American Gods (56 page)

“How do you know?”

The girl grinned. “I am Macha, of the Morrigan. When war comes, I can smell it in the air. I am a war goddess, and I say, blood shall be spilled this day.”

“Oh,” said Easter. “Well. There you go.” She was watching the smaller dot in the sky as it tumbled down toward them, dropping like a rock.

“And we shall fight them, and we shall kill them, every one,” said the girl. “And we shall take their heads as trophies, and the crows shall have their eyes and their corpses.” The dot had become a bird, its wings outstretched, riding the gusty morning winds above them.

Easter cocked her head on one side. “Is that some hidden war goddess knowledge?” she asked. “The whole who's-going-to-win thing? Who gets whose head?”

“No,” said the girl. “I can smell the battle, but that's all. But we'll win. Won't we? We
have
to. I saw what they did to the All-Father. It's them or us.”

“Yeah,” said Easter. “I suppose it is.”

The girl smiled again, in the half-light, and made her way back to the camp. Easter put her hand down and touched a green shoot that stabbed up from the earth like a knife blade. As she touched it it grew, and opened, and twisted, and changed, until she was resting her hand on a green tulip head. When the sun was high the flower would open.

Easter looked up at the hawk. “Can I help you?” she said.

The hawk circled about fifteen feet above Easter's head, slowly, then it glided down to her, and landed on the ground nearby. It looked up at her with mad eyes.

“Hello, cutie,” she said. “Now, what do you really look like, eh?”

The hawk hopped toward her, uncertainly, and then it was no longer a hawk, but a young man. He looked at her, and then looked down at the grass. “You?” he said. His glance went everywhere, to the grass, to the sky, to the bushes. Not to her.

“Me,” she said. “What about me?”

“You.” He stopped. He seemed to be trying to muster his thoughts; strange expressions flitted and swam across his face.
He spent too long a bird
, she thought.
He has forgotten how to be a man.
She waited patiently. Eventually, he said, “Will you come with me?”

“Maybe. Where do you want me to go?”

“The man on the tree. He needs you. A ghost hurt, in his side. The blood came, then it stopped. I think he is dead.”

“There's a war on. I can't just go running away.”

The naked man said nothing, just moved from one foot to another as if he were uncertain of his weight, as if he were used to resting on the air or on a swaying branch, not on the solid earth. Then he said, “If he is gone forever, it is all over.”

“But the battle—“

“If he is lost, it will not matter who wins.” He looked like he needed a blanket, and a cup of sweet coffee, and someone to take him somewhere he could just shiver and babble until he got his mind back. He held his arms stiffly against his sides.

“Where is this? Nearby?”

He stared at the tulip plant, and shook his head. “Way away.”

“Well,” she said, “I'm needed here. And I can't just leave. How do you expect me to get there? I can't fly, like you, you know.”

“No,” said Horus. “You can't.” Then he looked up, gravely, and pointed to the other dot that circled them, as it dropped from the darkening clouds, growing in size. “
He
can.”

 

Another several hours' pointless driving, and by now Town hated the global positioning system almost as much as he hated Shadow. There was no passion in the hate, though. He had thought finding his way to the farm, to the great silver ash tree, had been hard; finding his way away from the farm was much harder. It did not seem to matter which road he took, which direction he drove down the narrow country lanes—the twisting Virginia back roads that must have begun, he was sure, as deer trails and cowpaths—eventually he would find himself passing the farm once more, and the hand-painted sign,
ASH
.

This was crazy, wasn't it? He simply had to retrace his way, take a left turn for every right he had taken on his way here, a right turn for every left.

Only that was what he had done last time, and now here he was, back at the farm once more. There were heavy storm clouds coming in, it was getting dark fast, it felt like night, not morning, and he had a long drive ahead of him: he would never get to Chattanooga before afternoon at this rate.

His cell phone gave him only a
No Service
message. The fold-out map in the car's glove compartments showed the main roads, all the interstates and the real highways, but as far as it was concerned nothing else existed.

Nor was there anyone around that he could ask. The houses were set back from the roads; there were no welcoming lights. Now the fuel gauge was nudging Empty. He heard a rumble of distant thunder, and a single drop of rain splashed heavily onto his windshield.

So when Town saw the woman, walking along the side of the road, he found himself smiling, involuntarily. “Thank God,” he said, aloud, and he drew up beside her. He thumbed down her window. “Ma'am? I'm sorry. I'm kind of lost. Can you tell me how to get to Highway Eighty-one from here?”

She looked at him through the open passenger-side window and said, “You know. I don't think I can explain it. But I can show you, if you like.” She was pale, and her wet hair was long and dark.

