American Gods (49 page)

The lights of L.A. are spread out in front of her, a
twinkling electrical map of an imaginary kingdom, the heavens laid out right
here on earth, and she knows that all she needs to be safe is to get off the road.

I am black but comely, she mouths to the night and the rain.
lam the rose ofSharon, and the lily of the valleys. Stay me with flagons,
comfort me with apples: for 1 am sick of love.

A fork of lightning bums greenly across the night sky. She
loses her footing, slides several feet, skinning her leg and elbow, and she is
getting to her feet when she sees the lights of the car descending the hill
toward her. It’s coming down too fast for safety and she wonders whether to
throw herself to the right, where it could crush her against the hillside, or
the left, where she might tumble down the gully. She runs across the road,
intending to push herself up the wet earth, to climb, when the white stretch
limo comes fish-tailing down the slick hillside road, hell, it must be doing
eighty, maybe even aquaplaning on the surface of the road, and she’s pushing
her hands into a handful of weeds and earth, and she’s going to get up and
away, she knows, when the wet earth crumbles and she tumbles back down onto the
road.

The car hits her with an impact that crumples the grille and
tosses her into the air like a glove puppet. She lands on the road behind the
limo, and the impact shatters her pelvis, fractures her skull. Cold rainwater
runs over her face.

She begins to curse her killer: curse him silently, as she cannot
move her lips. She curses him in waking and in sleeping, in living and in
death. She curses him as only someone who is half-demon on her father’s side
can curse.

A car door slams. Someone approaches her. “You were an analog
girl,” he sings again, tunelessly, “living in a digital world.” And then he
says, “You fucking madonnas. All you fucking madonnas.” He walks away.

The car door slams.

The limo reverses, and runs back over her, slowly, for the
first time. Her bones crunch beneath the wheels. Then the limo comes back down
the hill toward her.

When, finally, it drives away down the hill, all it leaves
behind on the road is the smeared red meat of roadkill, barely recognizable as
human, and soon even that will be washed away by the rain.

“Hi, Samantha.”

“Mags? Is that you?”

“Who else? Leon said that Auntie Sammy called when I was in
the shower.”

“We had a good talk. He’s such a sweet%id.”

“Yeah. I think I’ll keep him.”

A moment of discomfort for both of them, barely a crackle of
a whisper over the telephone lines. Then, “Sammy, how’s school?”

“They’re giving us a week off. Problem with the furnaces.
How are things in your neck of the North Woods?”

“Well, I’ve got a new next-door neighbor. He does coin tricks.
The Lakeside News letter column currently features a blistering debate on the
potential rezoning of the town land down by the old cemetery on the southeast
shore of the lake and yours truly has to write a strident editorial summarizing
the paper’s position on this without offending anybody or in fact giving anyone
any idea what our position is.” “Sounds like fun.”

“It’s not. Alison McGovern vanished last week—Jilly and Stan
McGovern’s oldest. Nice kid. She baby-sat for Leon a few times.”

A mouth opens to say something, and it closes again, leaving
whatever it was to say unsaid, and instead it says, “That’s awful.”

“Yes.”

“So ...” and there’s nothing to follow that with that isn’t
going to hurt, so she says, “Is he cute?”

“Who?”

“The neighbor.”

“His name’s Ainsel. Mike Ainsel. He’s okay. Too young for
me. Big guy, looks ... what’s the word. Begins with anM.”

“Mean? Moody? Magnificent? Married?”

A short laugh, then, “Yes, I guess he does look married. I
mean, if there’s a look that married men have, he kind of has it. But the word
I was thinking of was Melancholy. He looks Melancholy.”

“And Mysterious?”

“Not particularly. When he moved in he seemed kinda helpless—he
didn’t even know to heat-seal the windows. These days he still looks like he
doesn’t know what he’s doing here. When he’s here—he’s here, then he’s gone
again. I’ve seen him out walking from time to time.”

“Maybe he’s a bank robber.”

“Uh-huh. Just what I was thinking.”

“You were not. That was my idea. Listen, Mags, how are youl
Are you okay?”

“Yeah.”

“Really?”

“No.”

A long pause then. “I’m coming up to see you.”

“Sammy, no.”

“It’ll be after the weekend, before the furnaces are working
and school starts again. It’ll be fun. You can make up a bed on the couch for
me. And invite the mysterious neighbor over for dinner one night.”

