American Gods

by Neil Gaiman

  “Well, you could give me the number of the local taxi company,” said Shadow.

  “I could,” said the old man, doubtfully, “but Tom’ll be in his bed this time of night, and even if you could rouse him you’ll get no satisfaction—I saw him down at the Buck Stops Here earlier this evening, and he was very merry. Very merry indeed. Where is it you’re aiming to go?”

  Shadow showed him the address tag on the door key.

  “Well,” he said, “that’s a ten-, mebbe a twenty-minute walk over the bridge and around. But it’s no fun when it’s this cold, and when you don’t know where you’re going it always seems longer—you ever notice that? First time takes forever, and then ever after it’s over in a flash?”

  “Yes,” said Shadow. “I’ve never thought of it like that. But I guess it’s true.”

  The old man nodded. His face cracked into a grin. “What the heck, it’s Christmas. I’ll run you over there in Tessie.”

  Shadow followed the old man to the road, where a huge old roadster was parked. It looked like something that gangsters might have been proud to drive in the Roaring Twenties, running boards and all. It was a deep dark color under the sodium lights that might have been red and might have been green. “This is Tessie,” the old man said. “Ain’t she a beaut?” He patted her proprietorially, where the hood curved up and arched over the front nearside wheel.

  “What make is she?” asked Shadow.

  “She’s a Wendt Phoenix. Wendt went under in ’31, name was bought by Chrysler, but they never made anymore Wendts. Harvey Wendt, who founded the company, was a local boy. Went out to California, killed himself in, oh, 1941, ’42. Great tragedy.”

  The car smelled of leather and old cigarette smoke—not a fresh smell, but as if enough people had smoked enough cigarettes and cigars in the car over the years that the smell of burning tobacco had become part of the fabric of the car. The old man turned the key in the ignition and Tessie started first time.

  “Tomorrow,” he told Shadow, “she goes into the garage. I’ll cover her with a dust sheet, and that’s where she’ll stay until spring. Truth of the matter is I shouldn’t be driving her right now, with the snow on the ground.”

  “Doesn’t she ride well in snow?”

  “Rides just fine. It’s the salt they put on the roads. Rusts these old beauties faster than you could believe. You want to go door to door, or would you like the moonlight grand tour of the town?”

  “I don’t want to trouble you—“

  “It’s no trouble. You get to be my age, you’re grateful for the least wink of sleep. I’m lucky if I get five hours a night nowadays—wake up and my mind is just turning and turning. Where are my manners? My name’s Hinzelmann. I’d say, call me Richie, but around here folks who know me just call me plain Hinzelmann. I’d shake your hand, but I need two hands to drive Tessie. She knows when I’m not paying attention.”

  “Mike Ainsel,” said Shadow. “Pleased to meet you, Hinzelmann.”

  “So we’ll go around the lake. Grand tour,” said Hinzelmann.

  Main Street, which they were on, was a pretty street, even at night, and it looked old-fashioned in the best sense of the word—as if, for a hundred years, people had been caring for that street and they had not been in a hurry to lose anything they liked.

  Hinzelmann pointed out the town’s two restaurants as they passed them (a German restaurant and what he described as “part Greek, part Norwegian, and a popover at every plate”); he pointed out the bakery and the bookstore (“What I say is, a town isn’t a town without a bookstore. It may call itself a town, but unless it’s got a bookstore, it knows it’s not fooling a soul”). He slowed Tessie as they passed the library so Shadow could get a good look at it. Antique gaslights flickered over the doorway—Hinzelmann proudly called Shadow’s attention to them. “Built in the 1870s by John Henning, local lumber baron. He wanted it called the Henning Memorial Library, but when he died they started calling it the Lakeside Library, and I guess it’ll be the Lakeside Library now until the end of time. Isn’t it a dream?” He couldn’t have been prouder of it if he had built it himself. The building reminded Shadow of a castle, and he said so. “That’s right,” agreed Hinzelmann. “Turrets and all. Henning wanted it to look like that on the outside. Inside they still have all the original pine shelving. Miriam Shultz wants to tear the insides out and modernize, but it’s on some register of historic places, and there’s not a damn thing she can do.”

