American Gods

by Neil Gaiman

  He put the book down on his chest and realized his head was nodding. It would be foolish to fall asleep on the couch, he decided soberly. The bedroom was only a few feet away. On the other hand, the bedroom and the bed would still be there in five minutes, and anyway, he was not going to go to sleep, only to close his eyes for a moment . . .

  Darkness roared.

  He stood on an open plain. Beside him was the place from which he had once emerged, from which the earth had squeezed him. Stars were still falling from the sky and each star that touched the red earth became a man or a woman. The men had long black hair and high cheekbones. The women all looked like Marguerite Olsen. These were the star people.

  They looked at him with dark, proud eyes.

  “Tell me about the thunderbirds,” said Shadow. “Please. It’s not for me. It’s for my wife.”

  One by one they turned their backs on him, and as he lost their faces they were gone, one with the landscape. But the last of them, her hair streaked white on dark gray, pointed before she turned away, pointed into the wine-colored sky.

  “Ask them yourself,” she said. Summer lightning flickered, momentarily illuminating the landscape from horizon to horizon.

  There were high rocks near him, peaks and spires of sandstone, and Shadow began to climb the nearest. The spire was the color of old ivory. He grabbed at a handhold and felt it slice into his hand. It’s bone, thought Shadow. Not stone. It’s old dry bone.

  It was a dream, and in dreams you have no choices: either there are no decisions to be made, or they were made for you long before ever the dream began. Shadow continued to climb. His hands hurt. Bone popped and crushed and fragmented under his bare feet. The wind tugged at him, and he pressed himself to the spire, and he continued to climb the tower.

  It was made of only one kind of bone, he realized, repeated over and over. Each of the bones was dry and ball-like. He imagined that they might be the egg shells of some huge bird. But another flare of lightning told him differently: they had holes for eyes, and they had teeth, which grinned without humor.

  Somewhere birds were calling. Rain spattered his face.

  He was hundreds of feet above the ground, clinging to the side of the tower of skulls, while flashes of lightning burned in the wings of the shadowy birds who circled the spire—enormous, black, condorlike birds, each with a ruff of white at its neck. They were huge, graceful, awful birds, and the beats of their wings crashed like thunder on the night air.

  They were circling the spire.

  They must be fifteen, twenty feet from wingtip to wingtip, thought Shadow.

  Then the first bird swung out of its glide toward him, blue lightning crackling in its wings. He pushed himself into a crevice of skulls, hollow eye-holes stared at him, a clutter of ivory teeth smiled at him, but he kept climbing, pulling himself up the mountain of skulls, every sharp edge cutting into his skin, feeling revulsion and terror and awe.

  Another bird came at him, and one hand-sized talon sank into his arm.

  He reached out and tried to grasp a feather from its wing—for if he returned to his tribe without a thunderbird’s feather he would be disgraced, he would never be a man—but the bird pulled up, so that he could not grasp a feather. The thunderbird loosened its grip and swung back onto the wind. Shadow continued to climb.

  There must be a thousand skulls, thought Shadow. A thousand thousand. And not all of them are human. He stood at last on the top of the spire, the great birds, the thunderbirds, circling him slowly, navigating the gusts of the storm with tiny flicks of their wings.

  He heard a voice, the voice of the buffalo man, calling to him on the wind, telling him who the skulls belonged to . . .

  The tower began to tumble, and the biggest bird, its eyes the blinding blue-white of forked lightning, plummeted down toward him in a rush of thunder, and Shadow was falling, tumbling down the tower of skulls . . .

  The telephone shrilled. Shadow had not even known that it was connected. Groggy, shaken, he picked it up.

  “What the fuck,” shouted Wednesday, angrier than Shadow had ever heard him, “what the almighty flying fuck do you think you are playing at?”

  “I was asleep,” said Shadow into the receiver, stupidly.

  “What do you think is the fucking point of stashing you in a hiding place like Lakeside, if you’re going to raise such a ruckus that not even a dead man could miss it?”