“Sam, you’re matchmaking.”

“Who’s matchmaking? After Claudine-the-bitch-from-hell,
maybe I’m ready to go back to boys for a while. I met a nice strange boy when I
hitchhiked down to El Paso for Christmas.”

“Oh. Look, Sam, you’ve got to stop hitchhiking.”

“How do you think I’m going to get to Lakeside?”

“Alison McGovern was hitchhiking. Even in a town like this,
it’s not safe. I’ll wire you the money. You can take the bus.”

“I’ll be fine.”

“Sammy.”

“Okay, Mags. Wire me the money if it’ll let you sleep
easier.”

“You know it will.”

“Okay, bossy big sister. Give Leon a bug and tell him Auntie
Sammy’s coming up and he’s riotterhlde his toys in her bed this time.”

“I’ll tell him. I don’t promise it’ll do any good.”

“So when should I expect you?”

‘Tomorrow night. You don’t have to meet me at the bus station—I’ll
ask Hinzelmann to run me over in Tessie.”

“Too late. Tessie’s in mothballs for the winter. But Hinzelmann
will give you a ride anyway. He likes you. You listen to his stories.”

“Maybe you should get Hinzelmann to write your editorial for
you. Let’s see. ‘On the Rezoning of the Land by the Old Cemetery. It so happens
that in the winter of ought-three my grampaw shot a stag down by the old
cemetery by the lake. He was out of bullets, so he used a cherry-stone from the
lunch my grandmama had packed for him. Creased the skull of the stag and it
shot off like a bat out of heck. Two years later he was down that way and he
sees this mighty buck with a spreading cherry tree growing between its antlers.
Well, he shot it, and grandmama made cherry pies enough that they were still
eating them come the next fourth of July ...’” And they both laughed, then.

“The sign says help wanted.”

“We’re always hiring.”

“I can only work the night shift. Is that going to be a
problem?”

“Shouldn’t be. I can get you an application to fill out. You
ever worked in a gas station before?”

“No. I figure, how hard can it be?”

“Well, it ain’t rocket science, that’s for sure. You know,
ma’am, you don’t mind my saying this, but you do not look well.”

“I know. It’s a medical condition. Looks worse than it is.
Nothing life-threatening.” ,

“Okay. You leave that application with me. We are really
shorthanded on the late shift right now. Round here we call it the zombie
shift. You do it too long, that’s how you feel. Well now ... is that LamaT

“Laura.”

“Laura. Okay. Well, I hope you don’t mind dealing with weirdos.
Because they come out at night.”

“I’m sure they do. I can cope.”

Hey, old friend.

What do you say, old friend?

Make it okay, old friend,

Give an old friendship a break.

Why so grim?

We’re going on forever.

You, me, him—

Too many lives are at stake ...

—Stephen Sondheim, “Old Friends”

It was Saturday morning. Shadow answered the door.

Marguerite Olsen was there. She did hof come in, just stood
in the sunlight, looking serious. “Mister Ainsel ... ?”

“Mike, please,” said Shadow.

“Mike, yes. Would you like to come over for dinner tonight?
About sixish? It won’t be anything exciting, just spaghetti and meatballs.”

“I like spaghetti and meatballs.”

“Obviously, if you have any other plans ...”

“I have no other plans.”

“Six o’clock.”

“Should I bring flowers?”

“If you must. But this is a social gesture. Not a romantic
one.”

He showered. He went for a short walk, down to the bridge
and back. The sun was up, a tarnished quarter in the sky, and he was sweating
in his coat by the time he got home. He drove the 4-Runner down to Dave’s
Finest Food and bought a bottle of wine. It was a twenty-dollar bottle, which
seemed to Shadow like some kind of guarantee of quality. He didn’t know wines,
so he bought a Californian cabernet, because Shadow had once seen a bumper-sticker,
back when he was younger and people still had bumper stickers on their cars,
which said LIFE is A CABERNET and it had made him laugh.

He bought a plant in a pot as a gift. Green leaves, no
flowers. Nothing remotely romantic about that.

He bought a carton of milk, which he would never drink, and
a selection of fruit, which he would never eat.

Then he drove over to Mabel’s and bought a single lunchtime
pasty. Mabel’s face lit up when she saw him. “Did Hinzelmann catch up with you?”

