by Neil Gaiman
“Hey,” said Shadow. “Huginn or Muninn, or whoever you are.”
The bird turned, head tipped, suspiciously, on one side, and it stared at him with bright eyes.
“Say ‘Nevermore,’ “ said Shadow.
“Fuck you,” said the raven. It said nothing else as they went through the woodland together.
In half an hour they reached a blacktop road on the edge of a town, and the raven flew back into the wood. Shadow observed a Culvers Frozen Custard Butterburgers sign, and, next to it, a gas station. He went into the Culvers, which was empty of customers. There was a keen young man with a shaven head behind the cash register. Shadow ordered two butterburgers and french fries. Then he went into the rest room to clean up. He looked a real mess. He did an inventory of the contents of his pockets: he had a few coins, including the silver Liberty dollar, a disposable toothbrush and toothpaste, three Snickers bars, five chemical heater pads, a wallet (with nothing more in it than his driver’s license and a credit card—he wondered how much longer the credit card had to live), and in the coat’s inside pocket, a thousand dollars in fifties and twenties, his take from yesterday’s bank job. He washed his face and hands in hot water, slicked down his dark hair, then went back into the restaurant and ate his burgers and fries and drank his coffee.
He went back to the counter. “You want frozen custard?” asked the keen young man.
“No. No thanks. Is there anywhere around here I could rent a car? My car died, back down the road a way.”
The young man scratched his head-stubble. “Not around here, Mister. If your car died you could call Triple-A. Or talk to the gas station next door about a tow.”
“A fine idea,” said Shadow. “Thanks.”
He walked across the melting snow, from the Culvers parking lot to the gas station. He bought candy bars and beef jerky sticks and more chemical hand and feet warmers.
“Anywhere hereabouts I could rent a car?” he asked the woman behind the cash register. She was immensely plump, and bespectacled, and was delighted to have someone to talk to.
“Let me think,” she said. “We’re kind of out of the way here. They do that kind of thing over in Madison. Where you going?”
“Kay-ro,” he said. “Wherever that is.”
“I know where that is,” she said. “Hand me an Illinois map from that rack over there.” Shadow passed her a plastic-coated map. She unfolded it, then pointed in triumph to the bottom-most corner of the state. “There it is.”
“Cairo?”
“That’s how they pronounce the one in Egypt. But the one in Little Egypt, they call that one Kayro. They got a Thebes down there, all sorts. My sister-in-law comes from Thebes. I asked her about the one in Egypt, she looked at me as if I had a screw loose.” The woman chuckled like a drain.
“Any pyramids?” The city was five hundred miles away, almost directly south.
“Not that they ever told me. They call it Little Egypt because back, oh, mebbe a hundred, hundred and fifty years back, there was a famine all over. Crops failed. But they didn’t fail down there. So everyone went there to buy food. Like in the Bible. Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat. Off we go to Egypt, bad-a-boom.”
“So if you were me, and you needed to get there, how would you go?” asked Shadow.
“Drive.”
“Car died a few miles down the road. It was a pieceashit if you’ll pardon my language,” said Shadow.
“Pee-Oh-Esses,” she said. “Yup. That’s what my brother-in-law calls ’em. He buys and sells cars in a small way. He’ll call me up, say Mattie, I just sold another Pee-Oh-Ess. Say, maybe he’d be interested in your old car. For scrap or something.”
“It belongs to my boss,” said Shadow, surprising himself with the fluency and ease of his lies. “I need to call him, so he can come pick it up.” A thought struck him. “Your brother-in-law, is he around here?”
“He’s in Muscoda. Ten minutes south of here. Just over the river. Why?”
“Well, does he have a Pee-Oh-Ess he’d like to sell me for, mm, five, six hundred bucks?”
She smiled sweetly. “Mister, he doesn’t have a car on that back lot you couldn’t buy with a full tank of gas for five hundred dollars. But don’t you tell him I said so.”
“Would you call him?” asked Shadow.
