American Gods (50 page)

Shadow noticed that Town was glaring at him. He turned his chair a little, so his back was to the wall. Media ate her burger with a napkin poised by her lips to remove crumbs.

“Oh. Great. These burgers are nearly cold,” said the fat kid. He was still wearing his shades, which Shadow thought pointless and foolish, given the darkness of the room.

“Sorry about that,” said Town. “The nearest McDonald's is in Nebraska.”

They finished their lukewarm hamburgers and cold fries. The fat kid bit into his single-person apple pie, and the filling spurted down his chin. Unexpectedly, the filling was still hot. “Ow,” he said. He wiped at it with his hand, licking his fingers to get them clean. “That stuff burns!” he said. “Those pies are a class-action suit waiting to fucking happen.”

Shadow wanted to hit the kid. He'd wanted to hit him since the kid had his goons hurt him in the limo, after Laura's funeral. He pushed the thought away. “Can't we just take Wednesday's body and get out of here?” he asked.

“Midnight,” said Mr. Nancy and the fat kid, at the same time.

“These things must be done by the rules,” said Czernobog.

“Yeah,” said Shadow. “But nobody tells me what they are. You keep talking about the goddamn rules, I don't even know what game you people are playing.”

“It's like breaking the street date,” said Media, brightly. “You know. When things are allowed to be on sale.”

Town said, “I think the whole thing's a crock of shit. But if their rules make them happy, then my agency is happy and everybody's happy.” He slurped his Coke. “Roll on midnight. You take the body, you go away. We're all lovey-fucking-dovey and we wave you goodbye. And then we can get on with hunting you down like the rats you are.”

“Hey,” said the fat kid to Shadow. “Reminds me. I told you to tell your boss he was history. Did you ever tell him?”

“I told him,” said Shadow. “And you know what he said to me? He said to tell the little snot, if ever I saw him again, to remember that today's future is tomorrow's yesterday.” Wednesday had never said any such thing. Still, these people seemed to like clichés. The black sunglasses reflected the flickering candle flames back at him, like eyes.

The fat kid said, “This place is such a fucking dump. No power. Out of wireless range. I mean, when you got to be wired, you're already back in the stone age.” He sucked the last of his Coke through the straw, dropped the cup on the table, and walked away down the corridor.

Shadow reached over and placed the fat kid's garbage back into the paper sack. “I'm going to see the center of America,” he announced. He got up and walked outside, into the night. Mr. Nancy followed him. They strolled together, across the little park, saying nothing until they reached the stone monument. The wind gusted at them, fitfully, first from one direction, then from another. “So,” he said. “Now what?”

The half-moon hung pale in the dark sky.

“Now,” said Nancy, “you should go back to your room. Lock the door. You try to get some more sleep. At midnight they give us the body. And then we get the hell out of here. The center is not a stable place for anybody.”

“If you say so.”

Mr. Nancy inhaled on his cigarillo. “This should never have happened,” he said. “None of this should have happened. Our kind of people, we are . . .” He waved the cigarillo about, as if using it to hunt for a word, then stabbing forward with it. “. . .
exclusive
. We're not social. Not even me. Not even Bacchus. Not for long. We walk by ourselves or we stay in our own little groups. We do not play well with others. We like to be adored and respected and worshiped—me, I like them to be tellin' tales about me, tales showing my cleverness. It's a fault, I know, but it's the way I am. We like to be big. Now, in these shabby days, we are small. The new gods rise and fall and rise again. But this is not a country that tolerates gods for long. Brahma creates, Vishnu preserves, Shiva destroys, and the ground is clear for Brahma to create once more.”

“So what are you saying?” asked Shadow. “The fighting's over, now? The battle's done?”

Mr. Nancy snorted. “Are you out of your mind? They killed Wednesday. They killed him and they bragged about it. They spread the word. They've showed it on every channel to those with eyes to see it. No, Shadow. It's only just begun.”

He bent down at the foot of the stone monument, stubbed out his cigarillo on the earth, and left it there, like ing.

“You used to make jokes,” said Shadow. “You don't anymore.”

“It's hard to find the jokes these days. Wednesday's dead. Are you comin' inside?”

