American Gods (18 page)

The buffalo-headed man reached a hand into the fire, stirring the embers and the broken branches into a blaze. “The storm is coming,” he said. Now there was ash on his hands, and he wiped it onto his hairless chest, leaving soot-black streaks.

“So you people keep telling me. Can I ask you a question?”

There was a pause. A fly settled on the furry forehead. The buffalo man flicked it away. “Ask.”

“Is this true? Are these people really gods? It's all so . . .” He paused. Then he said, “impossible,” which was not exactly the word he had been going for but seemed to be the best he could do.

“What are gods?” asked the buffalo man.

“I don't know,” said Shadow.

There was a tapping, relentless and dull. Shadow waited for the buffalo man to say something more, to explain what gods were, to explain the whole tangled nightmare that his life seemed to have become. He was cold.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

Shadow opened his eyes, and, groggily, sat up. He was freezing, and the sky outside the car was the deep luminescent purple that divides the dusk from the night.

Tap. Tap.
Someone said, “Hey, mister,” and Shadow turned his head. The someone was standing beside the car, no more than a darker shape against the darkling sky. Shadow reached out a hand and cranked down the window a few inches. He made some waking-up noises, and then he said, “Hi.”

“You all right? You sick? You been drinking?” The voice was high—a woman's or a boy's.

“I'm fine,” said Shadow. “Hold on.” He opened the door, and got out, stretching his aching limbs and neck as he did so. Then he rubbed his hands together, to get the blood circulating and to warm them up.

“Whoa. You're pretty big.”

“That's what they tell me,” said Shadow. “Who are you?”

“I'm Sam,” said the voice.

“Boy Sam or girl Sam?”

“Girl Sam. I used to be Sammi with an i, and I'd do a smiley face over the i, but then I got completely sick of it because like absolutely everybody was doing it, so I stopped.”

“Okay, girl Sam. You go over there, and look out at the road.”

“Why? Are you a crazed killer or something?”

“No,” said Shadow, “I need to take a leak and I'd like just the smallest amount of privacy.”

“Oh. Right. Okay. Got it. No problem. I am so with you. I can't even pee if there's someone in the next stall. Major shy bladder syndrome.”

“Now, please.”

She walked to the far side of the car, and Shadow took a few steps closer to the field, unzipped his jeans, and pissed against a fence post for a very long time. He walked back to the car. The last of the gloaming had become night.

“You still there?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said. “You must have a bladder like Lake Erie. I think empires rose and fell in the time it took you to pee. I could hear it the whole time.”

“Thank you. Do you want something?”

“Well, I wanted to see if you were okay. I mean, if you were dead or something I would have called the cops. But the windows were kind of fogged up so I thought, well, he's probably still alive.”

“You live around here?”

“Nope. Hitchhiking down from Madison.”

“That's not safe.”

“I've done it five times a year for three years now. I'm still alive. Where are you headed?”

“I'm going as far as Cairo.”

“Thank you,” she said. “I'm going to El Paso. Staying with my aunt for the holidays.”

“I can't take you all the way,” said Shadow.

“Not El Paso, Texas. The other one, in Illinois. It's a few hours south. You know where you are now?”

“No,” said Shadow. “I have no idea. Somewhere on Highway Fifty-two?”

“The next town's Peru,” said Sam. “Not the one in Peru. The one in Illinois. Let me smell you. Bend down.” Shadow bent down, and the girl sniffed his face. “Okay. I don't smell booze. You can drive. Let's go.”

“What makes you think I'm giving you a ride?”

“Because I'm a damsel in distress,” she said, “And you are a knight in whatever. A really dirty car. You know someone wrote ‘Wash me!' on your rear window?” Shadow got into the car and opened the passenger door. The light that goes on in cars when the front door is opened did not go on in this car.

“No,” he said, “I didn't.”

She climbed in. “It was me,” she said. “I wrote it. While there was still enough light to see.”