“I’m way ahead of you,” she told him, and she picked up the phone. “Hon? It’s Mattie. You get over here this minute. I got a man here wants to buy a car.”
The piece of shit he chose was a 1983 Chevy Nova, which he bought, with a full tank of gas, for four hundred and fifty dollars. It had almost a quarter of a million miles on the clock, and smelled faintly of bourbon, tobacco, and more strongly of something that might well have been bananas. He couldn’t tell what color it was, under the dirt and the snow. Still, of all the vehicles in Mattie’s brother-in-law’s back lot, it was the only one that looked like it might take him five hundred miles.
The deal was done in cash, and Mattie’s brother-in-law never asked for Shadow’s name or social security number or for anything except the money.
Shadow drove west, then south, with five hundred and fifty dollars in his pocket, keeping off the interstate. The piece of shit had a radio, but nothing happened when he turned it on. A sign said he’d left Wisconsin and was now in Illinois. He passed a strip-mining works, huge blue arc lights burning in the dim midwinter daylight.
He stopped and ate at a place called Mom’s, catching them just before they closed for the afternoon.
Each town he passed through had an extra sign up beside the sign telling him that he was now entering Our Town (pop. 720). The extra sign announced that the town’s under-14s team was the third runner-up in the interstate basketball team, or that the town was the home of the Illinois girls’ under-16s wrestling semifinalist.
He drove on, head nodding, feeling more drained with every minute that passed. He ran a stoplight, and was nearly side-swiped by a woman in a Dodge. As soon as he got out into open country he pulled off onto an empty tractor path on the side of the road, and he parked by a snow-spotted stubbly field in which a slow procession of fat black wild turkeys walked like a line of mourners; he turned off the engine, stretched out in the backseat, and fell asleep.
Darkness; a sensation of falling—as if he were tumbling down a great hole, like Alice. He fell for a hundred years into darkness. Faces passed him, swimming out of the black, then each face was ripped up and away before he could touch it . . .
Abruptly, and without transition, he was not falling. Now he was in a cave, and he was no longer alone. Shadow stared into familiar eyes: huge, liquid black eyes. They blinked.
Under the earth: yes. He remembered this place. The stink of wet cow. Firelight flickered on the wet cave walls, illuminating the buffalo head, the man’s body, skin the color of brick clay.
“Can’t you people leave me be?” asked Shadow. “I just want to sleep.”
The buffalo man nodded, slowly. His lips did not move, but a voice in Shadow’s head said, “Where are you going, Shadow?”
“Cairo.”
“Why?”
“Where else have I got to go? It’s where Wednesday wants me to go. I drank his mead.” In Shadow’s dream, with the power of dream logic behind it, the obligation seemed unarguable: he drank Wednesday’s mead three times, and sealed the pact—what other choice of action did he have?
The buffalo-headed man reached a hand into the fire, stirring the embers and the broken branches into a blaze. “The storm is coming,” he said. Now there was ash on his hands, and he wiped it onto his hairless chest, leaving soot-black streaks.
“So you people keep telling me. Can I ask you a question?”
There was a pause. A fly settled on the furry forehead. The buffalo man flicked it away. “Ask.”
“Is this true? Are these people really gods? It’s all so . . .” He paused. Then he said, “impossible,” which was not exactly the word he had been going for but seemed to be the best he c
ould do.
“What are gods?” asked the buffalo man.
“I don’t know,” said Shadow.
There was a tapping, relentless and dull. Shadow waited for the buffalo man to say something more, to explain what gods were, to explain the whole tangled nightmare that his life seemed to have become. He was cold.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
Shadow opened his eyes, and, groggily, sat up. He was freezing, and the sky outside the car was the deep luminescent purple that divides the dusk from the night.
Tap. Tap. Someone said, “Hey, mister,” and Shadow turned his head. The someone was standing beside the car, no more than a darker shape against the darkling sky. Shadow reached out a hand and cranked down the window a few inches. He made some waking-up noises, and then he said, “Hi.”
