American Gods

by Neil Gaiman

  “I read in a book about a way of doing the miser’s dream with latex covering the palm of your hand, making a skin-colored pouch for the coins to hide behind.”

  “This is a sad wake for Great Sweeney who flew like a bird across all of Ireland and ate watercress in his madness: to be dead and unmourned save for a bird, a dog, and an idiot. No, it is not a pouch.”

  “Well, that’s pretty much it for ideas,” said Shadow. “I expect you just take them out of nowhere.” It was meant to be sarcasm, but then he saw the expression on Sweeney’s face. “You do,” he said. “You do take them from nowhere.”

  “Well, not exactly nowhere,” said Mad Sweeney. “But now you’re getting the idea. You take them from the hoard.”

  “The hoard,” said Shadow, starting to remember. “Yes.”

  “You just have to hold it in your mind, and it’s yours to take from. The sun’s treasure. It’s there in those moments when the world makes a rainbow. It’s there in the moment of eclipse and the moment of the storm.”

  And he showed Shadow how to do the thing.

  This time Shadow got it.

  Shadow’s head ached and pounded, and his tongue tasted and felt like flypaper. He squinted at the glare of the daylight. He had fallen asleep with his head on the kitchen table. He was fully dressed, although he had at some point taken off his black tie.

  He walked downstairs, to the mortuary, and was relieved but unsurprised to see that John Doe was still on the embalming table. Shadow pried the empty bottle of Jameson Gold from the corpse’s rigor-mortised fingers and threw it away. He could hear someone moving about in the house above.

  Mr. Wednesday was sitting at the kitchen table when Shadow went upstairs. He was eating leftover potato salad from a Tupperware container with a plastic spoon. He wore a dark gray suit, a white shirt, and a deep gray tie: the morning sun glittered on the silver tie pin in the shape of a tree. He smiled at Shadow when he saw him.

  “Ah, Shadow m’boy, good to see you’re up. I thought you were going to sleep forever.”

  “Mad Sweeney’s dead,” said Shadow.

  “So I heard,” said Wednesday. “A great pity. Of course it will come to all of us, in the end.” He tugged on an imaginary rope, somewhere on the level of his ear, and then jerked his neck to one side, tongue protruding, eyes bulging. As quick pantomimes went, it was disturbing. And then he let go of the rope and smiled his familiar grin. “Would you like some potato salad?”

  “I would not.” Shadow darted a look around the kitchen and out into the hall. “Do you know where Ibis and Jacquel are?”

  “Indeed I do. They are burying Mrs. Lila Goodchild—something that they would probably have liked your help in doing, but I asked them not to wake you. You have a long drive ahead of you.”

  “We’re leaving?”

  “Within the hour.”

  “I should say goodbye.”

  “Goodbyes are overrated. You’ll see them again, I have no doubt, before this affair is done.”

  For the first time since that first night, Shadow observed, the small brown cat was curled up in her basket. She opened her incurious amber eyes and watched him go.

  So Shadow left the house of the dead. Ice sheathed the winter-black bushes and trees as if they’d been insulated, made into dreams. The path was slippery.

  Wednesday led the way to Shadow’s white Chevy Nova, parked out on the road. It had been recently cleaned, and the Wisconsin plates had been removed, replaced with Minnesota plates. Wednesday’s luggage was already stacked in the backseat. Wednesday unlocked the car with keys that were duplicates of the ones Shadow had in his own pocket.

  “I’ll drive,” said Wednesday. “It’ll be at least an hour before you’re good for anything.”

  They drove north, the Mississippi on their left, a wide silver stream beneath a gray sky. Shadow saw, perched on a leafless gray tree beside the road, a huge brown-and-white hawk, which stared down at them with mad eyes as they drove toward it, then took to the wing and rose in slow and powerful circles.

  Shadow realized it had only been a temporary reprieve, his time in the house of the dead; and already it was beginning to feel like something that happened to somebody else, a long time ago.

  Part Two

  MY AINSEL

  CHAPTER NINE

  Not to mention mythic creatures in the rubble . . .

  —Wendy Cope, “A Policeman’s Lot”

  As they drove out of Illinois late that evening, Shadow asked Wednesday his first question. He saw the WELCOME TO WISCONSIN sign, and said, “So who were the guys that grabbed me in the parking lot? Mister Wood and Mister Stone? Who were they?”

