American Gods

by Neil Gaiman

  He tried to remember his dream, but remembered nothing but misery and darkness.

  He put on his shoes. He figured he would walk into the town center, walk across the bridge across the northern end of the lake, if he had the geography of the town right. He put on his thin jacket, remembering his promise to himself that he would buy himself a warm winter coat, opened the apartment door, and stepped out onto the wooden deck. The cold took his breath away: he breathed in, and felt every hair in his nostrils freeze into rigidity. The deck gave him a fine view of the lake, irregular patches of gray surrounded by an expanse of white.

  The cold snap had come, that was for sure. It could not be much above zero, and it would not be a pleasant walk, but he was certain he could make it into town without too much trouble. What did Hinzelmann say last night—a ten-minute walk? And Shadow was a big man. He would walk briskly and keep himself warm.

  He set off south, heading for the bridge.

  Soon he began to cough, a dry, thin cough, as the bitterly cold air touched his lungs. Soon his ears and face and lips hurt, and then his feet hurt. He thrust his ungloved hands deep into his coat pockets, clenched his fingers together trying to find some warmth. He found himself remembering Low Key Lyesmith’s tall tales of the Minnesota winters—particularly the one about a hunter treed by a bear during a hard freeze who took out his dick and pissed an arching yellow stream of steaming urine that was already frozen hard before it hit the ground, then slid down the rock-hard frozen-piss-pole to freedom. A wry smile at the memory and another dry, painful cough.

  Step after step after step. He glanced back. The apartment building was not as far away as he had expected.

  This walk, he decided, was a mistake. But he was already three or four minutes from the apartment, and the bridge over the lake was in sight. It made as much sense to press on as to go home (and then what? Call a taxi on the dead phone? Wait for spring? He had no food in the apartment, he reminded himself).

  He kept walking, revising his estimates of the temperature downward as he walked. Minus ten? Minus twenty? Minus forty, maybe, that strange point on the thermometer when Celsius and Fahrenheit say the same thing. Probably not that cold. But then there was wind chill, and the wind was now hard and steady and continuous, blowing over the lake, coming down from the Arctic across Canada.

  He remembered, enviously, the chemical hand- and foot-warmers. He wished he had them now.

  Ten more minutes of walking, he guessed, and the bridge seemed to be no nearer. He was too cold to shiver. His eyes hurt. This was not simply cold: this was science fiction. This was a story set on the dark side of Mercury, back when they thought Mercury had a dark side. This was somewhere out on rocky Pluto, where the sun is just another star, shining only a little more brightly in the darkness. This, thought Shadow, is just a hair away from the places where air comes in buckets and pours just like beer.

  The occasional cars that roared past him seemed unreal: spaceships, little freeze-dried packages of metal and glass, inhabited by people dressed more warmly than he was. An old song his mother had loved, “Walking in a Winter Wonderland,” began to run through his head, and he hummed it through closed lips, kept pace to it as he walked.

  He had lost all sensation in his feet. He looked down at his black leather shoes, at the thin cotton socks, and began, seriously, to worry about frostbite.

  This was beyond a joke. This had moved beyond foolishness, slipped over the line into genuine twenty-four-karat Jesus-Christ-I-screwed-up-big-time territory. His clothes might as well have been netting or lace: the wind blew through him, froze his bones and the marrow in his bones, froze the lashes of his eyes, froze the warm place under his balls, which were retreating into his pelvic cavity.

  Keep walking, he told himself. Keep walking. I can stop and drink a pail of air when I get home. A Beatles song started in his head, and he adjusted his pace to match it. It was only when he got to the chorus that he realized that he was humming “Help.”

  He was almost at the bridge now. Then he had to walk across it, and he would still be another ten minutes from the stores on the west of the lake—maybe a little more . . .

  A dark car passed him, stopped, then reversed in a foggy cloud of exhaust smoke and came to a halt beside him. A window slid down, and the haze and steam from the window mixed with the exhaust to form a dragon’s breath that surrounded the car. “Everything okay here?” said a cop inside.

  Shadow’s first, automatic instinct was to say Yup, everything’s just fine and jimdandy thank you officer. But it was too late for that, and he started to say, “I think I’m freezing. I was walking into Lakeside to buy food and clothes, but I underestimated the length of the walk”—he was that far through the sentence in his head, when he realized that all that had came out was “F-f-freezing,” and a chattering noise, and he said, “So s-sorry. Cold. Sorry.”