  “I dreamed of thunderbirds . . .” said Shadow. “And a tower. Skulls . . .” It seemed to him very important to recount his dream.

  “I know what you were dreaming. Everybody damn well knows what you were dreaming. Christ almighty. What’s the point in hiding you, if you’re going to start to fucking advertise?”

  Shadow said nothing.

  There was a pause at the other end of the telephone. “I’ll be there in the morning,” said Wednesday. It sounded like the anger had died down. “We’re going to San Francisco. The flowers in your hair are optional.” And the line went dead.

  Shadow put the telephone down on the carpet, and sat up, stiffly. It was 6:00 A.M. and still night-dark outside. He got up from the sofa, shivering. He could hear the wind as it screamed across the frozen lake. And he could hear somebody nearby crying, only the thickness of a wall away. He was certain it was Marguerite Olsen, and her sobbing was insistent and low and heartbreaking.

  Shadow walked into the bathroom and pissed, then went into his bedroom and closed the door, blocking off the sound of the crying woman. Outside the wind howled and wailed as if it, too, was seeking a lost child.

  San Francisco in January was unseasonably warm, warm enough that the sweat prickled on the back of Shadow’s neck. Wednesday was wearing a deep blue suit, and a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles that made him look like an entertainment lawyer.

  They were walking along Haight Street. The street people and the hustlers and the moochers watched them go by, and no one shook a paper cup of change at them, no one asked them for anything at all.

  Wednesday’s jaw was set. Shadow had seen immediately that the man was still angry, and had asked no questions when the black Lincoln Town Car had pulled up outside the apartment that morning. They had not talked on the way to the airport. He had been relieved that Wednesday was in first class and he was back in coach.

  Now it was late in the afternoon. Shadow, who had not been in San Francisco since he was a boy, who had only seen it since then as a background to movies, was astonished at how familiar it was, how colorful and unique the wooden houses, how steep the hills, how very much it didn’t feel like anywhere else.

  “It’s almost hard to believe that this is in the same country as Lakeside,” he said.

  Wednesday glared at him. Then he said, “It’s not. San Francisco isn’t in the same country as Lakeside anymore than New Orleans is in the same country as New York or Miami is in the same country as Minneapolis.”

  “Is that so?” said Shadow, mildly.

  “Indeed it is. They may share certain cultural signifiers—money, a federal government, entertainment—it’s the same land, obviously—but the only things that give it the illusion of being one country are the greenback, The Tonight Show, and McDonald’s.” They were approaching a park at the end of the road. “Be nice to the lady we are visiting. But not too nice.”

  “I’ll be cool,” said Shadow.

  They stepped onto the grass.

  A young girl, no older than fourteen, her hair dyed green and orange and pink, stared at them as they went by. She sat beside a dog, a mongrel, with a piece of string for a collar and a leash. She looked hungrier than the dog did. The dog yapped at them, then wagged its tail.

  Shadow gave the girl a dollar bill. She stared at it as if she was not sure what it was. “Buy dog food with it,” Shadow suggested. She nodded, and smiled.

  “Let me put it bluntly,” said Wednesday. “You must be very cautious around the lady we are visiting. She might take a fancy to you, and that would be bad.”

  “I
s she your girlfriend or something?”

  “Not for all the little plastic toys in China,” said Wednesday, agreeably. His anger seemed to have dissipated, or perhaps to have been invested for the future. Shadow suspected that anger was the engine that made Wednesday run.

  There was a woman sitting on the grass, under a tree, with a paper tablecloth spread in front of her, and a variety of Tupperware dishes on the cloth.

  She was—not fat, no, far from fat: what she was, a word that Shadow had never had cause to use until now, was curvaceous. Her hair was so fair that it was white, the kind of platinum-blonde tresses that should have belonged to a long-dead movie starlet, her lips were painted crimson, and she looked to be somewhere between twenty-five and fifty.

