American Gods (11 page)

“Don’t tell them cow-killing stories.” Zorya Utrennyaya carried
in their coffee on a red wooden tray, in small brightly enameled cups. She gave
them each a cup, then sat beside Czernobog.

“Zorya Vechernyaya is doing shopping,” she said. “She will
be soon back.”

“We met her downstairs,” said Shadow. “She says she tells fortunes.”

“Yes,” said her sister. “In the twilight, that is the time
for lies. I do not tell good lies, so I am a poor fortune-teller. And our
sister, Zorya Polunochnaya, she can’t tell no lies at all.”

The coffee was even sweeter and stronger than Shadow had
expected.

Shadow excused himself to use the bathroom—a closet-like
room, hung with several brown-spotted framed photographs of men and women in
stiff Victorian poses. It was early afternoon, but already the daylight was
beginning to fade. He heard voices raised from down the hall. He washed his hands
in icy-cold water with a sickly-smelling sliver of pink soap.

Czernobog was standing in the hall as Shadow came out.

“You bring trouble!” he was shouting. “Nothing but trouble!
I will not listen! You will get out of my house!”

Wednesday was still sitting on the sofa, sipping his coffee,
stroking the gray cat. Zorya Utrennyaya stood on the thin carpet, one hand
nervously twining in and out of her long yellow hair.

“Is there a problem?” asked Shadow.

“He is the problem!” shouted Czernobog. “He is! You tell him
that there is nothing will make me help him! I want him to go! I want him out
of here! Both of you go!”

“Please,” said Zorya Utrennyaya. “Please be quiet, you wake
up Zorya Polunochnaya.”

“You are like him, you want me to join his madness!” shouted
Czernobog. He looked as if he was on the verge of tears. A pillar of ash
tumbled from his cigarette onto the threadbare hall carpet.

Wednesday stood up, walked over to Czernobog. He rested his
hand on Czernobog’s shoulder. “Listen,” he said, peaceably. “Firstly, it’s not
madness. It’s the only way. Secondly, everyone will be there. You would not
want to be left out, would you?”

“You know who I am,” said Czernobog. “You know what these
hands have done. You want my brother, not me. And he’s gone.”

A door in the hallway opened, and a sleepy female voice
said, “Is something wrong?”

“Nothing is wrong, my sister,” said Zorya Utrennyaya. “Go
back to sleep.” Then she turned to Czernobog. “See? See what you do with all
your shouting? You go back in there and sit down. Sit!” Czernobog looked as if
he were about to protest; and then the fight went out of him. He looked frail,
suddenly: frail, and lonely.

The three men went back into the shabby sitting room. There
was a brown nicotine ring around that room that ended about a foot from the
ceiling, like the tide line in an old bathtub.

“It doesn’t have to be for you,” said Wednesday to
Czernobog, unfazed. “If it is for your brother, it’s for you as well. That’s
one place you dualistic types have it over the rest of us, eh?”

Czernobog said nothing.

“Speaking of Bielebog, have you heard anything from him?”

Czernobog shook his head. He looked up at Shadow. “Do you
have a brother?”

“No,” said Shadow. “Not that I know of.”

“I have a brother. They say, you put us together, we are like
one person, you know? When we are young, his hair, it is very blond, very
light, his eyes are blue, and people say, he is the good one. And my hair it is
very dark, darker than yours even, and people say I am the rogue, you know? I
am the bad one. And now time passes, and my hair is gray. His hair, too, I
think, is gray. And you look at us, you would not know who was light, who was
dark.”

“Were you close?” asked Shadow.

“Close?” asked Czernobog. “No. How could we be? We cared
about such different things.”

There was a clatter from the end of the hall, and Zorya Vechemyaya
came in. “Supper in one hour” she said. Then she went out.

Czernobog sighed. “She thinks she is a gpod cook,” he said. “She
was brought up, there were servants to cook. Now, there are no servants. There
is nothing.”

“Not nothing,” said Wednesday. “Never nothing.”

“You,” said Czernobog. “I shall not listen to you.” He
turned to Shadow. “Do you play checkers?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Shadow.

“Good. You shall play checkers with me,” he said, taking a
wooden box of pieces from the mantelpiece and shaking them out onto the table. “I
shall play black.”