Shadow started the car, turned on the headlights, and headed back onto the road. “Left,” said Sam helpfully. Shadow turned left, and he drove. After several minutes the heater started to work, and blessed warmth filled the car.

“You haven't said anything yet,” said Sam. “Say something.”

“Are you human?” asked Shadow. “An honest-to-goodness, born-of-man-and-woman, living, breathing human being?”

“Sure,” she said.

“Okay. Just checking. So what would you like me to say?”

“Something to reassure me, at this point. I suddenly have that ‘oh shit I'm in the wrong car with a crazy man' feeling.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I've had that one. What would you find reassuring?”

“Just tell me you're not an escaped convict or a mass murderer or something.”

He thought for a moment. “You know, I'm really not.”

“You had to think about it though, didn't you?”

“Done my time. Never killed anybody.”

“Oh.”

They entered a small town, lit up by streetlights and blinking Christmas decorations, and Shadow glanced to his right. The girl had a tangle of short dark hair and a face that was both attractive and, he decided, faintly mannish: her features might have been chiseled out of rock. She was looking at him.

“What were you in prison for?”

“I hurt a couple of people real bad. I got angry.”

“Did they deserve it?”

Shadow thought for a moment. “I thought so at the time.”

“Would you do it again?”

“Hell, no. I lost three years of my life in there.”

“Mm. You got Indian blood in you?”

“Not that I know of.”

“You looked like it, was all.”

“Sorry to disappoint you.”

“S'okay. You hungry?”

Shadow nodded. “I could eat,” he said.

“There's a good place just past the next set of lights. Good food. Cheap, too.”

Shadow pulled up in the parking lot. They got out of the car. He didn't bother to lock it, although he pocketed the keys. He pulled out some coins to buy a newspaper. “Can you afford to eat here?” he asked.

“Yeah,” she said, raising her chin. “I can pay for myself.”

Shadow nodded. “Tell you what. I'll toss you for it,” he said. “Heads you pay for my dinner, tails, I pay for yours.”

“Let me see the coin first,” she said, suspiciously. “I had an uncle had a double-headed quarter.”

She inspected it, satisfied herself there was nothing strange about the quarter. Shadow placed the coin head up on his thumb and cheated the toss, so it wobbled and looked like it was spinning, then he caught it and flipped it over onto the back of his left hand, and uncovered it with his right, in front of her.

“Tails,” she said, happily. “Dinner's on you.”

“Yup,” he said. “You can't win them all.”

Shadow ordered the meat loaf, Sam ordered lasagna. Shadow flipped through the newspaper to see if there was anything in it about dead men in a freight train. There wasn't. The only story of interest was on the cover: crows in record numbers were infesting the town. Local farmers wanted to hang dead crows around the town on public buildings to frighten the others away; ornithologists said that it wouldn't work, that the living crows would simply eat the dead ones. The locals were implacable. “When they see the corpses of their friends,” said a spokesman, “they'll know that we don't want them here.”

The food came mounded high on plates and steaming, more than any one person could eat.

“So what's in Cairo?” asked Sam, with her mouth full.

“No idea. I got a message from my boss saying he needs me down there.”

“What do you do?”

“I'm an errand boy.”

She smiled. “Well,” she said, “you aren't mafia, not looking like that and driving that piece of shit. Why does your car smell like bananas, anyway?”

He shrugged, carried on eating.

Sam narrowed her eyes. “Maybe you're a banana smuggler,” she said. “You haven't asked me what I do yet.”

“I figure you're at school.”

“UW Madison.”

“Where you are undoubtedly studying art history, women's studies, and probably casting your own bronzes. And you probably work in a coffeehouse to help cover the rent.”

She put down her fork, nostrils flaring, eyes wide. “How the fuck did you do that?”

“What? Now you say, no, actually I'm studying Romance languages and ornithology.”

“So you're saying that was a lucky guess or something?”

“What was?”

She stared at him with dark eyes. “You are one peculiar guy, Mister . . . I don't know your name.”

“They call me Shadow,” he said.