“You all right? You sick? You been drinking?” The voice was high—a woman’s or a boy’s.
“I’m fine,” said Shadow. “Hold on.” He opened the door, and got out, stretching his aching limbs and neck as he did so. Then he rubbed his hands together, to get the blood circulating and to warm them up.
“Whoa. You’re pretty big.”
“That’s what they tell me,” said Shadow. “Who are you?”
“I’m Sam,” said the voice.
“Boy Sam or girl Sam?”
“Girl Sam. I used to be Sammi with an i, and I’d do a smiley face over the i, but then I got completely sick of it because like absolutely everybody was doing it, so I stopped.”
“Okay, girl Sam. You go over there, and look out at the road.”
“Why? Are you a crazed killer or something?”
“No,” said Shadow, “I need to take a leak and I’d like just the smallest amount of privacy.”
“Oh. Right. Okay. Got it. No problem. I am so with you. I can’t even pee if there’s someone in the next stall. Major shy bladder syndrome.”
“Now, please.”
She walked to the far side of the car, and Shadow took a few steps closer to the field, unzipped his jeans, and pissed against a fence post for a very long time. He walked back to the car. The last of the gloaming had become night.
“You still there?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said. “You must have a bladder like Lake Erie. I think empires rose and fell in the time it took you to pee. I could hear it the whole time.”
“Thank you. Do you want something?”
“Well, I wanted to see if you were okay. I mean, if you were dead or something I would have called the cops. But the windows were kind of fogged up so I thought, well, he’s probably still alive.”
“You live around here?”
“Nope. Hitchhiking down from Madison.”
“That’s not safe.”
“I’ve done it five times a year for three years now. I’m still alive. Where are you headed?”
“I’m going as far as Cairo.”
“Thank you,” she said. “I’m going to El Paso. Staying with my aunt for the holidays.”
“I can’t take you all the way,” said Shadow.
“Not El Paso, Texas. The other one, in Illinois. It’s a few hours south. You know where you are now?”
“No,” said Shadow. “I have no idea. Somewhere on Highway Fifty-two?”
“The next town’s Peru,” said Sam. “Not the one in Peru. The one in Illinois. Let me smell you. Bend down.” Shadow bent down, and the girl sniffed his face. “Okay. I don’t smell booze. You can drive. Let’s go.”
“What makes you think I’m giving you a ride?”
“Because I’m a damsel in distress,” she said, “And you are a knight in whatever. A really dirty car. You know someone wrote ‘Wash me!’ on your rear window?” Shadow got into the car and opened the passenger door. The light that goes on in cars when the front door is opened did not go on in this car.
“No,” he said, “I didn’t.”
She climbed in. “It was me,” she said. “I wrote it. While there was still enough light to see.”
Shadow started the car, turned on the headlights, and headed back onto the road. “Left,” said Sam helpfully. Shadow turned left, and he drove. After several minutes the heater started to work, and blessed warmth filled the car.
“You haven’t said anything yet,” said Sam. “Say something.”
“Are you human?” asked Shadow. “An honest-to-goodness, born-of-man-and-woman, living, breathing human being?”
“Sure,” she said.
“Okay. Just checking. So what would you like me to say?”
“Something to reassure me, at this point. I suddenly have that ‘oh shit I’m in the wrong car with a crazy man’ feeling.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I’ve had that one. What would you find reassuring?”
“Just tell me you’re not an escaped convict or a mass murderer or something.”
He thought for a moment. “You know, I’m really not.”
“You had to think about it though, didn’t you?”
“Done my time. Never killed anybody.”
“Oh.”
They entered a small town, lit up by streetlights and blinking Christmas decorations, and Shadow glanced to his right. The girl had a tangle of short dark hair and a face that was both attractive and, he decided, faintly mannish: her features might have been chiseled out of rock. She was looking at him.
“What were you in prison for?”
“I hurt a couple of people real bad. I got angry.”
“Did they deserve it?”
Shadow thought for a moment. “I thought so at the time.”
“Would you do it again?”