  They drove around the south side of the lake. The town circled the lake, which was a thirty-foot drop below the level of the road. Shadow could see the patches of white ice dulling the surface of the lake with, here and there, a shiny patch of water reflecting the lights of the town.

  “Looks like it’s freezing over,” he said.

  “It’s been frozen over for a month now,” said Hinzelmann. “The dull spots are snowdrifts and the shiny spots are ice. It froze just after Thanksgiving in one cold night, froze smooth as glass. You do much ice-fishing, Mr. Ainsel?”

  “Never.”

  “Best thing a man can do. It’s not the fish you catch, it’s the peace of mind that you take home at the end of the day.”

  “I’ll remember that.” Shadow peered down at the lake through Tessie’s window. “Can you actually walk on it already?”

  “You can walk on it. Drive on it too, but I wouldn’t want to risk it yet. It’s been cold up here for six weeks,” said Hinzelmann. “But you also got to allow that things freeze harder and faster up here in northern Wisconsin than they do most anyplace else there is. I was out hunting once—hunting for deer, and this was oh, thirty, forty years back, and I shot at a buck, missed him, and sent him running off through the woods—this was over acrost the north end of the lake, up near where you’ll be living, Mike. Now he was the finest buck I ever did see, twenty point, big as a small horse, no lie. Now, I’m younger and feistier back then than I am now, and though it had started snowing before Halloween that year, now it was Thanksgiving and there was clean snow on the ground, fresh as anything, and I could see the buck’s footprints. It looked to me like the big fellow was heading for the lake in a panic.

  “Well, only a damn fool tries to run down a buck, but there am I, a damn fool, running after him, and there he is, standing in the lake, in oh, eight, nine inches of water, and he’s just looking at me. That very moment, the sun goes behind a cloud, and the freeze comes—temperature must have fallen thirty degrees in ten minutes, not a word of a lie. And that old stag, he gets ready to run, and he can’t move. He’s frozen into the ice.

  “Me, I just walk over to him slowly. You can see he wants to run, but he’s iced in and it just isn’t going to happen. But there’s no way I can bring myself to shoot a defenseless critter when he can’t get away—what kind of man would I be if I done that, heh? So I takes my shotgun and I fires off one shell, straight up into the air.

  “Well, the noise and the shock is enough to make that buck just about jump out of his skin, and seein’ that his legs are iced in, that’s just what he proceeds to do. He leaves his hide and his antlers stuck to the ice, while he charges back into the woods, pink as a newborn mouse and shivering fit to bust.

  “I felt bad enough for that old buck that I talked the Lakeside Ladies’ Knitting Circle into making him something warm to wear all the winter, and they knitted him an all-over one-piece woolen suit, so he wouldn’t freeze to death. ‘Course, the joke was on us, because they knitted him a suit of bright orange wool, so no hunter ever shot at it. Hunters in these parts wear orange at hunting season,” he added, helpfully. “And if you think there’s a word of a lie in that, I can prove it to you. I’ve got the antlers up on my rec room wall to this day.”

  Shadow laughed, and the old man smiled the satisfied smile of a master craftsman. They pulled up outside a brick building with a large wooden deck, from which golden holiday lights hung and twinkled invitingly.

  “That’s five-oh-two,” said Hinzelmann. “Apartment three
would be on the top floor, around the other side, overlooking the lake. There you go, Mike.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Hinzelmann. Can I give you anything toward gas?”

  “Just Hinzelmann. And you don’t owe me a penny. Merry Christmas from me and from Tessie.”

  “Are you sure you won’t accept anything?”

  The old man scratched his chin. “Tell you what,” he said. “Sometime in the next week or so I’ll come by and sell you some tickets. For our raffle. Charity. For now, young man, you can be getting onto bed.”

  Shadow smiled. “Merry Christmas, Hinzelmann,” he said.

