American Gods (54 page)

One of the children, hoping for clemency, took them to a
cave in the hills in which they found a mammoth skull, the tattered remnants of
a mammoth-skin cloak, a wooden cup, and the preserved head of Atsula the
oracle.

While some of the warriors of the new tribe were for taking
the sacred objects away with them, stealing the gods of the first people and
owning their power, others counseled against it, saying that they would bring
nothing but ill luck and the malice of their own god (for these were the people
of a raven tribe, and ravens are jealous gods).

So they threw the objects down the side of the hill, into a
deep ravine, and took the survivors of the first people with them on their long
journey south. And the raven tribes, and the fox tribes, grew more powerful in
the land, and soon Nunyunnini was entirely forgotten.

People are in the dark, they don’t know what to do I had a
little lantern, oh but it got blown out too. I’m reaching out my hand. I hope
you are too. I just want to be in the dark with you.

—Greg Brown, “In the Dark with You”

They changed cars at five in the morning, in Minneapolis, in
the airport’s long-term parking lot. They drove to the top floor, where the
parking building was open to the sky.

Shadow took the orange uniform and the handcuffs and leg
hobbles, put them in the brown paper bag that had briefly held his possessions,
folded the whole tfiing up, and dropped it into a garbage can. They had beeq
waiting for ten minutes when a barrel-chested young man came out of an airport
door and walked over to them. He was eating a packet of Burger King french
fries. Shadow recognized him immediately: he had sat in the back of the car,
when they had left the House on the Rock, and hummed so deeply the car had
vibrated. He now sported a white-streaked winter beard he had not had before.
It made him look older.

The man wiped the grease from his hands onto his jeans, extended
one huge hand to Shadow. “I heard of the All-Father’s death,” he said. “They
will pay, and they will pay dearly.”

“Wednesday was your father?” asked Shadow.

“He was the All-Father,” said the man. His deep voice caught
in his throat. “You tell them, tell them all, that when we are needed, my
people will be there.”

Czernobog picked at a flake of tobacco from between his
teeth and spat it out onto the frozen slush. “And how many of you is that? Ten?
Twenty?”

The barrel-chested man’s beard bristled. “And aren’t ten of
us worth a hundred of them? Who would stand against even one of my folk, in a
battle? But there are more of us than that, at the edge of the cities. There
are a few in the mountains. Some in the Catskills, a few living in the carny
towns in Florida. They keep their axes sharp. They will come if I call them.”

“You do that, Elvis,” said Mr. Nancy. Shadow thought he said
Elvis, anyway. Nancy had exchanged the deputy’s uniform for a thick brown
cardigan, corduroy trousers, and brown loafers. “You call them. It’s what the
old bastard would have wanted.”

“They betrayed him. They killed him. I laughed at Wednesday,
but I was wrong. None of us are safe any longer,” said the man whose name
sounded like Elvis. “But you can rely on us.” He gently patted Shadow on the
back and almost sent him sprawling. It was like being gently patted on the back
by a wrecking ball.

Czernobog had been looking around the parking lot. Now he
said, “You will pardon me asking, but our new vehicle is which?”

The barrel-chested man pointed. “There she is,” he said.

Czernobog snorted. “That?”

It was a 1970 VW bus. There was a rainbow decal in the rear
window.

“It’s a fine vehicle. And it’s the last thing that they’ll
be expecting you to be driving.”

Czernobog walked around the vehicle. Then he started to
cough, a lung-rumbling, old-man, five-in-the-morning smoker’s cough. He hawked,
and spat, and put his hand to his chest, massaging away the pain. “Yes. The
last car they will suspect. So what happens when the police pull us over,
looking for the hippies and the dope? Eh? We are not here to ride the magic
bus. We are to blend in.”

The bearded man unlocked the door of the bus. “So they take
a look at you, they see you aren’t hippies, they wave you goodbye. It’s the
perfect disguise. And it’s all I could find at no notice.”

Czernobog seemed to be ready to argue it further, but Mr.
Nancy intervened smoothly. “Elvis, you came through for us. We are very
grateful. Now, that car needs to get back to Chicago.”

“We’ll leave it in Bloomington,” said the bearded man. “The
wolves will take care of it. Don’t give it another thought.” He turned back to
Shadow. “Again, you have my sympathy and I share your pain. Good luck. And if
the vigil falls to you, my admiration, and my sympathy.” He squeezed Shadow’s
hand with his own catcher’s-mitt fist. It hurt. “You tell his corpse when you
see it. Tell him that Alviss son of Vindalf will keep the faith.”

