American Gods (62 page)

—Lord Carlisle, to George Selwyn, 1778

The most important place in the southeastern United States
is advertised on hundreds of aging barn roofs across Georgia and Tennessee and
up into Kentucky. On a-winding road through a forest a driver will pass a
rotting red barn, and see, painted on its roof,

SEE ROCK CITY

THE EIGHTH WONDER OF THE WORLD

and on the roof of a tumbledown milking shed nearby, painted
in white block letters,

SEE SEVEN STATES FROM ROCK CITY THE WORLD’S WONDER.

The driver is led by this to believe that Rock City is
surely just around the nearest corner, instead of being a day’s drive

.,, away, on Lookout Mountain, a hair over the state line,
in Georgia, just southwest of Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Lookout Mountain is not much of a mountain. It resembles an
impossibly high and commanding hill. The Chicka-mauga, a branch of the
Cherokee, lived there when the white men came; they called the mountain
Chattotqnoogee, which has been translated as the mountain that rises to a
point.

In the 1830s Andrew Jackson’s Indian Relocation Act exiled
them from their land—all the Choctaw and Chicka-mauga and Cherokee and
Chickasaw—and U.S. troops forced every one of them they could catch to walk
over a thousand miles to the new Indian Territories in what would one day be
Oklahoma, down the trail of tears: an act of casual genocide. Thousands of men,
women, and children died on the way. When you’ve won, you’ve won, and nobody
can argue with that.

For whoever controlled Lookout Mountain controlled the land;
that was the legend. It was a sacred site, after all, and it was a high place.
In the Civil War, the War Between the States, there was a battle there: the
Battle Above the Clouds, that was the first day’s fighting, and then the Union
forces did the impossible and, without orders, swept up Missionary Ridge and
took it. The North took Lookout Mountain and the North took the war.

There are tunnels and caves, some very old, beneath Lookout
Mountain. For the most part they are blocked off now, although a local
businessman excavated an underground waterfall, which he called Ruby Falls. It
can be reached by elevator. It’s a tourist attraction, although the biggest
tourist attraction of all is at the top of Lookout Mountain. That is Rock City.

Rock City begins as an ornamental garden on a mountainside:
its visitors walk a path that takes them through rocks, over rocks, between
rocks. They throw corn into a deer enclosure, cross a hanging bridge and peer
out through a quarter-a-throw binoculars at a view that promises mem seven
states on the rare sunny days when the air is perfectly clear. And from mere,
like a drop into some strange hell, the path takes the visitors, millions upon
millions of them every year, down into caverns, where they stare at back-lit
dolls arranged into nursery-rhyme and fairy-tale dioramas. When they leave,
they leave bemused, uncertain of why they came, of what they have seen, of
whether they had a good time or not.

They came to Lookout Mountain from all across the United
States. They were not tourists. They came by car and they came by plane and by
bus and by railroad and on foot. Some of mem flew—they flew low, and they flew
only in the dark of the night. Several of them traveled their own ways beneath
the earth. Many of them hitchhiked, cadging rides from nervous motorists or
from truck drivers. Those who had cars or trucks would see the ones who had not
walking beside the roads or at rest stations and in diners on the way, and,
recognizing them for what they were, would offer them rides.

They arrived dust-stained and weary at the foot-of Lookout
Mountain. Looking up to the heights of the tree-covered slope they could see,
or imagine that they could see, the paths and gardens and waterfall of Rock
City.

They started arriving early in the mornfhg. A second wave of
them arrived at dusk. And for several days they simply kept coming.

A battered U-Haul truck pulled up, disgorging several
travel-weary vila and rusalka, their makeup smudged, runs in their stockings,
their expressions heavy-lidded and tired.

In a clump of trees at the bottom of the hill, an elderly
wampyr offered a Marlboro to a naked apelike creature covered with a tangle of
orange fur. It accepted graciously, and they smoked in silence, side by side.

A Toyota Previa pulled over by the side of the road, and seven
Chinese men and women got out of it. They looked, above all, clean, and they
wore the kind of dark suits that, in some countries, are worn by minor
government officials. One of them carried a clipboard, and he checked the
inventory as they unloaded large golf bags from the back of the car: the bags
contained ornate swords with lacquer handles, and carved sticks, and mirrors.
The weapons were distributed, checked off, signed for.

