American Gods (71 page)

He breathed deep gasps of air, stretched flat out on the
creaking ice, and even that would not hold for long, he knew, but it was no
good. His thoughts were coming with difficulty, syrupy-slow.

“Just leave me,” he tried to say. “I’ll be fine.” His words
were a slur, and everything was drawing to a halt.

He just needed to rest for a moment, that was all, just
rest, and then he would get up and move on, Obviously he could not just lie
there forever.

There was a jerk; water splashed his face. His head was
lifted up. Shadow felt himself being hauled across the ice, sliding on his back
across the slick surface, and he wanted to protest, to explain that he just
needed a little rest—maybe a little sleep, was that asking for so much?—and he
would be just fine. If they just left him alone.

He did not believe that he had fallen asleep, but he was
standing on a vast plain, and there was a man there with the head and shoulders
of a buffalo, and a woman with the head of an enormous condor, and there was
Whiskey Jack standing between them, looking at him sadly, shaking his head.

Whiskey Jack turned and walked slowly away from Shadow. The
buffalo man walked away beside him. The thunderbird woman also walked, and then
she ducked and kicked and she was gliding out into the skies.

Shadow felt a sense of loss. He wanted to call to them, to
plead with them to come back, not to give up on him, but everything was
becoming formless and without shape: they were gone, and the plains were fading,
and everything became void.

The pain was intense: it was as if every cell in his body,
every nerve, was melting and waking and advertising its presence by burning him
and hurting him.

There was a hand at the back of his head, gripping it by the
hair, and another hand beneath his chin. He opened his eyes, expecting to find
himself in some kind of hospital.

His feet were bare. He was wearing jeans. He was naked from
the waist up. There was steam in the air. He could see a shaving mirror on the
wall facing him, and a small basin, and a blue toothbrush in a
toothpaste-stained glass.

Information was processed slowly, one datum at a time.

His fingers burned. His toes burned.

He began to whimper from the pain.

“Easy now, Mike. Easy there,” said a voice he knew.

“What?” he said, or tried to say. “What’s happening?” It
sounded strained and strange to his ears.

He was in a bathtub. The water was hot. He thought the water
was hot, although he could not be certain. The water was up to his neck.

“Dumbest thing you can do with a fellow freezing to death is
to put him in front of a fire. The second dumbest thing you can do is to wrap
him in blankets—especially if he’s in cold wet clothes already. Blankets
insulate him—keep the cold in. The third dumbest thing—and this is my private
opinion—is to take the fellow’s blood out, warm it up and put it back. That’s
what doctors do these days. Complicated, expensive. Dumb.” The voice was coming
from above and behind his head.

“The smartest, quickest thing you can do is what sailors
have done to men overboard for hundreds of years. You put the fellow in hot
water. Not too hot. Just hot. Now, just so you know, you were basically dead
when I found you on the ice back there. How are you feeling now, Houdini?”

“It hurts,” said Shadow. “Everything hurts. You saved my
life.”

“I guess maybe I did, at that. Can you hold your head up on
your own now?”

“Maybe.”

“I’m going to let you go. If you start sinking below the
water I’ll pull you back up again.”

The hands released their grip on his head.

He felt himself sliding forward in the tub. He put out his
hands, pressed them against the sides of the tub, and leaned back. The bathroom
was small. The tub was metal, and the enamel was stained and scratched.

An old man moved into his field of vision. He looked concerned.

“Feeling better?” asked Hinzelmann. “You just lay back and
relax. I’ve got the den nice and warm. You tell me when you’re ready, I got a
robe you can wear, an«H can throw your jeans into the dryer with the rest of
your clothes. Sound good, Mike?”

“That’s not my name.”

“If you say so.” The old man’s goblin face twisted into an expression
of discomfort.

Shadow had no real sense of time: he lay in the bathtub
until the burning stopped and his toes and fingers flexed without real discomfort.
Hinzelmann helped Shadow to his feet and let out the warm water. Shadow sat on
the side of the bathtub and together they pulled off his jeans.

He squeezed, without much difficulty, into a terrycloth robe
too small for him, and, leaning on the old man, he went into the den and
flopped down on an ancient sofa. He was tired and weak: deeply fatigued, but
alive. A log fire burned in the fireplace. A handful of surprised-looking deer
heads peered down dustily from around the walls, where they jostled for space
with several large varnished fish.

