American Gods (29 page)

Shadow shut the front door. The room was freezing. It smelled of people who had gone away to live other lives, and of all they had eaten and dreamed. He found the thermostat and cranked it up to seventy degrees. He went into the tiny kitchen, checked the drawers, opened the avocado-colored refrigerator, but it was empty. No surprise there. At least the fridge smelled clean inside, not musty.

There was a small bedroom with a bare mattress in it, beside the kitchen, next to an even tinier bathroom that was mostly shower stall. An aged cigarette butt sat in the toilet bowl, staining the water brown. Shadow flushed it away.

He found sheets and blankets in a closet, and made the bed. Then he took off his shoes, his jacket, and his watch, and he climbed into the bed fully dressed, wondering how long it would take him to get warm.

The lights were off, and there was silence, mostly, nothing but the hum of the refrigerator, and, somewhere in the building, a radio playing. He lay there in the darkness, wondering if he had slept himself out on the Greyhound, if the hunger and the cold and the new bed and the craziness of the last few weeks would combine to keep him awake that night.

In the stillness he heard something snap like a shot. A branch, he thought, or the ice. It was freezing out there.

He wondered how long he would have to wait until Wednesday came for him. A day? A week? However long he had, he knew he had to focus on something in the meantime. He would start to work out again, he decided, and practice his coin sleights and palms until he was smooth as anything (
practice all your tricks
, somebody whispered inside his head, in a voice that was not his own,
all of them but one, not the trick that poor dead Mad Sweeney showed you, dead of exposure and the cold and of being forgotten and surplus to requirements, not that trick. Oh, not that one)
.

But this was a good town. He could feel it.

He thought of his dream, if it had been a dream, that first night in Cairo. He thought of Zorya . . . what the hell was her name? The midnight sister.

And then he thought of Laura . . .

It was as if thinking of her opened a window in his mind. He could see her. He could, somehow, see her.

She was in Eagle Point, in the backyard outside her mother's big house.

She stood in the cold, which she did not feel anymore or which she felt all the time, she stood outside the house that her mother had bought in 1989 with the insurance money after Laura's father, Harvey McCabe, had passed on, a heart attack while straining on the can, and she was staring in, her cold hands pressed against the glass, her breath not fogging it, not at all, watching her mother, and her sister and her sister's children and husband in from Texas, home for Christmas. Out in the darkness, that was where Laura was, unable not to look.

Tears prickled in Shadow's eyes, and he rolled over in his bed.

He felt like a Peeping Tom, turned his thoughts away, willed them to come back to him: he could see the lake spread out below him as the wind blew down from the arctic, prying jack-frost fingers a hundred times colder than the fingers of any corpse.

Shadow's breath came shallowly now. He could hear a wind rising, a bitter screaming around the house, and for a moment he thought he could hear words on the wind.

If he was going to be anywhere, he might as well be here, he thought, and then he slept.

Dingdong.

“Miz Crow?”

“Yes.”

“Miz Samantha Black Crow?”

“Yes.”

“Do you mind if we ask you a few questions, ma'am?”

“Are you cops? What are you?”

“My name is Town. My colleague here is Mister Road. We're investigating the disappearance of two of our associates.”

“What were their names?”

“I'm sorry?”

“Tell me their names. I want to know what they were called. Your associates. Tell me their names and maybe I'll help you.”

“. . . Okay. Their names were Mister Stone and Mister Wood. Now, can we ask you some questions?”

“Do you guys just see things and pick names? ‘Oh, you be Mister Sidewalk, he's Mister Carpet, say hello to Mister Airplane'?”

“Very funny, young lady. First question: we need to know if you've seen this man. Here. You can hold the photograph.”

“Whoah. Straight on and profile, with numbers on the bottom . . . And big. He's cute, though. What did he do?”

“He was mixed up in a small-town bank robbery, as a driver, some years ago. His two colleagues decided to keep all the loot for themselves and ran out on him. He got angry. Found them. Came close to killing them with his hands. The state cut a deal with the men he hurt: they testified against him. Shadow here got six years. He served three. You ask me, guys like that, they should just lock them up and throw away the key.”

“I've never heard anyone say that in real life, you know. Not out loud.”

“Say what, Miz Crow?”

“ ‘Loot.' It's not a word you ever hear people say. Maybe in movies people say it. Not for real.”

“This isn't a movie, Miz Crow.”

“Black Crow. It's Miz Black Crow. My friends call me Sam.”