  The old man shook Shadow’s hand with one red-knuckled hand. It felt as hard and as callused as an oak branch. “Now, you watch the path as you go up there, it’s going to be slippery. I can see your door from here, at the side there, see it? I’ll just wait in the car down here until you’re safely inside. You just give me the thumbs-up when you’re in okay, and I’ll drive off.”

  He kept the Wendt idling until Shadow was safely up the wooden steps on the side of the house and had opened the apartment door with his key. The door to the apartment swung open. Shadow made a thumbs-up sign and the old man in the Wendt—Tessie, thought Shadow, and the thought of a car with a name made him smile one more time—Hinzelmann and Tessie swung around and made their way back across the bridge.

  Shadow shut the front door. The room was freezing. It smelled of people who had gone away to live other lives, and of all they had eaten and dreamed. He found the thermostat and cranked it up to seventy degrees. He went into the tiny kitchen, checked the drawers, opened the avocado-colored refrigerator, but it was empty. No surprise there. At least the fridge smelled clean inside, not musty.

  There was a small bedroom with a bare mattress in it, beside the kitchen, next to an even tinier bathroom that was mostly shower stall. An aged cigarette butt sat in the toilet bowl, staining the water brown. Shadow flushed it away.

  He found sheets and blankets in a closet, and made the bed. Then he took off his shoes, his jacket, and his watch, and he climbed into the bed fully dressed, wondering how long it would take him to get warm.

  The lights were off, and there was silence, mostly, nothing but the hum of the refrigerator, and, somewhere in the building, a radio playing. He lay there in the darkness, wondering if he had slept himself out on the Greyhound, if the hunger and the cold and the new bed and the craziness of the last few weeks would combine to keep him awake that night.

  In the stillness he heard something snap like a shot. A branch, he thought, or the ice. It was freezing out there.

  He wondered how long he would have to wait until Wednesday came for him. A day? A week? However long he had, he knew he had to focus on something in the meantime. He would start to work out again, he decided, and practice his coin sleights and palms until he was smooth as anything (practice all your tricks, somebody whispered inside his head, in a voice that was not his own, all of them but one, not the trick that poor dead Mad Sweeney showed you, dead of exposure and the cold and of being forgotten and surplus to requirements, not that trick. Oh, not that one).

  But this was a good town. He could feel it.

  He thought of his dream, if it had been a dream, that first night in Cairo. He thought of Zorya . . . what the hell was her name? The midnight sister.

  And then he thought of Laura . . .

  It was as if thinking of her opened a window in his mind. He could see her. He could, somehow, see her.

  She was in Eagle Point, in the backyard outside her mother’s big house.

  She stood in the cold, which she did not feel anymore or which she felt all the time, she stood outside the house that her mother had bought in 1989 with the insurance money after Laura’s father, Harvey McCabe, had passed on, a heart attack while straining on the can, and she was staring in, her cold hands pressed against the glass, her breath not fogging it, not at all, watching her mother, and her sister and her sister’s children and husband in from Texas, home for Christmas. Out in the darkness, that was where Laura was, unable not to look.

  Tears prickled in Shadow’s eyes, and he rolled over in his bed.

  He felt like a Peeping Tom, turned his thoughts away, willed them to come back to him: he could see the lake spread out below him as the wind blew down from the arctic, prying jack-frost fingers a hundred times colder than the fingers of any corpse.

  Shadow’s breath came shallowly now. He could hear a wind rising, a bitter screaming around the house, and for a moment he thought he could hear words on the wind.

  If he was going to be anywhere, he might as well be here, he thought, and then he slept.

  MEANWHILE. A CONVERSATION.

  Dingdong.

  “Miz Crow?”

  “Yes.”

  “Miz Samantha Black Crow?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you mind if we ask you a few questions, ma’am?”

  “Are you cops? What are you?”

  “My name is Town. My colleague here is Mister Road. We’re investigating the disappearance of two of our associates.”

  “What were their names?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Tell me their names. I want to know what they were called. Your associates. Tell me their names and maybe I’ll help you.”

  “. . . Okay. Their names were Mister Stone and Mister Wood. Now, can we ask you some questions?”

  “Do you guys just see things and pick names? ‘Oh, you be Mister Sidewalk, he’s Mister Carpet, say hello to Mister Airplane’?”

