American Gods

by Neil Gaiman

  Shadow almost took his hands off the wheel to applaud. Instead he said, “Okay. So if I tell you what I’ve learned you won’t think that I’m a nut.”

  “Maybe,” she said. “Try me.”

  “Would you believe that all the gods that people have ever imagined are still with us today?”

  “. . . Maybe.”

  “And that there are new gods out there, gods of computers and telephones and whatever, and that they all seem to think there isn’t room for them both in the world. And that some kind of war is kind of likely.”

  “And these gods killed those two men?”

  “No, my wife killed those two men.”

  “I thought you said your wife was dead.”

  “She is.”

  “She killed them before she died, then?”

  “After. Don’t ask.”

  She reached up a hand and flicked her hair from her forehead.

  They pulled up on Main Street, outside the Buck Stops Here. The sign over the window showed a surprised-looking stag standing on its hind legs holding a glass of beer. Shadow grabbed the bag with the book in it and got out.

  “Why would they have a war?” asked Sam. “It seems kind of redundant. What is there to win?”

  “I don’t know,” admitted Shadow.

  “It’s easier to believe in aliens than in gods,” said Sam. “Maybe Mister Town and Mister Whatever were Men in Black, only the alien kind.”

  They were standing on the sidewalk outside the Buck Stops Here and Sam stopped. She looked up at Shadow, and her breath hung on the night air like a faint cloud. She said, “Just tell me you’re one of the good guys.”

  “I can’t,” said Shadow. “I wish I could. But I’m doing my best.”

  She looked up at him, and bit her lower lip. Then she nodded. “Good enough,” she said. “I won’t turn you in. You can buy me a beer.”

  Shadow pushed the door open for her, and they were hit by a blast of heat and music. They went inside.

  Sam waved at some friends. Shadow nodded to a handful of people whose faces—although not their names—he remembered from the day he had spent searching for Alison McGovern, or who he had met in Mabel’s in the morning. Chad Mulligan was standing at the bar, with his arm around the shoulders of a small red-haired woman—the kissing cousin, Shadow figured. He wondered what she looked like, but she had her back to him. Chad’s hand raised in a mock salute when he saw Shadow. Shadow grinned, and waved back at him. Shadow looked around for Hinzelmann, but the old man did not seem to be there this evening. He spied a free table at the back and started walking toward it.

  Then somebody began to scream.

  It was a bad scream, a full-throated, seen-a-ghost hysterical scream, which silenced all conversation. Shadow looked around, certain somebody was being murdered, and then he realized that all the faces in the bar were turning toward him. Even the black cat, who slept in the window during the day, was standing up on top of the jukebox with its tail high and its back arched and was staring at Shadow.

  Time slowed.

  “Get him!” shouted a woman’s voice, parked on the verge of hysteria. “Oh for God’s sake, somebody stop him! Don’t let him get away! Please!” It was a voice he knew.

  Nobody moved. They stared at Shadow. He stared back at them.

  Chad Mulligan stepped forward, walking through the people. The small woman walked behind him warily, her eyes wide, as if she was preparing to start screaming once more. Shadow knew her. Of course he knew her.

  Chad was still holding his beer, which he put down on a nearby table. He said, “Mike.”

  Shadow said, “Chad.”

  Audrey Burton took hold of Chad’s sleeve. Her face was white, and there were tears in her eyes. “Shadow,” she said. “You bastard. You murderous evil bastard.”

  “Are you sure that you know this man, hon?” said Chad. He looked uncomfortable.

  Audrey Burton looked at him incredulously. “Are you crazy? He worked for Robbie for years. His slutty wife was my best friend. He’s wanted for murder. I had to answer questions. He’s an escaped convict.” She was way over the top, her voice trembling with suppressed hysteria, sobbing out her words like a soap actress going for a daytime Emmy. Kissing cousins, thought Shadow, unimpressed.

