American Gods (12 page)

Zorya Vechernyaya looked offended at this. “Why should you
go to a hotel?” she said. “We are not your friends?”

“I couldn’t put you to any trouble ...” said Wednesday.

“Is no trouble,” said Zorya Utrennyaya, one hand playing
with her incongruously golden hair, and she yawned.

“You can sleep in Bielebog’s room,” said Zorya Vechernyaya,
pointing to Wednesday. “Is empty. And for you, young man, I make up a bed on
sofa. You will be more comfortable than in feather bed. I swear.”

“That would be really kind of you,” said Wednesday. “We accept.”

“And you pay me only no more than what’ybu pay for hotel,”
said Zorya Vechernyaya, with a triumphant toss of her head. “A hundred dollars.”

“Thirty” said Wednesday.

“Fifty.”

“Thirty-five.”

“Forty-five.”

“Forty.”

“Is good. Forty-five dollar.” Zorya Vechernyaya reached
across the table and shook Wednesday’s hand. Then she began to clean the pots
off the table. Zorya Utrennyaya yawned so hugely Shadow worried that she might
dislocate her jaw, and announced that she was going to bed before she fell
asleep with her head in the pie, and she said good night to them all.

Shadow helped Zorya Vechernyaya to take the plates and
dishes into the little kitchen. To his surprise there was an elderly
dishwashing machine beneath the sink, and he filled it. Zorya Vechernyaya
looked over his shoulder, tutted, and removed the wooden borscht bowls. “Those,
in the sink,” she told him.

“Sorry.”

“Is not to worry. Now, back in there, we have pie,” she
said.

The pie—it was an apple pie—had been bought in a store and
oven-warmed, and was very, very good. The four of them ate it with ice cream,
and then Zorya Vechernyaya made everyone go out of the sitting room, and made
up a very fine-looking bed on the sofa for Shadow.

Wednesday spoke to Shadow as they stood in the corridor.

“What you did in there, with the checkers game,” he said.

“Yes?”

“That was good. Very, very stupid of you. But good. Sleep
safe.”

Shadow brushed his teeth and washed his face in the cold
water of the little bathroom, and then walked back down the hall to the sitting
room, turned out the light, and was asleep before his head touched the pillow.

There were explosions in Shadow’s dream: he was driving a
truck through a minefield, and bombs were going off on each side of him. The
windshield shattered and he felt warm blood running down his face.

Someone was shooting at him.

A bullet punctured his lung, a bullet shattered his spine, another
hit his shoulder. He felt each bullet strike. He collapsed across the steering
wheel.

The last explosion ended in darkness.

/ must be dreaming, thought Shadow, alone in the darkness. /
think I just died. He remembered hearing and believing, as a child, that if you
died in your dreams, you would die in real life. He did not feel dead. He
opened his eyes, experimentally.

There was a woman in the little sitting room, standing
against the window, with her back to him. His heart missed a half-beat, and he
said, “Laura?”

She turned, framed by the moonlight. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I
did not mean to wake you.” She had a soft, Eastern European accent. “I will go.”

“No, it’s okay,” said Shadow. “You didn’t wake me. I had a
dream.”

“Yes,” she said. “You were crying out, and moaning. Part of
me wanted to wake you, but I thought, no, I should leave him.”

Her hair was pale and colorless in the moon’s thin light.
She wore a white cotton nightgown, with a high lace neck and a hem that swept
the ground. Shadow sat up, entirely awake. “You are Zorya Polu ...,” he
hesitated. “The sister who was asleep.”

“I am Zorya Polunochnaya, yes. And—you are called Shadow,
yes? That was what Zorya Vechernyaya told me, when I woke.”

“Yes. What were you looking at, out there?”

She looked at him, then she beckoned him to join her by the
window. She turned her back while he pulled on his jeans. He walked over to
her. It seemed a long walk, for such a small room.

He could not tell her age. Her skin was unlined, her eyes
were dark, her lashes were long, her hair was to her waist and white. The
moonlight drained colors into ghosts of themselves. She was taller than either
of her sisters.

She pointed up into the night sky. “I was looking at that,”
she said, pointing to the Big Dipper. “See?”

“Ursa Major,” he said. “The Great Bear.”

“That is one way of looking at it,” she said. “But it is not
the way from where I come from. I am going to sit on the roof. Would you like
to come with me?”

