American Gods

by Neil Gaiman

  “Listen. Fox was here first, and his brother was the wolf. Fox said, people will live forever. If they die they will not die for long. Wolf said, no, people will die, people must die, all things that live must die, or they will spread and cover the world, and eat all the salmon and the caribou and the buffalo, eat all the squash and all the corn. Now one day Wolf died, and he said to the fox, quick, bring me back to life. And Fox said, No, the dead must stay dead. You convinced me. And he wept as he said this. But he said it, and it was final. Now Wolf rules the world of the dead and Fox lives always under the sun and the moon, and he still mourns his brother.”

  Wednesday said, “If you won’t play, you won’t play. We’ll be moving on.”

  Whiskey Jack’s face was impassive. “I’m talking to this young man,” he said. “You are beyond help. He is not.” He turned back to Shadow. “Tell me your dream,” said Whiskey Jack.

  Shadow said, “I was climbing a tower of skulls. There were huge birds flying around it. They had lightning in their wings. They were attacking me. The tower fell.”

  “Everybody dreams,” said Wednesday. “Can we hit the road?”

  “Not everybody dreams of the Wakinyau, the thunderbird,” said Whiskey Jack. “We felt the echoes of it here.”

  “I told you,” said Wednesday. “Jesus.”

  “There’s a clutch of thunderbirds in West Virginia,” said Chapman, idly. “A couple of hens and an old cock-bird at least. There’s also a breeding pair in the land, they used to call it the State of Franklin, but old Ben never got his state, up between Kentucky and Tennessee. ‘Course, there was never a great number of them, even at the best of times.”

  Whiskey Jack reached out a hand the color of red clay and touched Shadow’s face, gently. “Eyah,” he said. “It’s true. If you hunt the thunderbird you could bring your woman back. But she belongs to the wolf, in the dead places, not walking the land.”

  “How do you know?” asked Shadow.

  Whiskey Jack’s lips did not move. “What did the buffalo tell you?”

  “To believe.”

  “Good advice. Are you going to follow it?”

  “Kind of. I guess.” They were talking without words, without mouths, without sound. Shadow wondered if, for the other two men in the room, they were standing, unmoving, for a heartbeat or for fraction of a heartbeat.

  “When you find your tribe, come back and see me,” said Whiskey Jack. “I can help.”

  “I shall.”

  Whiskey Jack lowered his hand. Then he turned to Wednesday. “Are you going to fetch your Ho Chunk?”

  “My what?”

  “Ho Chunk. It’s what the Winnebago call themselves.”

  Wednesday shook his head. “It’s too risky. Retrieving it could be problematic. They’ll be looking for it.”

  “Is it stolen?”

  Wednesday looked affronted. “Not a bit of it. The papers are in the glove compartment.”

  “And the keys?”

  “I’ve got them,” said Shadow.

  “My nephew, Harry Bluejay, has an ’81 Buick. Why don’t you give me the keys to your camper? You can take his car.”

  Wednesday bristled. “What kind of trade is that?”

  Whiskey Jack shrugged. “You know how hard it will be to bring back your camper from where you abandoned it? I’m doing you a favor. Take it or leave it. I don’t care.” He closed his knife-wound mouth.

  Wednesday looked angry, and then the anger became rue, and he said, “Shadow, give the man the keys to the Winnebago.” Shadow passed the car keys to Whiskey Jack.

  “Johnny,” said Whiskey Jack, “will you take these men down to find Harry Bluejay? Tell him I said for him to give them his car.”

  “Be my pleasure,” said John Chapman.

  He got up and walked to the door, picked up a small burlap sack sitting next to it, opened the door, and walked outside. Shadow and Wednesday followed him. Whiskey Jack waited in the doorway. “Hey,” he said to Wednesday. “Don’t come back here, you. You are not welcome.”

  Wednesday extended his finger heavenward. “Rotate on this,” he said affably.

  They walked downhill through the snow, pushing their way through the drifts. Chapman walked in front, his bare feet red against the crust-topped snow. “Aren’t you cold?” asked Shadow.

  “My wife was Choctaw,” said Chapman.

  “And she taught you mystical ways to keep out the cold?”