  The cop pulled open the back door of the car and said, “You get in there this moment and warm yourself up, okay?” Shadow climbed in gratefully, and he sat in the back and rubbed his hands together, trying not to worry about frostbitten toes. The cop got back in the driver’s seat. Shadow stared at him through the metal grille. Shadow tried not to think about the last time he’d been in the back of a police car, or to notice that there were no door handles in the back, and to concentrate instead on rubbing life back into his hands. His face hurt and his red fingers hurt, and now, in the warmth, his toes were starting to hurt once more. That was, Shadow figured, a good sign.

  The cop put the car in drive and moved off. “You know, that was,” he said, not turning to look at Shadow, just talking a little louder, “if you’ll pardon me saying so, a real stupid thing to do. You didn’t hear any of the weather advisories? It’s minus thirty out there. God alone knows what the windchill is, minus sixty, minus seventy, although I figure when you’re down at minus thirty, windchill’s the least of your worries.”

  “Thanks,” said Shadow. “Thanks for stopping. Very, very grateful.”

  “Woman in Rhinelander went out this morning to fill her bird feeder in her robe and carpet slippers and she froze, literally froze, to the sidewalk. She’s in intensive care now. It was on the TV this morning. You’re new in town.” It was almost a question, but the man knew the answer already.

  “I came in on the Greyhound last night. Figured today I’d buy myself some warm clothes, food, and a car. Wasn’t expecting this cold.”

  “Yeah,” said the cop. “It took me by surprise as well. I was too busy worrying about global warming. I’m Chad Mulligan. I’m the chief of police here in Lakeside.”

  “Mike Ainsel.”

  “Hi, Mike. Feeling any better?”

  “A little, yes.”

  “So where would you like me to take you first?”

  Shadow put his hands down to the hot-air stream, painful on his fingers, then he pulled them away. Let it happen in its own time. “Can you just drop me off in the town center?”

  “Wouldn’t hear of it. Long as you don’t need me to drive a getaway car for your bank robbery I’ll happily take you wherever you need to go. Think of it as the town welcome wagon.”

  “Where would you suggest we start?”

  “You only moved in last night.”

  “That’s right.”

  “You eaten breakfast yet?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Well, that seems like a heck of a good starting place to me,” said Mulligan.

  They were over the bridge now, and entering the northwest side of the town. “This is Main Street,” said Mulligan, “and this,” he said, crossing Main Street and turning right, “is the town square.”

  Even in the winter the town square was impressive, but Shadow knew that this place was meant to be seen in summer: it would be a riot of color, of poppies and irises and flowers of every kind, and the clump of birch trees in one corner would be a green and silver bower. Now it was colorless, beautiful in a skeletal way, the bandshell empty, the fountain turned off for t
he winter, the brownstone city hall capped by white snow.

  “. . . and this,” concluded Chad Mulligan, bringing the car to a stop outside a high glass-fronted old building on the west of the square, “is Mabel’s.”

  He got out of the car, opened the passenger door for Shadow. The two men put their heads down against the cold and the wind, and hurried across the sidewalk and into a warm room, fragrant with the smells of new-baked bread, of pastry and soup and bacon.

  The place was almost empty. Mulligan sat down at a table and Shadow sat opposite him. He suspected that Mulligan was doing this to get a feel for the stranger in town. Then again, the police chief might simply be what he appeared: friendly, helpful, good.

  A woman bustled over to their table, not fat but big, a big woman in her sixties, her hair bottle-bronze.

  “Hello, Chad,” she said. “You’ll want a hot chocolate while you’re thinking.” She handed them two laminated menus.

  “No cream on the top, though,” he agreed. “Mabel knows me too well,” he said to Shadow. “What’ll it be, pal?”

  “Hot chocolate sounds great,” said Shadow. “And I’m happy to have the whipped cream on the top.”

  “That’s good,” said Mabel. “Live dangerously, hon. Are you going to introduce me, Chad? Is this young man a new officer?”

  “Not yet,” said Chad Mulligan, with a flash of white teeth. “This is Mike Ainsel. He moved to Lakeside last night. Now, if you’ll excuse me.” He got up, walked to the back of the room, through the door marked POINTERS. It was next to a door marked SETTERS.

