American Gods (39 page)

Then she laughed, and crouched, and picked up in her good hand a blacksnake as tall as a sapling and as thick as a ship's rope.

“Here,” she said, “Here will be our
voudon
.”

She dropped the unresisting snake into a basket that yellow Marie was carrying.

And then, in the moonlight, the second sight possessed her for a final time, and she saw her brother Agasu. He was not the twelve-year-old boy she had last seen in the Bridgeport market, but a huge man, bald and grinning with broken teeth, his back lined with deep scars. In one hand he held a machete. His right arm was barely a stump.

She reached out her own good left hand.

“Stay, stay awhile,” she whispered. “I will be there. I will be with you soon.”

And Marie Paris thought the old woman was speaking to her.

Shadow drove west, across Wisconsin and Minnesota and into North Dakota, where the snow-covered hills looked like huge sleeping buffalo, and he and Wednesday saw nothing but nothing and plenty of it for mile after mile. They went south, then, into South Dakota, heading for reservation country.

Wednesday had traded the Lincoln Town Car, which Shadow had liked to drive, for a lumbering and ancient Winnebago, which smelled pervasively and unmistakably of male cat, which he didn't enjoy driving at all.

As they passed their first signpost for Mount Rushmore, still several hundred miles away, Wednesday grunted. “Now that,” he said, “is a holy place.”

Shadow had thought Wednesday was asleep. He said, “I know it used to be sacred to the Indians.”

“It's a holy place,” said Wednesday. “That's the American Way—they need to give people an excuse to come and worship. These days, people can't just go and see a mountain. Thus, Mister Gutzon Borglum's tremendous presidential faces. Once they were carved, permission was granted, and now the people drive out in their multitudes to see something in the flesh that they've already seen on a thousand postcards.”

“I knew a guy once. He did weight training at the Muscle Farm, years back. He said that the Dakota Indians, the young men climb up the mountain, then form death-defying human chains off the heads, just so that the guy at the end of the chain can piss on the president's nose.”

Wednesday guffawed. “Oh, fine! Very fine! Is any specific president the particular butt of their ire?”

Shadow shrugged. “He never said.”

Miles vanished beneath the wheels of the Winnebago. Shadow began to imagine that he was staying still while the American landscape moved past them at a steady sixty-seven miles per hour. A wintry mist fogged the edges of things.

It was midday on the second day of the drive, and they were almost there. Shadow, who had been thinking, said, “A girl vanished from Lakeside last week. When we were in San Francisco.”

“Mm?” Wednesday sounded barely interested.

“Kid named Alison McGovern. She's not the first kid to vanish there. There have been others. They go in the wintertime.”

Wednesday furrowed his brow. “It is a tragedy, is it not? The little faces on the milk cartons—although I can't remember the last time I saw a kid on a milk carton—and on the walls of freeway rest areas. ‘Have you seen me?' they ask. A deeply existential question at the best of times. ‘Have you seen me?' Pull off at the next exit.”

Shadow thought he heard a helicopter pass overhead, but the clouds were too low to see anything.

“Why did you pick Lakeside?” asked Shadow.

“I told you. It's a nice quiet place to hide you away. You're off the board there, under the radar.”

“Why?”

“Because that's the way it is. Now hang a left,” said Wednesday.

Shadow turned left.

“There's something wrong,” said Wednesday. “Fuck. Jesus fucking Christ on a bicycle. Slow down, but don't stop.”

“Care to elaborate?”

“Trouble. Do you know any alternative routes?”

“Not really. This is my first time in South Dakota,” said Shadow. “And I don't know where we're going.”

On the other side of the hill something flashed redly, smudged by the mist.

“Roadblock,” said Wednesday. He pushed his hand deeply into first one pocket of his suit, then another, searching for something.

“I can stop and turn around.”

“We can't turn. They're behind us as well,” said Wednesday. “Take your speed down to ten, fifteen miles per hour.”

Shadow glanced into the mirror. There were headlights behind them, under a mile back. “Are you sure about this?” he asked.

Wednesday snorted. “Sure as eggs is eggs,” he said. “As the turkey farmer said when he hatched his first turtle. Ah, success!” and from the bottom of a pocket he produced a small piece of white chalk.