  The lights of the car illuminated the winter landscape. Wednesday had announced that they were not to take freeways because he didn’t know whose side the freeways were on, so Shadow was sticking to back roads. He didn’t mind. He wasn’t even sure that Wednesday was crazy.

  Wednesday grunted. “Just spooks. Members of the opposition. Black hats.”

  “I think,” said Shadow, “that they think they’re the white hats.”

  “Of course they do. There’s never been a true war that wasn’t fought between two sets of people who were certain they were in the right. The really dangerous people believe that they are doing whatever they are doing solely and only because it is without question the right thing to do. And that is what makes them dangerous.”

  “And you?” asked Shadow. “Why are you doing what you’re doing?”

  “Because I want to,” said Wednesday. And then he grinned. “So that’s all right.”

  Shadow said, “How did you all get away? Or did you all get away?”

  “We did,” said Wednesday. “Although it was a close thing. If they’d not stopped to grab you, they might have taken the lot of us. It convinced several of the people who had been sitting on the fence that I might not be completely crazy.”

  “So how did you get out?”

  Wednesday shook his head. “I don’t pay you to ask questions,” he said. “I’ve told you before.”

  Shadow shrugged.

  They spent the night in a Super 8 motel south of La Crosse.

  Christmas Day was spent on the road, driving north and east. The farmland became pine forest. The towns seemed to come farther and farther apart.

  They ate their Christmas lunch late in the afternoon in a hall-like family restaurant in northern central Wisconsin. Shadow picked cheerlessly at the dry turkey, jam-sweet red lumps of cranberry sauce, tough-as-wood roasted potatoes, and violently green canned peas. From the way he attacked it, and the way he smacked his lips, Wednesday seemed to be enjoying the food. As the meal progressed he became positively expansive—talking, joking, and, whenever she came close enough, flirting with the waitress, a thin blonde girl who looked scarcely old enough to have dropped out of high school.

  “Excuse me, m’dear, but might I trouble you for another cup of your delightful hot chocolate? And I trust you won’t think me too forward if I say what a mightily fetching and becoming dress that is. Festive, yet classy.”

  The waitress, who wore a bright red-and-green skirt edged with glittering silver tinsel, giggled and colored and smiled happily, and went off to get Wednesday another mug of hot chocolate.

  “Fetching,” said Wednesday, thoughtfully, watching her go. “Becoming,” he said. Shadow did not think he was talking about the dress. Wednesday shoveled the final slice of turkey into his mouth, flicked at his beard with his napkin, and pushed his plate forward. “Aaah. Good.” He looked around him, at the family restaurant. In the background a tape of Christmas songs was playing: the little drummer boy had no gifts to bring, parupapom-pom, rapappom pom, rapappom pom.

  “Some things may change,” said Wednesday, abruptly. “People, however . . . people stay the same. Some grifts last forever, others are swallowed soon enough by time and by the world. My favorite grift of all is no longer practical. Still, a surprising number of grifts are timeless—the Spanish Prisoner
, the Pigeon Drop, the Fawney Rig (that’s the Pigeon Drop but with a gold ring instead of a wallet), the Fiddle Game . . .”

  “I’ve never heard of the Fiddle Game,” said Shadow. “I think I’ve heard of the others. My old cellmate said he’d actually done the Spanish Prisoner. He was a grifter.”

  “Ah,” said Wednesday, and his left eye sparkled. “The Fiddle Game was a fine and wonderful con. In its purest form it is a two-man grift. It trades on cupidity and greed, as all great grifts do. You can always cheat an honest man, but it takes more work. So. We are in a hotel or an inn or a fine restaurant, and, dining there, we find a man—shabby, but shabby genteel, not down-at-heel but certainly down on his luck. We shall call him Abraham. And when the time comes to settle his bill—not a huge bill, you understand, fifty, seventy-five dollars—an embarrassment! Where is his wallet? Good Lord, he must have left it at a friend’s, not far away. He shall go and obtain his wallet forthwith! But here, mine host, says Abraham, take this old fiddle of mine for security. It’s old, as you can see, but it’s how I make my living.”

  Wednesday’s smile when he saw the waitress approaching was huge and predatory. “Ah, the hot chocolate! Brought to me by my Christmas Angel! Tell me my dear, could I have some more of your delicious bread when you get a moment?”

  The waitress—what was she, Shadow wondered: sixteen, seventeen?—looked at the floor and her cheeks flushed crimson. She put down the chocolate with shaking hands and retreated to the edge of the room, by the slowly rotating display of pies, where she stopped and stared at Wednesday. Then she slipped into the kitchen to fetch Wednesday his bread.

