American Gods (44 page)

A car door slams. Someone approaches her.
“You were an analog girl,”
he sings again, tunelessly,
“living in a digital world.”
And then he says, “You fucking madonnas. All you fucking madonnas.” He walks away.

The car door slams.

The limo reverses, and runs back over her, slowly, for the first time. Her bones crunch beneath the wheels. Then the limo comes back down the hill toward her.

When, finally, it drives away down the hill, all it leaves behind on the road is the smeared red meat of roadkill, barely recognizable as human, and soon even that will be washed away by the rain.

“Hi, Samantha.”

“Mags? Is that you?”

“Who else? Leon said that Auntie Sammy called when I was in the shower.”

“We had a good talk. He's such a sweet kid.”

“Yeah. I think I'll keep him.”

A moment of discomfort for both of them, barely a crackle of a whisper over the telephone lines. Then, “Sammy, how's school?”

“They're giving us a week off. Problem with the furnaces. How are things in your neck of the North Woods?”

“Well, I've got a new next-door neighbor. He does coin tricks. The
Lakeside News
letter column currently features a blistering debate on the potential rezoning of the town land down by the old cemetery on the southeast shore of the lake and yours truly has to write a strident editorial summarizing the paper's position on this without offending anybody or in fact giving anyone any idea what our position is.”

“Sounds like fun.”

“It's not. Alison McGovern vanished last week—Jilly and Stan McGovern's oldest. Nice kid. She baby-sat for Leon a few times.”

A mouth opens to say something, and it closes again, leaving whatever it was to say unsaid, and instead it says, “That's awful.”

“Yes.”

“So . . .” and there's nothing to follow that with that isn't going to hurt, so she says, “Is he cute?”

“Who?”

“The neighbor.”

“His name's Ainsel. Mike Ainsel. He's okay. Too young for me. Big guy, looks . . . what's the word. Begins with an M.”

“Mean? Moody? Magnificent? Married?”

A short laugh, then, “Yes, I guess he does look married. I mean, if there's a look that married men have, he kind of has it. But the word I was thinking of was Melancholy. He looks Melancholy.”

“And Mysterious?”

“Not particularly. When he moved in he seemed kinda helpless—he didn't even know to heat-seal the windows. These days he still looks like he doesn't know what he's doing here. When he's here—he's here, then he's gone again. I've seen him out walking from time to time.”

“Maybe he's a bank robber.”

“Uh-huh. Just what I was thinking.”

“You were not. That was my idea. Listen, Mags, how are you? Are you okay?”

“Yeah.”

“Really?”

“No.”

A long pause then. “I'm coming up to see you.”

“Sammy, no.”

“It'll be after the weekend, before the furnaces are working and school starts again. It'll be fun. You can make up a bed on the couch for me. And invite the mysterious neighbor over for dinner one night.”

“Sam, you're matchmaking.”

“Who's matchmaking? After Claudine-the-bitch-from-hell, maybe I'm ready to go back to boys for a while. I met a nice strange boy when I hitchhiked down to El Paso for Christmas.”

“Oh. Look, Sam, you've got to stop hitchhiking.”

“How do you think I'm going to get to Lakeside?”

“Alison McGovern was hitchhiking. Even in a town like this, it's not safe. I'll wire you the money. You can take the bus.”

“I'll be fine.”

“Sammy.”

“Okay, Mags. Wire me the money if it'll let you sleep easier.”

“You know it will.”

“Okay, bossy big sister. Give Leon a hug and tell him Auntie Sammy's coming up and he's not to hide his toys in her bed this time.”

“I'll tell him. I don't promise it'll do any good.”

“So when should I expect you?”

“Tomorrow night. You don't have to meet me at the bus station—I'll ask Hinzelmann to run me over in Tessie.”

“Too late. Tessie's in mothballs for the winter. But Hinzelmann will give you a ride anyway. He likes you. You listen to his stories.”

“Maybe you should get Hinzelmann to write your editorial for you. Let's see. ‘On the Rezoning of the Land by the Old Cemetery. It so happens that in the winter of ought-three my grampaw shot a stag down by the old cemetery by the lake. He was out of bullets, so he used a cherry-stone from the lunch my grandmama had packed for him. Creased the skull of the stag and it shot off like a bat out of heck. Two years later he was down that way and he sees this mighty buck with a spreading cherry tree growing between its antlers. Well, he shot it, and grandmama made cherry pies enough that they were still eating them come the next fourth of July . . . ‘ “

And they both laughed, then.