A once-famous comedian, believed to have died in the 1920s,
climbed out of his rusting car and proceeded to remove his clothing: his legs
were goat legs, and his tail was short and goatish.

Four Mexicans arrived, all smiles, their hair black and very
shiny: they passed among themselves a bottle that they kept out of sight in a
brown paper bag, its contents a bitter mixture of powdered chocolate, liquor,
and blood.

A small, dark-bearded man with a dusty black derby on his
head, curling payess at his temples, and a ragged fringed prayer shawl came to
them walking across the fields. He was several feet in front of his companion,
who was twice his height and was the blank gray color of good Polish clay: the
word inscribed on his forehead meant truth.

They kept coming. A cab drew up and several Rak-shasas, the
demons of the Indian subcontinent, climbed out and milled around, staring at
the people at the bottom of the hill without speaking, until they found
Mama-ji, her eyes closed, her lips moving in prayer. She was the only thing
here that was familiar to them, but still, they hesitated to approach her,
remembering old battles. Her hands rubbed the necklace of skulls about her
neck. Her brown skin became slowly black, the glassy black of jet, of obsidian:
her lips curled and her long white teeth were very sharp. She opened all her
eyes, beckoned the Rakshasas to her, and greeted them as she would have greeted
her own children.

The storms of the last few days, to the north and the east, had
done nothing to ease the feeling of pressure and discomfort in the air. Local
weather forecasters had begun to warn of cells that might spawn tornados, of
high-pressure areas that did not move. It was warm by day there, but the nights
were cold.

They clumped together in informal companies, banding together
sometimes by nationality, by race, by temperament, even by species. They looked
apprehensive. They looked tired.

Some of them were talking. There was laughter, on occasion,
but it was muted and sporadic. Six-packs of beer were handed around.

Several local men and women came walking over the meadows,
their bodies moving in unfamiliar ways: their voices, when they spoke, were the
voices of the Loa who rode them: a tall black man spoke in the voice of Papa
Legba who opens the gates; while Baron Samedi, the voudon lord of death, had
taken over the body of a teenage goth girl from Chattanooga, possibly because
she possessed her own black silk top hat, which sat on her dark hair at a
jaunty angle. She spoke in the Baron’s own deep voice, smoked a cigar of enormous
size, and commanSed three of the Cede, the Loa of the dead. The Cede inhabited
the bodies of three middle-aged brothers. They carried shotguns and told jokes
of such astounding filthiness’fcat only they were willing to laugh at them,
which they did, raucously.

Two ageless Chickamauga women, in oil-stained blue jeans and
battered leather jackets, walked around, watching the people and the
preparations for battle. Sometimes they pointed and shook their heads. They did
not intend to take part in the coming conflict.

The moon swelled and rose in the east, a day away from full.
It seemed half as big as the sky, as it rose, a deep reddish-orange,
immediately above the hills. As it crossed the sky it seemed to shrink and pale
until it hung high in the sky like a lantern. There were so many of them
waiting there, in the moonlight, at the foot of Lookout Mountain.

Laura was thirsty.

Sometimes living people burned steadily in her mind like candles
and sometimes they flamed like torches. It made them easy to avoid, and it made
them easy, on occasion, to find. Shadow had burned so strangely, with his own
light, up on that tree. She had chided him once, when they had walked and held
hands, for not being alive. She had hoped, then, to see a spark of raw emotion.
To have seen anything.

She remembered walking beside him, wishing that he could
understand what she was trying to say.

But dying on the tree, Shadow had been utterly alive. She
had watched him as the life had faded, and he had been focused and real. And he
had asked her to stay with him, to stay the whole night. He had forgiven her
... perhaps he had forgiven her. It did not matter. He had changed; that was
all she knew.

Shadow had told her to go to the farmhouse, that they would
give her water to drink there. There were no lights burning in the farm
building, and she could feel nobody at home. But he had told her that they
would care for her. She pushed against the door of the farmhouse and it opened,
rusty hinges protesting the whole while.