“Climb in,” said Town. He didn't even hesitate. “First thing, we need to buy some gas.”

“Thanks,” she said. “I needed a ride.” She got in. Her eyes were astonishingly blue. “There's a stick here, on the seat,” she said, puzzled.

“Just throw it in the back. Where are you heading?” he asked. “Lady, if you can get me to a gas station, and back to a freeway, I'll take you all the way to your own front door.”

She said, “Thank you. But I think I'm going farther than you are. If you can get me to the freeway, that will be fine. Maybe a trucker will give me a ride.” And she smiled, a crooked, determined smile. It was the smile that did it.

“Ma'am,” he said, “I can give you a finer ride than any trucker.” He could smell her perfume. It was heady and heavy, a cloying scent, like magnolias or lilacs, but he did not mind.

“I'm going to Georgia,” she said. “It's a long way.”

“I'm going to Chattanooga. I'll take you as far as I can.”

“Mm,” she said. “What's your name?”

“They call me Mack,” said Mr. Town. When he was talking to women in bars, he would sometimes follow that up with “And the ones that know me really well call me Big Mack.” That could wait. With a long drive ahead of them, they would have many hours in each other's company to get to know each other. “What's yours?”

“Laura,” she told him.

“Well, Laura,” he said, “I'm sure we're going to be great friends.”

 

The fat kid found Mr. World in the Rainbow Room—a walled section of the path, its window glass covered in clear plastic sheets of green and red and yellow film. He was walking impatiently from window to window, staring out, in turn, at a golden world, a red world, a green world. His hair was reddish-orange and close-cropped to his skull. He wore a Burberry raincoat.

The fat kid coughed. Mr. World looked up.

“Excuse me? Mister World?”

“Yes? Is everything on schedule?”

The fat kid's mouth was dry. He licked his lips, and said, “I've set up everything. I don't have confirmation on the choppers.”

“The helicopters will be here when we need them.”

“Good,” said the fat kid. “Good.” He stood there, not saying anything, not going away. There was a bruise on his forehead.

After a while Mr. World said, “Is there anything else I can do for you?”

A pause. The boy swallowed and nodded. “Something else,” he said. “Yes.”

“Would you feel more comfortable discussing it in private?”

The boy nodded again.

Mr. World walked with the kid back to his operations center: a damp cave containing a diorama of drunken pixies making moonshine with a still. A sign outside warned tourists away during renovations. The two men sat down on plastic chairs.

“How can I help you?” asked Mr. World.

“Yes. Okay. Right, two things, Okay. One. What are we waiting for? And two. Two is harder. Look. We have the guns. Right. We have the firepower. They have. They have fucking swords and knives and fucking hammers and stone axes. And like, tire irons. We have fucking
smart
bombs.”

“Which we will not be using,” pointed out the other man.

“I know that. You said that already. I know that. And that's doable. But. Look, ever since I did the job on that bitch in L.A., I've been . . .” He stopped, made a face, seemed unwilling to go on.

“You've been troubled?”

“Yes. Good word.
Troubled.
Yes. Like a home for troubled teens. Funny. Yes.”

“And what exactly is troubling you?”

“Well, we fight, we win.”

“And that is a source of trouble? I find it a matter of triumph and delight, myself.”

“But. They'll die out anyway. They are passenger pigeons and thylacines. Yes? Who cares? This way, it's going to be a bloodbath.”

“Ah.” Mr. World nodded.

He was following. That was good. The fat kid said, “Look, I'm not the only one who feels this way. I've checked with the crew at Radio Modern, and they're all for settling this peacefully; and the intangibles are pretty much in favor of letting market forces take care of it. I'm being. You know. The voice of reason here.”

“You are indeed. Unfortunately, there is information you do not have.” The smile that followed was twisted and scarred.

The boy blinked. He said, “Mister World? What happened to your lips?”

World sighed. “The truth of the matter,” he said, “is that somebody once sewed them together. A long time ago.”

“Whoa,” said the fat kid. “Serious
omertà
shit.”

“Yes. You want to know what we're waiting for? Why we didn't strike last night?”

The fat kid nodded. He was sweating, but it was a cold sweat.

“We didn't strike yet, because I'm waiting for a stick.”

“A stick?”

“That's right. A stick. And do you know what I'm going to do with the stick?”

A head shake. “Okay. I'll bite. What?”

“I could tell you,” said Mr. World, soberly. “But then I'd have to kill you.” He winked, and the tension in the room evaporated.