  “So. The violin—old, unquestionably, perhaps even a little battered—is placed away in its case, and our temporarily impecunious Abraham sets off in search of his wallet. But a well-dressed gentleman, only just done with his own dinner, has been observing this exchange, and now he approaches our host: could he, perchance, inspect the violin that honest Abraham left behind?

  “Certainly he can. Our host hands it over, and the well-dressed man—let us call him Barrington—opens his mouth wide, then remembers himself and closes it, examines the violin reverentially, like a man who has been permitted into a holy sanctum to examine the bones of a prophet. ‘Why!’ he says, ‘this is—it must be—no, it cannot be—but yes, there it is—my lord! But this is unbelievable!” and he points to the maker’s mark, on a strip of browning paper inside the violin—but still, he says, even without it he would have known it by the color of the varnish, by the scroll, by the shape.

  “Now Barrington reaches inside his pocket and produces an engraved business card, proclaiming him to be a preeminent dealer in rare and antique musical instruments. ‘So this violin is rare?’ asks mine host. ‘Indeed it is,’ says Barrington, still admiring it with awe, ‘and worth in excess of a hundred thousand dollars, unless I miss my guess. Even as a dealer in such things I would pay fifty—no, seventy-five thousand dollars, good cash money, for such an exquisite piece. I have a man on the West Coast who would buy it tomorrow, sight unseen, with one telegram, and pay whatever I asked for it.’ And then he consults his watch, and his face falls. ‘My train—’ he says. ‘I have scarcely enough time to catch my train! Good sir, when the owner of this inestimable instrument should return, please give him my card, for, alas, I must be away.’ And with that, Barrington leaves, a man who knows that time and the train wait for no man.

  “Mine host examines the violin, curiosity mingling with cupidity in his veins, and a plan begins to bubble up through his mind. But the minutes go by, and Abraham does not return. And now it is late, and through the door, shabby but proud, comes our Abraham, our fiddle player, and he holds in his hands a wallet, a wallet that has seen better days, a wallet that has never contained more than a hundred dollars on its best day, and from it he takes the money to pay for his meal or his stay, and he asks for the return of his violin.

  “Mine host puts the fiddle in its case on the counter, and Abraham takes it like a mother cradling her child. ‘Tell me,’ says the host (with the engraved card of a man who’ll pay fifty thousand dollars, good cash money, burning in his inside breast pocket), ‘how much is a violin like this worth? For my niece has a yearning on her to play the fiddle, and it’s her birthday coming up in a week or so.’

  “ ‘Sell this fiddle?’ says Abraham. ‘I could never sell her. I’ve had her for twenty years, I have, fiddled in every state of the union with her. And to tell the truth, she cost me all of five hundred dollars back when I bought her.’

  “Mine host keeps the smile from his face. ‘Five hundred dollars? What if I were to offer you a thousand dollars for it, here and now?’

  “The fiddle player looks delighted, then crestfallen, and he says, ‘But lordy, I’m a fiddle player, sir, it’s all I know how to do. This fiddle knows me and she loves me, and my fingers know her so well I could play an air upon her in the dark. Where will I find another that sounds so fine? A thousand dollars is good money, but this is my livelihood. Not a thousand dollars, not for five thousand.”

  “Mine host sees his profits shrinking, but this is business, and you must spend money to make money. ‘Eight thousand dollars,’ he says. ‘It’s not worth that, but I’ve taken a fancy to it, and I do love and indulge my niece.’

  “Abraham is almost in tears at the thought of losing his beloved fiddle, but how can he say no to eight thousand dollars?—especially when mine host goes to the wall safe and removes not eight but nine thousand dollars, all neatly banded and ready to be slipped into the fiddle player’s threadbare pocket. ‘You’re a good man,’ he tells his host. ‘You’re a saint! But you must swear to take care of my girl!’ and, reluctantly, he hands over his violin.”

  “But what if mine host simply hands over Barrington’s card and tells Abraham that he’s come into some good fortune?” asked Shadow.

  “Then we’re out the cost of two dinners,” said Wednesday. He wiped the remaining gravy and leftovers from his plate with a slice of bread, which he ate with lip-smacking relish.