Something moved in her left lung, something that pushed and
squirmed and made her cough.

She found herself in a narrow hallway, her way almost
blocked by a tall and dusty piano. The inside of the building smelled of old
damp. She squeezed past the piano, pushed open a door and found herself in a
dilapidated drawing room, filled with ramshackle furniture. An oil lamp burned
on the mantelpiece. There was a coal fire burning in the fireplace beneath it,
although she had neither seen nor smelled smoke outside the house. The coal fire
did nothing to lift the chill she felt in that room, although, Laura was
willing to concede, that might not be the fault of the room.

Death hurt Laura, although the hurt consisted mostly of
things that were not there: a parching thirst that drained every cell of her,
an absence of heat in her bones that was absolute. Sometimes she would catch
herself wondering whether the crisp and crackling flames of a pyre would warm
her, or the soft brown blanket of the earth; whether the cold sea would quench
her thirst ...

The room, she realized, was not empty.

Three women sat on, an elderly couch, as if they had come as
a matched set in some peculiar artistic exhibition. The couch was upholstered
in threadbare velvet, a faded brown that might, once, a hundred years ago, have
been a bright canary yellow. They followed her with their eyes as she entered
the room, and they said nothing.

Laura had not known they would be there.

Something wriggled and fell in her nasal cavity. Laura
fumbled in her sleeve for a tissue, and she blew her nose into it. She crumpled
the tissue and flung it and its contents onto the coals of the fire, watched it
crumple and blacken and become orange lace. She watched the maggois’shrivel and
brown and burn.

This done, she turned back to the women on the couch. They
had not moved since she had entered, not a muscle, not a hair. They stared at
her.

“Hello. Is this your farm?” she asked.

The largest of the women nodded. Her hands were very red,
and her expression was impassive.

“Shadow—that’s the guy hanging on the tree. He’s my husband—he
said I should tell you that he wants you to give me water.” Something large
shifted in her bowels. It squirmed, and then was still.

The smallest woman clambered off the couch. Her feet had not
previously reached the floor. She scurried from the room.

Laura could hear doors opening and closing, through the farmhouse.
Then, from outside, she could hear a series of loud creaks. Each was followed
by a splash of water.

Soon enough, the small woman returned. She was carrying a
brown earthenware jug of water. She put it down, carefully, on the table, and
retreated to the couch. She pulled herself up, with a wriggle and a shiver, and
was seated beside her sisters once again.

“Thank you.” Laura walked over to the table, looked around
for a cup or a glass, but there was nothing like that to be seen. She picked up
the jug. It was heavier than it looked. The water in it was perfectly clear.

She raised the jug to her lips and began to drink.

The water was colder than she had ever imagined liquid water
could be. It froze her tongue and her teeth and her gullet. Still, she drank,
unable to stop, feeling the water freezing its way into her stomach, her
bowels, her heart, her veins.

The water flowed into her. It was like liquid ice.

She realized that the jug was empty and, surprised, she put
it down on the table.

The women were observing her, dispassionately. Since her
death, Laura had not thought in metaphors: things were, or they were not. But
now, as she looked at the women on the sofa, she found herself thinking of
juries, of scientists observing a laboratory animal.

She shook, suddenly and convulsively. She reached out a hand
to the table to steady herself, but the table was slipping and lurching, and it
almost avoided her grasp. As she put her hand on the table she began to vomit.
She brought up bile and formalin, centipedes, and maggots. And then she felt
herself starting to void, and to piss: stuff was being pushed violently, wetly,
from her body. She would have screamed if she could; but then the dusty floorboards
came up to meet her so fast and so hard that, had she been breathing, they
would have knocked the breath from her body.

Time rushed over her and into her, swirling like a dust
devil. A thousand memories began to play at once: she was lost in a department
store the week before Christmas and her father was nowhere to be seen; and now
she was sitting in the bar at Chi-Chi’s, ordering a strawberry daiquiri and
checking out her blind date, the big, grave man-child, and wondering how he
kissed; and she was in the car as, sicken-ingly, it rolled and jolted, and
Robbie was screaming at her until the metal post finally stopped the car, but
not its contents, from moving ...