The fat kid began to giggle, a low, snuffling laugh in the back of his throat and in his nose. “Okay,” he said. “
Hee. Hee.
Okay.
Hee.
Got it. Message received on Planet Technical. Loud and clear. Ixnay on the Estionsquay.”

Mr. World shook his head. He rested a hand on the fat kid's shoulder. “Hey,” he said. “You really want to know?”

“Sure.”

“Well,” said Mr World, “seeing that we're friends, here's the answer: I'm going to take the stick, and I'm going to throw it over the armies as they come together. As I throw it, it will become a spear. And then, as the spear arcs over the battle, I'm going to shout ‘I dedicate this battle to Odin.' “

“Huh?” said the fat kid. “Why?”

“Power,” said Mr. World. He scratched his chin. “And food. A combination of the two. You see, the outcome of the battle is unimportant. What matters is the chaos, and the slaughter.”

“I don't get it.”

“Let me show you. It'll be just like this,” said Mr. World. “Watch!” He took the wooden-bladed hunter's knife from the pocket of his Burberry and, in one fluid movement, he slipped the blade of it into the soft flesh beneath the fat kid's chin, and pushed hard upward, toward the brain. “I dedicate this death to Odin,” he said, as the knife sank in.

There was a leakage onto his hand of something that was not actually blood, and a sputtering sparking noise behind the fat kid's eyes. The smell on the air was that of burning insulation wire.

The fat kid's hand twitched spastically, and then he fell. The expression on his face was one of puzzlement and misery. “Look at him,” said Mr. World, conversationally, to the air. “He looks as if he just saw a sequence of zeroes and ones turn into a flock of brightly colored birds and fly away.”

There was no reply from the empty rock corridor.

Mr. World shouldered the body as if it weighed very little, and he opened the pixie diorama and dropped the body beside the still, covering it with its long black raincoat. He would dispose of it that evening, he decided, and he grinned his scarred grin: hiding a body on a battlefield would almost be too easy. Nobody would ever notice. Nobody would care.

For a little while there was silence in that place. And then a gruff voice, which was not Mr. World's, cleared its throat in the shadows, and said, “Good start.”

None of this can actually be happening. If it makes you more comfortable, you could simply think of it as metaphor. Religions are, by definition, metaphors, after all: God is a dream, a hope, a woman, an ironist, a father, a city, a house of many rooms, a watchmaker who left his prize chronometer in the desert, someone who loves you—even, perhaps, against all evidence, a celestial being whose only interest is to make sure your football team, army, business, or marriage thrives, prospers, and triumphs over all opposition.

Religions are places to stand and look and act, vantage points from which to view the world.

So none of this is happening. Such things could not occur. Never a word of it is literally true. Even so, the next thing that happened, happened like this:

At the foot of Lookout Mountain men and women were gathered around a small bonfire in the rain. They were standing beneath the trees, which provided poor cover, and they were arguing.

The lady Kali, with her ink-black skin and her white, sharp teeth, said, “It is time.”

Anansi, with lemon-yellow gloves and silvering hair, shook his head. “We can wait,” he said. “While we
can
wait, we
should
wait.”

There was a murmur of disagreement from the crowd.

“No, listen. He's right,” said an old man with iron-gray hair: Czernobog. He was holding a small sledgehammer, resting the head of it on his shoulder. “They have the high ground. The weather is against us. This is madness, to begin this now.”

Something that looked a little like a wolf and a little more like a man grunted and spat on the forest floor. “When better to attack them,
dedushka
? Shall we wait until the weather clears, when they expect it? I say we go now. I say we move.”

“There are clouds between us and them,” pointed out Isten of the Hungarians. He had a fine black mustache, a large, dusty black hat, and the grin of a man who makes his living selling aluminum siding and new roofs and gutters to senior citizens but who always leaves town the day after the checks clear whether the work is done or not.

A man in an elegant suit, who had until now said nothing, put his hands together, stepped into the firelight, and made his point succinctly and clearly. There were nods and mutters of agreement.

A voice came from one of three warrior-women who comprised the Morrigan, standing so close together in the shadows that they had become an arrangement of blue-tattooed limbs and dangling crow's wings. She said, “It doesn't matter whether this is a good time or a bad time. This is
the
time. They have been killing us. Better to die together, on the attack, like gods, than to die fleeing and singly, like rats in a cellar.”

Another murmur, this time one of deep agreement. She had said it for all of them. Now was the time.

“The first head is mine,” said a very tall Chinese man, with a rope of tiny skulls around his neck. He began to walk, slowly and intently, up the mountain, shouldering a staff with a curved blade at the end of it, like a silver moon.