“Soon.”

Nancy walked away, toward the motel. Shadow reached out his hand and touched the monument's stones. He dragged his big fingers across the cold brass plate. Then he turned and walked over to the tiny white chapel, walked through the open doorway, into the darkness. He sat down in the nearest pew and closed his eyes and lowered his head, and thought about Laura, and about Wednesday, and about being alive.

There was a click from behind him, and a scuff of shoe against earth. Shadow sat up, and turned. Someone stood just outside the open doorway, a dark shape against the stars. Moonlight glinted from something metal.

“You going to shoot me?” asked Shadow.

“Jesus—I wish,” said Mr. Town. “It's only for self-defense. So, you're praying? Have they got you thinking that they're gods? They aren't gods.”

“I wasn't praying,” said Shadow. “Just thinking.”

“The way I figure it,” said Town, “they're mutations. Evolutionary experiments. A little hypnotic ability, a little hocus-pocus, and they can make people believe anything. Nothing to write home about. That's all. They die like men, after all.”

“They always did,” said Shadow. He got up, and Town took a step back. Shadow walked out of the little chapel, and Mr. Town kept his distance. “Hey,” Shadow said. “Do you know who Louise Brooks was?”

“Friend of yours?”

“Nope. She was a movie star from south of here.”

Town paused. “Maybe she changed her name, and became Liz Taylor or Sharon Stone or someone,” he suggested, helpfully.

“Maybe.” Shadow started to walk back to the motel. Town kept pace with him.

“You should be back in prison,” said Mr. Town. “You should be on fucking death row.”

“I didn't kill your associates,” said Shadow. “But I'll tell you something a guy once told me, back when I was in prison. Something I've never forgotten.”

“And that is?”

“There was only one guy in the whole Bible Jesus ever personally promised a place with him in Paradise. Not Peter, not Paul, not any of those guys. He was a convicted thief, being executed. So don't knock the guys on death row. Maybe they know something you don't.”

The driver stood by the Humvee. “G'night, gentlemen,” he said as they passed.

“Night,” said Mr. Town. And then he said, to Shadow, “I personally don't give a fuck about any of this. What I do, is what Mister World says. It's easier that way.”

Shadow walked down the corridor to room 9.

He unlocked the door, went inside. He said, “Sorry. I thought this was my room.”

“It is,” said Media. “I was waiting for you.” He could see her hair in the moonlight, and her pale face. She was sitting on his bed, primly.

“I'll find another room.”

“I won't be here for long,” she said. “I just thought it might be an appropriate time to make you an
offer
.”

“Okay. Make the offer.”

“Relax,” she said. There was a smile in her voice. “You have
such
a stick up your butt. Look, Wednesday's
dead
. You don't owe anyone anything. Throw in with us. Time to Come Over to the Winning Team.”

Shadow said nothing.

“We can make you
famous
, Shadow. We can give you power over what people believe and say and wear and dream. You want to be the next Cary Grant? We can make that
happen
. We can make you the next Beatles.”

“I think I preferred it when you were offering to show me Lucy's tits,” said Shadow. “If that was you.”

“Ah,” she said.

“I need my room back. Good night.”

“And then of course,” she said, not moving, as if he had not spoken, “we can turn it all around. We can make it
bad
for you. You could be a bad joke forever, Shadow. Or you could be remembered as a monster. You could be remembered forever, but as a Manson, a Hitler . . . how would you
like
that?”

“I'm sorry, ma'am, but I'm kind of tired,” said Shadow. “I'd be grateful if you'd leave now.”

“I offered you the world,” she said. “When you're dying in a gutter, you
remember
that.”

“I'll make a point of it,” he said.

After she had gone her perfume lingered. He lay on the bare mattress and thought about Laura, but whatever he thought about—Laura playing Frisbee, Laura eating a root-beer float without a spoon, Laura giggling, showing off the exotic underwear she had bought when she attended a travel agents' convention in Anaheim—always morphed, in his mind, into Laura sucking Robbie's cock as a truck slammed them off the road and into oblivion. And then he heard her words, and they hurt every time.