Hinzelmann went away with Shadow’s jeans, and from the room
next door Shadow could hear a brief pause in the rattle of a clothes dryer
before it resumed. The old man returned with a steaming mug.

“It’s coffee,” he said, “which is a stimulant. And I
splashed a little schnapps into it. Just a little. That’s what we always did in
the old days. A doctor wouldn’t recommend it.”

Shadow took the coffee with both hands. On the side of the
mug was a picture of a mosquito and the message, GIVE BLOOD—VISIT WISCONSIN!!

“Thanks,” he said.

“It’s what friends are for,” said Hinzelmann. “One day, you
can save my life. For now, forget about it.”

Shadow sipped the coffee. “I thought I was dead.”

“You were lucky. I was up on the bridge—I’d pretty much figured
that today was going to be the big day, you get a feel for it, when you get to
my age—so I was up there with my old pocket watch, and I saw you heading out
onto the lake. I shouted, but I sure as heck don’t think you coulda heard me. I
saw the car go down, and I saw you go down with it, and I thought I’d lost you,
so I went out onto the ice. Gave me the heebie-jeebies. You must have been
under the water for the best part of two minutes. Then I saw your hand come up
through the place where the car went down—it was like seeing a ghost, seeing
you there ...” He trailed off. “We were both damn lucky that the ice took our
weight as I dragged you back to the shore.”

Shadow nodded.

“You did a good thing,” he told Hinzelmann, and the old man beamed
all over his goblin face.

Somewhere in the house, Shadow heard a door close. He sipped
at his coffee. Now that he was able to think clearly, he was starting to ask
himself questions.

He wondered how an old man, a man half his height and perhaps
a third his weight, had been able to drag him, unconscious, across the ice, or
get him up the bank to a car. He wondered how Hinzelmann had gotten Shadow into
the house and the bathtub.

Hinzelmann walked over to the fire, picked up the tongs and
placed a thin log, carefully, onto the blazing fire.

“Do you want to know what I was doing out on the ice?”

Hinzelmann shrugged. “None of my business,”

“You know what I don’t understand ...” said Shadow. He hesitated,
putting his thoughts in order. “I don’t understand why you saved my life.”

“Well,” said Hinzelmann, “the way I was brought up, if you
see another fellow in trouble—”

“No,” said Shadow. “That’s not what I mean. I mean, you
killed all those kids. Every winter. I was the only one to have figured it out.
You must have seen me open the trunk. Why didn’t you just let me drown?”

Hinzelmann tipped his head on one side. He scratched his
nose, thoughtfully, rocked back and forth as if he were thinking. “Well,” he
said. “That’s a good question. I guess it’s because I owed a certain party a
debt. And I’m good for my debts.”

“Wednesday?”

“That’s the fellow.”

“There was a reason he hid me in Lakeside, wasn’t there?
There was a reason nobody should have been able to find me here.”

Hinzelmann said nothing. He unhooked a heavy black poker
from its place on the wall, and he prpdded at the fire with it, sending up a
cloud of orange sparks and smoke. “This is my home,” he said, petulantly. “It’s
a good town.”

Shadow finished his coffee. He put the cup down on the floor.
The effort was exhausting. “How long have you been here?”

“Long enough.”

“And you made the lake?”

Hinzelmann peered at him, surprised. “Yes,” he said. “I made
the lake. They were calling it a lake when I got here, but it weren’t nothing
more than a spring and a mill pond and a creek.” He paused. “I figured that
this country is hell on my kind of folk. It eats us. I didn’t want to be eaten.
So I made a deal. I gave them a lake, and I gave them prosperity ...”

“And all it cost them was one child every winter.”

“Good kids,” said Hinzelmann, shaking his old head, slowly. “They
were all good kids. I’d only pick ones I liked. Except for Charlie Nelligan. He
was a bad seed, that one. He was, what, 1924? 1925? Yeah. That was the deal.”