“The sign says help wanted.”

“We're always hiring.”

“I can only work the night shift. Is that going to be a problem?”

“Shouldn't be. I can get you an application to fill out. You ever worked in a gas station before?”

“No. I figure, how hard can it be?”

“Well, it ain't rocket science, that's for sure. You know, ma'am, you don't mind my saying this, but you do not look well.”

“I know. It's a medical condition. Looks worse than it is. Nothing life-threatening.”

“Okay. You leave that application with me. We are really shorthanded on the late shift right now. Round here we call it the zombie shift. You do it too long, that's how you feel. Well now . . . is that
Lama
?”

“Laura.”

“Laura. Okay. Well, I hope you don't mind dealing with weirdos. Because they come out at night.”

“I'm sure they do. I can cope.”

It was Saturday morning. Shadow answered the door.

Marguerite Olsen was there. She did not come in, just stood in the sunlight, looking serious. “Mister Ainsel . . . ?”

“Mike, please,” said Shadow.

“Mike, yes. Would you like to come over for dinner tonight? About sixish? It won't be anything exciting, just spaghetti and meatballs.”

“I like spaghetti and meatballs.”

“Obviously, if you have any other plans . . .”

“I have no other plans.”

“Six o'clock.”

“Should I bring flowers?”

“If you must. But this is a social gesture. Not a romantic one.”

He showered. He went for a short walk, down to the bridge and back. The sun was up, a tarnished quarter in the sky, and he was sweating in his coat by the time he got home. He drove the 4-Runner down to Dave's Finest Food and bought a bottle of wine. It was a twenty-dollar bottle, which seemed to Shadow like some kind of guarantee of quality. He didn't know wines, so he bought a Californian cabernet, because Shadow had once seen a bumper sticker, back when he was younger and people still had bumper stickers on their cars, which said
LIFE IS A CABERNET
and it had made him laugh.

He bought a plant in a pot as a gift. Green leaves, no flowers. Nothing remotely romantic about that.

He bought a carton of milk, which he would never drink, and a selection of fruit, which he would never eat.

Then he drove over to Mabel's and bought a single lunchtime pasty. Mabel's face lit up when she saw him. “Did Hinzelmann catch up with you?”

“I didn't know he was looking for me.”

“Yup. Wants to take you ice fishing. And Chad Mulligan wanted to know if I'd seen you around. His cousin's here from out of state. His second cousin, what we used to call kissing cousins. Such a sweetheart. You'll love her,” and she dropped the pasty into a brown paper bag, twisted the top over to keep the pasty warm.

Shadow drove the long way home, eating one-handed, the pastry crumbs tumbling onto his jeans and onto the floor of the 4-Runner. He passed the library on the south shore of the lake. It was a black-and-white town in the ice and the snow. Spring seemed unimaginably far away: the klunker would always sit on the ice, with the ice-fishing shelters and the pickup trucks and the snowmobile tracks.

He reached his apartment, parked, walked up the drive, up the wooden steps to his apartment. The goldfinches and nuthatches on the birdfeeder hardly gave him a glance. He went inside. He watered the plant, wondered whether or not to put the wine into the refrigerator.

There was a lot of time to kill until six.

Shadow wished he could comfortably watch television once more. He wanted to be entertained, not to have to think, just to sit and let the sounds and the light wash over him.
Do you want to see Lucy's tits?
something with a Lucy voice whispered in his memory, and he shook his head, although there was no one there to see him.

He was nervous, he realized. This would be his first real social interaction with other people—normal people, not people in jail, not gods or culture heroes or dreams—since he was first arrested, over three years ago. He would have to make conversation, as Mike Ainsel.

He checked his watch. It was two-thirty. Marguerite Olsen had told him to be there at six. Did she mean six
exactly
? Should he be there a little early? A little late? He decided, eventually, to walk next door at five past six.

Shadow's telephone rang.

“Yeah?” he said.

“That's no way to answer the phone,” growled Wednesday.

“When I get my telephone connected I'll answer it politely,” said Shadow. “Can I help you?”

“I don't know,” said Wednesday. There was a pause. Then he said, “Organizing gods is like herding cats into straight lines. They don't take naturally to it.” There was a deadness, and an exhaustion, in Wednesday's voice that Shadow had never heard before.