You're not dead
, said Laura in her quiet voice, in his head.
But I'm not sure that you're alive, either.

There was a knock. Shadow got up and opened the door. It was the fat kid. “Those hamburgers,” he said. “They were just icky. Can you believe it? Fifty miles from McDonald's. I didn't think there was anywhere in the
world
that was fifty miles from McDonald's.”

“This place is turning into Grand Central Station,” said Shadow. “Okay, so I guess you're here to offer me the freedom of the Internet if I come over to your side of the fence. Right?”

The fat kid was shivering. “No. You're already dead meat,” he said. “You—you're a fucking illuminated Gothic black-letter manuscript. You couldn't be hypertext if you tried. I'm . . . I'm synaptic, while, while you're synoptic . . .” He smelled strange, Shadow realized. There was a guy in the cell across the way, whose name Shadow had never known. He had taken off all his clothes in the middle of the day and told everyone that he had been sent to take them away, the truly good ones, like him, in a silver spaceship to a perfect place. That had been the last time Shadow had seen him. The fat kid smelled like that guy.

“Are you here for a reason?”

“Just wanted to talk,” said the fat kid. There was a whine in his voice. “It's creepy in my room. That's all. It's
creepy
in there. Fifty miles to a McDonald's, can you believe that? Maybe I could stay in here with you.”

“What about your friends from the limo? The ones who hit me? Shouldn't you ask them to stay with you?”

“The children wouldn't operate out here. We're in a dead zone.”

Shadow said, “It's a while until midnight, and it's longer to dawn. I think maybe you need rest. I know I do.”

The fat kid said nothing for a moment, then he nodded, and walked out of the room.

Shadow closed his door, and locked it with the key. He lay back on the mattress.

After a few moments the noise began. It took him a few moments to figure out what it had to be, then he unlocked his door and walked out into the hallway. It was the fat kid, now back in his own room. It sounded like he was throwing something huge against the walls of the room. From the sounds, Shadow guessed that what he was throwing was himself. “It's just me!” he was sobbing. Or perhaps, “It's just meat.” Shadow could not tell.

“Quiet!” came a bellow from Czernobog's room, down the hall.

Shadow walked down to the lobby and out of the motel. He was tired.

The driver still stood beside the Humvee, a dark shape in a peaked cap.

“Couldn't sleep, sir?” he asked.

“No,” said Shadow.

“Cigarette, sir?”

“No, thank you.”

“You don't mind if I do?”

“Go right ahead.”

The driver used a Bic disposable lighter, and it was in the yellow light of the flame that Shadow saw the man's face, actually saw it for the first time, and recognized him, and began to understand.

Shadow knew that thin face. He knew that there would be close-cropped orange hair beneath the black driver's cap, cut close to the scalp. He knew that when the man's lips smiled they would crease into a network of rough scars.

“You're looking good, big guy,” said the driver.

“Low Key?” Shadow stared at his old cellmate warily.

Prison friendships are good things: they get you through bad places and through dark times. But a prison friendship ends at the prison gates, and a prison friend who reappears in your life is at best a mixed blessing.

“Jesus. Low Key Lyesmith,” said Shadow, and then he heard what he was saying and he understood. “Loki,” he said. “Loki Lie-Smith.”

“You're slow,” said Loki, “but you get there in the end.” And his lips twisted into a scarred smile and embers danced in the shadows of his eyes.

 

They sat in Shadow's room in the abandoned motel, sitting on the bed, at opposite ends of the mattress. The sounds from the fat kid's room had pretty much stopped.

“You were lucky we were inside together,” said Loki. “You would never have survived your first year without me.”

“You couldn't have walked out if you wanted?”

“It's easier just to do the time.” He paused. Then, “You got to understand the god thing. It's not magic. It's about being you, but the
you
that people believe in. It's about being the concentrated, magnified, essence of you. It's about becoming thunder, or the power of a running horse, or wisdom. You take all the belief and become bigger, cooler, more than human. You crystallize.” He paused. “And then one day they forget about you, and they don't believe in you, and they don't sacrifice, and they don't care, and the next thing you know you're running a three-card monte game on the corner of Broadway and Forty-third.”