American Gods

by Neil Gaiman

  “Yes. It was gross.”

  “It’s common humanity, that’s what it is. The sooner we get into the new facilities, it can’t be too soon for me. One of the women we had in yesterday must’ve flushed a tampon away. I tell ’em not to. We got bins for that. They clog the pipes. Every damn tampon down that john costs the county a hundred bucks in plumbers’ fees. So, I can keep you out here, if I cuff you. Or you can go in the cell.” She looked at him. “Your call,” she said.

  “I’m not crazy about them,” he said. “But I’ll take the cuffs.”

  She took a pair from her utility belt, then patted the semiautomatic in its holster, as if to remind him that it was there. “Hands behind your back,” she said.

  The cuffs were a tight fit: he had big wrists. Then she put hobbles on his ankles and sat him down on a bench on the far side of the counter, against the wall. “Now,” she said. “You don’t bother me, and I won’t bother you.” She tilted the television so that he could see it.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  “When we get our new offices,” she said, “there won’t be none of this nonsense.”

  The Tonight Show finished. An episode of Cheers began. Shadow had never watched Cheers. He had only ever seen one episode of it—the one where Coach’s daughter comes to the bar—although he had seen that several times. Shadow had noticed that you only ever catch one episode of shows you don’t watch, over and over, years apart; he thought it must be some kind of cosmic law.

  Officer Liz Bute sat back in her chair. She was not obviously dozing, but she was by no means awake, so she did not notice when the gang at Cheers stopped talking and getting off one-liners and just started staring out of the screen at Shadow.

  Diane, the blonde barmaid who fancied herself an intellectual, was the first to talk. “Shadow,” she said. “We were so worried about you. You’d fallen off the world. It’s so good to see you again—albeit in bondage and orange couture.”

  “What I figure is the thing to do,” pontificated bar bore Cliff, “is to escape in hunting season, when everybody’s wearing orange anyway.”

  Shadow said nothing.

  “Ah, cat got your tongue, I see,” said Diane. “Well, you’ve led us a merry chase!”

  Shadow looked away. Officer Liz had begun, gently, to snore. Carla, the little waitress, snapped, “Hey, jerk-wad! We interrupt this broadcast to show you something that’s going to make you piss in your friggin’ pants. You ready?”

  The screen flickered and went black. The words LIVE FEED pulsated in white at the bottom left of screen. A subdued female voice said, in voice-over, “It’s certainly not too late to change to the winning side. But you know, you also have the freedom to stay just where you are. That’s what it means to be an American. That’s the miracle of America. Freedom to believe means the freedom to believe the wrong thing, after all. Just as freedom of speech gives you the right to stay silent.”

  The picture now showed a street scene. The camera lurched forward, in the manner of handheld video cameras in real-life documentaries.

  A man with thinning hair, a tan, and a faintly hangdog expression filled the frame. He was standing by a wall sipping a cup of coffee from a plastic cup. He looked into the camera, and said, “Terrorists hide behind weasel words, like ‘freedom fighter.’ You and I know that they are murdering scum, pure and simple. We’re risking our lives to make a difference.”

  Shadow recognized the voice. He had been inside the man’s head once. Mr. Town sounded different from inside—his voice was deeper, more resonant—but there was no mistaking it.

  The cameras pulled back to show that Mr. Town was standing outside a brick building on an American street. Above the door was a set-square and compass framing the letter G.

  “In position,” said somebody offscreen.

  “Let’s see if the cameras inside the hall are rolling,” said the female voice-over voice.

  The words LIVE FEED continued to blink at the bottom left of the screen. Now the picture showed the interior of a small hall: the room was underlit. Two men sat at a table at the far end of the room. One of them had his back to the camera. The camera zoomed in to them awkwardly. For a moment they were out of focus, and then they became sharp once more. The man facing the camera got up and began to pace, like a bear on a chain. It was Wednesday. He looked as if, on some level, he was enjoying this. As they came into focus the sound came on with a pop.

  The man with his back to the screen was saying, “—we are offering is the chance to end this, here and now, with no more bloodshed, no more aggression, no more pain, no more loss of life. Isn’t that worth giving up a little?”

  Wednesday stopped pacing and turned. His nostrils flared. “First,” he growled, “you have to understand that you are asking me to speak for all of us. Which is manifestly nonsensical. Secondly, what on earth makes you think that I believe that you people are going to keep your word?”

  The man with his back to the camera moved his head. “You do yourself an injustice,” he said. “Obviously you people have no leaders. But you’re the one they listen to. They pay attention to you. And as for keeping my word, well, these preliminary talks are being filmed and broadcast live,” and he gestured back toward the camera. “Some of your people are watching as we speak. Others will see videotapes. The camera does not lie.”

  “Everybody lies,” said Wednesday.

  Shadow recognized the voice of the man with his back to the camera. It was Mr. World, the one who had spoken to Town on the cellphone while Shadow was in Town’s head.

  “You don’t believe,” said Mr. World, “that we will keep our word?”

  “I think your promises were made to be broken and your oaths to be forsworn. But I will keep my word.”

  “Safe conduct is safe conduct,” said Mr. World, “and a flag of truce is what we agreed. I should tell you, by the way, that your young protégé is once more in our custody.”