  “You’re the new man in the apartment up on Northridge Road. The old Pilsen place. Oh, yes,” she said, happily, “I know just who you are. Hinzelmann was by this morning for his morning pasty, he told me all about you. You boys only having hot chocolate or you want to look at the breakfast menu?”

  “Breakfast for me,” said Shadow. “What’s good?”

  “Everything’s good,” said Mabel. “I make it. But this is the farthest south and east of the yoopie you can get pasties, and they are particularly good. Warming and filling too. My speciality.”

  Shadow had no idea what a pasty was, but he said that would be fine, and in a few moments Mabel returned with a plate with what looked like a folded-over pie on it. The lower half was wrapped in a paper napkin. Shadow picked it up with the napkin and bit into it: it was warm and filled with meat, potatoes, carrots, onions. “First pasty I’ve ever had,” he said. “It’s real good.”

  “They’re a yoopie thing,” she told him. “Mostly you need to be at least up Ironwood way to get one. The Cornish men who came over to work the iron mines brought them over.”

  “Yoopie?”

  “Upper Peninsula. U.P. Yoopie. It’s the little chunk of Michigan to the northeast.”

  The chief of police came back. He picked up the hot chocolate and slurped it. “Mabel,” he said, “are you forcing this nice young man to eat one of your pasties?”

  “It’s good,” said Shadow. It was too, a savory delight wrapped in hot pastry.

  “They go straight to the belly,” said Chad Mulligan, patting his own stomach. “I warn you. Okay. So, you need a car?” With his parka off, he was revealed as a lanky man with a round, apple-belly gut on him. He looked harassed and competent, more like an engineer than a cop.

  Shadow nodded, mouth full.

  “Right. I made some calls. Justin Liebowitz’s selling his jeep, wants four thousand dollars for it, will settle for three. The Gunthers have had their Toyota 4-Runner for sale for eight months, ugly sonofabitch, but at this point they’d probably pay you to take it out of their driveway. And if you don’t care about ugly, it’s got to be a great deal. I used the phone in the men’s room, left a message for Missy Gunther down at Lakeside Realty, but she wasn’t in yet, probably getting her hair done down at Sheila’s.”

  The pasty remained good as Shadow chewed his way through it. It was astonishingly filling. “Stick-to-your-ribs food,” as his mother would have said. “Sticks to your sides.”

  “So,” said Chief of Police Chad Mulligan, wiping the hot-chocolate foam from around his lips. “I figure we stop off next at Hennings Farm and Home Supplies, get you a real winter wardrobe, swing by Dave’s Finest Food so you can fill your larder, then I’ll drop you up by Lakeside Realty. If you can put down a thousand up front for the car they’ll be happy, otherwise five hundred a month for four months should see them okay. It’s an ugly car, like I said, but if the kid hadn’t painted it purple it’d be a ten-thousand-dollar car, and reliable, and you’ll need something like that to get around this winter, you ask me.”

  “This is very good of you,” said Shadow. “But shouldn’t you be out catching criminals, not helping newcomers? Not that I’m complaining, you understand.”

  Mabel chuckled. “We all tell him that,” she said.

  Mulligan shrugged. “It’s a good town,” he said, simply. “Not much trouble. You’ll always get someone speeding within city limits—which is a good thing, as traffic tickets pay my wages. Friday, Saturday nights you get some jerk who gets drunk and beats on a spouse—and that one can go both ways, believe me. Men and women. But out here things are quiet. They call me out when someone’s locked their keys in their vehicle. Barking dogs. Every year there’s a couple of high school kids caught with weed behind the bleachers. Biggest police case we’ve had here in five years was when Dan Schwartz got drunk and shot up his own trailer, then he went on the run, down Main Street, in his wheelchair, waving this darn shotgun, shouting that he would shoot anyone who got in his way, that no one would stop him from getting to the interstate. I think he was on his way to Washington to shoot the president. I still laugh whenever I think of Dan heading down the interstate in that wheelchair of his with the bumper sticker on the back. ‘My Juvenile Delinquent is Screwing Your Honor Student.’ You remember, Mabel?”

  She nodded, lips pursed. She did not seem to find it as funny as Mulligan did.

  “What did you do?” asked Shadow.