  “Let me see if I’ve got it straight,” said Shadow. “So Abraham leaves, nine thousand dollars the richer, and in the parking lot by the train station he and Barrington meet up. They split the money, get into Barrington’s Model A Ford, and head for the next town. I guess in the trunk of that car they must have a box filled with hundred-dollar violins.”

  “I personally made it a point of honor never to pay more than five dollars for any of them,” said Wednesday. Then he turned to the hovering waitress. “Now, my dear, regale us with your description of the sumptuous desserts available to us on this, our Lord’s natal day.” He stared at her—it was almost a leer—as if nothing that she could offer him would be as toothsome a morsel as herself. Shadow felt deeply uncomfortable: it was like watching an old wolf stalking a fawn too young to know that if it did not run, and run now, it would wind up in a distant glade with its bones picked clean by the ravens.

  The girl blushed once more and told them that dessert was apple pie à la mode—“That’s with a scoop of vanilla ice cream”—Christmas cake à la mode, or a red-and-green whipped pudding. Wednesday stared into her eyes and told her that he would try the Christmas cake à la mode. Shadow passed.

  “Now, as grifts go,” said Wednesday, “the fiddle game goes back three hundred years or more. And if you pick your chicken correctly you could still play it anywhere in America tomorrow.”

  “I thought you said that your favorite grift was no longer practical,” said Shadow.

  “I did indeed. However, that is not my favorite. No, my favorite was one they called the Bishop Game. It had everything: excitement, subterfuge, portability, surprise. Perhaps, I think from time to time, perhaps with a little modification, it might . . .” he thought for a moment, then shook his head. “No. Its time has passed. It is, let us say, 1920, in a city of medium to large size—Chicago, perhaps, or New York, or Philadelphia. We are in a jeweler’s emporium. A man dressed as a clergyman—and not just
any clergyman, but a bishop, in his purple—enters and picks out a necklace—a gorgeous and glorious confection of diamonds and pearls, and pays for it with a dozen of the crispest hundred-dollar bills.

  “There’s a smudge of green ink on the topmost bill and the store owner, apologetically but firmly, sends the stack of bills to the bank on the corner to be checked. Soon enough, the store clerk returns with the bills. The bank says they are none of them counterfeit. The owner apologizes again, and the bishop is most gracious, he well understands the problem, there are such lawless and ungodly types in the world today, such immorality and lewdness abroad in the world—and shameless women, and now that the underworld has crawled out of the gutter and come to live on the screens of the picture palaces, what more could anyone expect? And the necklace is placed in its case, and the store owner does his best not to ponder why a bishop of the church would be purchasing a twelve-hundred-dollar diamond necklace, nor why he would be paying good cash money for it.

  “The bishop bids him a hearty farewell, and walks out on the street, only for a heavy hand to descend on his shoulder. ‘Why Soapy, yez spalpeen, up to your old tricks, are you?’ and a broad beat cop with an honest Irish face walks the bishop back into the jewelry store.

  “ ‘Beggin’ your pardon, but has this man just bought anything from you?’ asks the cop. ‘Certainly not,’ says the bishop. ‘Tell him I have not.’ ‘Indeed he has,’ says the jeweler. ‘He bought a pearl and diamond necklace from me—paid for it in cash as well.’ ‘Would you have the bills available, sir?’ asks the cop.

  “So the jeweler takes the twelve hundred-dollar bills from the cash register and hands them to the cop, who holds them up to the light and shakes his head in wonder. ‘Oh, Soapy, Soapy,’ he says, ‘these are the finest that you’ve made yet! You’re a craftsman, that you are!’

  “A self-satisfied smile spreads across the bishop’s face. ‘You can’t prove nothing,’ says the bishop. ‘And the bank said that they were on the level. It’s the real green stuff.’ ‘I’m sure they did,’ agrees the cop on the beat, ‘but I doubt that the bank had been warned that Soapy Sylvester was in town, nor of the quality of the hundred-dollar bills he’d been passing in Denver and in St. Louis.’ And with that he reaches into the bishop’s pocket and pulls out the necklace. “Twelve hundred dollars’ worth of diamonds and pearls in exchange for fifty cents’ worth of paper and ink,’ says the policeman, who is obviously a philosopher at heart. ‘And passing yourself off as a man of the church. You should be ashamed,’ he says, as he claps the handcuffs on the bishop, who is obviously no bishop, and he marches him away, but not before he gives the jeweler a receipt for both the necklace and the twelve hundred counterfeit dollars. It’s evidence, after all.”