American Gods

by Neil Gaiman

  He reached his apartment, parked, walked up the drive, up the wooden steps to his apartment. The goldfinches and nuthatches on the birdfeeder hardly gave him a glance. He went inside. He watered the plant, wondered whether or not to put the wine into the refrigerator.

  There was a lot of time to kill until six.

  Shadow wished he could comfortably watch television once more. He wanted to be entertained, not to have to think, just to sit and let the sounds and the light wash over him. Do you want to see Lucy’s tits? something with a Lucy voice whispered in his memory, and he shook his head, although there was no one there to see him.

  He was nervous, he realized. This would be his first real social interaction with other people—normal people, not people in jail, not gods or culture heroes or dreams—since he was first arrested, over three years ago. He would have to make conversation, as Mike Ainsel.

  He checked his watch. It was two-thirty. Marguerite Olsen had told him to be there at six. Did she mean six exactly? Should he be there a little early? A little late? He decided, eventually, to walk next door at five past six.

  Shadow’s telephone rang.

  “Yeah?” he said.

  “That’s no way to answer the phone,” growled Wednesday.

  “When I get my telephone connected I’ll answer it politely,” said Shadow. “Can I help you?”

  “I don’t know,” said Wednesday. There was a pause. Then he said, “Organizing gods is like herding cats into straight lines. They don’t take naturally to it.” There was a deadness, and an exhaustion, in Wednesday’s voice that Shadow had never heard before.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s hard. It’s too fucking hard. I don’t know if this is going to work. We might as well cut our throats. Just cut our own throats.”

  “You mustn’t talk like that.”

  “Yeah. Right.”

  “Well, if you do cut your throat,” said Shadow, trying to jolly Wednesday out of his darkness, “maybe it wouldn’t even hurt.”

  “It would hurt. Even for my kind, pain still hurts. If you move and act in the material world, then the material world acts on you. Pain hurts, just as greed intoxicates and lust burns. We may not die easy and we sure as hell don’t die well, but we can die. If we’re still loved and remembered, something else a whole lot like us comes along and takes our place and the whole damn thing starts all over again. And if we’re forgotten, we’re done.”

  Shadow did not know what to say. He said, “So where are you calling from?”

  “None of your goddamn business.”

  “Are you drunk?”

  “Not yet. I just keep thinking about Thor. You never knew him. Big guy, like you. Good-hearted. Not bright, but he’d give you the goddamned shirt off his back if you asked him. And he killed himself. He put a gun in his mouth and blew his head off in Philadelphia in 1932. What kind of a way is that for a god to die?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You don’t give two fucking cents, son. He was a whole lot like you. Big and dumb.” Wednesday stopped talking. He coughed.

  “What’s wrong?” said Shadow, for the second time.

  “They got in touch.”

  “Who did?”

  “The opposition.”

  “And?”

  “They want to discuss a truce. Peace talks. Live and let fucking live.”

  “So what happens now?”

  “Now I go and drink bad coffee with the modern assholes in a Kansas City Masonic Hall.”

  “Okay. You going to pick me up, or shall I meet you somewhere?”

  “You stay there and you keep your head down. Don’t get into any trouble. You hear me?”

  “But—“

  There was a click, and the line went dead and stayed dead. There was no dial tone, but then, there never had been.

  Nothing but time to kill. The conversation with Wednesday had left Shadow with a sense of disquiet. He got up, intending to go for a walk, but already the light was fading, and he sat back down again.

  Shadow picked up the Minutes of the Lakeside City Council 1872–1884 and turned the pages, his eyes scanning the tiny print, not actually reading it, occasionally stopping to scan something that caught his eye.

  In July 1874, Shadow learned, the city council was concerned about the number of itinerant foreign loggers arriving in the town. An opera house was to be built on the corner of Third Street and Broadway. It was to be expected that the nuisances attendant to the damming of the Mill-Creek would abate once the mill-pond had become a lake. The council authorized the payment of seventy dollars to Mr. Samuel Samuels, and of eighty-five dollars to Mr. Heikki Salminen, in compensation for their land and for the expenses incurred in moving their domiciles out of the area to be flooded.

  It had never occurred to Shadow before that the lake was manmade. Why call a town Lakeside, when the lake had begun as a dammed mill-pond? He read on, to discover that a Mr. Hinzelmann, originally of Hüdemuhlen in Bavaria, was in charge of the lake-building project, and that the city council had granted him the sum of $370 toward the project, any shortfall to be made up by public subscription. Shadow tore off a strip of a paper towel and placed it into the book as a bookmark. He could imagine Hinzelmann’s pleasure in seeing the reference to his grandfather. He wondered if the old man knew that his family had been instrumental in building the lake. Shadow flipped forward through the book, scanning for more references to the lake-building project.

  They had dedicated the lake in a ceremony in the spring of 1876, as a precursor to the town’s centennial celebrations. A vote of thanks to Mr. Hinzelmann was taken by the council.

  Shadow checked his watch. It was five-thirty. He went into the bathroom, shaved, combed his hair. He changed his clothes. Somehow the final fifteen minutes passed. He got the wine and the plant, and he walked next door.