  Nobody in the bar said a word. Chad Mulligan looked up at Shadow. “It’s probably a mistake. I’m sure we can sort this all out,” he said. Then he said, to the bar, “It’s all fine. Nothing to worry about. We can sort this out. Everything’s fine.” Then, to Shadow, “Let’s step outside, Mike.” Quiet competence. Shadow was impressed.

  “Sure,” said Shadow.

  He felt a hand touch his hand, and he turned to see Sam staring at him. He smiled down at her as reassuringly as he could.

  Sam looked at Shadow, then she looked around the bar at the faces staring at them. She said to Audrey Burton, “I don’t know who you are. But. You. Are such. A cunt.” Then she went up on tiptoes and pulled Shadow down to her, and kissed him hard on the lips, pushing her mouth against his for what felt to Shadow like several minutes, and might have been as long as five seconds in real, clock-ticking time.

  It was a strange kiss, Shadow thought, as her lips pressed against his: it wasn’t intended for him. It was for the other people in the bar, to let them know that she had picked sides. It was a flag-waving kiss. Even as she kissed him, he became certain that she didn’t even like him—well, not like that.

  Still, there was a tale he had read once, long ago, as a small boy: the story of a traveler who had slipped down a cliff, with man-eating tigers above him and a lethal fall below him, who managed to stop his fall halfway down the side of the cliff, holding on for dear life. There was a clump of strawberries beside him, and certain death above him and below. What should he do? went the question.

  And the reply was, Eat the strawberries.

  The story had never made any sense to him as a boy. It did now. So he closed his eyes, threw himself into the kiss and experienced nothing but Sam’s lips and the softness of her skin against his, sweet as a wild strawberry.

  “C’mon Mike,” said Chad Mulligan, firmly. “Please. Let’s take it outside.”

  Sam pulled back. She licked her lips, and smiled, a smile that nearly reached her eyes. “Not bad,” she said. “You kiss good for a boy. Okay, go play outside.” Then she turned to Audrey Burton. “But you,” she said, “are still a cunt.”

  Shadow tossed Sam his car keys. She caught them, one-handed. He walked through the bar and stepped outside, followed by Chad Mulligan. A gentle snow had begun to fall, the flakes spinning down into the light of the neon bar sign. “You want to talk about this?” asked Chad.

  Audrey had followed them out onto the sidewalk. She looked as if she were ready to start screaming again. She said, “He killed two men, Chad. The FBI came to my door. He’s a psycho. I’ll come down to the station with you, if you want.”

  “You’ve caused enough trouble, ma’am,” said Shadow. He sounded tired, even to himself. “Please go away.”

  “Chad? Did you hear that? He threatened me!” said Audrey.

  “Get back inside, Audrey,” said Chad Mulligan. She looked as if she were about to argue, then she pressed her lips together so hard they went white, and went back into the bar.

  “Would you like to comment on anything she said?” asked Chad Mulligan.

  “I’ve never killed anyone,” said Shadow.

  Chad nodded. “I believe you,” he said. “I’m sure we can deal with these allegations easily enough. You won’t give me any trouble, will you, Mike?”

  “No trouble,” said Shadow. “This is all a mistake.”

  “Exactly,” said Chad. “So I figure we ought to head down to my office and sort it all out there?”

  “Am I under arrest?” asked Shadow.

  “Nope,” said Chad. “Not unless you want to be. I figure, you come with me out of a sense of civic duty, and we’ll straighten all this out.”

  Chad patted
Shadow down, found no weapons. They got into Mulligan’s car. Again Shadow sat in the back, looking out through the metal cage. He thought, SOS. Mayday. Help. He tried to push Mulligan with his mind, as he’d once pushed a cop in Chicago—This is your old friend Mike Ainsel. You saved his life. Don’t you know how silly this is? Why don’t you just drop the whole thing?

  “I figure it was good to get you out of there,” said Chad. “All you needed was some loudmouth deciding that you were Alison McGovern’s killer and we’d’ve had a lynch mob on our hands.”

  “Point.”

