal Hinzel-mann’s
cheerful face. “I said, ‘It’s Hinzelmann.’ You know, I don’t know what we did
before they came up with these masks. Well, I do remember what we did. Thick
knitted caps that went all around your face, and scarves and you don’t want to
know what else. I think it’s a miracle what they come up with these days. I may
be an old man, but I’m not going to grumble about progress, not me.”

He finished this speech by thrusting a basket at Shadow,
filled high with local cheeses, bottles, jars, and several small salamis that
proclaimed themselves to be venison summer sausage, and by coming inside. “Merry
day after Christmas,” he said. His nose and ears and cheeks were red as
raspberries, mask or no mask. “I hear you already ate a whole one of Mabel’s
pasties. Brought you a few things.”

“That’s very kind of you,” said Shadow.

“Kind, nothing. I’m going to stick it to you next week for
the raffle. The Chamber of Commerce runs it, and I run the Chamber of Commerce.
Last year we raised almost seventeen thousand dollars for the children’s ward
of Lakeside Hospital.”

“Well, why don’t you put me down for a ticket now?”

“It don’t start until the day the klunker hits the ice,”
said Hinzelmann. He looked out of Shadow’s window toward the lake. “Cold out
there. Must have dropped fifty degrees last night.”

“It happened really fast,” agreed Shadow.

“We used to pray for freezes like this back in the old days,”
said Hinzelmann. “My daddy told me.”

“You’d pray for days like this?”

“Well, yah, it was the only way the settlers survived back
then. Weren’t enough food for everyone, and you couldn’t just go down to Dave’s
and fill up your shopping cart in the old days, no sir. So my grampaw, he got
to figgerin’, and when a really cold day like this come along he’d take my
grarnmaw, and the kids, my uncle and my aunt and my daddy—he was the youngest—and
the serving girl and the hired man, and he’d go down with them to the creek,
give ‘em a little drink of rum and herbs, it was a recipe he’d got from the old
country, then he’d pour creek water over them. Course they’d freeze in seconds,
stiff and blue as so many Popsicles. He’d haul them to a trench they’d already
dug and filled with straw, and he’d stack ‘em down there, one by one, like so
much cordwood in the trench, and he’d pack straw around mem, then he’d cover
the top of the trench with two-b’-fours to keep the critters out—in those days
there were wolves and bears and all sorts you never see anymore around here, no
hodags though, that’s just a story about the hodags and I wouldn’t ever stretch
your credulity by telling you no stories, no sir—he’d cover the trench with
two-b’-fours and the next snowfall would cover it up completely, save for the
flag he’d planted to show him where the trench was.

“Then my grampaw would ride through the winter in comfort
and never have to worry about running out of food or out of fuel. And when he
saw that the true spring was coming he’d go to the flag, and he’d dig his way
down through the snow, and he’d move the two-by-fours, and he’d carry them in
one by one and set the family in front of the fire to thaw. Nobody ever minded
except one of the hired men who lost half an ear to a family of mice who nibbled
it off one time my grampaw didn’t push those two-by-fours all the way closed.
Of course, in those days we had real winters. You could do that back then. These
pussy winters we get nowadays it don’t hardly get cold enough.”