American Gods

by Neil Gaiman

  “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.”

  “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. I 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 light of 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 coming 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.

  Shadow rolled over on the foam rubber, in his sleep, finding new places that hurt as he rolled.

  Someone was shaking his shoulder.

  He wanted to ask them not to wake him, to let him sleep and leave him be, but it came out as a grunt.

  “Puppy?” said Laura. “You have to wake up. Please wake up, hon.”

  And there was a moment’s gentle relief. He had had such a strange dream, of prisons and con men and down-at-heel gods, and now Laura was waking him to tell him it was time for work, and perhaps there would be time enough before work to steal some coffee and a kiss, or more than a kiss; and he put out his hand to touch her.

  Her flesh was cold as ice, and sticky.

  Shadow opened his eyes.

  “Where did all the blood come from?” he asked.

  “Other people,” she said. “It’s not mine. I’m filled with formaldehyde, mixed with glycerin and lanolin.”

  “Which other people?” he asked.

  “The guards,” she said. “It’s okay. I killed them. You better move. I don’t think I gave anyone a chance to raise the alarm. Take a coat from out there, or you’ll freeze your butt off.”

  “You killed them?”

  She shrugged, and half smiled, awkwardly. Her hands looked as if she had been finger-painting, composing a picture that had been executed solely in crimsons, and there were splashes and spatters on her face and clothes (the same blue suit in which she had been buried) that made Shadow think of Jackson Pollock, because it was less problematic to think of Jackson Pollock than to accept the alternative.

  “It’s easier to kill people, when you’re dead yourself,” she told him. “I mean, it’s not such a big deal. You’re not so prejudiced anymore.”

  “It’s still a big deal to me,” said Shadow.

  “You want to stay here until the morning crew comes?” she said. “You can if you like. I thought you’d like to get out of here.”

  “They’ll think I did it,” he said, stupidly.

  “Maybe,” she said. “Put on a coat, hon. You’ll freeze.”

  He walked out into the corridor. At the end of the corridor was a guardroom. In the guardroom were four dead men: three guards, and the man who had called himself Stone. His friend was nowhere to be seen. From the blood-colored skid marks on the floor, two of them had been dragged into the guardroom and dropped onto the floor.

  His own coat was hanging from the coat rack. His wallet was still in the inside pocket, apparently untouched. Laura pulled open a couple of cardboard boxes filled with candy bars.

  The guards, now he could see them properly, were wearing dark camouflage uniforms, but there were no official tags on them, nothing to say who they were working for. They might have been weekend duck hunters, dressed for the shoot.

  Laura reached out her cold hand and squeezed Shadow’s hand in hers. She had the gold coin he had given her around her neck, on a golden chain.

  “That looks nice,” he said.

  “Thanks.” She smiled, prettily.

  “What about the others,” he asked. “Wednesday, and the rest of them? Where are they?” Laura passed him a handful of candy bars, and he filled his pockets with them.

  “There wasn’t anybody else here. A lot of empty cells, and one with you in it. Oh, and one of the men had gone into the cell down there to jack off with a magazine. He got such a shock.”

  “You killed him while he was jerking himself off?”

  She shrugged. “I guess,” she said, uncomfortably. “I was worried they were hurting you. Someone has to watch out for you, and I told you I would, didn’t I? Here, take these.” Th
ey were chemical hand and foot warmers: thin pads—you broke the seal and they heated up and stayed that way for hours. Shadow pocketed them.

  “Look out for me? Yes,” he said, “you did.”

  She reached out a finger, stroked him above his left eyebrow. “You’re hurt,” she said.

  “I’m okay,” he said.

  He opened a metal door in the wall. It swung open slowly. There was a four-foot drop to the ground, and he swung himself down to what felt like gravel. He picked up Laura by the waist, swung her down, as he used to swing her, easily, without a second thought. . . .

  The moon came out from behind a thick cloud. It was low on the horizon, ready to set, but the light it cast onto the snow was enough to see by.

  They had emerged from what turned out to be the black-painted metal car of a long freight train, parked or abandoned in a woodland siding. The series of wagon cars went on as far as he could see, into the trees and away. He had been on a train. He should have known.