  They were silent for the rest of the drive to the Lakeside police building, which, Chad said as they pulled up outside it, actually belonged to the county sheriff’s department. The local police made do with a few rooms in there. Pretty soon the county would build something modern. For now they had to make do with what they had.

  They walked inside.

  “Should I call a lawyer?” asked Shadow.

  “You aren’t accused of anything,” said Mulligan. “Up to you.” They pushed through some swing doors. “Take a seat over there.”

  Shadow took a seat on the wooden chair with cigarette burns on the side. He felt stupid and numb. There was small poster on the notice board, beside a large NO SMOKING sign: ENDANGERED MISSING it said. The photograph was Alison McGovern’s.

  There was a wooden table with old copies of Sports Illustrated and Newsweek on it. The light was bad. The paint on the wall was yellow, but it might once have been white.

  After ten minutes Chad brought him a watery cup of vending machine hot chocolate. “What’s in the bag?” he asked. And it was only then that Shadow realized he was still holding the plastic bag containing the Minutes of the Lakeside City Council.

  “Old book,” said Shadow. “Your grandfather’s picture’s in here. Or great-grandfather maybe.”

  “Yeah?”

  Shadow flipped through the book until he found the portrait of the town council, and he pointed to the man called Mulligan. Chad chuckled. “If that don’t beat all,” he said.

  Minutes passed, and hours, in that room. Shadow read two of the Sports Illustrateds and he started in on the Newsweek. From time to time Chad would come through, once checking to see if Shadow needed to use the rest room, once to offer him a ham roll and a small packet of potato chips.

  “Thanks,” said Shadow, taking them. “Am I under arrest yet?”

  Chad sucked the air between his teeth. “Well,” he said, “Not yet. It doesn’t look like you came by the name Mike Ainsel legally. On the other hand, you can call yourself whatever you want in this state, if it’s not for fraudulent purposes. You just hang loose.”

  “Can I make a phone call?”

  “Is it a local call?”

  “Long distance.”

  “It’ll save money if I put it on my calling card, otherwise you’ll just be feeding ten bucks worth of quarters into that thing in the hall.”

  Sure, thought Shadow. And this way you’ll know the number I dialed, and you’ll probably be listening in on an extension.

  “That would be great,” said Shadow. They went into an empty office. The number Shadow gave Chad to dial for him was that of a funeral home in Cairo, Illinois. Chad dialed it, handed Shadow the receiver. “I’ll leave you in here,” he said, and went out.

  The telephone rang several times, then it was picked up.

  “Jacquel and Ibis? Can I help you?”

  “Hi. Mister Ibis, this is Mike Ainsel. I helped out there for a few days over Christmas.”

  A moment’s hesitation, then, “Of course. Mike. How are you?”

  “Not great, Mister Ibis. In a patch of trouble. About to be arrested. Hoping you’d seen my uncle about, or maybe you could get a message to him.”

  “I can certainly ask around. Hold on, uh, Mike. There’s someone here who wishes a word with you.”

  The phone was passed to somebody, and then a smoky female voice said “Hi, honey. I miss you.”

  He was certain he’d never heard that voice before. But he knew her. He was sure that he knew her . . .

  Let it go, the smoky voice whispered in his mind, in a dream. Let it all go.

  “Who’s that girl you were kissing, hon? You trying to make me jealous?”

  “We’re just friends,” said Shadow. “I think she was trying to prove a point. How did you know she kissed me?”

  “I got eyes wherever my folk walk,” she said. “You take care now, hon . . .” There was a moment of silence, then Mr. Ibis came back on the line and said, “Mike?”

  “Yes.”

  “There’s a problem getting hold of your uncle. He seems to be kind of tied up. But I’ll try and get a message to your aunt Nancy. Best of luck.” The line went dead.

  Shadow sat down, expecting Chad to return. He sat in the empty office, wishing he had something to distract him. Reluctantly, he picked up the Minutes once more, opened it to somewhere in the middle of the book, and began to read.

  An ordinance prohibiting expectoration on sidewalks and on the floors of public buildings, or throwing thereon tobacco in any form was introduced and passed, eight to four, in December of 1876.

