American Gods

by Neil Gaiman

In prison Shadow had learned there were two kinds of fights: don’t fuck with me fights, where you made it as showy and impressive as you could, and private fights, real fights, which were fast and hard and nasty, and always over in seconds.

  “Hey, Sweeney,” said Shadow, breathless, “why are we fighting?”

  “For the joy of it,” said Sweeney, sober now, or at least, no longer visibly drunk. “For the sheer unholy fucken delight of it. Can’t you feel the joy in your own veins, rising like the sap in the springtime?” His lip was bleeding. So was Shadow’s knuckle.

  “So how’d you do the coin production?” asked Shadow. He swayed back and twisted, took a blow on his shoulder intended for his face.

  “I told you how I did it when first we spoke,” grunted Sweeney. “But there’s none so blind—ow! Good one!—as those who will not listen.”

  Shadow jabbed at Sweeney, forcing him back into a table; empty glasses and ashtrays crashed to the floor. Shadow could have finished him off then.

  Shadow glanced at Wednesday, who nodded. Shadow looked down at Mad Sweeney. “Are we done?” he asked. Mad Sweeney hesitated, then nodded. Shadow let go of him, and took several steps backward. Sweeney, panting, pushed himself back up to a standing position.

  “Not on yer ass!” he shouted. “It ain’t over till I say it is!” Then he grinned, and threw himself forward, swinging at Shadow. He stepped onto a fallen ice cube, and his grin turned to openmouthed dismay as his feet went out from under him, and he fell backward. The back of his head hit the barroom floor with a definite thud.

  Shadow put his knee into Mad Sweeney’s chest. “For the second time, are we done fighting?” he asked.

  “We may as well be, at that,” said Sweeney, raising his head from the floor, “for the joy’s gone out of me now, like the pee from a small boy in a swimming pool on a hot day.” And he spat the blood from his mouth and closed his eyes and began to snore, in deep and magnificent snores.

  Somebody clapped Shadow on the back. Wednesday put a bottle of beer into his hand.

  It tasted better than mead.

  Shadow woke up stretched out in the back of a sedan. The morning sun was dazzling, and his head hurt. He sat up awkwardly, rubbing his eyes.

  Wednesday was driving. He was humming tunelessly as he drove. He had a paper cup of coffee in the cup holder. They were heading along an interstate highway. The passenger seat was empty.

  “How are you feeling, this fine morning?” asked Wednesday, without turning around.

  “What happened to my car?” asked Shadow. “It was a rental.”

  “Mad Sweeney took it back for you. It was part of the deal the two of you cut last night. After the fight.”

  Conversations from the night before began to jostle uncomfortably in Shadow’s head. “You got anymore of that coffee?”

  The big man reached beneath the passenger seat and passed back an unopened bottle of water. “Here. You’ll be dehydrated. This will help more than coffee, for the moment. We’ll stop at the next gas station and get you some breakfast. You’ll need to clean yourself up, too. You look like something the goat dragged in.”

  “Cat dragged in,” said Shadow.

  “Goat,” said Wednesday. “Huge rank stinking goat with big teeth.”

  Shadow unscrewed the top of the water and drank. Something clinked heavily in his jacket pocket. He put his hand into the pocket and pulled out a coin the size of a half-dollar. It was heavy, and a deep yellow in color.

  In the gas station Shadow bought a Clean-U-Up Kit, which contained a razor, a packet of shaving cream, a comb, and a disposable toothbrush packed with a tiny tube of toothpaste. Then he walked into the men’s rest room and looked at himself in the mirror.

  He had a bruise under one eye—when he prodded it, experimentally, with one finger, he found it hurt deeply—and a swollen lower lip.

  Shadow washed his face with the rest room’s liquid soap, then he lathered his face and shaved. He cleaned his teeth. He wet his hair and combed it back. He still looked rough.

  He wondered what Laura would say when she saw him, and then he remembered that Laura wouldn’t say anything ever again and he saw his face, in the mirror, tremble, but only for a moment.

  He went out.

  “I look like shit,” said Shadow.