He started to scratch with the chalk on the dashboard of the camper, making marks as if he were solving an algebraic puzzle—or perhaps, Shadow thought, as if he were a hobo, scratching long messages to the other hobos in hobo code—
bad dog here, dangerous town, nice woman, soft jail in which to overnight . . .

“Okay,” said Wednesday. “Now increase your speed to thirty. And don't slow down from that.”

One of the cars behind them turned on its lights and siren and accelerated toward them. “Do not slow down,” repeated Wednesday. “They just want us to slow before we get to the roadblock.”
Scratch. Scratch. Scratch.

They crested the hill. The roadblock was less than a quarter of a mile away. Twelve cars arranged across the road, and on the side of the road, police cars, and several big black SUVs.

“There,” said Wednesday, and he put his chalk away. The dashboard of the Winnebago was now covered with runelike scratchings.

The car with the siren was just behind them. It had slowed to their speed, and an amplified voice was shouting, “Pull over!” Shadow looked at Wednesday.

“Turn right,” said Wednesday. “Just pull off the road.”

“I can't take this thing off-road. We'll tip.”

“It'll be fine. Take a right. Now!”

Shadow pulled the wheel down with his right hand, and the Winnebago lurched and jolted. For a moment he thought he had been correct, that the camper was going to tip, and then the world through the windshield dissolved and shimmered, like the reflection in a clear pool when the wind brushes the surface.

The clouds and the mist and the snow and the day were gone.

Now there were stars overhead, hanging like frozen spears of light, stabbing the night sky.

“Park here,” said Wednesday. “We can walk the rest of the way.”

Shadow turned off the engine. He went into the back of the Winnebago, pulled on his coat, his boots and gloves. Then he climbed out of the vehicle and said “Okay. Let's go.”

Wednesday looked at him with amusement and something else—irritation perhaps. Or pride. “Why don't you argue?” asked Wednesday. “Why don't you exclaim that it's all impossible? Why the hell do you just do what I say and take it all so fucking calmly?”

“Because you're not paying me to ask questions,” said Shadow. And then he said, realizing the truth as the words came out of his mouth, “Anyway, nothing's really surprised me since Laura.”

“Since she came back from the dead?”

“Since I learned she was screwing Robbie. That one hurt. Everything else just sits on the surface. Where are we going now?”

Wednesday pointed, and they began to walk. The ground beneath their feet was rock of some kind, slick and volcanic, occasionally glassy. The air was chilly, but not winter-cold. They sidestepped their way awkwardly down a hill. There was a rough path, and they followed it. Shadow looked down to the bottom of the hill.

“What the hell is that?” asked Shadow, but Wednesday touched his finger to his lips, shook his head sharply. Silence.

It looked like a mechanical spider, blue metal, glittering LED lights, and it was the size of a tractor. It squatted at the bottom of the hill. Beyond it were an assortment of bones, each with a flame beside it little bigger than a candle-flame, flickering.

Wednesday gestured for Shadow to keep his distance from these objects. Shadow took an extra step to the side, which was a mistake on that glassy path, as his ankle twisted and he tumbled down the slope, rolling and slipping and bouncing. He grabbed at a rock as he went past, and the obsidian snag ripped his leather glove as if it were paper.

He came to rest at the bottom of the hill, between the mechanical spider and the bones.

He put a hand down to push himself to his feet, and found himself touching what appeared to be a thighbone with the palm of his hand, and he was . . .

. . . standing in the daylight, smoking a cigarette, and looking at his watch. There were cars all around him, some empty, some not. He was wishing he had not had that last cup of coffee, for he dearly needed a piss, and it was starting to become uncomfortable.

One of the local law enforcement people came over to him, a big man with frost in his walrus mustache. He had already forgotten the man's name.

“I don't know how we could have lost them,” says Local Law Enforcement, apologetic and puzzled.

“It was an optical illusion,” he replies. “You get them in freak weather conditions. The mist. It was a mirage. They were driving down some other road. We thought they were on this one.”