“Got it, Sam. Now about this man—“

“But you aren't my friends. You can call me Miz Black Crow.”

“Listen, you snot-nosed little—“

“It's okay, Mister Road. Sam here—pardon, ma'am—I mean, Miz Black Crow wants to help us. She's a law-abiding citizen.”

“Ma'am, we know you helped Shadow. You were seen with him, in a white Chevy Nova. He gave you a ride. He bought you dinner. Did he say anything that could help us in our investigation? Two of our best men have vanished.”

“I never met him.”

“You met him. Please don't make the mistake of thinking we're stupid. We aren't stupid.”

“Mm. I meet a lot of people. Maybe I met him and forgot already.”

“Ma'am, it really is to your advantage to cooperate with us.”

“Otherwise, you'll have to introduce me to your friends Mister Thumbscrews and Mister Pentothal?”

“Ma'am, you aren't making this any easier on yourself.”

“Gee. I'm sorry. Now, is there anything else? ‘Cos I'm going to say ‘Buh-bye now' and close the door and I figure you two are going to go and get into Mister Car and drive away.”

“Your lack of cooperation has been noted, ma'am.”

“Buh-bye now.”

Click.

A whole life in darkness, surrounded by filth, that was what Shadow dreamed, his first night in Lakeside. A child's life, long ago and far away, in a land across the ocean, in the lands where the sun rose. But this life contained no sunrises, only dimness by day and blindness by night.

Nobody spoke to him. He heard human voices, from outside, but could understand human speech no better than he understood the howling of the owls or the yelps of dogs.

He remembered, or thought he remembered, one night, half a lifetime ago, when one of the big people had entered, quietly, and had not cuffed him or fed him, but had picked him up to her breast and embraced him. She smelled good. Hot drops of water had fallen from her face to his. He had been scared, and had wailed loudly in his fear.

She put him down on the straw, hurriedly, and left the hut, fastening the door behind her.

He remembered that moment, and he treasured it, just as he remembered the sweetness of a cabbage heart, the tart taste of plums, the crunch of apples, the greasy delight of roasted fish.

And now he saw the faces in the firelight, all of them looking at him as he was led out from the hut for the first time, which was the only time. So that was what people looked like. Raised in darkness, he had never seen faces. Everything was so new. So strange. The bonfire light hurt his eyes. They pulled on the rope around his neck, to lead him to the place where the man waited for him.

And when the first blade was raised in the firelight, what a cheer went up from the crowd. The child from the darkness began to laugh with them, in delight and in freedom.

And then the blade came down.

Shadow opened his eyes and realized that he was hungry and cold, in an apartment with a layer of ice clouding the inside of the window glass. His frozen breath, he thought. He got out of bed, pleased he did not have to get dressed. He scraped at a window with a fingernail as he passed, felt the ice collect under the nail, then melt to water.

He tried to remember his dream, but remembered nothing but misery and darkness.

He put on his shoes. He figured he would walk into the town center, walk across the bridge across the northern end of the lake, if he had the geography of the town right. He put on his thin jacket, remembering his promise to himself that he would buy himself a warm winter coat, opened the apartment door, and stepped out onto the wooden deck. The cold took his breath away: he breathed in, and felt every hair in his nostrils freeze into rigidity. The deck gave him a fine view of the lake, irregular patches of gray surrounded by an expanse of white.

The cold snap had come, that was for sure. It could not be much above zero, and it would not be a pleasant walk, but he was certain he could make it into town without too much trouble. What did Hinzelmann say last night—a ten-minute walk? And Shadow was a big man. He would walk briskly and keep himself warm.

He set off south, heading for the bridge.

Soon he began to cough, a dry, thin cough, as the bitterly cold air touched his lungs. Soon his ears and face and lips hurt, and then his feet hurt. He thrust his ungloved hands deep into his coat pockets, clenched his fingers together trying to find some warmth. He found himself remembering Low Key Lyesmith's tall tales of the Minnesota winters—particularly the one about a hunter treed by a bear during a hard freeze who took out his dick and pissed an arching yellow stream of steaming urine that was already frozen hard before it hit the ground, then slid down the rock-hard frozen-piss-pole to freedom. A wry smile at the memory and another dry, painful cough.

Step after step after step. He glanced back. The apartment building was not as far away as he had expected.

This walk, he decided, was a mistake. But he was already three or four minutes from the apartment, and the bridge over the lake was in sight. It made as much sense to press on as to go home (and then what? Call a taxi on the dead phone? Wait for spring? He had no food in the apartment, he reminded himself).