  “I talked to him. He gave me the shotgun. Slept it off down at the jail. Dan’s not a bad guy, he was just drunk and upset.”

  Shadow paid for his own breakfast and, over Chad Mulligan’s halfhearted protests, both hot chocolates.

  Hennings Farm and Home Supplies was a warehouse-sized building on the south of the town that sold everything from tractors to toys (the toys, along with the Christmas ornaments, were already on sale). The store was bustling with post-Christmas shoppers. Shadow recognized the younger of the girls who had sat in front of him on the bus. She was trailing after her parents. He waved at her and she gave him a hesitant, blue-rubber-banded smile. Shadow wondered idly what she’d look like in ten years’ time.

  Probably as beautiful as the girl at the Hennings Farm and Home checkout counter, who scanned in his purchases with a chattering hand-held gun, capable, Shadow had no doubt, of ringing up a tractor if someone drove it through.

  “Ten pairs of long underwear?” said the girl. “Stocking up, huh?” She looked like a movie starlet.

  Shadow felt fourteen again, and tongue-tied and foolish. He said nothing while she rang up the thermal boots, the gloves, the sweaters, and the goose-down-filled coat.

  He had no wish to put the credit card that Wednesday had given him to the test, not with Chief of Police Mulligan standing helpfully beside him, so he paid for everything in cash. Then he took his bags into the men’s rest room, came out wearing many of his purchases.

  “Looking good, big fella,” said Mulligan.

  “At least I’m warm,” said Shadow, and outside, in the parking lot, although the wind burned cold on the skin of his face, the rest of him was warm enough. At Mulligan’s invitation, he put his shopping bags in the back of the police car, and rode in the passenger seat, in the front.

  “So, what do you do, Mister Ainsel?” asked the chief of police. “Big guy like you. What’s your profession, and will you be practicing it in Lakeside?”

  Shadow’
s heart began to pound, but his voice was steady. “I work for my uncle. He buys and sells stuff all over the country. I just do the heavy lifting.”

  “Does he pay well?”

  “I’m family. He knows I’m not going to rip him off, and I’m learning a little about the trade on the way. Until I figure out what it is I really want to do.” It was coming out of him with conviction, smooth as a snake. He knew everything about big Mike Ainsel in that moment, and he liked Mike Ainsel. Mike Ainsel had none of the problems that Shadow had. Ainsel had never been married. Mike Ainsel had never been interrogated on a freight train by Mr. Wood and Mr. Stone. Televisions did not speak to Mike Ainsel (“You want to see Lucy’s tits?” asked a voice in his head). Mike Ainsel didn’t have bad dreams, or believe that there was a storm coming.

  He filled his shopping basket at Dave’s Finest Food, doing what he thought of as a gas-station stop—milk, eggs, bread, apples, cheese, cookies. Just some food. He’d do a real one later. As Shadow moved around, Chad Mulligan said hello to people and introduced Shadow to them. “This is Mike Ainsel, he’s taken the empty apartment at the old Pilsen place. Up around the back,” he’d say. Shadow gave up trying to remember names. He just shook hands with people and smiled, sweating a little, uncomfortable in his insulated layers in the hot store.

  Chad Mulligan drove Shadow across the street to Lakeside Realty. Missy Gunther, her hair freshly set and lacquered, did not need an introduction—she knew exactly who Mike Ainsel was. Why, that nice Mr. Borson, his uncle Emerson, such a nice man, he’d been by, what, about six, eight weeks ago now, and rented the apartment up at the old Pilsen Place, and wasn’t the view just to die for up there? Well, honey, just wait until the spring, and we’re so lucky, so many of the lakes in this part of the world go bright green from the algae in the summer, it would turn your stomach, but our lake, well, come fourth of July you could still practically drink it, and Mr. Borson had paid for a whole year’s lease in advance, and as for the Toyota 4-Runner, she couldn’t believe that Chad Mulligan still remembered it, and yes, she’d be delighted to get rid of it. Tell the truth, she’d pretty much resigned herself to giving it to Hinzelmann as this year’s klunker and just taking the tax write-off, not that the car was a klunker, far from it, no, it was her son’s car before he went to school in Green Bay, and, well, he’d painted it purple one day and, ha-ha, she certainly hoped that Mike Ainsel liked purple, that was all she had to say, and if he didn’t she wouldn’t blame him . . .