  “Of course you do,” agreed Wednesday.

  Wednesday took an assortment of snack food up to the cash register and paid for that and their gas, changing his mind twice about whether he was doing it with plastic or with cash, to the irritation of the gum-chewing young lady behind the till. Shadow watched as Wednesday became increasingly flustered and apologetic. He seemed very old, suddenly. The girl gave him his cash back, and put the purchase on the card, and then gave him the card receipt and took his cash, then returned the cash and took a different card. Wednesday was obviously on the verge of tears, an old man made helpless by the implacable plastic march of the modern world.

  They walked out of the warm gas station, and their breath steamed in the air.

  On the road once more: browning grass meadows slipped past on each side of them. The trees were leafless and dead. Two black birds stared at them from a telegraph wire.

  “Hey, Wednesday.”

  “What?”

  “The way I saw it in there, you never paid for the gas.”

  “Oh?”

  “The way I saw it, she wound up paying you for the privilege of having you in her gas station. You think she’s figured it out yet?”

  “She never will.”

  “So what are you? A two-bit con artist?”

  Wednesday nodded. “Yes,” he said. “I suppose I am. Among other things.”

  He swung out into the left lane to pass a truck. The sky was a bleak and uniform gray.

  “It’s going to snow,” said Shadow.

  “Yes.”

  “Sweeney. Did he actually show me how he did that trick with the gold coins?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “I can’t remember.”

  “It’ll come back. It was a long night.”

  Several small snowflakes brushed the windshield, melting in seconds.

  “Your wife’s body is on display at Wendell’s Funeral Parlor at present,” said Wednesday. “Then after lunch they will take her from there to the graveyard for the interment.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I called ahead while you were in the john. You know where Wendell’s Funeral Parlor is?”

  Shadow nodded. The snowflakes whirled and dizzied in front of them.

  “This is our exit,” said Shadow. The car stole off the interstate and past the cluster of motels to the north of Eagle Point.

  Three years had passed. Yes. There were more stoplights, unfamiliar storefronts. Shadow asked Wednesday to slow as they drove past the Muscle Farm. CLOSED INDEFINITELY, said the hand-lettered sign on the door, DUE TO BEREAVEMENT.

  Left on Main Street. Past a new tattoo parlor and the Armed Forces Recruitment Center, then the Burger King, and, familiar and unchanged, Olsen’s Drug Store, finally the yellow-brick facade of Wendell’s Funeral Parlor. A neon sign in the front window said HOUSE OF REST. Blank tombstones stood unchristened and uncarved in the window beneath the sign.

  Wednesday pulled up in the parking lot.

  “Do you want me to come in?” he asked.

  “Not particularly.”

  “Good.” The grin flashed, without humor. “There’s business I can be getting on with while you say your goodbyes. I’ll get rooms for us at the Motel America. Meet me there when you’re done.”

  Shadow got out of the car and watched it pull away. Then he walked in. The dimly lit corridor smelled of flowers and of furniture polish, with just the slightest tang of formaldehyde. At the far end was the Chapel of Rest.

  Shadow realized that he was palming the gold coin, moving it compulsively from a back palm to a front palm to a Downs palm, over and over. The weight was reassuring in his hand.

  His wife’s name was
on a sheet of paper beside the door at the far end of the corridor. He walked into the Chapel of Rest. Shadow knew most of the people in the room: Laura’s workmates, several of her friends.

  They all recognized him. He could see it in their faces. There were no smiles, though, no hellos.

  At the end of the room was a small dais, and, on it, a cream-colored casket with several displays of flowers arranged about it: scarlets and yellows and whites and deep, bloody purples. He took a step forward. He could see Laura’s body from where he was standing. He did not want to walk forward; he did not dare to walk away.

  A man in a dark suit—Shadow guessed he worked at the funeral home—said, “Sir? Would you like to sign the condolence and remembrance book?” and pointed him to a leather-bound book, open on a small lectern.

  He wrote SHADOW and the date in his precise handwriting, then, slowly, he wrote (PUPPY) beside it, putting off walking toward the end of the room where the people were, and the casket, and the thing in the cream casket that was no longer Laura.