He kept walking, revising his estimates of the temperature downward as he walked. Minus ten? Minus twenty? Minus forty, maybe, that strange point on the thermometer when Celsius and Fahrenheit say the same thing. Probably not that cold. But then there was wind chill, and the wind was now hard and steady and continuous, blowing over the lake, coming down from the Arctic across Canada.

He remembered, enviously, the chemical hand- and foot-warmers. He wished he had them now.

Ten more minutes of walking, he guessed, and the bridge seemed to be no nearer. He was too cold to shiver. His eyes hurt. This was not simply cold: this was science fiction. This was a story set on the dark side of Mercury, back when they thought Mercury had a dark side. This was somewhere out on rocky Pluto, where the sun is just another star, shining only a little more brightly in the darkness. This, thought Shadow, is just a hair away from the places where air comes in buckets and pours just like beer.

The occasional cars that roared past him seemed unreal: spaceships, little freeze-dried packages of metal and glass, inhabited by people dressed more warmly than he was. An old song his mother had loved, “Walking in a Winter Wonderland,” began to run through his head, and he hummed it through closed lips, kept pace to it as he walked.

He had lost all sensation in his feet. He looked down at his black leather shoes, at the thin cotton socks, and began, seriously, to worry about frostbite.

This was beyond a joke. This had moved beyond foolishness, slipped over the line into genuine twenty-four-karat Jesus-Christ-I-screwed-up-big-time territory. His clothes might as well have been netting or lace: the wind blew through him, froze his bones and the marrow in his bones, froze the lashes of his eyes, froze the warm place under his balls, which were retreating into his pelvic cavity.

Keep walking,
he told himself.
Keep walking. I can stop and drink a pail of air when I get home.
A Beatles song started in his head, and he adjusted his pace to match it. It was only when he got to the chorus that he realized that he was humming “Help.”

He was almost at the bridge now. Then he had to walk across it, and he would still be another ten minutes from the stores on the west of the lake—maybe a little more . . .

A dark car passed him, stopped, then reversed in a foggy cloud of exhaust smoke and came to a halt beside him. A window slid down, and the haze and steam from the window mixed with the exhaust to form a dragon's breath that surrounded the car. “Everything okay here?” said a cop inside.

Shadow's first, automatic instinct was to say
Yup, everything's just fine and jimdandy thank you officer.
But it was too late for that, and he started to say, “I think I'm freezing. I was walking into Lakeside to buy food and clothes, but I underestimated the length of the walk”—he was that far through the sentence in his head, when he realized that all that had came out was “F-f-freezing,” and a chattering noise, and he said, “So s-sorry. Cold. Sorry.”

The cop pulled open the back door of the car and said, “You get in there this moment and warm yourself up, okay?” Shadow climbed in gratefully, and he sat in the back and rubbed his hands together, trying not to worry about frostbitten toes. The cop got back in the driver's seat. Shadow stared at him through the metal grille. Shadow tried not to think about the last time he'd been in the back of a police car, or to notice that there were no door handles in the back, and to concentrate instead on rubbing life back into his hands. His face hurt and his red fingers hurt, and now, in the warmth, his toes were starting to hurt once more. That was, Shadow figured, a good sign.

The cop put the car in drive and moved off. “You know, that was,” he said, not turning to look at Shadow, just talking a little louder, “if you'll pardon me saying so, a real stupid thing to do. You didn't hear any of the weather advisories? It's minus thirty out there. God alone knows what the windchill is, minus sixty, minus seventy, although I figure when you're down at minus thirty, windchill's the least of your worries.”

“Thanks,” said Shadow. “Thanks for stopping. Very, very grateful.”

“Woman in Rhinelander went out this morning to fill her bird feeder in her robe and carpet slippers and she froze, literally froze, to the sidewalk. She's in intensive care now. It was on the TV this morning. You're new in town.” It was almost a question, but the man knew the answer already.

“I came in on the Greyhound last night. Figured today I'd buy myself some warm clothes, food, and a car. Wasn't expecting this cold.”

“Yeah,” said the cop. “It took me by surprise as well. I was too busy worrying about global warming. I'm Chad Mulligan. I'm the chief of police here in Lakeside.”

“Mike Ainsel.”

“Hi, Mike. Feeling any better?”

“A little, yes.”

“So where would you like me to take you first?”

Shadow put his hands down to the hot-air stream, painful on his fingers, then he pulled them away. Let it happen in its own time. “Can you just drop me off in the town center?”