She twisted her mouth wryly, as if she were tasting something she disliked. She stopped talking, put her head down, finished her lasagna.

“Do you know why it's called Egypt?” asked Shadow when Sam finished eating.

“Down Cairo way? Yeah. It's in the delta of the Ohio and the Mississippi. Like Cairo in Egypt, in the Nile delta.”

“That makes sense.”

She sat back in her chair, ordered coffee and chocolate cream pie, ran a hand through her black hair. “You married, Mister Shadow?” And then, as he hesitated, “Gee. I just asked another tricky question, didn't I?”

“They buried her on Thursday,” he said, picking his words with care. “She was killed in a car crash.”

“Oh. God. Jesus. I'm sorry.”

“Me too.”

An awkward pause. “My half sister lost her kid, my nephew, end of last year. It's rough.”

“Yeah. It is. What did he die of?”

She sipped her coffee. “We don't know. We don't even really know that he's dead. He just vanished. But he was only thirteen. It was the middle of last winter. My sister was pretty broken up about it.”

“Were there any, any clues?” He sounded like a TV cop. He tried again. “Did they suspect foul play?” That sounded worse.

“They suspected my noncustodial asshole brother-in-law, his father. Who was asshole enough to have stolen him away. Probably did. But this is in a little town in the North Woods. Lovely, sweet, pretty little town where no one ever locks their doors.” She sighed, shook her head. She held her coffee cup in both hands. “Are you sure you aren't part Indian?”

“Not that I know. It's possible. I don't know much about my father. I guess my ma would have told me if he was Native American, though. Maybe.”

Again the mouth twist. Sam gave up halfway through her chocolate cream pie: the slice was half the size of her head. She pushed the plate across the table to Shadow. “You want?” He smiled, said, “Sure,” and finished it off.

The waitress handed them the check, and Shadow paid.

“Thanks,” said Sam.

It was getting colder now. The car coughed a couple of times before it started. Shadow drove back onto the road, and kept going south. “You ever read a guy named Herodotus?” he asked.

“Jesus. What?”

“Herodotus. You ever read his
Histories
?”

“You know,” she said, dreamily, “I don't get it. I don't get how you talk, or the words you use or anything. One moment you're a big dumb guy, the next you're reading my friggin' mind, and the next we're talking about Herodotus. So no. I have not read Herodotus. I've heard about him. Maybe on NPR. Isn't he the one they call the father of lies?”

“I thought that was the Devil.”

“Yeah, him too. But they were talking about Herodotus saying there were giant ants and gryphons guarding gold mines, and how he made this stuff up.”

“I don't think so. He wrote what he'd been told. It's like, he's writing these histories. And they're mostly pretty good histories. Loads of weird little details—like, did you know, in Egypt, if a particularly beautiful girl or the wife of a lord or whatever died, they wouldn't send her to the embalmer for three days? They'd let her body spoil in the heat first.”

“Why? Oh, hold on. Okay, I think I know why. Oh, that's disgusting.”

“And there're battles in there, all sorts of normal things. And then there are the gods. Some guy is running back to report on the outcome of a battle and he's running and running, and he sees Pan in a glade. And Pan says, ‘Tell them to build me a temple here.' So he says okay, and runs the rest of the way back. And he reports the battle news, and then says, ‘Oh, and by the way, Pan wants you to build him a temple.' It's really matter-of-fact, you know?”

“So there are stories with gods in them. What are you trying to say? That these guys had hallucinations?”

“No,” said Shadow. “That's not it.”

She chewed a hangnail. “I read some book about brains,” she said. “My roommate had it and she kept waving it around. It was like, how five thousand years ago the lobes of the brain fused and before that people thought when the right lobe of the brain said anything it was the voice of some god telling them what to do. It's just brains.”

“I like my theory better,” said Shadow.

“What's your theory?”

“That back then people used to run into the gods from time to time.”

“Oh.” Silence: only the rattling of the car, the roar of the engine, the growling of the muffler—which did not sound healthy. Then, “Do you think they're still there?”