She lifted the window and clambered, barefoot, out onto the
fire escape. A freezing wind blew through the window. Something was bothering
Shadow, but he did not know what it was; he hesitated, then pulled on his
sweater, stocks, and shoes and followed her out onto the rusting fire escape.
She was waiting for him. His breath steamed in the chilly air. He watched her
bare feet pad up the icy metal steps, and followed her up to the roof.

The wind gusted cold, flattening her nightgown against her
body, and Shadow became uncomfortably aware that Zorya Polunochnaya was wearing
nothing at all underneath.

“You don’t mind the cold?” he said, as they reached the top
of the fire escape, and the wind whipped his words away.

“Sorry?”

She bent her face close to his. Her breath was sweet.

“I said, doesn’t the cold bother you?”

In reply, she held up a finger: wait. She stepped, lightly,
over the side of the building and onto the flat roof. Shadow stepped over a
little more clumsily, and followed her across the roof, to the shadow of the
water tower. There was a wooden bench waiting for them there, and she sat down
on it, and he sat down beside her. The water tower acted as a windbreak, for
which Shadow was grateful.

“No,” she said. “The cold does not bother me. This time is
my time: I could no more feel uncomfortable in the night than a fish could feel
uncomfortable in the deep water.”

“You must like the night,” said Shadow, wishing that he had
said something wiser, more profound.

“My sisters are of their times. Zorya Utrennyaya is of the
dawn. In the old country she would wake to open the gates, and let our father
drive his—uhm, I forget the word, like a car but with horses?”

“Chariot?’

“His chariot. Our father would ride it out. And Zorya Vechernyaya,
she would open the gates for him at dusk, when he returned to us.”

“And you?”

She paused. Her lips were full, but very pale, “I never saw
our father. I was asleep.”

“Is it a medical condition?”

She did not answer. The shrug, if she shrugged, was imperceptible.
“So. You wanted to know what I was looking at.”

‘The Big Dipper.”

She raised an arm to point to it, and the wind flattened her
nightgown against her body. Her nipples, every goose-bump on the areolae, were
visible momentarily, dark against the white cotton. Shadow shivered.

“Odin’s Wain, they call it. And the Great Bear. Where we
come from, we believe that is a, a thing, a, not a god, but like a god, a bad
thing, chained up in those stars. If it escapes, it will eat the whole of
everything. And there are three sisters who must watch the sky, all the day,
all the night. If he escapes, the thing in the stars, the world is over. Pf!,
like that.”

“And people believe that?”

“They did. A long time ago.”

“And you were looking to see if you could see the monster in
the stars?”

“Something like that. Yes.”

He smiled. If it were not for the cold, he decided, he would
have thought he was dreaming. Everything felt so much like a dream.

“Can I ask how old you are? Your sisters seem so much older.”

She nodded her head. “I am the youngest. Zorya Utrennyaya
was born in the morning, and Zorya Vechernyaya was born in the evening, and I
was born at midnight. I am the midnight sister: Zorya Polunochnaya. Are you
married?”

“My wife is dead. She died last week in a car accident. It
was her funeral yesterday.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“She came to see me last night.” It was not hard to say, in
the darkness and the moonlight; it was not as unthinkable as it was by
daylight.

“Did you ask her what she wanted?”

“No. Not really.”

“Perhaps you should. It is the wisest thing to ask the dead.
Sometimes they will tell you. Zorya Vechernyaya tells me that you played
checkers with Czernobog.”

“Yes. He won the right to knock in my skull with a sledge.”

“In the old days, they would take people up to the top of
the mountains. To the high places. They would smash the back of their skulls
with a rock. For Czernobog.”

Shadow glanced about. No, they were alone on the roof.

Zorya Polunochnaya laughed. “Silly, he is not here. And you
won a game also. He may not strike his blow until this is all over. He said he
would not. And you will know. Like the cows he killed. They always know, first.
Otherwise, what is the point?”

“I feel,” Shadow told her, “like I’m in a world with its own
sense of logic. Its own rules. Like when you’re in a dream, and you know there
are rules you mustn’t break. Even if you don’t know what they mean. I’m just
going along with it, you know?”

“I know,” she said. She held his hand, with a hand that was
icy cold. “You were given protection once. You were given the sun itself. But
you lost it already. You gave it away. All I can give you is much weaker
protection. The daughter, not the father. But all helps. Yes?” Her white hair
blew about her face in the chilly wind.