  Lemmi Hautala was twelve years old and had, “it was feared, wandered away in a fit of delirium” on December 13, 1876. “A search being immediately effected, but impeded by the snows, which are blinding.” The council had voted unanimously to send the Hautala family their condolences.

  The fire at Olsen’s livery stables the following week was extinguished without any injury or loss of life, human or equine.

  Shadow scanned the closely printed columns. He found no further mention of Lemmi Hautala.

  And then, on something slightly more than a whim, Shadow flipped the pages forward to the winter of 1877. He found what he was looking for mentioned as an aside in the January minutes: Jessie Lovat, age not given, “a Negro child,” had vanished on the night of December 28. It was believed that she might have been “abducted by traveling so-called pedlars.” Condolences were not sent to the Lovat family.

  Shadow was scanning the minutes of winter 1878 when Chad Mulligan knocked and entered, looking shamefaced, like a child bringing home a bad report card.

  “Mister Ainsel,” he said. “Mike. I’m truly sorry about this. Personally, I like you. But that don’t change anything, you know?”

  Shadow said he knew.

  “I got no choice in the matter,” said Chad, “but to place you under arrest for violating your parole.” Then Mulligan read Shadow his rights. He filled out some paperwork. He took Shadow’s prints. He walked him down the hall to the county jail, on the other side of the building.

  There was a long counter and several doorways on one side of the room, two glassed-in holding cells and a doorway on the other. One of the cells was occupied—a man slept on a cement bed under a thin blanket. The other was empty.

  There was a sleepy-looking woman in a brown uniform behind the counter, watching Jay Leno on a small white portable television. She took the papers from Chad, and signed for Shadow. Chad hung around, filled in more papers. The woman came around the counter, patted Shadow down, took all his possessions—wallet, coins, front door key, book, watch—and put them on the counter, then gave him a plastic bag with orange clothes in it and told him to go into the open cell and change into them. He could keep his own underwear and socks. He went in and changed into the orange clothes and the shower footwear. It stank evilly in there. The orange top he pulled over his head had LUMBER COUNTY JAIL written on the back in large black letters.

  The metal toilet in the cell had backed up, and was filled to the brim with a brown stew of liquid feces and sour, beerish urine.

  Shadow came back out, gave the woman his clothes, which she put into the plastic bag with the rest of his possessions. He had thumbed through the wallet before he handed it over. “You take care of this,” he had said to the woman, “My whole life is in here.” The woman took the wallet from him, and assured him that it would be safe
with them. She asked Chad if that wasn’t true, and Chad, looking up from the last of his paperwork, said Liz was telling the truth, they’d never lost a prisoner’s possessions yet.

  Shadow had slipped the four hundred-dollar bills that he had palmed from the wallet into his socks, when he had changed, along with the silver Liberty dollar he had palmed as he had emptied his pockets.

  “Say,” Shadow asked, when he came out. “Would it be okay if I finished reading the book?”

  “Sorry, Mike. Rules are rules,” said Chad.

  Liz put Shadow’s possessions in a bag in the back room. Chad said he’d leave Shadow in Officer Bute’s capable hands. Liz looked tired and unimpressed. Chad left. The telephone rang, and Liz—Officer Bute—answered it. “Okay,” she said. “Okay. No problem. Okay. No problem. Okay.” She put down the phone and made a face.

  “Problem?” asked Shadow.

  “Yes. Not really. Kinda. They’re sending someone up from Milwaukee to collect you.”

  “Why is that a problem?”

  “I got to keep you in here with me for three hours,” she said. “And the cell over there”—she pointed to the cell by the door, with the sleeping man in it—“that’s occupied. He’s on suicide watch. I shouldn’t put you in with him. But it’s not worth the trouble to sign you in to the county and then sign you out again.” She shook her head. “And you don’t want to go in there”—she pointed to the empty cell in which he’d changed his clothes—“because the can is shot. It stinks in there, doesn’t it?”