The VW bus smelled of patchouli, of old incense and rolling
tobacco. There was a faded pink carpet glued to the floor and to the walls.

“Who was that?” asked Shadow, as he drove them down the
ramp, grinding the gears.

“Just like he said, Alviss son of Vindalf. Htfs the king of
the dwarfs. The biggest, mightiest, greatest of all the dwarf folk.”

“But he’s not a dwarf,” pointed out Shadow. “He’s what,
five-eight? Five-nine?”

“Which makes him a giant among dwarfs,” said Czernobog from
behind him. ‘Tallest dwarf in America.”

“What was that about the vigil?” asked Shadow.

The two old men said nothing. Shadow glanced at Mr. Nancy,
who was staring out of the window.

“Well? He was talking about a vigil. You heard him.”

Czernobog spoke up from the backseat. “You will not have to
do it,” he said.

“Do what?”

“The vigil. He talks too much. All the dwarfs talk and talk.
Is nothing to think of. Better you put it out of your mind.”

Driving south was like driving forward in time. The snows
erased, slowly, and were completely gone by the following morning when the bus
reached Kentucky. Winter was already over in Kentucky, and spring was on its
way. Shadow began to wonder if there were some kind of equation to explain
it—perhaps every fifty miles he drove south he was driving a day into the
future.

He would have mentioned his idea to somebody, but Mr. Nancy
was asleep in the passenger seat in the front, while Czernobog snored
unceasingly in the back.

Time seemed a flexible construct at that moment, an illusion
he was imagining as he drove. He found himself becoming painfully aware of
birds and animals: he saw the crows on the side of the road, or in the bus’s
path, picking at roadkill; flights of birds wheeled across the skies in
patterns that almost made sense; cats stared at them from front lawns and fence
posts.

Czernobog snorted and woke, sitting up slowly. “I dreamed a
strange dream,” he said. “I dreamed that I am truly Bielebog. That forever the
world imagines that there are two of us, the light god and the dark, but that
now we are both old, I find it was only me all the time, giving them gifts,
taking my gifts away.” He broke the filter from a Lucky Strike, put the
cigarette between his lips and lit it.

Shadow wound down his window.

“Aren’t you worried about lung cancer?” he said.

“I am cancer,” said Czernobog. “I do not frighten myself.”

Nancy spoke. “Folk like us don’t get cancer. We don’t get
arteriosclerosis or Parkinson’s disease or syphilis. We’re kind of hard to
kill.”

“They killed Wednesday,” said Shadow.

He pulled over for gas, and then parked next door at a restaurant
for an early breakfast. As they entered, the pay phone in the entrance began to
jangle.

They gave their orders to an elderly woman with a worried
smile, who had been sitting reading a paperback copy of What My Heart Meant by
Jenny Kerton. The woman sighed, then walked back and over to the phone, picked
it up, said “Yes.” Then she looked back at the room, said, “Yep. Looks like
they are. You just hold the line now,” and walked over to Mr. Nancy.

“It’s for you,” she said.

“Okay,” said Mr. Nancy. “Now, ma’am, you make sure those
fries are real crisp now. Think burnt.” He walked over to the pay phone. “This
is he.”

“And what makes you think I’m dumb enough to trust you?” he
said.

“I can find it,” he said. “I know where it is.”

“Yes,” he said. “Of course we want it. You know we want it.
And I know you want to get rid of it. So don’t give me any shit.”

He hung up the telephone, came back to the table.

“Who was it?” asked Shadow.

“Didn’t say.”

“What did they want?”

‘They were offerin’ us a truce, while they hand over the
body.”

“They lie,” said Czernobog. “They want to lure us in, and
then they will kill us. What they did to Wednesday. Is what I always used to
do,” he added, with gloomy pride.

“It’s on neutral territory,” said Nancy. “Truly neutral.”

Czernobog chuckled. It sounded like a metal ball rattling in
a dry skull. “I used to say that also. Come to a neutral place, I would say,
and then in the night we would rise up and kill them all. Those were the good
days.”

Mr. Nancy shrugged. He crunched down on his dark brown
french fries, grinned his approval. “Mm-mm. These are fine fries,” he said.

“We can’t trust those people,” said Shadow.