  “How the hell did you find me here?” he asked his dead wife.

  She shook her head slowly, amused. “You shine like a beacon in a dark world,” she told him. “It wasn’t that hard. Now, just go. Go as far and as fast as you can. Don’t use your credit cards and you should be fine.”

  “Where should I go?”

  She pushed a hand through her matted hair, flicking it back out of her eyes. “The road’s that way,” she told him. “Do whatever you can. Steal a car if you have to. Go south.”

  “Laura,” he said, and hesitated. “Do you know what’s going on? Do you know who these people are? Who you killed?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “I think I do know.”

  “I owe you,” said Shadow. “I’d still be in there if it wasn’t for you. I don’t think they had anything good planned for me.”

  “No,” she said. “I don’t think they did.”

  They walked away from the empty train cars. Shadow wondered about the other trains he’d seen, blank windowless metal cars that went on for mile after mile, hooting their lonely way through the night. His fingers closed around the Liberty dollar in his pocket, and he remembered Zorya Polunochnaya, and the way she had looked at him in the moonlight. Did you ask her what she wanted? It is the wisest thing to ask the dead. Sometimes they will tell you.

  “Laura . . . What do you want?” he asked.

  “You really want to know?”

  “Yes. Please.”

  Laura looked up at him with dead blue eyes. “I want to be alive again,” she said. “Not in this half-life. I want to be really alive. I want to feel my heart pumping in my chest again. I want to feel blood moving through me—hot, and salty, and real. It’s weird, you don’t think you can feel it, the blood, but believe me, when it stops flowing, you’ll know.” She rubbed her eyes, smudging her face with red from the mess on her hands. “Look, it’s hard. You know why dead people only go out at night, puppy? Because it’s easier to pass for real, in the dark. And I don’t want to have to pass. I want to be alive.”

  “I don’t understand what you want me to do.”

  “Make it happen, hon. You’ll figure it out. I know you will.”

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ll try. And if I do figure it out, how do I find you?”

  But she was gone, and there was nothing left in the woodland but a gentle gray in the sky to show him where east was, and on the bitter December wind a lonely wail that might have been the cry of the last nightbird or the call of the first bird of dawn.

  Shadow set his face to the south, and he began to walk.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  As the Hindu gods are “immortal” only in a very particular sense—for they are born and they die—they experience most of the great human dilemmas and often seem to differ from mortals in a few trivial details . . . and from demons even less. Yet they are regarded by the Hindus as a class of beings by definition totally different from any other; they are symbols in a way that no human being, however “archetypal” his life story, can ever be. They are actors playing parts that are real only for us; they are the masks behind which we see our own faces.

  —Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty, Introduction, Hindu Myths (Penguin Books, 1975)

  Shadow had been walking south, or what he hoped was more or less south, for several hours, heading along a narrow and unmarked road through the woods somewhere in, he imagined, southern Wisconsin. A couple of jeeps came down the road toward him at one point, headlights blazing, and he ducked into the trees until they had passed. The early morning mist hung at waist level. The cars were black.

  When, thirty minutes later, he heard the noise of distant helicopters coming from the west, he struck out away from the timber trail and into the woods. There were two helicopters, and he lay crouched in a hollow beneath a fallen tree and listened to them pass over. As they moved away, he looked out and looked up for one hasty glance at the gray winter sky. He was satisfied to observe that the helicopters were painted a matte black. He waited beneath the tree until the noise of the helicopters was completely gone.

  Under the trees the snow was little more than a dusting, which crunched underfoot. He was deeply grateful for the chemical hand and feet warmers, which kept his extremities from freezing. Beyond that, he was numb: heart-numb, mind-numb, soul-numb. And the numbness, he realized, went a long way down, and a long way back.

  So what do I want? he asked himself. He couldn’t answer, so he just kept on walking, a step at a time, on and on through the woods. Trees looked familiar, moments of landscape were perfectly déjà-vued. Could he be walking in circles? Maybe he would just walk and walk and walk until the warmers and the candy bars ran out and then sit down and never get up again.

