American Gods (50 page)

Shadow picked up the Minutes of the Lakeside City Council
1872-1884 and turned the pages, his eyes scanning the tiny print, not actually
reading it, occasionally stopping to scan something that caught his eye.

In July 1874, Shadow learned, the city council was concerned
about the number of itinerant foreign loggers arriving in the town. An opera
house was to be built on the corner of Third Street and Broadway. It was to be
expected that the nuisances attendant to the damming of the Mill-Creek would
abate once the mill-pond had become a lake. The council authorized the payment
of seventy dollars to Mr. Samuel Samuels, and of eighty-five dollars to Mr.
Heikki Salminen, in compensation for their land and for the expenses incurred
in moving their domiciles out of the area to be flooded.

It had never occurred to Shadow before that the: lake was
manmade. Why call a town Lakeside, when the lake had begun as a dammed
mill-pond? He read on, to discover that a Mr. Hinzelmann, originally of
Hiidemuhlen in Bavaria, was in charge of the lake-building project, andgthat
the city council had granted him the sum of $370 toward the project, any
shortfall to be made up by public subscription. Shadow tore off a strip of a
paper towel and placed it into the book as a bookmark. He could imagine Hinzelmann’s
pleasure in seeing the reference to his grandfather. He wondered if the old man
knew that his family had been instrumental in building the lake. Shadow flipped
forward through the book, scanning for more references to the lake-building
project.

They had dedicated the lake in a ceremony in the spring of
1876, as a precursor to the town’s centennial celebrations. A vote of thanks to
Mr. Hinzelmann was taken by the council.

Shadow checked his watch. It was five-thirty. He went into
the bathroom, shaved, combed his hair. He changed his clothes. Somehow the
final fifteen minutes passed. He got the wine and the plant, arid he walked
next door.

The door opened as he knocked. Marguerite Olsen looked almost
as nervous as he felt. She took the wine bottle and the potted plant, and said
thank you. The television was on, The Wizard ofOz on video. It was still in
sepia, and Dorothy was still in Kansas, sitting with her eyes closed in
Professor Marvel’s wagon as the old fraud pretended to read her mind, and the
twister-wind that would tear her away from her life was approaching. Leon sat
in front of the screen, playing with a toy fire truck. When he saw Shadow an
expression of delight touched his face; he stood up and ran, tripping over his
feet in his excitement, into a back bedroom, from which he emerged a moment
later triumphantly waving a quarter.

“Watch, Mike Ainsel!” he shouted. Then closed both his hands
and he pretended to take the coin into his right hand, which he opened wide. “I
made it disappear, Mike Ainsel!”

“You did,” agreed Shadow. “After we’ve eaten, if it’s okay
with your mom, I’ll show you how to do it even smoother than that.”

“Do it now if you want,” said Marguerite. “We’re still
waiting for Samantha. I sent her out for sour cream. I don’t know what’s taking
her so long.”

And, as if that was her cue, footsteps sounded on the wooden
deck, and somebody shouldered open the front door. Shadow did not recognize her
at first, then she said, “I didn’t know if you wanted the kind with calories or
the kind that tastes like wallpaper paste so I went for the kind with calories,”
and he knew her then: the girl from the road to Cairo.

“That’s fine,” said Marguerite. “Sam, this is my neighbor,
Mike Ainsel. Mike, this is Samantha Black Crow, my sister.”

/ don’t know you, thought Shadow desperately. You’ve never
met me before. We’re total strangers. He tried to remember how he had thought
snow, how easy and light that had been: this was desperate. He put out his hand
and said, “Pleased to meetcha.”

She blinked, looked up at his face. A moment of puzzlement,
then recognition entered her eyes and curved the corners of her mouth into a
grin. “Hello,” she said.

“I’ll see how the food is doing,” said Marguerite, in the
taut voice of someone who burns things in kitchens if they leave them alone and
unwatched even for a moment.

Sam took off her puffy coat and her hat. “So you’re the melancholy
but mysterious neighbor,” she said. “Who’da thunk it?” She kept her voice down.

“And you,” he said, “are girl Sam. Can we talk about this
later?”

“If you promise to tell me what’s going on.” “Deal.”

Leon tugged at the leg of Shadow’s pants. “Will you show me
now?” he asked, and held out his quarter.