“What's wrong?”

“It's hard. It's too fucking hard. I don't know if this is going to work. We might as well cut our throats. Just cut our own throats.”

“You mustn't talk like that.”

“Yeah. Right.”

“Well, if you do cut your throat,” said Shadow, trying to jolly Wednesday out of his darkness, “maybe it wouldn't even hurt.”

“It would hurt. Even for my kind, pain still hurts. If you move and act in the material world, then the material world acts on you. Pain hurts, just as greed intoxicates and lust burns. We may not die easy and we sure as hell don't die well, but we can die. If we're still loved and remembered, something else a whole lot like us comes along and takes our place and the whole damn thing starts all over again. And if we're forgotten, we're done.”

Shadow did not know what to say. He said, “So where are you calling from?”

“None of your goddamn business.”

“Are you drunk?”

“Not yet. I just keep thinking about Thor. You never knew him. Big guy, like you. Good-hearted. Not bright, but he'd give you the goddamned shirt off his back if you asked him. And he killed himself. He put a gun in his mouth and blew his head off in Philadelphia in 1932. What kind of a way is that for a god to die?”

“I'm sorry.”

“You don't give two fucking cents, son. He was a whole lot like you. Big and dumb.” Wednesday stopped talking. He coughed.

“What's wrong?” said Shadow, for the second time.

“They got in touch.”

“Who did?”

“The opposition.”

“And?”

“They want to discuss a truce. Peace talks. Live and let fucking live.”

“So what happens now?”

“Now I go and drink bad coffee with the modern assholes in a Kansas City Masonic Hall.”

“Okay. You going to pick me up, or shall I meet you somewhere?”

“You stay there and you keep your head down. Don't get into any trouble. You hear me?”

“But—“

There was a click, and the line went dead and stayed dead. There was no dial tone, but then, there never had been.

Nothing but time to kill. The conversation with Wednesday had left Shadow with a sense of disquiet. He got up, intending to go for a walk, but already the light was fading, and he sat back down again.

Shadow picked up the
Minutes of the Lakeside City Council 1872–1884
and turned the pages, his eyes scanning the tiny print, not actually reading it, occasionally stopping to scan something that caught his eye.

In July 1874, Shadow learned, the city council was concerned about the number of itinerant foreign loggers arriving in the town. An opera house was to be built on the corner of Third Street and Broadway. It was to be expected that the nuisances attendant to the damming of the Mill-Creek would abate once the mill-pond had become a lake. The council authorized the payment of seventy dollars to Mr. Samuel Samuels, and of eighty-five dollars to Mr. Heikki Salminen, in compensation for their land and for the expenses incurred in moving their domiciles out of the area to be flooded.

It had never occurred to Shadow before that the lake was manmade. Why call a town Lakeside, when the lake had begun as a dammed mill-pond? He read on, to discover that a Mr. Hinzelmann, originally of Hüdemuhlen in Bavaria, was in charge of the lake-building project, and that the city council had granted him the sum of $370 toward the project, any shortfall to be made up by public subscription. Shadow tore off a strip of a paper towel and placed it into the book as a bookmark. He could imagine Hinzelmann's pleasure in seeing the reference to his grandfather. He wondered if the old man knew that his family had been instrumental in building the lake. Shadow flipped forward through the book, scanning for more references to the lake-building project.

They had dedicated the lake in a ceremony in the spring of 1876, as a precursor to the town's centennial celebrations. A vote of thanks to Mr. Hinzelmann was taken by the council.

Shadow checked his watch. It was five-thirty. He went into the bathroom, shaved, combed his hair. He changed his clothes. Somehow the final fifteen minutes passed. He got the wine and the plant, and he walked next door.

The door opened as he knocked. Marguerite Olsen looked almost as nervous as he felt. She took the wine bottle and the potted plant, and said thank you. The television was on,
The Wizard of Oz
on video. It was still in sepia, and Dorothy was still in Kansas, sitting with her eyes closed in Professor Marvel's wagon as the old fraud pretended to read her mind, and the twister-wind that would tear her away from her life was approaching. Leon sat in front of the screen, playing with a toy fire truck. When he saw Shadow an expression of delight touched his face; he stood up and ran, tripping over his feet in his excitement, into a back bedroom, from which he emerged a moment later triumphantly waving a quarter.