Wednesday touched Shadow’s arm. “You don’t have to do this,
you know,” he said.

“Not a problem. I want to,” said Shadow. Wednesday shrugged,
and picked up an old copy of Reader’s Digest from a small pile of yellowing
magazines on the windowsill.

Czernobog’s brown fingers finished arranging the pieces on
the squares, and the game began.

In the days that were to come, Shadow often found himself remembering
that game. Some nights he dreamed of it. His flat, round pieces were the color
of old, dirty wood, nominally white. Czernobog’s were a dull, faded black.
Shadow was the first to move. In his dreams, there was no conversation as they
played, just the loud click as the pieces were put down, or the hiss of wood
against wood as they were slid from square to adjoining square.

For the first half dozen moves each of the men slipped
pieces out onto the board, into the center, leaving the back rows untouched.
There were pauses between the moves, long, chesslike pauses, while each man
watched, and thought.

Shadow had played checkers in prison: it passed the time. He
had played chess, too, but he was not temperamentally suited to planning ahead.
He preferred picking the perfect move for the moment. You could win in checkers
like that, sometimes.

There was a click as Czernobog picked up a black piece and
jumped it over one of Shadow’s white pieces. The old man picked up Shadow’s
white piece and put it on the table at the side of the board.

“First blood. You have lost,” said Czernobog. “The game is
done.”

“No,” said Shadow. “Game’s got a long way to go yet.”

“Then would you care for a wager? A little side bet, to make
it more interesting?”

“No,” said Wednesday, without looking up from a “Humor in
Uniform” column. “He wouldn’t.”

“I am not playing with you, old man. I play with him. So,
you want to bet on the game, Mister Shadow?”

“What were you two arguing about, before?” asked Shadow.

Czernobog raised a craggy eyebrow. “Your master wants me to
come with him. To help him with his nonsense. I would rather die.”

“You want to bet? Okay. If I win, you come with us.”

The old man pursed his lips. “Perhaps,” he said. “But only
if you take my forfeit, when you lose.”

“And that would be?”

There was no change in Czernobog’s expression. “If I win, I
get to knock your brains out. With the sledgehammer. First you go down on your
knees. Then I hit you a blow with it, so you don’t get up again.” Shadow looked
at the man’s old face, trying to read him. He was not joking, Shadow was
certain of that: there was a hunger there for something, for pain, or death, or
retribution.

Wednesday closed the Reader’s Digest. “This is ridiculous,”
he said. “I was wrong to come here. Shadow, we’re leaving.” The gray cat,
disturbed, got to its feet and stepped onto the table beside the checkers game.
If stared at the pieces, then leapt down onto the floor and, tail held high, it
stalked from the room.

“No,” said Shadow. He was not scared of dying. After all, it
was not as if he had anything to live for. ‘It’s fine. I accept. If you win the
game, you get the chance to knock my brains out with one blow of your
sledgehammer,” and he moved his next white piece to the adjoining square on the
edge of the board.

Nothing more was said, but Wednesday did not pick up his
Reader’s Digest again. He watched the game with his glass eye and his true eye,
with an expression that betrayed nothing.

Czernobog took another of Shadow’s pieces. Shadow

 took two of Czernobog’s. From the corridor came the smell
of unfamiliar foods cooking. While not all of the smells were appetizing,
Shadow realized suddenly how hungry he was.

The two men moved their pieces, black and white, turn and
turnabout. A flurry of pieces taken, a blossoming of two-piece-high kings: no
longer forced to move only forward on the board, a sideways slip at a time, the
kings could move forward or back, which made them doubly dangerous. They had
reached the farthest row, and could go where they wanted. Czernobog had three
kings, Shadow had two.

Czernobog moved one of his kings around the board, eliminating
Shadow’s remaining pieces, while using the other two kings to keep Shadow’s
kings pinned down.

And then Czernobog made a fourth king, and returned down the
board to Shadow’s two kings, and, unsmiling, took them both. And that was that.

“So,” said Czernobog. “I get to knock out your brains. And
you will go on your knees willingly. Is good.” He reached out an old hand, and
patted Shadow’s arm with it.

“We’ve still got time before dinner’s ready,” said Shadow. “You
want another game? Same terms?”