  The door opened as he knocked. Marguerite Olsen looked almost as nervous as he felt. She took the wine bottle and the potted plant, and said thank you. The television was on, The Wizard of Oz on video. It was still in sepia, and Dorothy was still in Kansas, sitting with her eyes closed in Professor Marvel’s wagon as the old fraud pretended to read her mind, and the twister-wind that would tear her away from her life was approaching. Leon sat in front of the screen, playing with a toy fire truck. When he saw Shadow an expression of delight touched his face; he stood up and ran, tripping over his feet in his excitement, into a back bedroom, from which he emerged a moment later triumphantly waving a quarter.

  “Watch, Mike Ainsel!” he shouted. Then closed both his hands and he pretended to take the coin into his right hand, which he opened wide. “I made it disappear, Mike Ainsel!”

  “You did,” agreed Shadow. “After we’ve eaten, if it’s okay with your mom, I’ll show you how to do it even smoother than that.”

  “Do it now if you want,” said Marguerite. “We’re still waiting for Samantha. I sent her out for sour cream. I don’t know what’s taking her so long.”

  And, as if that was her cue, footsteps sounded on the wooden deck, and somebody shouldered open the front door. Shadow did not recognize her at first, then she said, “I didn’t know if you wanted the kind with calories or the kind that tastes like wallpaper paste so I went for the kind with calories,” and he knew her then: the girl from the road to Cairo.

  “That’s fine,” said Marguerite. “Sam, this is my neighbor, Mike Ainsel. Mike, this is Samantha Black Crow, my sister.”

  I don’t know you, thought Shadow desperately. You’ve never met me before. We’re total strangers. He tried to remember how he had thought snow, how easy and light that had been: this was desperate. He put out his hand and said, “Pleased to meetcha.”

  She blinked, looked at up his face. A moment of puzzlement, then recognition entered her eyes and curved the corners of her mouth into a grin. “Hello,” she said.

  “I’ll see how the food is doing,” said Marguerite, in the taut voice of someone who burns things in kitchens if they leav
e them alone and unwatched even for a moment.

  Sam took off her puffy coat and her hat. “So you’re the melancholy but mysterious neighbor,” she said. “Who’da thunk it?” She kept her voice down.

  “And you,” he said, “Are girl Sam. Can we talk about this later?”

  “If you promise to tell me what’s going on.”

  “Deal.”

  Leon tugged at the leg of Shadow’s pants. “Will you show me now?” he asked, and held out his quarter.

  “Okay,” said Shadow. “But if I show you, you have to remember that a master magician never tells anyone how it’s done.”

  “I promise,” said Leon, gravely.

  Shadow took the coin in his left hand, then moved Leon’s right hand, showing him how to appear to take the coin in his right hand while actually leaving it in Shadow’s left hand. Then he made Leon repeat the movements on his own.

  After several attempts the boy mastered the move. “Now you know half of it,” said Shadow. “The other half is this: put your attention on the place where the coin ought to be. Look at the place it’s meant to be. If you act like it’s in your right hand, no one will even look at your left hand, no matter how clumsy you are.”

  Sam watched all this with her head tipped slightly on one side, saying nothing.

  “Dinner!” called Marguerite, pushing her way in from the kitchen with a steaming bowl of spaghetti in her hands. “Leon, go wash your hands.”

  There was crusty garlic bread, thick red sauce, good spicy meatballs. Shadow complimented Marguerite on it.

  “Old family recipe,” she told him, “from the Corsican side of the family.”

  “I thought you were Native American.”

  “Dad’s Cherokee,” said Sam. “Mag’s mom’s father came from Corsica.” Sam was the only person in the room who was actually drinking the cabernet. “Dad left her when Mags was ten and he moved across town. Six months after that, I was born. Mom and Dad got married when the divorce came through. When I was ten he went away. I think he has a ten-year attention span.”

  “Well, he’s been out in Oklahoma for ten years,” said Marguerite.

  “Now, my mom’s family were European Jewish,” continued Sam, “from one of those places that used to be communist and now are just chaos. I think she liked the idea of being married to a Cherokee. Fry bread and chopped liver.” She took another sip of the red wine.

  “Sam’s mom’s a wild woman,” said Marguerite, semiapprovingly.

  “You know where she is now?” asked Sam. Shadow shook his head. “She’s in Australia. She met a guy on the Internet who lived in Hobart. When they met in the flesh she decided he was actually kind of icky. But she really liked Tasmania. So she’s living down there, with a woman’s group, teaching them to batik cloth and things like that. Isn’t that cool? At her age?”

  Shadow agreed that it was, and helped himself to more meatballs. Sam told them how all the aboriginal natives of Tasmania had been wiped out by the British, and about the human chain they made across the island to catch them which trapped only an old man and a sick boy. She told him how the thylacines—the Tasmanian tigers—had been killed by farmers, scared for their sheep, how the politicians in the 1930s noticed that the thylacines should be protected only after the last of them was dead. She finished her second glass of wine, poured her third.

  “So, Mike,” said Sam, suddenly, her cheeks reddening, “tell us about your family. What are the Ainsels like?” She was smiling, and there was mischief in that smile.