  He reached a large stream, of the kind the locals called a creek and pronounced crick, and decided to follow it. Streams led to rivers, rivers all led to the Mississippi, and if he kept walking, or stole a boat or built a raft, eventually he’d get to New Orleans, where it was warm, an idea that seemed both comforting and unlikely.

  There were no more helicopters. He had the feeling that the ones that had passed overhead had been cleaning up the mess at the freight train siding, not hunting for him, otherwise they would have returned; there would have been tracker dogs and sirens and the whole paraphernalia of pursuit. Instead, there was nothing.

  What did he want? Not to get caught. Not to get blamed for the deaths of the men on the train. “It wasn’t me,” he heard himself saying, “it was my dead wife.” He could imagine the expressions on the faces of the law officers. Then people could argue about whether he was crazy or not while he went to the chair . . .

  He wondered whether Wisconsin had the death penalty. He wondered whether that would matter. He wanted to understand what was going on—and to find out how it was all going to end. And finally, producing a half-rueful grin, he realized that most of all he wanted everything to be normal. He wanted never to have gone to prison, for Laura still to be alive, for none of this ever to have happened.

  “I’m afraid that’s not exactly an option, m’boy,” he thought to himself, in Wednesday’s gruff voice, and he nodded agreement. Not an option. You burned your bridges. So keep walking. Do your own time . . .

  A distant woodpecker drummed against a rotten tree.

  Shadow became aware of eyes on him: a handful of red cardinals stared at him from a skeletal elder bush then returned to pecking at the clusters of black elderberries. They looked like the illustrations in the Songbirds of North America calendar. He heard the birds’ video-arcade trills and zaps and whoops follow him along the side of the creek. Eventually, they faded away.

  The dead fawn lay in a glade in the shadow of a hill, and a black bird the size of a small dog was picking at its side with a large, wicked beak, rending and tearing gobbets of red meat from the corpse. The animal’s eyes were gone, but its head was untouched, and white fawn spots were visible on its rump. Shadow wondered how it had died.

  The black bird cocked its head onto one side, a
nd then said, in a voice like stones being struck, “You shadow man.”

  “I’m Shadow,” said Shadow. The bird hopped up onto the fawn’s rump, raised its head, ruffled its crown and neck feathers. It was enormous and its eyes were black beads. There was something intimidating about a bird that size, this close.

  “Says he will see you in Kay-ro,” tokked the raven. Shadow wondered which of Odin’s ravens this was: Huginn or Muninn, Memory or Thought.

  “Kay-ro?” he asked.

  “In Egypt.”

  “How am I going to go to Egypt?”

  “Follow Mississippi. Go south. Find Jackal.”

  “Look,” said Shadow, “I don’t want to seem like I’m—Jesus, look . . .” he paused. Regrouped. He was cold, standing in a wood, talking to a big black bird who was currently brunching on Bambi. “Okay. What I’m trying to say is I don’t want mysteries.”

  “Mysteries,” agreed the bird, helpfully.

  “What I want is explanations. Jackal in Kay-ro. This does not help me. It’s a line from a bad spy thriller.”

  “Jackal. Friend. Tok. Kay-ro.”

  “So you said. I’d like a little more information than that.”

  The bird half turned, and pulled another strip of raw venison from the fawn’s ribs. Then it flew off into the trees, the red strip dangling from its beak like a long, bloody worm.

  “Hey! Can you at least get me back to a real road?” called Shadow.

  The raven flew up and away. Shadow looked at the corpse of the baby deer. He decided that if he were a real woodsman, he would slice off a steak and grill it over a wood fire. Instead, he sat on a fallen tree and ate a Snickers bar and knew that he really wasn’t a real woodsman.

  The raven cawed from the edge of the clearing.

  “You want me to follow you?” asked Shadow. “Or has Timmy fallen down another well?” The bird cawed again, impatiently. Shadow started walking toward it. It waited until he was close, then flapped heavily into another tree, heading somewhat to the left of the way Shadow had originally been going.