  As they reached her she was selecting from a plate of deviled eggs. She looked up as Wednesday approached her, put down the egg she had chosen, and wiped her hand. “Hello, you old fraud,” she said, but she smiled as she said it, and Wednesday bowed low, took her hand, and raised it to his lips.

  He said, “You look divine.”

  “How the hell else should I look?” she demanded, sweetly. “Anyway, you’re a liar. New Orleans was such a mistake—I put on, what, thirty pounds there? I swear. I knew I had to leave when I started to waddle. The tops of my thighs rub together when I walk now, can you believe that?” This last was addressed to Shadow. He had no idea what to say in reply, and felt a hot flush suffuse his face. The woman laughed delightedly. “He’s blushing! Wednesday, my sweet, you brought me a blusher. How perfectly wonderful of you. What’s he called?”

  “This is Shadow,” said Wednesday. He seemed to be enjoying Shadow’s discomfort. “Shadow, say hello to Easter.”

  Shadow said something that might have been Hello, and the woman smiled at him again. He felt like he was caught in headlights—the blinding kind that poachers use to freeze deer before they shoot them. He could smell her perfume from where he was standing, an intoxicating mixture of jasmine and honeysuckle, of sweet milk and female skin.

  “So, how’s tricks?” asked Wednesday.

  The woman—Easter—laughed a deep and throaty laugh, full-bodied and joyous. How could you not like someone who laughed like that? “Everything’s fine,” she said. “How about you, you old wolf?”

  “I was hoping to enlist your assistance.”

  “Wasting your time.”

  “At least hear me out before dismissing me.”

  “No point. Don’t even bother.”

  She looked at Shadow. “Please, sit down here and help yourself to some of this food. Here, take a plate and pile it high. It’s all good. Eggs, roast chicken, chicken curry, chicken salad, and over here is lapin—rabbit, actually, but cold rabbit is a delight, and in that bowl over there is the jugged hare—well, why don’t I just fill a plate for you?” And she did, taking a plastic plate, piling it high with food, and passing it to him. Then she looked at Wednesday. “Are you eating?” she asked.

  “I am at your disposal, my dear,” said Wednesday.

  “You,” she told him, “are so full of shit it’s a wonder your eyes don’t turn brown.” She passed him an empty plate. “Help yourself,” she said.

  The afternoon sun at her back burned her hair into a platinum aura. “Shadow,” she said, chewing a chicken leg with gusto. “That’s a sweet name. Why do they call you Shadow?”

  Shadow licked his lips to moisten them. “When I was a kid,” he said. “We lived, my mother and I, we were, I mean, she was, well, like a secretary, at a bunch of U.S. embassies, we went from city to city all over northern Europe. Then she got sick and had to take early retirement and we came back to the States. I never knew what to say to the other kids, so I’d just find adults and follow them around, not saying anything. I just needed the company, I guess. I don’t know. I was a small kid.”

  “You grew,” she said.

  “Yes,” said Shadow. “I grew.”

  She turned back to Wednesday, who was spooning down a bowl of what looked like cold gumbo. “Is this the boy who’s got everybody so upset?”

  “You heard?”

  “I keep my ears pricked up,” she said. Then to Shadow, “You keep out of their way. There are too many secret societies out there, and they have no loyalties and no love. Commercial, independent, government, they’re all in the same boat. They range from the barely competent to the deeply dangerous. Hey, old wolf, I heard a joke you’d like the other day. How do you know the CIA wasn’t involved in the Kennedy assassination?”

  “I’ve heard it,” said Wednesday.

  “Pity.” She turned her attention back to Shadow. “But the spook show, the ones you met, they’re something else. They exist because everyone knows they must exist.” She drained a paper cup of something that looked like white wine, and then she got to her feet. “Shadow’s a good name,” she said. “I want a mochaccino. Come on.”

  She began to walk away. “What about the food?” asked Wednesday. “You can’t just leave it here.”

  She smiled at him, and pointed to the girl sitting by the dog, and then extended her arms to take in the Haight and the world. “Let it feed them,” she said, and she walked, with Wednesday and Shadow trailing behind her.