  “Nope. She thought I was crazy,” said Chapman. “She used t’say, ‘Johnny, why don’t you jes’ put on boots?’ “ The slope of the hill became steeper, and they were forced to stop talking. The three men stumbled and slipped on the snow, using the trunks of birch trees on the hillside to steady themselves, and to stop themselves from falling. When the ground became slightly more level, Chapman said, “She’s dead now, a’course. When she died I guess maybe I went a mite crazy. It could happen to anyone. It could happen to you.” He clapped Shadow on the arm. “By Jesus and Jehosophat, you’re a big man.”

  “So they tell me,” said Shadow.

  They trudged down that hill for about half an hour, until they reached the gravel road that wound around the base of it, and the three men began to walk along it, toward the cluster of buildings they had seen from high on the hill.

  A car slowed and stopped. The woman driving it reached over, wound down the passenger window, and said, “You bozos need a ride?”

  “You are very gracious, madam,” said Wednesday. “We’re looking for a Mister Harry Bluejay.”

  “He’ll be down at the rec hall,” said the woman. She was in her forties, Shadow guessed. “Get in.”

  They got in. Wednesday took the passenger seat, John Chapman and Shadow climbed into the back. Shadow’s legs were too long to sit in the back comfortably, but he did the best he could. The car jolted forward, down the gravel road.

  “So where did you three come from?” asked the driver.

  “Just visiting with a friend,” said Wednesday.

  “Lives on the hill back there,” said Shadow.

  “What hill?” she asked.

  Shadow looked back through the dusty rear window, looking back at the hill. But there was no high hill back there; nothing but clouds on the plains.

  “Whiskey Jack,” he said.

  “Ah,” she said. “We call him Inktomi here. I think it’s the same guy. My grandfather used to tell some pretty good stories about him. Of course, all the best of them were kind of dirty.” They hit a bump in the road, and the woman swore. “You okay back there?”

  “Yes ma’am,” said Johnny Chapman. He was holding onto the backseat with both hands.

  “Rez roads,” she said. “You get used to them.”

  “Are they all like this?” asked Shadow.

  “Pretty much,” said the woman. “All the ones around here. And don’t you go asking about all the money from casinos, because who in their right mind wants to come all the way out here to go to a casino? We don’t see none of that money out here.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be.” She changed gear with a crash and a groan. “You know the white population all around here is falling? You go out there, you find ghost towns. How you going to keep them down on the farm, after they seen the world on their television screens? And it’s not worth anyone’s while to farm the Badlands anyhow. They took our lands, they settled here, now they’re leaving. They go south. They go west. Maybe if we wait for enough of them to move to New York and Miami and L.A. we can take the whole of the middle back without a fight.”

  “Good luck,” said Shadow.

  They found Harry Bluejay in the rec hall, at the pool table, doing trick shots to impress a group of several girls. He had a blue jay tattooed on the back of his right hand, and multiple piercings in his right ear.

  “Ho hoka, Harry Bluejay,” said John Chapman.

  “Fuck off, you crazy barefoot white ghost,” said Harry Bluejay, conversationally. “You give me the creeps.”
>
  There were older men at the far end of the room, some of them playing cards, some of them talking. There were other men, younger men of about Harry Bluejay’s age, waiting for their turn at the pool table. It was a full-sized pool table, and a rip in the green baize on one side had been repaired with silver-gray duct tape.

  “I got a message from your uncle,” said Chapman, unfazed. “He says you’re to give these two your car.”

  There must have been thirty, maybe even forty people in that hall, and now they were every one of them looking intently at their playing cards, or their feet, or their fingernails, and pretending as hard as they could not to be listening.

  “He’s not my uncle.”

  A cigarette-smoke fug hung over the hall. Chapman smiled widely, displaying the worst set of teeth that Shadow had seen in a human mouth. “You want to tell your uncle that? He says you’re the only reason he stays among the Lakota.”

  “Whiskey Jack says a lot of things,” said Harry Bluejay, petulantly. But he did not say Whiskey Jack either. It sounded almost the same, to Shadow’s ear, but not quite: Wisakedjak, he thought. That’s what they’re saying. Not Whiskey Jack at all.

  Shadow said, “Yeah. And one of the things he said was that we’re trading our Winnebago for your Buick.”