 

Even Nothing cannot last forever.

He might have been there, been Nowhere, for ten minutes or for ten thousand years. It made no difference: time was an idea for which he no longer had any need.

He could no longer remember his real name. He felt empty and cleansed, in that place that was not a place.

He was without form, and void.

He was nothing.

And into that nothing a voice said, “Ho-hoka, cousin. We got to talk.”

And something that might once have been Shadow said, “Whiskey Jack?”

“Yeah,” said Whiskey Jack, in the darkness. “You are a hard man to hunt down, when you're dead. You didn't go to any of the places I figured. I had to look all over before I thought of checking here. Say, you ever find your tribe?”

Shadow remembered the man and the girl in the disco beneath the spinning mirror-ball. “I guess I found my family. But no, I never found my tribe.”

“Sorry to have to disturb you.”

“Let me be. I got what I wanted. I'm done.”

“They are coming for you,” said Whiskey Jack. “They are going to revive you.”

“But I'm done,” said Shadow. “It was all over and done.”

“No such thing,” said Whiskey Jack. “Never any such thing. We'll go to my place. You want a beer?”

He guessed he
would
like a beer, at that. “Sure.”

“Get me one too. There's a cooler outside the door,” said Whiskey Jack, and he pointed. They were in his shack.

Shadow opened the door to the shack with hands he had not possessed moments before. There was a plastic cooler filled with chunks of river ice out there, and, in the ice, a dozen cans of Budweiser. He pulled out a couple of cans of beer and then sat in the doorway and looked out over the valley.

They were at the top of a hill, near a waterfall, swollen with melting snow and runoff. It fell in stages, maybe seventy feet below them, maybe a hundred. The sun reflected from the ice that sheathed the trees that overhung the waterfall basin.

“Where are we?” asked Shadow.

“Where you were last time,” said Whiskey Jack. “My place. You planning on holding on to my Bud till it warms up?”

Shadow stood up and passed him the can of beer. “You didn't have a waterfall outside your place last time I was here,” he said.

Whiskey Jack said nothing. He popped the top of the Bud, and drank half the can in one long slow swallow. Then he said, “You remember my nephew? Henry Bluejay? The poet? He traded his Buick for your Winnebago. Remember?”

“Sure. I didn't know he was a poet.”

Whiskey Jack raised his chin and looked proud. “Best damn poet in America,” he said.

He drained the rest of his can of beer, belched, and got another can, while Shadow popped open his own can of beer, and the two men sat outside on a rock, by the pale green ferns, in the morning sun, and they watched the falling water and they drank their beer. There was still snow on the ground, in the places where the shadows never lifted.

The earth was muddy and wet.

“Henry was diabetic,” continued Whiskey Jack. “It happens. Too much. You people came to America, you take our sugar cane, potatoes, and corn, then you sell us potato chips and caramel popcorn, and we're the ones who get sick.” He sipped his beer, reflecting. “He'd won a couple of prizes for his poetry. There were people in Minnesota who wanted to put his poems into a book. He was driving to Minnesota in a sports car to talk to them. He had traded your ‘Bago for a yellow Miata. The doctors said they think he went into a coma while he was driving, went off the road, ran the car into one of your road signs. Too lazy to look at where you are, to read the mountains and the clouds, you people need road signs everywhere. And so Henry Bluejay went away forever, went to live with brother Wolf. So I said, nothing keeping me there any longer. I came north. Good fishing up here.”

“I'm sorry about your nephew.”

“Me too. So now I'm living here in the north. Long way from white man's diseases. White man's roads. White man's road signs. White man's yellow Miatas. White man's caramel popcorn.”

“White man's beer?”

Whiskey Jack looked at the can. “When you people finally give up and go home, you can leave us the Budweiser breweries,” he said.

“Where are we?” asked Shadow. “Am I on the tree? Am I dead? Am I here? I thought everything was finished. What's real?”

“Yes,” said Whiskey Jack.

“ ‘Yes'? What kind of an answer is ‘Yes'?”

“It's a good answer. True answer, too.”

Shadow said, “Are you a god as well?”

Whiskey Jack shook his head. “I'm a culture hero,” he said. “We do the same shit gods do, we just screw up more and nobody worships us. They tell stories about us, but they tell the ones that make us look bad along with the ones where we came out fairly okay.”

“I see,” said Shadow. And he did see, more or less.

“Look,” said Whiskey Jack. “This is not a good country for gods. My people figured that out early on. There are creator spirits who found the earth or made it or shit it out, but you think about it: who's going to worship Coyote? He made love to Porcupine Woman and got his dick shot through with more needles than a pincushion. He'd argue with rocks and the rocks would win.

