American Gods (19 page)

“If you ask me, he wants a last stand. He wants us to go out
in a blaze of glory. That’s what he wants. And we are old enough, or stupid
enough, that maybe some of us will say yes.”

“It’s not my job to ask questions, Mama-ji,” said Shadow.
The inside of the car filled with her tinkling laughter.

The man in the backseat—not the peculiar-looking young man,
the other one—said something, and Shadow replied to him, but a moment later he
was damned if he could remember what had been said.

The peculiar-looking young man had said nothing, but now he
started to hum to himself, a deep, melodic bass humming that made the interior
of the car vibrate and rattle and buzz.

The peculiar-looking man was of average height, but of an
odd shape: Shadow had heard of men who were barrel-chested before, but had no
image to accompany the metaphor. This man was barrel-chested, and he had legs
like, yes, like tree trunks, and hands like, exactly, ham hocks. He wore a
black parka with a hood, several sweaters, thick dungarees, and, incongruously,
in the winter and with those clothes, a pair of white tennis shoes, which were
the same size and shape as shoeboxes. His fingers resembled sausages, with
flat, squared-off fingertips.

“That’s some hum you got,” said Shadow from the driver’s
seat.

“Sorry,” said the peculiar young man, in a deep, deep voice,
embarrassed. He stopped humming.

“No, I enjoyed it,” said Shadow. “Don’t stop.”

The peculiar young man hesitated, then commenced to hum once
more, his voice as deep and reverberant as before. This time there were words
interspersed in the humming. “Down down down,” he sang, so deeply that the
windows rattled. “Down down down, down down, down down.”

Christmas lights were draped across the eaves of every house
and building that they drove past. They ranged from discreet golden lights that
dripped twinkles to giant displays of snowmen and teddy bears and multicolored
stars.

Shadow pulled up at the restaurant, a big, barnlike
structure, and he let his passengers off by the front door. He drove the car to
the back of the parking lot. He wanted to make the short walk back to the
restaurant alone, in the cold, to clear his head.

He parked the car beside a black truck. He wondered if it
was the same one that had sped past him earlier. He closed the car door, and
stood there in the parking lot, his breath steaming.

Inside the restaurant, Shadow could imagine Wednesday already
sitting all his guests down around a big table, working the room. Shadow
wondered whether he had really had Kali in the front of his car, wondered what
he had been driving in the back ...

“Hey bud, you got a match?” said a voice that was half familiar,
and Shadow turned to apologize and say no, he didn’t, but the gun barrel hit
him over the left eye, and he started to fall. He put out an arm to steady
himself as he went down. Someone pushed something soft into his mouth, to stop
him from crying out, and taped it into position: easy, practiced moves, like a
butcher gutting a chicken.

Shadow tried to shout, to warn Wednesday, to warn them all,
but nothing came out of his mouth but a muffled noise.

“The quarry are all inside,” said the half-familiar voice. “Everyone
in position?” A crackle of a voice, half audible through a radio. “Let’s move
in and round them all up.”

“What about the big guy?” said another voice.

“Package him up, take him out,” said the first voice.

They put a baglike hood over Shadow’s head, and bound his
wrists and ankles with tape, and put him in the back of a truck, and drove him
away.

There were no windows in the tiny room in which they had
locked Shadow. There was a plastic chair, a lightweight folding table, and a
bucket with a cover on it, which served Shadow as a makeshift toilet. There was
also a six-foot-long strip of yellow foam on the floor, and a thin blanket with
a long-since-crusted brown stain in the center: blood or shit or food, Shadow
didn’t know, and didn’t care to investigate. There was a naked bulb behind a
metal grille high in the room, but no light switch that Shadow had been able to
find. The light was always on. There was no door handle on his side of the
door.

He was hungry.

The first thing he had done, when the spooks had pushed him
into the room, after they’d ripped off the tape from his ankles and wrists and
mouth and left him alone, was to walk around the room and inspect it,
carefully. He tapped the walls. They sounded dully metallic. There was a small
ventilation grid at the top of the room. The door was soundly locked.

He was bleeding above the left eyebrow in a slow ooze. His
head ached.