“Hell, no. I lost three years of my life in there.”
“Mm. You got Indian blood in you?”
“Not that I know of.”
“You looked like it, was all.”
“Sorry to disappoint you.”
“S’okay. You hungry?”
Shadow nodded. “I could eat,” he said.
“There’s a good place just past the next set of lights. Good food. Cheap, too.”
Shadow pulled up in the parking lot. They got out of the car. He didn’t bother to lock it, although he pocketed the keys. He pulled out some coins to buy a newspaper. “Can you afford to eat here?” he asked.
“Yeah,” she said, raising her chin. “I can pay for myself.”
Shadow nodded. “Tell you what. I’ll toss you for it,” he said. “Heads you pay for my dinner, tails, I pay for yours.”
“Let me see the coin first,” she said, suspiciously. “I had an uncle had a double-headed quarter.”
She inspected it, satisfied herself there was nothing strange about the quarter. Shadow placed the coin head up on his thumb and cheated the toss, so it wobbled and looked like it was spinning, then he caught it and flipped it over onto the back of his left hand, and uncovered it with his right, in front of her.
“Tails,” she said, happily. “Dinner’s on you.”
“Yup,” he said. “You can’t win them all.”
Shadow ordered the meat loaf, Sam ordered lasagna. Shadow flipped through the newspaper to see if there was anything in it about dead men in a freight train. There wasn’t. The only story of interest was on the cover: crows in record numbers were infesting the town. Local farmers wanted to hang dead crows around the town on public buildings to frighten the others away; ornithologists said that it wouldn’t work, that the living crows would simply eat the dead ones. The locals were implacable. “When they see the corpses of their friends,” said a spokesman, “they’ll know that we don’t want them here.”
The food came mounded high on plates and steaming, more than any one person could eat.
“So what’s in Cairo?” asked Sam, with her mouth full.
“No idea. I got a message from my boss saying he needs me down there.”
“What do you do?”
“I’m an errand boy.”
She smiled. “Well,” she said, “you aren’t mafia, not looking like that and driving that piece of s
hit. Why does your car smell like bananas, anyway?”
He shrugged, carried on eating.
Sam narrowed her eyes. “Maybe you’re a banana smuggler,” she said. “You haven’t asked me what I do yet.”
“I figure you’re at school.”
“UW Madison.”
“Where you are undoubtedly studying art history, women’s studies, and probably casting your own bronzes. And you probably work in a coffeehouse to help cover the rent.”
She put down her fork, nostrils flaring, eyes wide. “How the fuck did you do that?”
“What? Now you say, no, actually I’m studying Romance languages and ornithology.”
“So you’re saying that was a lucky guess or something?”
“What was?”
She stared at him with dark eyes. “You are one peculiar guy, Mister . . . I don’t know your name.”
“They call me Shadow,” he said.
She twisted her mouth wryly, as if she were tasting something she disliked. She stopped talking, put her head down, finished her lasagna.
“Do you know why it’s called Egypt?” asked Shadow when Sam finished eating.
“Down Cairo way? Yeah. It’s in the delta of the Ohio and the Mississippi. Like Cairo in Egypt, in the Nile delta.”
“That makes sense.”
She sat back in her chair, ordered coffee and chocolate cream pie, ran a hand through her black hair. “You married, Mister Shadow?” And then, as he hesitated, “Gee. I just asked another tricky question, didn’t I?”
“They buried her on Thursday,” he said, picking his words with care. “She was killed in a car crash.”
“Oh. God. Jesus. I’m sorry.”
“Me too.”
An awkward pause. “My half sister lost her kid, my nephew, end of last year. It’s rough.”
“Yeah. It is. What did he die of?”
She sipped her coffee. “We don’t know. We don’t even really know that he’s dead. He just vanished. But he was only thirteen. It was the middle of last winter. My sister was pretty broken up about it.”
“Were there any, any clues?” He sounded like a TV cop. He tried again. “Did they suspect foul play?” That sounded worse.