“Okay,” said Shadow. “But if I show you, ybu have to remember
that a master magician never tells “Snyone how it’s done.”

“I promise,” said Leon, gravely. Shadow took the coin in his
left hand, then moved Leon’s right hand, showing him how to appear to take the
coin in his right hand while actually leaving it in Shadow’s left hand. Then he
made Leon repeat the movements on his own.

After several attempts the boy mastered the move. “Now you
know half of it,” said Shadow. “The other half is this: put your attention on
the place where the coin ought to be. Look at the place it’s meant to be. If
you act like it’s in your right hand, no one will even look at your left hand,
no matter how clumsy you are.”

Sam watched all this with her head tipped slightly on one
side, saying nothing.

“Dinner!” called Marguerite, pushing her way in from the
kitchen with a steaming bowl of spaghetti in her hands. “Leon, go wash your
hands.”

There was crusty garlic bread, thick red sauce, good spicy
meatballs. Shadow complimented Marguerite on it.

“Old family recipe,” she told him, “from the Corsican side
of the family.”

“I thought you were Native American.”

“Dad’s Cherokee,” said Sam. “Mag’s mom’s father came from
Corsica.” Sam was the only person in the room who was actually drinking the
cabernet. “Dad left her when Mags was ten and he moved across town. Six months
after that, I was born. Mom and Dad got married when the divorce came through.
When I was ten he went away. I think he has a ten-year attention span.”

“Well, he’s been out in Oklahoma for ten years,” said Marguerite.

“Now, my mom’s family were European Jewish,” continued Sam, “from
one of those places that used to be communist and now are just chaos. I think
she liked the idea of being married to a Cherokee. Fry bread and chopped liver.”
She took another sip of the red wine.

“Sam’s mom’s a wild woman,” said Marguerite,
semiap-provingly.

“You know where she is now?” asked Sam. Shadow shook his
head. “She’s in Australia. She met a guy on the Internet who lived in Hobart.
When they met in the flesh she decided he was actually kind of icky. But she
really liked Tasmania. So she’s living down there, with a woman’s group,
teaching them to batik cloth and things like that. Isn’t that cool? At her age?”

Shadow agreed that it was, and helped himself to more meatballs.
Sam told them how all the aboriginal natives of Tasmania had been wiped out by
the British, and about the human chain they made across the island to catch
them which trapped only an old man and a sick boy. She told him how the
thylacines—the Tasmanian tigers—had been killed _ by farmers, scared for their
sheep, how the politicians in the 1930s noticed that the thylacines should be
protected only after the last of them was dead. She finished her second glass
of wine, poured her third.

“So, Mike,” said Sam, suddenly, her cheeks reddening, “tell
us about your family. What are the Ainsels like?” She was smiling, and there
was mischief in that smile.

“We’re real dull,” said Shadow. “None of us ever got as far
as Tasmania. So you’re at school in Madison. What’s that like?”

“You know,” she said. “I’m studying art history, women’s
studies, and casting my own bronzes.”

“When I grow up,” said Leon, “I’m going to do magic. Poof.
Will you teach me, Mike Ainsel?”

“Sure,” said Shadow. “If your mom doesn’t mind.”

Sam said, “After we’ve eaten, while you’re putting Leon to
bed, Mags, I think I’m going to get Mike to take me to the Buck Stops Here for
an hour or so.”  v_ \

Marguerite did not shrug. Her head moved, i»-«yebrow raised
slightly.

“I think he’s interesting,” said Sam. “AndHve have lots to
talk about.”

Marguerite looked at Shadow, who busieo himself in dabbing
an imaginary blob of red sauce from his chin with a paper napkin. “Well, you’re
grownups,” she said, in a tone of voice that implied that they weren’t, and
that even if they were they shouldn’t be.

After dinner Shadow helped Sam with the washing up—he
dried—and then he did a trick for Leon, counting pennies into Leon’s palm: each
time Leon opened his hand and counted them there was one less coin than he had
counted in. And as for the final penny—”Are you squeezing it? Tightly?”—when
Leon opened his hand he found it had transformed into a dime. Leon’s plaintive
cries of “How’d you do that? Momma, how’d he do that?” followed him out into
the hall.

Sam handed him his coat. “Come on,” she said. Her cheeks
were flushed from the wine.

Outside it was cold.

