American Gods (24 page)

And he came, spasming and dissolving, the back of his mind itself liquefying then sublimating slowly from one state to the next.

Somewhere in there, at the end of it, he took a breath, a clear draught of air he felt all the way down to the depths of his lungs, and he knew that he had been holding his breath for a long time now. Three years, at least. Perhaps even longer.

—
Now rest
, she said, and she kissed his eyelids with her soft lips.
Let it go. Let it all go.

The sleep he slept after that was deep and dreamless and comforting, and Shadow dived deep and embraced it.

 

The light was strange. It was, he checked his watch, 6:45
A.M
., and still dark outside, although the room was filled with a pale blue dimness. He climbed out of bed. He was certain that he had been wearing pajamas when he went to bed, but now he was naked, and the air was cold on his skin. He walked to the window and closed it.

There had been a snowstorm in the night: six inches had fallen, perhaps more. The corner of the town that Shadow could see from his window, dirty and run-down, had been transformed into somewhere clean and different: these houses were not abandoned and forgotten, they were frosted into elegance. The streets had vanished completely, lost beneath a white field of snow.

There was an idea that hovered at the edge of his perception. Something about
transience
. It flickered and was gone.

He could see as well as if it were full daylight.

In the mirror, Shadow noticed something strange. He stepped closer, and stared, puzzled. All his bruises had vanished. He touched his side, pressing firmly with his fingertips, feeling for one of the deep pains that told him he had encountered Mr. Stone and Mr. Wood, hunting for the greening blossoms of bruise that Mad Sweeney had gifted him with, and finding nothing. His face was clear and unmarked. His sides, however, and his back (he twisted to examine it) were scratched with what looked like claw marks.

He hadn't dreamed it, then. Not entirely.

Shadow opened the drawers, and put on what he found: an ancient pair of blue-denim Levi's, a shirt, a thick blue sweater, and a black undertaker's coat he found hanging in the wardrobe at the back of the room.

He wore his own old shoes.

The house was still asleep. He crept through it, willing the floorboards not to creak, and then he was outside, and he walked through the snow, his feet leaving deep prints on the sidewalk. It was lighter out than it had seemed from inside the house, and the snow reflected the light from the sky.

After fifteen minutes of walking, Shadow came to a bridge with a big sign on the side of it warning him he was now leaving historical Cairo. A man stood under the bridge, tall and gangling, sucking on a cigarette and shivering continually. Shadow thought he recognized the man.

And then, under the bridge in the winter darkness, he was close enough to see the purple smudge of bruise around the man's eye, and he said, “Good morning, Mad Sweeney.”

The world was so quiet. Not even cars disturbed the snowbound silence.

“Hey, man,” said Mad Sweeney. He did not look up. The cigarette had been rolled by hand.

“You keep hanging out under bridges, Mad Sweeney,” said Shadow, “people gonna think you're a troll.”

This time Mad Sweeney looked up. Shadow could see the whites of his eyes all around his irises. The man looked scared. “I was lookin' for you,” he said. “You gotta help me, man. I fucked up big time.” He sucked on his hand-rolled cigarette, pulled it away from his mouth. The cigarette paper stuck to his lower lip, and the cigarette fell apart, spilling its contents onto his ginger beard and down the front of his filthy T-shirt. Mad Sweeney brushed it off, convulsively, with blackened hands, as if it were a dangerous insect.

“My resources are pretty much tapped out, Mad Sweeney,” said Shadow. “But why don't you tell me what it is you need. You want me to get you a coffee?”

Mad Sweeney shook his head. He took out a tobacco pouch and papers from the pocket of his denim jacket and began to roll himself another cigarette. His beard bristled and his mouth moved as he did this, although no words were said aloud. He licked the adhesive side of the cigarette paper and rolled it between his fingers. The result looked only distantly like a cigarette. Then he said, “ ‘M not a troll. Shit. Those bastards're fucken
mean
.”

“I know you're not a troll, Sweeney,” said Shadow, gently. “How can I help you?”

Mad Sweeney flicked his brass Zippo, and the first inch of his cigarette flamed and then subsided to ash. “You remember I showed you how to get a coin? You remember?”

“Yes,” said Shadow. He saw the gold coin in his mind's eye, watched it tumble into Laura's casket, saw it glitter around her neck. “I remember.”