“Listen, I’m older than you and I’m smarter than you and I’m
better lookin’ than you,” said Mr. Nancy, thumping the bottom of the ketchup
bottle, blobbing ketchup over his burnt fries. “I can get more pussy in an
afternoon than you’ll get in a year. I can dance like an angel, fight like a
cornered bear, plan better than a fox, sing like a nightingale ...”

“And your point here is ... ?”

Nancy’s brown eyes gazed into Shadow’s. “And they need to
get rid of the body as much as we need to take it.”

Czernobog said, “There is no such neutral place.”

“There’s one,” said Mr. Nancy. “It’s the center.”

Determining the exact center of anything can be problematic
at best. With living things—people, for example, or continents—the problem
becomes one of intangibles: What is the center of a man? What is the center of
a dream? And in the case of the continental United States, should one count
Alaska when one attempts to find the center? Or Hawaii?

As the Twentieth Century began, they made a huge model of
the USA, the lower forty-eight states, out of cardboard, and to find the center
they balanced it on a pin, until they found the single place it balanced.

As near as anyone could figure it out, the exact center of
the continental United States was several miles from Lebanon, Kansas, on Johnny
Grib’s hog farm. By the 1930s the people of Lebanon were all ready to put a
monument up in the middle of the hog farm, but Johnny Grib said that he didn’t
want millions of tourists coming in and tramping all over and upsetting the
hogs, so they put the monument to the geographical center of the United States
two miles north of the town. They built a park, and a stone monument to go in
the park, and a brass plaque on the monument. They blacktopped the road from
the town, and, certain of the influx of tourists waiting to arrive, they even
built a motel by the monument. Then they waited.

The tourists did not come. Nobody came.

It’s a sad little park, now, with a mobile chapel in it that
wouldn’t fit a small funeral party, and a motel whose windows look like dead
eyes.

“Which is why,” concluded Mr. Nancy, as they drove into
Humansville, Missouri (pop. 1084), “the exact center of America is a tiny
run-down park, an empty church, a pile of stones, and a derelict motel.”

“Hog farm,” said Czernobog. “You just said that the real
center of America was a hog farm.”

“This isn’t about what is,” said Mr. Nancy. “It’s about what
people think is. It’s all imaginary anyway. That’s why it’s important. People
only fight over imaginary things.”

“My kind of people?” asked Shadow. “Or your kind of people?”

Nancy said nothing. Czernobog made a noise that might have
been a chuckle, might have been a snort.

Shadow tried to get comfortable in the back of. the bus. He
had only slept a little. He had a bad feeling ijCthe pit of his stomach. Worse
than the feeling he had had in prison, worse than the feeling he had had back
when Laura had come to him and told him about the robbery. This was bad. The
back of his neck prickled, he felt sickwid, several times, in waves, he felt
scared.

Mr. Nancy pulled over in Humansville, parked outside a supermarket.
Mr. Nancy went inside, and Shadow followed him in. Czernobog waited in the
parking lot, smoking his cigarette.

There was a young fair-haired man, little more than a boy, restocking
the breakfast cereal shelves.

“Hey,” said Mr. Nancy.

“Hey,” said the young man. “It’s true, isn’t it? They killed
him?”

“Yes,” said Mr. Nancy. “They killed him.”

The young man banged several boxes of Cap’n Crunch down on
the shelf. “They think they can crush us like cockroaches,” he said. He had a
tarnished silver bracelet circling his wrist. “We don’t crush that easy, do we?”

“No,” said Mr. Nancy. “We don’t.”

“I’ll be there, sir,” said the young man, his pale blue eyes
blazing.

“I know you will, Gwydion,” said Mr. Nancy.

Mr. Nancy bought several large bottles of RC Cola, a
six-pack of toilet paper, a pack of evil-looking black cigarillos, a bunch of
bananas, and a pack of Doublemint chewing gum. “He’s a good boy. Came over in
the seventh century. Welsh.”

The bus meandered first to the west and then to the north.
Spring faded back into the dead end of winter. Kansas was the cheerless gray of
lonesome clouds, empty windows, and lost hearts. Shadow had become adept at
hunting for radio stations, negotiating between Mr. Nancy, who liked talk radio
and dance music, and Czeraobog, who favored classical music, the gloomier the
better, leavened with the more extreme evangelical religious stations. For
himself, Shadow liked oldies.