  “I don’t see a Winnebago.”

  “He’ll bring you the Winnebago,” said John Chapman. “You know he will.”

  Harry Bluejay attempted a trick shot and missed. His hand was not steady enough. “I’m not the old fox’s nephew,” said Harry Bluejay. “I wish he wouldn’t say that to people.”

  “Better a live fox than a dead wolf,” said Wednesday, in a voice so deep it was almost a growl. “Now, will you sell us your car?”

  Harry Bluejay shivered, visibly and violently. “Sure,” he said. “Sure. I was only kidding. I kid a lot, me.” He put down the pool cue on the pool table, and took a thick jacket, pulling it out from a cluster of similar jackets hanging from pegs by the door. “Let me get my shit out of the car first,” he said.

  He kept darting glances at Wednesday, as if he were concerned that the older man were about to explode.

  Harry Bluejay’s car was parked a hundred yards away. As they walked toward it, they passed a small whitewashed Catholic church, and a man in a priest’s collar who stared at them from the doorway as they went past. He was sucking on a cigarette as if he did not enjoy smoking it.

  “Good day to you, father!” called Johnny Chapman, but the man in the collar made no reply; he crushed his cigarette under his heel, picked up the butt and dropped it into the bin beside the door, and went inside.

  Harry Bluejay’s car was missing its wing mirrors, and its tires were the baldest Shadow had ever seen: perfectly smooth black rubber. Harry Bluejay told them the car drank oil, but as long as you kept pouring oil in, it would just keep running forever, unless it stopped.

  Harry Bluejay filled a black garbage bag with shit from the car (said shit including several screw-top bottles of cheap beer, unfinished, a small packet of cannabis resin wrapped in silver foil and badly hidden in the car’s ashtray, a skunk tail, two dozen country-and-western cassettes and a battered, yellowing copy of Stranger in a Strange Land). “Sorry I was jerking your chain before,” said Harry Bluejay to Wednesday, passing him the car keys. “You know when I’ll get the Winnebago?”

  “Ask your uncle. He’s the fucking used-car dealer,” growled Wednesday.

  “Wisakedjak is not my uncle,” said Harry Bluejay. He took his black garbage bag and went into the nearest house, and closed the door behind him.

  They dropped Johnny Chapman in Sioux Falls, outside a whole-food store.

  Wednesday said nothing on the drive. He was in a black sulk, as he had been since they left Whiskey Jack’s place.

  In a family restaurant just outside St. Paul, Shadow picked up a newspaper someone else had put down. He looked at it once, then again, then he showed it to Wednesday.

  “Look at that,” said Shadow.

  Wednesday sighed, and looked down at the paper. “I am,” he said, “delighted that the air-traffic controllers’ dispute has been resolved without recourse to industrial action.”

  “Not that,” said Shadow. “Look. It says it’s the fourteenth of February.”

  “Happy Valentine’s Day.”

  “So we set out January the what, twentieth, twenty-first. I wasn’t keeping track of the dates, but it was the third week of January. We were three days on the road, all told. So how is it the fourteenth of February?”

  “Because we walked for almost a month,” said Wednesday. “In the Badlands. Backstage.”

  “Hell of a shortcut,” said Shadow.

  Wednesday pushed the paper away. “Fucking Johnny Appleseed, always going on about Paul Bunyan. In real life Chapman owned fourteen apple orchards. He farmed thousands of acres. Yes, he kept pace with the western frontier, but there’s not a story out there about him with a word of truth in it, save that he went a little crazy once. But it doesn’t matter. Like the newspapers used to say, if the truth isn’t big enough, you print the legend. This country needs its legends. And even the legends don’t believe it anymore.”

  “But you see it.”

  “I’m a has-been. Who the fuck cares about me?”

  Shadow said softly, “You’re a god.”

  Wednesday looked at him sharply. He seemed to be about to say something, and then he slumped back in his seat, and looked down at the menu, and said, “So?”

  “It’s a good thing to be a god,” said Shadow.

  “Is it?” asked Wednesday, and this time it was Shadow who looked away.