“You took the wrong coin, man.”

A car approached the gloom under the bridge, blinding them with its lights. It slowed as it passed them, then stopped, and a window slid down. “Everything okay here, gentlemen?”

“Everything's just peachy, thank you, officer,” said Shadow. “We're just out for a morning walk.”

“Okay now,” said the cop. He did not look as if he believed that everything was okay. He waited. Shadow put a hand on Mad Sweeney's shoulder, and walked him forward, out of town, away from the police car. He heard the window hum closed, but the car remained where it was.

Shadow walked. Mad Sweeney walked, and sometimes he staggered.

The police car cruised past them slowly, then turned and went back into the city, accelerating down the snowy road.

“Now, why don't you tell me what's troubling you,” said Shadow.

“I did it like he said. I did it all like he said, but I gave you the wrong coin. It wasn't meant to be that coin. That's for royalty. You see? I shouldn't even have been able to take it. That's the coin you'd give to the king of America himself. Not some pissant bastard like you or me. And now I'm in big trouble. Just give me the coin back, man. You'll never see me again, if you do, I sweartofuckenBran, okay? I swear by the years I spent in the fucken trees.”

“You did it like who said, Sweeney?”

“Grimnir. The dude you call Wednesday. You know who he is? Who he really is?”

“Yeah. I guess.”

There was a panicked look in the Irishman's crazy blue eyes. “It was nothing bad. Nothing you can—nothing bad. He just told me to be there at that bar and to pick a fight with you. He said he wanted to see what you were made of.”

“He tell you do anything else?”

Sweeney shivered and twitched; Shadow thought it was the cold for a moment, then knew where he'd seen that shuddering shiver before. In prison: it was a junkie shiver. Sweeney was in withdrawal from something, and Shadow would have been willing to bet it was heroin. A junkie leprechaun? Mad Sweeney pinched off the burning head of his cigarette, dropped it on the ground, put the unfinished yellowing rest of it into his pocket. He rubbed his dirt-black fingers together, breathed on them to try and rub warmth into them. His voice was a whine now, “Listen, just give me the fucken coin, man. I'll give you another, just as good. Hell, I'll give you a shitload of the fuckers.”

He took off his greasy baseball cap, then, with his right hand, he stroked the air, producing a large golden coin. He dropped it into his cap. And then he took another from a wisp of breath steam, and another, catching and grabbing them from the still morning air until the baseball cap was brimming with them and Sweeney was forced to hold it with both hands.

He extended the baseball cap filled with gold to Shadow. “Here,” he said. “Take them, man. Just give me back the coin I gave to you.” Shadow looked down at the cap, wondered how much its contents would be worth.

“Where am I going to spend those coins, Mad Sweeney?” Shadow asked. “Are there a lot of places you can turn your gold into cash?”

He thought the Irishman was going to hit him for a moment, but the moment passed and Mad Sweeney just stood there, holding out his gold-filled cap with both hands like Oliver Twist. And then tears swelled in his blue eyes and began to spill down his cheeks. He took the cap and put it—now empty of everything except a greasy sweatband—back over his thinning scalp. “You gotta, man,” he was saying. “Didn't I show you how to do it? I showed you how to take coins from the hoard. I showed you where the hoard was. Just give me that first coin back. It didn't belong to me.”

“I don't have it anymore.”

Mad Sweeney's tears stopped, and spots of color appeared in his cheeks. “You, you fucken—“ he said, and then the words failed him and his mouth opened and closed, wordlessly.

“I'm telling you the truth,” said Shadow. “I'm sorry. If I had it I'd give it back to you. But I gave it away.”

Sweeney's grimy hands clamped on Shadow's shoulders, and the pale blue eyes stared into his. The tears had made streaks in the dirt on Mad Sweeney's face. “Shit,” he said. Shadow could smell tobacco and stale beer and whiskey-sweat. “You're telling the truth, you fucker. Gave it away and freely and of your own will. Damn your dark eyes, you gave it a-fucken-way.”

“I'm sorry.” Shadow remembered the whispering thump the coin had made as it landed on Laura's casket.

“Sorry or not, I'm damned and I'm doomed.” He wiped his nose and his eyes on his sleeves, muddying his face into strange patterns.