The floor was uncarpeted. He tapped it. It was made of the
same metal as the walls. He took the top off the bucket, pissed in it, and
covered it once more. According to his watch only four hours had passed since
the raid on the restaurant.

His wallet was gone, but they had left him his coins.

He sat on the chair, at the card table. The table was
covered with a cigarette-burned green baize. Shadow practiced appearing to push
coins through the table. Then he took two quarters and made up a Pointless Coin
Trick.

He concealed a quarter in his right palm, and openly
displayed the other quarter in his left hand, between finger and thumb. Then he
appeared to take the quarter from his left hand, while actually letting it drop
back into his left hand. He opened his right hand to display the quarter that
had been there all along.

The thing about coin manipulation was that it took all
Shadow’s head to do it; or rather, he could not do it if he was angry or upset,
so the action of practicing an illusion, even one with, on its own, no possible
use—for he had expended an enormous amount of effort and skill to make it
appear that he had moved a quarter fronirpne hand to the other, something that
it takes no skill whatever to do for real—calmed him, cleared his mind of
tufmoil-and fear.

He began a trick even more pointless: a one-handed
half-dollar-to-penny transformation, but with his two quarters. Each of the
coins was alternately concealed $nd revealed as the trick progressed: he began
with one quafter visible, the other hidden. He raised his hand to his mouth and
blew on the visible coin, while slipping it into a classic palm, as the first
two fingers took the hidden quarter out and presented it. The effect was that
he displayed a quarter in his hand, raised it to his mouth, blew on it, and
lowered it again, displaying the same quarter all the while.

He did it over and over and over again.

He wondered if they were going to kill him, and his hand trembled,
just a little, and one of the quarters dropped from his fingertip onto the
stained green baize of the card table. And then, because he just couldn’t do it
anymore, he put the coins away, and took out the Liberty-head dollar that Zorya
Polunochnaya had given him, and held onto it tightly, and waited.

At three in the morning, by his watch, the spooks returned
to interrogate him. Two men in dark suits, with ciark hair and shiny black
shoes. Spooks. One was square-jawed, wide-shouldered, had great hair, looked
like he had played football in high school, badly bitten fingernails; the other
had a receding hairline, silver-rimmed round glasses, manicured nails. While
they looked nothing alike, Shadow found himself suspecting that on some level,
possibly cellular, the two men were identical. They stood on each side of the
card table, looking down at him.

“How long have you been working for Cargo, sir?” asked one.

“I don’t know what that is,” said Shadow.

“He calls himself Wednesday. Grimm. Olfather. Old guy. You’ve
been seen with him, sir.”

“I’ve been working for him for a couple of days.”

“Don’t lie to us, sir,” said the spook with the glasses.

“Okay,” said Shadow. “I won’t. But it’s still a couple of
days.”

The square-jawed spook reached down and twisted Shadow’s ear
between finger and thumb. He squeezed as he twisted. The pain was intense. “We
told you not to lie to us, sir,” he said, mildly. Then he let go.

Each of the spooks had a gun bulge under his jacket. Shadow
did not try to retaliate. He pretended he was back in prison. Do your own time,
thought Shadow. Don’t tell them anything they don’t know already. Don’t ask
questions.

“These are dangerous people you’re palling around with, sir,”
said the spook with glasses. “You will be doing your country a service by
turning state’s evidence.” He smiled, sympathetically: I’m the good cop, said
the smile.

“I see,” said Shadow.

“And if you don’t want to help us, sir,” said the
square-jawed spook, “you can see what we’re like when we’re not happy.” He hit
Shadow an openhanded blow across the stomach, knocking the breath from him. It
wasn’t torture, Shadow thought, just punctuation: I’m the bad cop. He retched.

“I would like to make you happy,” said Shadow, as soon as he
could speak.

“All we ask is your cooperation, sir.”

“Can I ask ...” gasped Shadow (don’t ask questions, he
thought, but it was too late, the words were already spoken), “can I ask who I’ll
be cooperating with?”

“You want us to tell you our names?” asked the square-jawed
spook. “You have to be out of your mind.”