Local Law Enforcement looks disappointed. “Oh. I thought it was maybe like an
X-Files
kinda thing,” he says.

“Nothing so exciting, I'm afraid.” He suffers from occasional hemorrhoids and his ass has just started itching in the way that signals that a flare-up is on the way. He wants to be back inside the Beltway. He wishes there was a tree to go and stand behind: the urge to piss is getting worse. He drops the cigarette and steps on it.

Local Law Enforcement walks over to one of the police cars and says something to the driver. They both shake their heads.

He pulls out his telephone, touches the menu, pages down and finds the address entry marked “Laundry,” which had amused him so much when he typed it in—a reference to
The Man from U.N.C.L.E
, and as he looks at it he realizes that it's not from that at all, that was a
tailor's
, he's thinking of
Get Smart
, and he still feels weird and slightly embarrassed after all those years about not realizing it was a comedy when he was a kid, and just wanting a shoephone . . .

A woman's voice on the phone. “Yes?”

“This is Mister Town, for Mister World.”

“Hold please. I'll see if he's available.”

There is silence. Town crosses his legs, tugs his belt higher on his belly—
got
to lose those last ten pounds—and away from his bladder. Then an urbane voice says, “Hello, Mister Town.”

“We lost them,” says Town. He feels a knot of frustration in his gut: these were the bastards, the lousy dirty sons of bitches who killed Woody and Stone, for Chrissakes. Good men. Good men. He badly wants to fuck Mrs. Wood, but knows it's still too soon after Woody's death to make a move. So he is taking her out for dinner every couple of weeks, an investment in the future, she's just grateful for the attention . . .

“How?”

“I don't know. We set up a roadblock, there was nowhere they could have gone and they went there anyway.”

“Just another one of life's little mysteries. Don't worry. Have you calmed the locals?”

“Told 'em it was an optical illusion.”

“They buy it?”

“Probably.”

There was something very familiar about Mr World's voice
—which was a strange thing to think, he'd been working for him directly for two years now, spoken to him every day, of course there was something familiar about his voice.

“They'll be far away by now.”

“Should we send people down to the rez to intercept them?”

“Not worth the aggravation. Too many jurisdictional issues, and there are only so many strings I can pull in a morning. We have plenty of time. Just get back here. I've got my hands full at this end trying to organize the policy meeting.”

“Trouble?”

“It's a pissing contest. I've proposed that we have it out here. The techies want it in Austin, or maybe San Jose, the players want it in Hollywood, the intangibles want it on Wall Street. Everybody wants it in their own backyard. Nobody's going to give.”

“You need me to do anything?”

“Not yet. I'll growl at some of them, stroke others. You know the routine.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Carry on, Town.”

The connection is broken.

Town thinks he should have had a S.W.A.T. team to pick off that fucking Winnebago, or land mines on the road, or a tactical friggin' nukuler device, that would have showed those bastards they meant business. It was like Mr. World had once said to him,
We are writing the future in Letters of Fire
and Mr. Town thinks that Jesus Christ, if he doesn't piss now he'll lose a kidney, it'll just burst, and it was like his pop had said when they were on long journeys, when Town was a kid, out on the interstate, his pop would always say, “My back teeth are afloat,” and Mr. Town could hear that voice even now, that sharp Yankee accent saying “I got to take a leak soon. My back teeth are afloat” . . .

. . . and it was then that Shadow felt a hand opening his own hand, prising it open one finger at a time, off the thighbone it was clutching. He no longer needed to urinate; that was someone else. He was standing under the stars on a glassy rock plain.

Wednesday made the signal for silence again. Then he began to walk, and Shadow followed.

There was a creak from the mechanical spider, and Wednesday froze. Shadow stopped and waited with him. Green lights flickered and ran up and along its side in clusters. Shadow tried not to breathe too loudly.

He thought about what had just happened. It had been like looking through a window into someone else's mind. And then he thought,
Mr. World. It was me who thought his voice sounded familiar. That was my thought, not Town's. That was why that seemed so strange.
He tried to identify the voice in his mind, to put it into the category in which it belonged, but it eluded him.

It'll come to me
, thought Shadow.
Sooner or later, it'll come to me.