  A small woman walked in through the door, and hesitated. Her hair was a coppery red, and her clothes were expensive and very black. Widow’s weeds, thought Shadow, who knew her well. Audrey Burton, Robbie’s wife.

  Audrey was holding a sprig of violets, wrapped at the base with silver foil. It was the kind of thing a child would make in June, thought Shadow. But violets were out of season.

  She walked across the room, to Laura’s casket. Shadow followed her.

  Laura lay with her eyes closed, and her arms folded across her chest. She wore a conservative blue suit he did not recognize. Her long brown hair was out of her eyes. It was his Laura and it was not: her repose, he realized, was what was unnatural. Laura was always such a restless sleeper.

  Audrey placed her sprig of summer violets on Laura’s chest. Then she worked her mouth for a moment and spat, hard, onto Laura’s dead face.

  The spit caught Laura on the cheek, and began to drip down toward her ear.

  Audrey was already walking toward the door. Shadow hurried after her.

  “Audrey?” he said.

  “Shadow? Did you escape? Or did they let you out?”

  He wondered if she were taking tranquilizers. Her voice was distant and detached.

  “Let me out yesterday. I’m a free man,” said Shadow. “What the hell was that all about?”

  She stopped in the dark corridor. “The violets? They were always her favorite flower. When we were girls we used to pick them together.”

  “Not the violets.”

  “Oh, that,” she said. She wiped a speck of something invisible from the corner of her mouth. “Well, I would have thought that was obvious.”

  “Not to me, Audrey.”

  “They didn’t tell you?” Her voice was calm, emotionless. “Your wife died with my husband’s cock in her mouth, Shadow.”

  He went back in to the funeral home. Someone had already wiped away the spit.

  After lunch—Shadow ate at the Burger King—was the burial. Laura’s cream-colored coffin was interred in the small nondenominational cemetery on the edge of town: unfenced, a hilly woodland meadow filled with black granite and white marble headstones.

  He rode to the cemetery in the Wendell’s hearse, with Laura’s mother. Mrs. McCabe seemed to feel that Laura’s death was Shadow’s fault. “If you’d been here,” she said, “this would never have happened. I don’t know why she married you. I told her. Time and again, I told her. But they don’t listen to their mothers, do they?” She stopped, looked more closely at Shadow’s face. “Have you been fighting?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Barbarian,” she said, then she set her mouth, raised her head so her chins quivered, and stared straight ahead of her.

  To Shadow’s surprise Audrey Burton was also at the funeral, standing toward the back. The short service ended, the casket was lowered into the cold ground. The people went away.

  Shadow did not leave. He stood there with his hands in his pockets, shivering, staring at the hole in the ground.

  Above him the sky was iron gray, featureless and flat as a mirror. It continued to snow, erratically, in ghostlike tumbling flakes.

  There was something he wanted to say to Laura, and he was prepared to wait until he knew what it was. The world slowly began to lose light and color. Shadow’s feet were going numb, while his hands and face hurt from the cold. He burrowed his hands into his pockets for warmth, and his fingers closed about the gold coin.

  He walked over to the grave.

  “This is for you,” he said.

  Several shovels of earth had been emptied onto the casket, but the hole was far from full. He threw the gold coin into the grave with Laura, then he pushed more earth into the hole, to hide the coin from acquisitive grave diggers. He brushed the earth from his hands and said, “Good night, Laura.” Then he said, “I’m sorry.” He turned his face toward the lights of the town, and began to walk back into Eagle Point.

  His motel was a good two miles away, but after spending three years in prison he was relishing the idea that he could simply walk and walk, forever if need be. He could keep walking north, and wind up in Alaska, or head south, to Mexico and beyond. He could walk to Patagonia, or to Tierra del Fuego.

  A car drew up beside him. The window hummed down.

  “You want a lift, Shadow?” asked Audrey Burton.

  “No,” he said. “And not from you.”

  He continued to walk. Audrey drove beside him at three miles an hour. Snowflakes danced in the beams of her headlights.