“Do I have to fight you? Or play checkers?” he asked.

“You do not even have to kiss me,” she told him. “Just take
the moon from me.”

“How?”

“Take the moon.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Watch,” said Zorya Polunochnaya. She raised her left hand
and held it in front of the moon, so that her forefinger and thumb seemed to be
grasping it. Then, in one smooth movement, she plucked at it. For a moment, it
looked like she had taken the moon from the sky, but then Shadow saw that the
moon shone still, and Zorya Polunochnaya opened her hand to display a silver
Liberty-head dollar resting between finger and thumb.

“That was beautifully done,” said Shadow. “I didn’t see you
palm it. And I don’t know how you did that last bit.”

“I did not palm it,” she said. “I took it. And now I give it
to you, to keep safe. Here. Don’t give this one away.”

She placed it in his right hand and closed his fingers
around it. The coin was cold in his hand. Zorya Polunochnaya leaned forward,
and closed his eyes with her fingers, and kissed him, lightly, once upon each
eyelid.

Shadow awoke on the sofa, fully dressed. A narrow shaft of
sunlight streamed in through the window, making the dust motes dance.

He got out of bed, and walked over to the window. The room
seemed much smaller in the daylight.

The thing that had been troubling him since last night came into
focus as he looked out and down and across the street. There was no fire escape
outside this window: no balcony, no rusting metal steps.

Still, held tight in the palm of his hand, bright and shiny
as the day it had been minted, was a 1922 Liberty-head silver dollar.

“Oh. You’re up,” said Wednesday, putting his head around the
door. “That’s good. You want coffee? We’re going to rob a bank.”

The important thing to understand about American history,
wrote Mr. Ibis, in his leather-bound journal, is that it is fictional, a
charcoal-sketched simplicity for the children, or the easily bored. For the
most part it is uninspected, unimagined, unthought, a representation of the
thing, and not the thing itself. It is a fine fiction, he continued, pausing
for a moment to dip his pen in the inkwell and collect his thoughts, that
America was founded by pilgrims, seeking the freedom to believe as they wished,
that they came to the Americas, spread and bred and filled the empty land.

In truth, the American colonies were as much a dumping
ground as an escape, a forgetting place. In the days where you could be hanged
in London from Tyburn’s triple-crowned tree for the theft of twelve pennies,
the Americas became a symbol of clemency, of a second chance. But the
conditions of transportation were such that, for some, it was easier to take
the leap from the leafless and dance on nothing until the dancing was done.
Transportation, it was called: for five years, for ten years, for life. That
was the sentence.

You were sold to a captain, and would ride in his ship,
crowded tight as a slaver’s, to the colonies or to the West Indies; off the
boat the captain would sell you on as an indentured servant to one who would
take the cost of your skin out in your labor until the years of your indenture
were done. But at least you were not waiting to hang in an English prison (for
in those days prisons were places where you stayed until you were freed,
transported, or hanged: you were not sentenced there for a term), and you were
free to make the best of your new world. You were also free to bribe a sea
captain to return you to England before the terms of your transportation were
over and done. People did. And if the authorities caught you returning from
transportation—if an old enemy, or an old friend with a score to settle, saw
you and peached on you—then you were hanged without a blink.

I am reminded, he continued, after a short pause, during
which he refilled the inkwell on his desk from the bottle of umber ink from the
closet and dipped his pen once more, of the life of Essie Tregowan, who came
from a chilly little cliff-top village in Cornwall, in the southwest of
England, where her family had lived from time out of mind. Her father was a
fisherman, and it was rumored that he was one of the wreckers—those who would
hang their lamps high on the dangerous cliffs when the storm winds raged,
luring ships onto the rocks, for the goods on shipboard. Essie’s mother was in
service as a cook at the squire’s house, and at the age of twelve Essie began
to work there, in the scullery. She was a thin little thing, with wide brown
eyes and dark brown hair; and she was not a hard worker but was forever
slipping off and away to listen to stories and tales, if there was anyone who
would tell them: tales of the piskies and the spriggans, of the black dogs of
the moors and the seal-women of the Channel. And, though the squire laughed at
such things, the kitchen-folk always put oyjt a china saucer of the creamiest
milk at night, put it outside the kitchen door, for the piskies.