“Watch, Mike Ainsel!” he shouted. Then closed both his hands and he pretended to take the coin into his right hand, which he opened wide. “I made it disappear, Mike Ainsel!”

“You did,” agreed Shadow. “After we've eaten, if it's okay with your mom, I'll show you how to do it even smoother than that.”

“Do it now if you want,” said Marguerite. “We're still waiting for Samantha. I sent her out for sour cream. I don't know what's taking her so long.”

And, as if that was her cue, footsteps sounded on the wooden deck, and somebody shouldered open the front door. Shadow did not recognize her at first, then she said, “I didn't know if you wanted the kind with calories or the kind that tastes like wallpaper paste so I went for the kind with calories,” and he knew her then: the girl from the road to Cairo.

“That's fine,” said Marguerite. “Sam, this is my neighbor, Mike Ainsel. Mike, this is Samantha Black Crow, my sister.”

I don't know you
, thought Shadow desperately.
You've never met me before. We're total strangers.
He tried to remember how he had thought snow, how easy and light that had been: this was desperate. He put out his hand and said, “Pleased to meetcha.”

She blinked, looked at up his face. A moment of puzzlement, then recognition entered her eyes and curved the corners of her mouth into a grin. “Hello,” she said.

“I'll see how the food is doing,” said Marguerite, in the taut voice of someone who burns things in kitchens if they leave them alone and unwatched even for a moment.

Sam took off her puffy coat and her hat. “So you're the melancholy but mysterious neighbor,” she said. “Who'da thunk it?” She kept her voice down.

“And you,” he said, “Are girl Sam. Can we talk about this later?”

“If you promise to tell me what's going on.”

“Deal.”

Leon tugged at the leg of Shadow's pants. “Will you show me now?” he asked, and held out his quarter.

“Okay,” said Shadow. “But if I show you, you have to remember that a master magician never tells anyone how it's done.”

“I promise,” said Leon, gravely.

Shadow took the coin in his left hand, then moved Leon's right hand, showing him how to appear to take the coin in his right hand while actually leaving it in Shadow's left hand. Then he made Leon repeat the movements on his own.

After several attempts the boy mastered the move. “Now you know half of it,” said Shadow. “The other half is this: put your attention on the place where the coin
ought
to be. Look at the place it's meant to be. If you act like it's in your right hand, no one will even look at your left hand, no matter how clumsy you are.”

Sam watched all this with her head tipped slightly on one side, saying nothing.

“Dinner!” called Marguerite, pushing her way in from the kitchen with a steaming bowl of spaghetti in her hands. “Leon, go wash your hands.”

There was crusty garlic bread, thick red sauce, good spicy meatballs. Shadow complimented Marguerite on it.

“Old family recipe,” she told him, “from the Corsican side of the family.”

“I thought you were Native American.”

“Dad's Cherokee,” said Sam. “Mag's mom's father came from Corsica.” Sam was the only person in the room who was actually drinking the cabernet. “Dad left her when Mags was ten and he moved across town. Six months after that, I was born. Mom and Dad got married when the divorce came through. When I was ten he went away. I think he has a ten-year attention span.”

“Well, he's been out in Oklahoma for ten years,” said Marguerite.

“Now, my mom's family were European Jewish,” continued Sam, “from one of those places that used to be communist and now are just chaos. I think she liked the idea of being married to a Cherokee. Fry bread and chopped liver.” She took another sip of the red wine.

“Sam's mom's a wild woman,” said Marguerite, semiapprovingly.

“You know where she is now?” asked Sam. Shadow shook his head. “She's in Australia. She met a guy on the Internet who lived in Hobart. When they met in the flesh she decided he was actually kind of icky. But she really liked Tasmania. So she's living down there, with a woman's group, teaching them to batik cloth and things like that. Isn't that cool? At her age?”

Shadow agreed that it was, and helped himself to more meatballs. Sam told them how all the aboriginal natives of Tasmania had been wiped out by the British, and about the human chain they made across the island to catch them which trapped only an old man and a sick boy. She told him how the thylacines—the Tasmanian tigers—had been killed by farmers, scared for their sheep, how the politicians in the 1930s noticed that the thylacines should be protected only after the last of them was dead. She finished her second glass of wine, poured her third.