“Wouldn't hear of it. Long as you don't need me to drive a getaway car for your bank robbery I'll happily take you wherever you need to go. Think of it as the town welcome wagon.”

“Where would you suggest we start?”

“You only moved in last night.”

“That's right.”

“You eaten breakfast yet?”

“Not yet.”

“Well, that seems like a heck of a good starting place to me,” said Mulligan.

They were over the bridge now, and entering the northwest side of the town. “This is Main Street,” said Mulligan, “and this,” he said, crossing Main Street and turning right, “is the town square.”

Even in the winter the town square was impressive, but Shadow knew that this place was meant to be seen in summer: it would be a riot of color, of poppies and irises and flowers of every kind, and the clump of birch trees in one corner would be a green and silver bower. Now it was colorless, beautiful in a skeletal way, the bandshell empty, the fountain turned off for the winter, the brownstone city hall capped by white snow.

“. . . and this,” concluded Chad Mulligan, bringing the car to a stop outside a high glass-fronted old building on the west of the square, “is Mabel's.”

He got out of the car, opened the passenger door for Shadow. The two men put their heads down against the cold and the wind, and hurried across the sidewalk and into a warm room, fragrant with the smells of new-baked bread, of pastry and soup and bacon.

The place was almost empty. Mulligan sat down at a table and Shadow sat opposite him. He suspected that Mulligan was doing this to get a feel for the stranger in town. Then again, the police chief might simply be what he appeared: friendly, helpful, good.

A woman bustled over to their table, not fat but big, a big woman in her sixties, her hair bottle-bronze.

“Hello, Chad,” she said. “You'll want a hot chocolate while you're thinking.” She handed them two laminated menus.

“No cream on the top, though,” he agreed. “Mabel knows me too well,” he said to Shadow. “What'll it be, pal?”

“Hot chocolate sounds great,” said Shadow. “And I'm happy to have the whipped cream on the top.”

“That's good,” said Mabel. “Live dangerously, hon. Are you going to introduce me, Chad? Is this young man a new officer?”

“Not yet,” said Chad Mulligan, with a flash of white teeth. “This is Mike Ainsel. He moved to Lakeside last night. Now, if you'll excuse me.” He got up, walked to the back of the room, through the door marked
POINTERS
. It was next to a door marked
SETTERS
.

“You're the new man in the apartment up on Northridge Road. The old Pilsen place. Oh, yes,” she said, happily, “I know
just
who you are. Hinzelmann was by this morning for his morning pasty, he told me all about you. You boys only having hot chocolate or you want to look at the breakfast menu?”

“Breakfast for me,” said Shadow. “What's good?”

“Everything's good,” said Mabel. “I make it. But this is the farthest south and east of the yoopie you can get pasties, and they are particularly good. Warming and filling too. My speciality.”

Shadow had no idea what a pasty was, but he said that would be fine, and in a few moments Mabel returned with a plate with what looked like a folded-over pie on it. The lower half was wrapped in a paper napkin. Shadow picked it up with the napkin and bit into it: it was warm and filled with meat, potatoes, carrots, onions. “First pasty I've ever had,” he said. “It's real good.”

“They're a yoopie thing,” she told him. “Mostly you need to be at least up Ironwood way to get one. The Cornish men who came over to work the iron mines brought them over.”

“Yoopie?”

“Upper Peninsula. U.P. Yoopie. It's the little chunk of Michigan to the northeast.”

The chief of police came back. He picked up the hot chocolate and slurped it. “Mabel,” he said, “are you forcing this nice young man to eat one of your pasties?”

“It's good,” said Shadow. It was too, a savory delight wrapped in hot pastry.

“They go straight to the belly,” said Chad Mulligan, patting his own stomach. “I warn you. Okay. So, you need a car?” With his parka off, he was revealed as a lanky man with a round, apple-belly gut on him. He looked harassed and competent, more like an engineer than a cop.

Shadow nodded, mouth full.

“Right. I made some calls. Justin Liebowitz's selling his jeep, wants four thousand dollars for it, will settle for three. The Gunthers have had their Toyota 4-Runner for sale for eight months, ugly sonofabitch, but at this point they'd probably pay you to take it out of their driveway. And if you don't care about ugly, it's got to be a great deal. I used the phone in the men's room, left a message for Missy Gunther down at Lakeside Realty, but she wasn't in yet, probably getting her hair done down at Sheila's.”