“So, yeah, my people figured that maybe there's something at the back of it all, a creator, a great spirit, and so we say thank you to it, because it's always good to say thank you. But we never built churches. We didn't need to. The land was the church. The land was the religion. The land was older and wiser than the people who walked on it. It gave us salmon and corn and buffalo and passenger pigeons. It gave us wild rice and walleye. It gave us melon and squash and turkey. And we were the children of the land, just like the porcupine and the skunk and the blue jay.”

He finished his second beer and gestured toward the river at the bottom of the waterfall. “You follow that river for a way, you'll get to the lakes where the wild rice grows. In wild rice time, you go out in your canoe with a friend, and you knock the wild rice into your canoe, and cook it, and store it, and it will keep you for a long time. Different places grow different foods. Go far enough south there are orange trees, lemon trees, and those squashy green guys, look like pears—“

“Avocados.”

“Avocados,” agreed Whiskey Jack. “That's them. They don't grow up this way. This is wild rice country. Moose country. What I'm trying to say is that America is like that. It's not good growing country for gods. They don't grow well here. They're like avocados trying to grow in wild rice country.”

“They may not grow well,” said Shadow, remembering, “but they're going to war.”

That was the only time he ever saw Whiskey Jack laugh. It was almost a bark, and it had little humor in it. “Hey Shadow,” said Whiskey Jack. “If all your friends jumped off a cliff, would you jump off too?”

“Maybe.” Shadow felt good. He didn't think it was just the beer. He couldn't remember the last time he had felt so alive, and so together.

“It's not going to be a war.”

“Then what is it?”

Whiskey Jack crushed the beer can between his hands, pressing it until it was flat. “Look,” he said, and pointed to the waterfall. The sun was high enough that it caught the waterfall spray: a rainbow nimbus hung in the air. Shadow thought it was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

“It's going to be a bloodbath,” said Whiskey Jack, flatly.

Shadow saw it then. He saw it all, stark in its simplicity. He shook his head, then he began to chuckle, and he shook his head some more, and the chuckle became a full-throated laugh.

“You okay?”

“I'm fine,” said Shadow. “I just saw the hidden Indians. Not all of them. But I saw them anyhow.”

“Probably Ho Chunk, then. Those guys never could hide worth a damn.” He looked up at the sun. “Time to go back,” he said. He stood up.

“It's a two-man con,” said Shadow. “It's not a war at all, is it?”

Whiskey Jack patted Shadow's arm. “You're not so dumb,” he said.

They walked back to Whiskey Jack's shack. He opened the door. Shadow hesitated. “I wish I could stay here with you,” he said. “This seems like a good place.”

“There are a lot of good places,” said Whiskey Jack. “That's kind of the point. Listen, gods die when they are forgotten. People too. But the land's still here. The good places, and the bad. The land isn't going anywhere. And neither am I.”

Shadow closed the door. Something was pulling at him. He was alone in the darkness once more, but the darkness became brighter and brighter until it was burning like the sun.

And then the pain began.

 

Easter walked through the meadow, and spring flowers blossomed where she had passed.

She walked by a place where, long ago, a farmhouse had stood. Even today several walls were still standing, jutting out of the weeds and the meadow grass like rotten teeth. A thin rain was falling. The clouds were dark and low, and it was cold.

A little way beyond the place where the farmhouse had been there was a tree, a huge silver-gray tree, winter-dead to all appearances, and leafless, and in front of the tree, on the grass, were frayed clumps of colorless fabric. The woman stopped at the fabric, and bent down, and picked up something brownish-white: it was a much-gnawed fragment of bone which might, once, have been a part of a human skull. She tossed it back down onto the grass.

Then she looked at the man on the tree and she smiled wryly. “They just aren't as interesting naked,” she said. “It's the unwrapping that's half the fun. Like with gifts, and eggs.”

The hawk-headed man who walked beside her looked down at his penis and seemed, for the first time, to become aware of his own nakedness. He said, “I can look at the sun without even blinking.”

“That's very clever of you,” Easter told him, reassuringly. “Now, let's get him down from there.”

The wet ropes that held Shadow to the tree had long ago weathered and rotted, and they parted easily as the two people pulled on them. The body on the tree slipped and slid down toward the roots. They caught him as he fell, and they took him up, carrying him easily, although he was a very big man, and they put him down in the gray meadow.

The body on the grass was cold, and it did not breathe. There was a patch of dried black blood on its side, as if it had been stabbed with a spear.