  “We’re real dull,” said Shadow. “None of us ever got as far as Tasmania. So you’re at school in Madison. What’s that like?”

  “You know,” she said. “I’m studying art history, women’s studies, and casting my own bronzes.”

  “When I grow up,” said Leon, “I’m going to do magic. Poof. Will you teach me, Mike Ainsel?”

  “Sure,” said Shadow. “If your mom doesn’t mind.”

  Sam said, “After we’ve eaten, while you’re putting Leon to bed, Mags, I think I’m going to get Mike to take me to the Buck Stops Here for an hour or so.”

  Marguerite did not shrug. Her head moved, an eyebrow raised slightly.

  “I think he’s interesting,” said Sam. “And we have lots to talk about.”

  Marguerite looked at Shadow, who busied himself in dabbing an imaginary blob of red sauce from his chin with a paper napkin. “Well, you’re grownups,” she said, in a tone of voice that implied that they weren’t, and that even if they were they shouldn’t be.

  After dinner Shadow helped Sam with the washing up—he dried—and then he did a trick for Leon, counting pennies into Leon’s palm: each time Leon opened his hand and counted them there was one less coin than he had counted in. And as for the final penny—“Are you squeezing it? Tightly?”—when Leon opened his hand he found it had transformed into a dime. Leon’s plaintive cries of “How’d you do that? Momma, how’d he do that?” followed him out into the hall.

  Sam handed him his coat. “Come on,” she said. Her cheeks were flushed from the wine.

  Outside it was cold.

  Shadow stopped in his apartment, tossed the Minutes of the Lakeside City Council into a plastic grocery bag, and brought it along. Hinzelmann might be down at the Buck, and he wanted to show him the mention of his grandfather.

  They walked down the drive side by side.

  He opened the garage door, and she started to laugh. “Omigod,” she said, when she saw the 4-Runner. “Paul Gunther’s car. You bought Paul Gunther’s car. Omigod.”

  Shadow opened the door for her. Then he went around and got in. “You know the car?”

  “When I came up here two or three years ago to stay with Mags. It was me that persuaded him to paint it purple.”

  “Oh,” said Shadow. “It’s good to have someone to blame.”

  He drove the car out onto the street. Got out and closed the garage door. Got back into the car. Sam was looking at him oddly as he got in, as if the confidence had begun to leak out of her. He put on his seat belt, and she said, “Okay. This is a stupid thing to do, isn’t it? Getting into a car with a psycho killer.”

  “I got you safe home last time,” said Shadow.

  “You killed two men,” she said. “You’re wanted by the feds. And now I find out you’re living under an assumed name next door to my sister. Unless Mike Ainsel is your real name?”

  “No,” said Shadow, and he sighed. “It’s not.” He hated saying it. It was if he was letting go of something important, abandoning Mike Ainsel by denying him; as if he were taking his leave of a friend.

  “Did you kill those men?”

  “No.”

  “They came to my house, and said we’d been seen together. And this guy showed me photographs of you. What was his name—Mister Hat? No. Mister Town. It was like The Fugitive. But I said I hadn’t seen you.”

  “Thank you.”

  “So,” she said. “Tell me what’s going on. I’ll keep your secrets if you keep mine.”

  “I don’t know any of yours,” said Shadow.

  “Well, you know that it was my idea to paint this thing purple, thus forcing Paul Gunther to become such an object of scorn and derision for several counties around that he was forced to leave town entirely. We were kind of stoned,” she admitted.

  “I doubt that bit of it’s much of a secret,” said Shadow. “Everyone in Lakeside must have known. It’s a stoner sort of purple.”

  And then she said, very quiet, very fast, “if you’re going to kill me please don’t hurt me. I shouldn’t have come here with you. I am so fucking fucking dumb. I can identify you. Jesus.”

  Shadow sighed. “I’ve never killed anybody. Really. Now I’m going to take you to the Buck,” he said. “We’ll have a drink. Or if you give the word, I’ll turn this car around and take you home. Either way, I’ll just have to hope you aren’t going to call the cops.”

  There was silence as they crossed the bridge.

  “Who did kill t
hose men?” she asked.

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  “I would.” She sounded angry now. He wondered if bringing the wine to the dinner had been a wise idea. Life was certainly not a cabernet right now.

  “It’s not easy to believe.”

  “I,” she told him, “can believe anything. You have no idea what I can believe.”

  “Really?”

  “I can believe things that are true and I can believe things that aren’t true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they’re true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen—I believe that people are perfectible, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkledy lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women. I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone’s ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state. I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste. I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we’ll all be wiped out by the common cold like the Martians in War of the Worlds. I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman. I believe that mankind’s destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it’s aerodynamically impossible for a bumblebee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there’s a cat in a box somewhere who’s alive and dead at the same time (although if they don’t ever open the box to feed it it’ll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself. I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn’t even know that I’m alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who says that sex is overrated just hasn’t done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what’s going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman’s right to choose, a baby’s right to live, that while all human life is sacred there’s nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you’re alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.” She stopped, out of breath.