“No, he’s got a point,” said the spook with glasses. “It may
make it easier for him to relate to us.” He looked at Shadow and smiled like a
man advertising toothpaste. “Hi. I’m Mister Stone, sir. My colleague is Mister
Wood.”

“Actually,” said Shadow, “I meant, what agency are you with?
CIA? FBI?”

Stone shook his head. “Gee. It’s not as” easy as that
anymore, sir. Things just aren’t that simple.” y

“The private sector,” said Wood, “the public sector. You
know. There’s a lot of interplay these days.”

“But I can assure you,” said Stone, with another smiley
smile, “we are the good guys. Are you hungry, sir?” He reached into a pocket of
his jacket, pulled out a Snickers bar. “Here. A gift.”

“Thanks,” said Shadow. He unwrapped the Snickers bar and ate
it.

“I guess you’d like something to drink with that. Coffee?
Beer?”

“Water, please,” said Shadow.

Stone walked to the door, knocked on it. He said something
to the guard on the other side of the door, who nodded and returned a minute
later with a polystyrene cup filled with cold water.

“CIA,” said Wood. He shook his head, ruefully. “Those bozos.
Hey, Stone. I heard a new CIA joke. Okay: how can we be sure the CIA wasn’t
involved in the Kennedy assassination?”

“I don’t know,” said Stone. “How can we be sure?”

“He’s dead, isn’t he?” said Wood.

They both laughed.

“Feeling better now, sir?” asked Stone.

“I guess.”

“So why don’t you tell us what happened this evening, sir?”

“We did some tourist stuff. Went to the House on the Rock.
Went out for some food. You know the rest.”

Stone sighed, heavily. Wood shook his head, as if disappointed,
and kicked Shadow in the kneecap. The pain was excruciating. Then Wood pushed a
fist slowly into Shadow’s back, just above the right kidney, and knuckled it,
hard, and the pain was worse than the pain in Shadow’s knee.

I’m bigger than either of them, he thought. / can take them.
But they were armed; and even if he—somehow—killed or subdued them both, he’d
still be locked in the cell with them. (But he’d have a gun. He’d have two
guns.) (No.)

Wood was keeping his hands away from Shadow’s face. No
marks. Nothing permanent: just fists and feet on his torso and knees. It hurt,
and Shadow clutched the Liberty dollar tight in the palm of his hand, and
waited for it to be over.

And after far too long a time the beating ended.

“We’ll see you in a couple of hours, sir,” said Stone.

“You know, Woody really hated to have to do that. We’re reasonable
men. Like I said, we are the good guys. You’re on the wrong side. Meantime, why
don’t you try to get a little sleep?”

“You better start taking us seriously,” said Wood.

“Woody’s got a point there, sir,” said Stone. “Think about
it.”

The door slammed closed behind them. Shadow wondered if they
would turn out the light, but they didn’t, and it blazed into the room like a
cold eye. Shadow crawled across the floor to the yellow foam-rubber pad and
climbed onto it, pulling the thin blanket over himself, and he closed his eyes,
and he held onto nothing, and he held onto dreams.

Time passed.

He was fifteen again, and his mother was dying, and she was
trying to tell him something very important, and he couldn’t understand her. He
moved in his sleep and a shaft of pain moved him from half-sleep to
half-waking, and he winced.

Shadow shivered under the thin blanket. His right arm covered
his eyes, blocking out the h’ghrof the bulb. He wondered whether Wednesday and
the others were still at liberty, if they were even still alive. He hoped that
they were.

The silver dollar remained cold in his left hand. He could
feel it there, as it had been during the beating. He wondered idly why it did
not warm to his body temperature. Half asleep, now, and half delirious, the
coin, and the idea of Liberty, and the moon, and Zorya Polunochnaya somehow
became intertwined in one woven beam of silver light that shone from the depths
to the heavens, and he rode the silver beam up and away from the pain and the
heartache and the fear, away from the pain and, blessedly, back into dreams.

From far away he could hear some kind of noise, but it was
too late to think about it: he belonged to sleep now. A half-thought: he hoped
it was not people coining to wake him up, to hit him or to shout at him. And
then, he noticed with pleasure, he was really asleep, and no longer cold.

Somebody somewhere was calling for help, loudly, in his
dream or out of it.