“The people of the town,” said Shadow. “Mabel. Marguerite.
Chad Mulligan. Do they knowT

Hinzelmann said nothing. He pulled the poker from the fire:
the first six inches at the tip glowed a dull orange. Shadow knew that the
handle of the poker must be too hot to hold, but it did not seem to bother
Hinzelmann, and he prodded the fire again. He put the poker back into the fire,
tip first, and left it there. Then he said, “They know that they live in a good
place. While every other town and city in this county, heck, in this part of
the state, is crumbling into nothing. They know that.”

“And that’s your doing?”

“This town,” said Hinzelmann. “I care for it. Nothing
happens here that I don’t want to happen. You understand that? Nobody comes
here that I don’t want to come here. That was why your father sent you here. He
didn’t want you out there in the world, attracting attention. That’s all.”

“And you betrayed him.”

“I did no such thing. He was a crook. But I always pay my
debts.”

“I don’t believe you,” said Shadow.

Hinzelmann looked offended. One hand tugged at the clump of
white hair at his temple. “I keep my word.”

“No. You don’t. Laura came here. She said something was calling
her here. And what about the coincidence that brought Sam Black Crow and Audrey
Burton here, on the same night? I guess I don’t believe in coincidence anymore.

“Sam Black Crow and Audrey Burton. Two people who both knew
who I really was, and that there were people out there looking for me. I guess
if one of them failed, there was always the other. And if all of them had
failed, who else was on their way to Lakeside, Hinzelmann? My old prison
warden, up here for a weekend’s ice fishing? Laura’s mother?” Shadow realized
that he was angry. “You wanted me but of your town. You just didn’t want to
have to tell Wednesday that was what you were doing.”

In the firelight, Hinzelmann seemed more like a gargoyle
than an imp. ‘This is a good town,” he said. Without his smile he looked waxen
and corpselike. “You could have attracted too much attention. Not good for the
town.”

“You should have left me back there qp me ice,” said Shadow.
“You should have left me in the lake. I opened the trunk of the klunker. Right
now Alison-is still iced into the trunk. But the ice will melt, and her body’ll
float out and up to the surface. And then they’ll go down and look and see what
else they can find down there. Find your whole stash of kids. I guess some of
those bodies are pretty well preserved.”

Hinzelmann reached down and picked up the poker. He made no
pretense of stirring the fire with it any longer; he held it like a sword, or a
baton, the glowing orange-white tip of it waving in the air. It smoked. Shadow
was very aware that he was next-to-naked, and he was still tired, and clumsy,
and far from able to defend himself.

“You want to kill me?” said Shadow. “Go ahead. Do it. I’m a
dead man anyway. I know you own this town—it’s your little world. But if you
think no one’s going to come looking for me, you’re living in a dream-world. It’s
over, Hinzelmann. One way or another, it’s done.”

Hinzelmann pushed himself to his feet, using the poker as a
walking stick. The carpet charred and smoked where he rested the red-hot tip,
as he got up. He looked at Shallow and there were tears in his pale blue eyes. “I
love this town,” he said. “I really like being a cranky old man, and telling my
stories and driving Tessie and ice-fishing. Remember what I told you? It’s not
the fish you bring home from a day’s fishing. It’s the peace of mind.”

He extended the tip of the poker in Shadow’s direction:
Shadow could feel the heat of it from a foot away.

“I could kill you,” said Hinzelmann, “I could fix it. I’ve
done it before. You’re not the first to figure it out. Chad Mulligan’s father,
he figured it out. I fixed him, and I can fix you.”

“Maybe,” said Shadow. “But for how long, Hinzelmann? Another
year? Another decade? They have computers now, Hinzelmann. They aren’t stupid.
They pick up on patterns. Every year a kid’s going to vanish. Sooner or later
they’ll come sniffing about here. Just like they’ll come looking for me. Tell me—how
old are you?” He curled his fingers around a sofa cushion, and prepared to pull
it over his head: it would deflect a first blow.

Hinzelmann’s face was expressionless. “They were giving
their children to me before the Romans came to the Black Forest,” he said. “I
was a god before ever I was a kobold.”

“Maybe it’s time to move on,” said Shadow. He wondered what
a kobold was.

Hinzelmann stared at him. Then he took the poker, and pushed
the tip of it back into the burning embers. “It’s not that simple. What makes
you think I can leave this town, even if I want to, Shadow? I’m part of this
town. You going to make me go, Shadow? You ready to kill me? So I can leave?”