Czernobog lit another cigarette, from a kitchen box of
matches. “How can it be same terms? You want I should kill you twice?”

“Right now, you have one blow, that’s all. You told me yourself
that it’s not just strength, it’s skill too. This way, if you win this game,
you get two blows to my head.”

Czernobog glowered. “One blow is all it takes, one blow.
That is the art.” He patted his upper right arm, where the muscles were, with
his left, scattering gray ash from the cigarette in his left hand.

“It’s been a long time. If you’ve lost your skill you might
simply bruise me. How long has it been since you swung a killing hammer in the
stockyards? Thirty years? Forty?”

Czernobog said nothing. His closed mouth was a gray slash
across his face. He tapped his fingers on the wooden table, drumming out a
rhythm with them. Then he pushed the twenty-four checkers back to their home
squares on the board.

“Play,” he said. “Again, you are light. I am dark.”

Shadow pushed his first piece out. Czernobog pushed one of
his own pieces forward. And it occurred to Shadow that Czernobog was going to
try to play the same game again, the one that he had just won, that this would
be his limitation.

This time Shadow played recklessly. He snatched tiny opportunities,
moved without thinking, without a pause to consider. And this time, as he
played, Shadow smiled; and whenever Czernobog moved a piece, Shadow smiled
wider.

Soon, Czernobog was slamming his pieces down as he moved
them, banging them down on the wooden table so hard that the remaining pieces
shivered on their black squares.

“There,” said Czernobog, taking one of Shadow’s men with a
crash, slamming the black piece down. “There. What do you say to mat?”

Shadow said nothing: he simply smiled, antfjumped the piece
that Czernobog had put down, and another, and another, and a fourth, clearing
the center of the board of black pieces. He took a white piece from the pile
beside the board and kinged his man.

After that, it was just a mopping-up exercise: another
handful of moves, and the game was done.

Shadow said, “Best of three?”

Czernobog simply stared at him, his gray eyes like points of
steel. And then he laughed, clapped his hands on Shadow’s shoulders. “I like
you!” he exclaimed. “You have balls.”

Then Zorya Utrennyaya put her head around the door to tell
them that dinner was ready, and they should clear their game away and put the
tablecloth down on the table.

“We have no dining room,” she said, “I am sorry. We eat in
here.”

Serving dishes were placed on the table. Each of the diners
was given a small painted tray on which was some tarnished cutlery, to hold on
his or her lap.

Zorya Vechernyaya took five wooden bowls and placed an unpeeled
boiled potato in each, then ladled in a healthy serving of a ferociously
crimson borscht. She plopped a spoonful of white sour cream in, and handed the
bowls to each of them.

“I thought there were six of us,” said Shadow.

“Zorya Polunochnaya is still asleep,” said Zorya
Vechernyaya. “We keep her food in the refrigerator. When she wakes, she will
eat.”

The borscht was vinegary, and tasted like pickled beets. The
boiled potato was mealy.

The next course was a leathery pot roast, accompanied by
greens of some description—although they had been boiled so long and so
thoroughly that they were no longer, by any stretch of the imagination, greens,
and were well on their way to becoming browns.

Then there were cabbage leaves stuffed with ground meat and
rice, cabbage leaves of such a toughness that they were almost impossible to
cut without spattering ground meat and rice all over the carpet. Shadow pushed
his around his plate.

“We played checkers,” said Czernobog, hacking himself another
lump of pot roast. “The young man and me. He won a game, I won a game. Because
he won a game, I have agreed to go with him and Wednesday, and help them in
their madness. And because I won a game, when this is all done, I get to kill
the young man, with a blow of a hammer.”

The two Zoryas nodded gravely. “Such a pity,” Zorya Vechernyaya
told Shadow. “In my fortune for you, I should have said you would have a long
life and a happy one, with many children.”

“That is why you are a good fortune-teller,” said Zorya
Utrennyaya. She looked sleepy, as if it were an effort for her to be up so
late. “You tell the best lies.”

At the end of the meal, Shadow was still hungry. Prison food
had been pretty bad, and prison food was better than this.

“Good food,” said Wednesday, who had cleaned his plate with
every evidence of enjoyment. “I thank you ladies. And now, I am afraid that it
is incumbent upon us to ask you to recommend to us a fine hotel in the
neighborhood.”