  In a gas station twenty-five miles outside Lakeside, on the wall by the rest rooms, Shadow saw a homemade photocopied notice: a black-and-white photo of Alison McGovern and the handwritten question Have You Seen Me? above it. Same yearbook photograph: smiling confidently, a girl with rubber-band braces on her top teeth who wants to work with animals when she grows up.

  Have you seen me?

  Shadow bought a Snickers bar, a bottle of water, and a copy of the Lakeside News. The above-the-fold story, written by Marguerite Olsen, our Lakeside Reporter, showed a photograph of a boy and an older man, out on the frozen lake, standing by an outhouselike ice-fishing shack, and between them they were holding a big fish. They were smiling. Father and Son Catch Local Record Northern Pike. Full story inside.

  Wednesday was driving. He said, “Read me anything interesting you find in the paper.”

  Shadow looked carefully, and he turned the pages slowly, but he couldn’t find anything.

  Wednesday dropped him off in the driveway outside his apartment. A smoke-colored cat stared at him from the driveway, then fled when he bent to stroke it.

  Shadow stopped on the wooden deck outside his apartment and looked out at the lake, dotted here and there with green and brown ice-fishing huts. Many of them had cars parked beside them. On the ice nearer the bridge sat the old green klunker, just as it had sat in the newspaper. “March twenty-third,” said Shadow, encouragingly. “Round nine-fifteen in the morning. You can do it.”

  “Not a chance,” said a woman’s voice. “April third. Six P.M. That way the day warms up the ice.” Shadow smiled. Marguerite Olsen was wearing a ski suit. She was at the far end of the deck, refilling the bird feeder.

  “I read your article in the Lakeside News on the Town Record Northern Pike.”

  “Exciting, huh?”

  “Well, educational, maybe.”

  “I thought you weren’t coming back to us,” she said. “You were gone for a while, huh?”

  “My uncle needed me,” said Shadow. “The time kind of got away from us.”

  She placed the last suet brick in its cage, and began to fill a net sock with thistle seeds from a plastic milk jug. Several goldfinches, olive in their winter coats, twitted impatiently from a nearby fir tree.

  “I didn’t see anything in the paper about Alison McGovern.”

  “There wasn�
��t anything to report. She’s still missing. There was a rumor that someone had seen her in Detroit, but it turned out to be a false alarm.”

  “Poor kid.”

  Marguerite Olsen screwed the top back onto the gallon jug. “I hope she’s dead,” she said, matter-of-factly.

  Shadow was shocked. “Why?”

  “Because the alternatives are worse.”

  The goldfinches hopped frantically from branch to branch of the fir tree, impatient for the people to be gone.

  You aren’t thinking about Alison, thought Shadow. You’re thinking of your son. You’re thinking of Sandy.

  He remembered someone saying I miss Sandy. Who was that?

  “Good talking to you,” he said.

  “Yeah,” she said. “You too.”

  February passed in a succession of short, gray days. Some days the snow fell, most days it didn’t. The weather warmed up, and on the good days it got above freezing. Shadow stayed in his apartment until it began to feel like a prison cell, and then, on the days that Wednesday did not need him to travel, he began to walk.

  He would walk for much of the day, long trudges out of the town. He walked, alone, until he reached the national forest to the north and the west, or the cornfields and cow pastures to the south. He walked the Lumber County Wilderness Trail, and he walked along the old railroad tracks, and he walked the back roads. A couple of times he even walked along the frozen lake, from north to south. Sometimes he’d see locals or winter tourists or joggers, and he’d wave and say hi. Mostly he saw nobody at all, just crows and finches, and a few times he spotted a hawk feasting on a roadkill possum or raccoon. On one memorable occasion he watched an eagle snatch a silver fish from the middle of the White Pine River, the water frozen at the edges, but still rushing and flowing at the center. The fish wriggled and jerked in the eagle’s talons, glittering in the midday sun; Shadow imagined the fish freeing itself and swimming off across the sky, and he smiled, grimly.

  If he walked, he discovered, he did not have to think, and that was just the way he liked it; when he thought, his mind went to places he could not control, places that made him feel uncomfortable. Exhaustion was the best thing. When he was exhausted, his thoughts did not wander to Laura, or to the strange dreams, or to things that were not and could not be. He would return home from walking, and sleep without difficulty and without dreaming.