Shadow squeezed Mad Sweeney's upper arm in an awkward male gesture.

“ ‘Twere better I had never been conceived,” said Mad Sweeney, at length. Then he looked up. “The fellow you gave it to. Would he give it back?”

“It's a woman. And I don't know where she is. But no, I don't believe she would.”

Sweeney sighed, mournfully. “When I was but a young pup,” he said, “there was a woman I met, under the stars, who let me play with her bubbies, and she told me my fortune. She told me that I would be undone and abandoned west of the sunset, and that a dead woman's bauble would seal my fate. And I laughed and poured more barley wine and played with her bubbies some more, and I kissed her full on her pretty lips. Those were the good days—the first of the gray monks had not yet come to our land, nor had they ridden the green sea to westward. And now.” He stopped, midsentence. His head turned and he focused on Shadow. “You shouldn't trust him,” he said, reproachfully.

“Who?”

“Wednesday. You mustn't trust him.”

“I don't have to trust him. I work for him.”

“Do you remember how to do it?”

“What?” Shadow felt he was having a conversation with half a dozen different people. The self-styled leprechaun sputtered and jumped from persona to persona, from theme to theme, as if the remaining clusters of brain cells were igniting, flaming, and then going out for good.

“The coins, man. The coins. I showed you, remember?” He raised two fingers to his face, stared at them, then pulled a gold coin from his mouth. He tossed the coin to Shadow, who stretched out a hand to catch it, but no coin reached him.

“I was drunk,” said Shadow. “I don't remember.”

Sweeney stumbled across the road. It was light now and the world was white and gray. Shadow followed him. Sweeney walked in a long, loping stride, as if he were always falling, but his legs were there to stop him, to propel him into another stumble. When they reached the bridge, he held onto the bricks with one hand, and turned and said, “You got a few bucks? I don't need much. Just enough for a ticket out of this place. Twenty bucks will do me fine. Just a lousy twenty?”

“Where can you go on a twenty dollar bus ticket?” asked Shadow.

“I can get out of here,” said Sweeney. “I can get away before the storm hits. Away from a world in which opiates have become the religion of the masses. Away from.” He stopped, wiped his nose on the side of his hand, then wiped his hand on his sleeve.

Shadow reached into his jeans, pulled out a twenty and passed it to Sweeney. “Here.”

Sweeney crumpled it up and pushed it deep into the breast pocket of his oil-stained denim jacket, under the sew-on patch showing two vultures on a dead branch and, beneath them, the words
PATIENCE MY ASS! I'M GOING TO KILL SOMETHING
! He nodded. “That'll get me where I need to go,” he said.

He leaned against the brick, fumbled in his pockets until he found the unfinished stub of cigarette he had abandoned earlier. He lit it carefully, trying not to burn his fingers or his beard. “I'll tell you something,” he said, as if he had said nothing that day. “You're walking on gallows ground, and there's a rope around your neck and a raven-bird on each shoulder waiting for your eyes, and the gallows tree has deep roots, for it stretches from heaven to hell, and our world is only the branch from which the rope is swinging.” He stopped. “I'll rest here a spell,” he said, crouching down, his back resting against the black brickwork.

“Good luck,” said Shadow.

“Hell, I'm fucked,” said Mad Sweeney. “Whatever. Thanks.”

Shadow walked back toward the town. It was 8:00
A.M
. and Cairo was waking. He glanced back to the bridge and saw Sweeney's pale face, striped with tears and dirt, watching him go.

It was the last time Shadow saw Mad Sweeney alive.

 

The brief winter days leading up to Christmas were like moments of light between the winter darknesses, and they fled fast in the house of the dead.

It was the twenty-third of December, and Jacquel and Ibis's played host to a wake for Lila Goodchild. Bustling women filled the kitchen with tubs and with saucepans and with skillets and with Tupperware, and the deceased was laid out in her casket in the funeral home's front room with hothouse flowers around her. There was a table on the other side of the room laden high with coleslaw and beans and cornmeal hush puppies and chicken and ribs and black-eyed peas, and by midafternoon the house was filled with people weeping and laughing and shaking hands with the minister, everything being quietly organized and overseen by the sober-suited Messrs. Jacquel and Ibis. The burial would be on the following morning.