  “Remember,” she said to Wednesday, as they walked, “I’m rich. I’m doing just peachy. Why should I help you?”

  “You’re one of us,” he said. “You’re as forgotten and as unloved and unremembered as any of us. It’s pretty clear whose side you should be on.”

  They reached a sidewalk coffeehouse, went inside, sat down. There was only one waitress, who wore her eyebrow ring as a mark of caste, and a woman making coffee behind the counter. The waitress advanced upon them, smiling automatically, sat them down, took their orders.

  Easter put her slim hand on the back of Wednesday’s square gray hand. “I’m telling you,” she said, “I’m doing fine. On my festival days they still feast on eggs and rabbits, on candy and on flesh, to represent rebirth and copulation. They wear flowers in their bonnets and they give each other flowers. They do it in my name. More and more of them every year. In my name, old wolf.”

  “And you wax fat and affluent on their worship and their love?” he said, dryly.

  “Don’t be an asshole.” Suddenly she sounded very tired. She sipped her mochaccino.

  “Serious question, m’dear. Certainly I would agree that millions upon millions of them give each other tokens in your name, and that they still practice all the rites of your festival, even down to hunting for hidden eggs. But how many of them know who you are? Eh? Excuse me, miss?” This to their waitress.

  She said, “You need another espresso?”

  “No, my dear. I was just wondering if you could solve a little argument we were having over here. My friend and I were disagreeing over what the word ‘Easter’ means. Would you happen to know?”

  The girl stared at him as if green toads had begun to push their way between his lips. Then she said, “I don’t know about any of that Christian stuff. I’m a pagan.”

  The woman behind the counter said, “I think it’s like Latin or something for ‘Christ has risen,’ maybe.”

  “Really?” said Wednesday.

  “Yeah, sure,” said the woman. “Easter. Just like the sun rises in the east, you know.”

  “The risen son. Of course—a most logical supposition.” The woman smiled and returned to her coffee grinder. Wednesday looked up at their waitress. “I think I shall have another espresso, if you do not mind. And tell me, as a pagan, who do you worship?”

  “Worship?”

  “That’s right. I imagine you must have a pretty wide-open field. So to whom do you set up your household altar? To whom do you bow down? To whom do you pray at dawn and at dusk?”

  Her lips described several shapes without saying anything before she said, “The female principle. It’s an empowerment thing. You know?”

  “Indeed. And this female principle of yours. Does she have a name?”

  “She’s t
he goddess within us all,” said the girl with the eyebrow ring, color rising to her cheek. “She doesn’t need a name.”

  “Ah,” said Wednesday, with a wide monkey grin, “so do you have mighty bacchanals in her honor? Do you drink blood wine under the full moon while scarlet candles burn in silver candleholders? Do you step naked into the seafoam, chanting ecstatically to your nameless goddess while the waves lick at your legs, lapping your thighs like the tongues of a thousand leopards?”

  “You’re making fun of me,” she said. “We don’t do any of that stuff you were saying.” She took a deep breath. Shadow suspected she was counting to ten. “Any more coffees here? Another mochaccino for you, ma’am?” Her smile was a lot like the one she had greeted them with when they had entered.

  They shook their heads, and the waitress turned to greet another customer.

  “There,” said Wednesday, “is one who ‘does not have the faith and will not have the fun,’ Chesterton. Pagan indeed. So. Shall we go out onto the street, Easter my dear, and repeat the exercise? Find out how many passersby know that their Easter festival takes its name from Eostre of the Dawn? Let’s see—I have it. We shall ask a hundred people. For every one that knows the truth, you may cut off one of my fingers, and when I run out of them, toes; for every twenty who don’t know, you spend a night making love to me. And the odds are certainly in your favor here—this is San Francisco, after all. There are heathens and pagans and Wiccans aplenty on these precipitous streets.”

  Her green eyes looked at Wednesday. They were, Shadow decided, the exact same color as a leaf in spring with the sun shining through it. She said nothing.