  “I thought she was my best friend,” said Audrey. “We’d talk every day. When Robbie and I had a fight, she’d be the first one to know—we’d go down to Chi-Chi’s for margaritas and to talk about what scumpots men can be. And all the time she was fucking him behind my back.”

  “Please go away, Audrey.”

  “I just want you to know I had good reason for what I did.”

  He said nothing.

  “Hey!” she shouted. “Hey! I’m talking to you!”

  Shadow turned. “Do you want me to tell you that you were right when you spit in Laura’s face? Do you want me to say it didn’t hurt? Or that what you told me made me hate her more than I miss her? It’s not going to happen, Audrey.”

  She drove beside him for another minute, not saying anything. Then she said, “So, how was prison, Shadow?”

  “It was fine,” said Shadow. “You would have felt right at home.”

  She put her foot down on the gas then, making the engine roar, and drove on and away.

  With the headlights gone, the world was dark. Twilight faded into night. Shadow kept expecting the act of walking to warm him, to spread warmth through his icy hands and feet. It didn’t happen.

  Back in prison, Low Key Lyesmith had once referred to the little prison cemetery out behind the infirmary as the Bone Orchard, and the image had taken root in Shadow’s mind. That night he had dreamed of an orchard under the moonlight, of skeletal white trees, their branches ending in bony hands, their roots going deep down into the graves. There was fruit that grew upon the trees in the bone orchard, in his dream, and there was something very disturbing about the fruit in the dream, but on waking he could no longer remember what strange fruit grew on the trees, nor why he found it so repellent.

  Cars passed him. Shadow wished that there was a sidewalk. He tripped on something that he could not see in the dark and sprawled into the ditch on the side of the road, his right hand sinking into several inches of cold mud. He climbed to his feet and wiped his hands on the leg of his pants. He stood there, awkwardly. He had only enough time to observe that there was someone beside him before something wet was forced over his nose and mouth, and he tasted harsh, chemical fumes.

  This time the ditch seemed warm and comforting.

  Shadow’s temples felt as if they had been reattached to the rest of his skull with roofing nails. His hands were bound behind his back with what felt like some kind of stra
ps. He was in a car, sitting on leather upholstery. For a moment he wondered if there was something wrong with his depth perception and then he understood that, no, the other seat really was that far away.

  There were people sitting beside him, but he could not turn to look at them.

  The fat young man at the other end of the stretch limo took a can of diet Coke from the cocktail bar and popped it open. He wore a long black coat, made of some silky material, and he appeared barely out of his teens: a spattering of acne glistened on one cheek. He smiled when he saw that Shadow was awake.

  “Hello, Shadow,” he said. “Don’t fuck with me.”

  “Okay,” said Shadow. “I won’t. Can you drop me off at the Motel America, up by the interstate?”

  “Hit him,” said the young man to the person on Shadow’s left. A punch was delivered to Shadow’s solar plexus, knocking the breath from him, doubling him over. He straightened up, slowly.

  “I said don’t fuck with me. That was fucking with me. Keep your answers short and to the point or I’ll fucking kill you. Or maybe I won’t kill you. Maybe I’ll have the children break every bone in your fucking body. There are two hundred and six of them. So don’t fuck with me.”

  “Got it,” said Shadow.

  The ceiling lights in the limo changed color from violet to blue then to green and to yellow.

  “You’re working for Wednesday,” said the young man.

  “Yes,” said Shadow.

  “What the fuck is he after? I mean, what’s he doing here? He must have a plan. What’s the game plan?”

  “I started working for Mister Wednesday this morning,” said Shadow. “I’m an errand boy.”

  “You’re saying you don’t know?”

  “I’m saying I don’t know.”

  The boy opened his jacket and took out a silver cigarette case from an inside pocket. He opened it, and offered a cigarette to Shadow. “Smoke?”

  Shadow thought about asking for his hands to be untied, but decided against it. “No, thank you,” he said.

  The cigarette appeared to have been hand-rolled, and when the boy lit it, with a matte black Zippo lighter, it smelled a little like burning electrical parts.