  “Very funny, young lady. First question: we need to know if you’ve seen this man. Here. You can hold the photograph.”

  “Whoah. Straight on and profile, with numbers on the bottom . . . And big. He’s cute, though. What did he do?”

  “He was mixed up in a small-town bank robbery, as a driver, some years ago. His two colleagues decided to keep all the loot for themselves and ran out on him. He got angry. Found them. Came close to killing them with his hands. The state cut a deal with the men he hurt: they testified against him. Shadow here got six years. He served three. You ask me, guys like that, they should just lock them up and throw away the key.”

  “I’ve never heard anyone say that in real life, you know. Not out loud.”

  “Say what, Miz Crow?”

  “ ‘Loot.’ It’s not a word you ever hear people say. Maybe in movies people say it. Not for real.”

  “This isn’t a movie, Miz Crow.”

  “Black Crow. It’s Miz Black Crow. My friends call me Sam.”

  “Got it, Sam. Now about this man—“

  “But you aren’t my friends. You can call me Miz Black Crow.”

  “Listen, you snot-nosed little—“

  “It’s okay, Mister Road. Sam here—pardon, ma’am—I mean, Miz Black Crow wants to help us. She’s a law-abiding citizen.”

  “Ma’am, we know you helped Shadow. You were seen with him, in a white Chevy Nova. He gave you a ride. He bought you dinner. Did he say anything that could help us in our investigation? Two of our best men have vanished.”

  “I never met him.”

  “You met him. Please don’t make the mistake of thinking we’re stupid. We aren’t stupid.”

  “Mm. I meet a lot of people. Maybe I met him and forgot already.”

  “Ma’am, it really is to your advantage to cooperate with us.”

  “Otherwise, you’ll have to introduce me to your friends Mister Thumbscrews and Mister Pentothal?”

  “Ma’am, you aren’t making this any easier on yourself.”

  “Gee. I’m sorry. Now, is there anything else? ‘Cos I’m going to say ‘Buh-bye now’ and close the door and I figure you two are going to go and get into Mister Car and drive away.”

  “Your lack of cooperation has been noted, ma’am.”

  “Buh-bye now.”

  Click.

  CHAPTER TEN

  I’ll tell you all my secrets

  But I lie about my past


  So send me off to bed forevermore

  —Tom Waits, “Tango Till They’re Sore”

  A whole life in darkness, surrounded by filth, that was what Shadow dreamed, his first night in Lakeside. A child’s life, long ago and far away, in a land across the ocean, in the lands where the sun rose. But this life contained no sunrises, only dimness by day and blindness by night.

  Nobody spoke to him. He heard human voices, from outside, but could understand human speech no better than he understood the howling of the owls or the yelps of dogs.

  He remembered, or thought he remembered, one night, half a lifetime ago, when one of the big people had entered, quietly, and had not cuffed him or fed him, but had picked him up to her breast and embraced him. She smelled good. Hot drops of water had fallen from her face to his. He had been scared, and had wailed loudly in his fear.

  She put him down on the straw, hurriedly, and left the hut, fastening the door behind her.

  He remembered that moment, and he treasured it, just as he remembered the sweetness of a cabbage heart, the tart taste of plums, the crunch of apples, the greasy delight of roasted fish.

  And now he saw the faces in the firelight, all of them looking at him as he was led out from the hut for the first time, which was the only time. So that was what people looked like. Raised in darkness, he had never seen faces. Everything was so new. So strange. The bonfire light hurt his eyes. They pulled on the rope around his neck, to lead him to the place where the man waited for him.

  And when the first blade was raised in the firelight, what a cheer went up from the crowd. The child from the darkness began to laugh with them, in delight and in freedom.

  And then the blade came down.

  Shadow opened his eyes and realized that he was hungry and cold, in an apartment with a layer of ice clouding the inside of the window glass. His frozen breath, he thought. He got out of bed, pleased he did not have to get dressed. He scraped at a window with a fingernail as he passed, felt the ice collect under the nail, then melt to water.