“I didn’t know he was looking for me.”

“Yup. Wants to take you ice fishing. And Chad Mulligan
wanted to know if I’d seen you around. His cousin’s here from out of state. His
second cousin, what we used to call kissing cousins. Such a sweetheart. You’ll
love her,” and she dropped the pasty into a brown paper bag, twisted the top over
to keep the pasty warm.

Shadow drove the long way home, eating one-handed, the pastry
crumbs tumbling onto his jeans and onto the floor of the 4-Runner. He passed
the library on the south shore of the lake. It was a black-and-white town in
the ice and the snow. Spring seemed unimaginably far away: the klunker would
always sit on the ice, with the ice-fishing shelters and the pickup trucks and
the snowmobile tracks.

He reached his apartment, parked, walked up the drive, up
the wooden steps to his apartment. The goldfinches and nuthatches on the
birdfeeder hardly gave him a glance. He went inside. He watered the plant,
wondered whether or not to put the wine into the refrigerator.

There was a lot of time to kill until six. Shadow wished he
could comfortably watch television once more. He wanted to be entertained, not
to have to think, just to sit and let the sounds and the light wash over him.
Do you want to see Lucy’s tits? something with a Lucy voice whispered in his
memory, and he shook his head, although there was no one there to see him.

He was nervous, he realized. This would be his first real
social interaction with other people—normal people, not people in jail, not
gods or culture heroes or dreams—since he was first arrested, over three years
ago. He would have to make conversation, as Mike Ainsel.

He checked his watch. It was two-thirty. Marguerite Olsen
had told him to be there at six. Did she mean six exactly! Should he be there a
little early? A little late? He decided, eventually, to walk next door at five
past six.

Shadow’s telephone rang.

“Yeah?” he said.

‘That’s no way to answer the phone,” growled Wednesday.

“When I get my telephone connected I’ll answer it politely,”
said Shadow. “Can I help you?”

“I don’t know,” said Wednesday. There fas a pause. Then he
said, “Organizing gods is like herding cats into straight lines. They don’t
take naturally to it.” There was a deadness, and an exhaustion, in Wednesday’s
voice that Shadow had never heard before.

“What’s wrong?”

“It’s hard. It’s too fucking hard. I don’t know if this is
going to work. We might as well cut our throats. Just cut our own throats.”

“You mustn’t talk like that.”

“Yeah. Right.”

“Well, if you do cut your throat,” said Shadow, trying to
jolly Wednesday out of his darkness, “maybe it wouldn’t even hurt.”

“It would hurt. Even for my kind, pain still hurts. If you
move and act in the material world, then the material world acts on you. Pain
hurts, just as greed intoxicates and lust burns. We may not die easy and we
sure as hell don’t die well, but we can die. If we’re still loved and
remembered, something else a whole lot like us conies along and takes our place
and the whole damn thing starts all over again. And if we’re forgotten, we’re
done.”

Shadow did not know what to say. He said, “So where are you
calling from?”

“None of your goddamn business.”

“Are you drunk?”

“Not yet. I just keep thinking about Thor. You never knew
him. Big guy, like you. Good-hearted. Not bright, but he’d give you the
goddamned shirt off his back if you asked him. And he killed himself. He put a
gun in his mouth and blew his head off in Philadelphia in 1932. What kind of a
way is that for a god to die?”

“I’m sorry.”

“You don’t give two fucking cents, son. He was a whole lot
like you. Big and dumb.” Wednesday stopped talking. He coughed.

“What’s wrong?” said Shadow, for the second time.

“They got in touch.”

“Who did?”

“The opposition.”

“And?”

“They want to discuss a truce. Peace talks. Live and let
fucking live.”

“So what happens now?”

“Now I go and drink bad coffee with the modern assholes in a
Kansas City Masonic Hall.”

“Okay. You going to pick me up, or shall I meet you somewhere?”

“You stay there and you keep your head down. Don’t get into
any trouble. You hear me?”

“But—”

There was a click, and the line went dead and stayed dead. There
was no dial tone, but then, there never had been.

Nothing but time to kill. The conversation with Wednesday
had left Shadow with a sense of disquiet. He got up, intending to go for a
walk, but already the light was fading, and he sat back down again.