Shadow stopped in his apartment, tossed the Minutes of the
Lakeside City Council into a plastic grocery bag, and brought it along.
Hinzelmann might be down at the Buck, and he wanted to show him the mention of
his grandfather.

They walked down the drive side by side.

He opened the garage door, and she started to laugh. “Omigod,”
she said, when she saw the 4-Runner. “Paul Gunther’s car. You bought Paul
Gunther’s car. Omigod.”

Shadow opened the door for her. Then he went around and got
in. “You know the car?”

“When I came up here two or three years ago to stay with
Mags. It was me that persuaded him to paint it purple.”

“Oh,” said Shadow. “It’s good to have someone to blame.”

He drove the car out onto the street. Got out and closed the
garage door. Got back into the car. Sam was looking at him oddly as he got in,
as if the confidence had begun to leak out of her. He put on his seat belt, and
she said, “Okay. This is a stupid thing to do, isn’t it? Getting into a car
with a psycho killer.”

“I got you home safe last time,” said Shadow.

“You killed two men,” she said. “You’re wanted by the feds.
And now I find out you’re living under an assumed name next door to my sister.
Unless Mike Ainsel is your real name?”

“No,” said Shadow, and he sighed. “It’s not.” He hated
saying it. It was as if he was letting go of something important, abandoning
Mike Ainsel by denying him; as if he were taking his leave of a friend.

“Did you kill those men?”

“No.”

“They came to my house, and said we’d been seen together.
And this guy showed me photographs of you. What was his name—Mister Hat? No.
Mister Town. It was like The Fugitive. But I said I hadn’t seen you.”

“Thank you.”

“So,” she said. “Tell me what’s going on. I’ll keep your
secrets if you keep mine.”

“I don’t know any of yours,” said Shadow.

“Well, you know that it was my idea to paint this thing
purple, thus forcing Paul Gunther to become such an object of scorn and
derision for several counties around that he was forced to leave town entirely.
We were kind of stoned,” she admitted.

“I doubt mat bit of it’s much of a secret,” said Shadow. “Everyone
in Lakeside must have known. It’s a stoner sort of purple.”

And then she said, very quiet, very fast, “If you’re going
to kill me please don’t hurt me. I shouldn’t have come here with you. I am so
fucking fucking dumb. I can identify you. Jesus.”

Shadow sighed. “I’ve never killed anybody. RSaTfy. Now I’m
going to take you to the Buck,” he said. “We’ll have a drink. Or if you give
the word, I’ll turn this car around and take you home. Either way, I’ll just
have to hope you aren’t going to call the cops.”

There was silence as they crossed the bridge.

“Who did kill those men?” she asked.

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

“I would.” She sounded angry now. He wondered if bringing
the wine to the dinner had been a wise idea. Life was certainly not a cabernet
right now.

“It’s not easy to believe.”

“I,” she told him, “can believe anything. You have no idea
what I can believe.”

“Really?”

“I can believe things that are true and I can believe things
that aren’t true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they’re true or
not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and Marilyn Monroe and
the Beatles and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen—I believe that people are
perfectible, that knowledge is infinite, that the worM is run by secret banking
cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like
wrinkledy lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our
women. I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and
I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick
everyone’s ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep
problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is
coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state. I
believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that
they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to
sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve
into madness and alligators and toxic waste. I believe that antibacterial soap
is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we’ll all be
wiped out by the common cold like the Martians in War of the Worlds. I believe
that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis,
that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former
life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman. I believe that mankind’s destiny lies
in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid,
that it’s aerodynamically impossible for a bumblebee to fly, that light is a
wave and a particle, that there’s a cat in a box somewhere who’s alive and dead
at the same time (although if they don’t ever open the box to feed it it’ll
eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in
the universe billions of years older than the universe itself. I believe in a
personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe
in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with
her girlfriends and doesn’t even know that I’m alive. I believe in an empty and
godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck. I
believe that anyone who says that sex is overrated just hasn’t done it
properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what’s going on will lie
about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social
lies. I believe in a woman’s right to choose, a baby’s right to live, that
while all human life is sacred there’s nothing wrong with the death penalty if
you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would
ever trust the legal system. I believe that life is a game, that life is a
cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you’re alive and that you might
as well lie back and enjoy it.” She stopped, out of breath.