  Wednesday snorted. “No,” he said. “He’s not.”

  “We were discussing the ways to deal with the coming paradigm shift. We don’t have to be enemies. Do we?”

  Wednesday seemed shaken. He said, “I will do whatever is in my power . . .”

  Shadow noticed something strange about the image of Wednesday on the television screen. A red glint burned on his left eye, the glass one. The dot left a phosphor-dot afterimage as he moved. He seemed unaware of it.

  “It’s a big country,” said Wednesday, marshaling his thoughts. He moved his head and the red laser-pointer dot slipped to his cheek. Then it edged up to his glass eye once more. “There is room for—“

  There was a bang, muted by the television speakers, and the side of Wednesday’s head exploded. His body tumbled backward.

  Mr. World stood up, his back still to the camera, and walked out of shot.

  “Let’s see that again, in slow motion this time,” said the announcer’s voice, reassuringly.

  The words LIVE FEED became REPLAY. Slowly now the red laser pointer traced its bead onto Wednesday’s glass eye, and once again the side of his face dissolved into a cloud of blood. Freeze frame.

  “Yes, it’s still God’s Own Country,” said the announcer, a news reporter pronouncing the final tag line. “The only question is, which gods?”

  Another voice—Shadow thought that it was Mr. World’s, it had that same half-familiar quality—said, “We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.”

  On Cheers, Coach assured his daughter that she was truly beautiful, just like her mother.

  The telephone rang, and Officer Liz sat up with a start. She picked it up. Said, “Okay. Okay. Yes. Okay.” Put the phone down. She got up from behind the counter, and said to Shadow, “I’m going to have to put you in the cell. Don’t use the can. The Lafayette sheriffs’ department should be here to collect you soon.”

  She removed the cuffs and the hobble, locked him into the holding cell. The smell was worse, now that the door was closed.

  Shado
w sat down on the concrete bed, slipped the Liberty dollar from his sock, and began moving it from finger to palm, from position to position, from hand to hand, his only aim to keep the coin from being seen by anyone who might look in. He was passing the time. He was numb.

  He missed Wednesday, then, sudden and deep. He missed the man’s confidence, his attitude. His conviction.

  He opened his hand, looked down at Lady Liberty, a silver profile. He closed his fingers over the coin, held it tightly. He wondered if he’d get to be one of those guys who got life for something they didn’t do. If he even made it that far. From what he’d seen of Mr. World and Mr. Town, they would have little trouble pulling him out of the system. Perhaps he’d suffer an unfortunate accident on the way to the next holding facility. He could be shot while making a break for it. It did not seem at all unlikely.

  There was a stir of activity in the room on the other side of the glass. Officer Liz came back in. She pressed a button, a door that Shadow could not see opened, and a black deputy in a brown sheriff’s uniform entered and walked briskly over to the desk.

  Shadow slipped the dollar coin back into his sock.

  The new deputy handed over some papers, Liz scanned them and signed. Chad Mulligan came in, said a few words to the new man, then he unlocked the cell door and walked inside.

  “Okay. Folk are here to pick you up. Seems you’re a matter of national security. You know that?”

  “It’ll make a great front-page story for the Lakeside News,” said Shadow.

  Chad looked at him without expression. “That a drifter got picked up for parole violations? Not much of a story.”

  “So that’s the way it is?”

  “That’s what they tell me,” said Chad Mulligan. Shadow put his hands in front of him this time, and Chad cuffed him. Chad locked on the ankle hobbles, and a rod from the cuffs to the hobbles.

  Shadow thought, They’ll take me outside. Maybe I can make a break for it—in hobbles and cuffs and lightweight orange clothes, out into the snow, and even as he thought it he knew how stupid and hopeless it was.

  Chad walked him out into the office. Liz had turned the TV off now. The black deputy looked him over. “He’s a big guy,” he said to Chad. Liz passed the new deputy the paper bag with Shadow’s possessions in it, and he signed for it.

  Chad looked at Shadow, then at the deputy. He said to the deputy, quietly, but loudly enough for Shadow to hear, “Look. I just want to say, I’m not comfortable with the way this is happening.”

  The deputy nodded. “You’ll have to take it up with the appropriate authorities, sir. Our job is simply to bring him in.”

  Chad made a sour face. He turned to Shadow. “Okay,” said Chad. “Through that door and into the sally port.”

  “What?”

  “Out there. Where the car is.”

  Liz unlocked the doors. “You make sure that orange uniform comes right back here,” she said to the deputy. “The last felon we sent down to Lafayette, we never saw the uniform again. They cost the county money.” They walked Shadow out to the sally port, where a car sat idling. It wasn’t a sheriff’s department car. It was a black town car. Another deputy, a grizzled white guy with a mustache, stood by the car, smoking a cigarette. He crushed it out underfoot as they came close, and opened the back door for Shadow.

  Shadow sat down, awkwardly, his movements hampered by the cuffs and the hobble. There was no grille between the back and the front of the car.

  The two deputies climbed into the front of the car. The black deputy started the motor. They waited for the sally port door to open.

  “Come on, come on,” said the black deputy, his fingers drumming against the steering wheel.

  Chad Mulligan tapped on the side window. The white deputy glanced at the driver, then he lowered the window. “This is wrong,” said Chad. “I just wanted to say that.”

  “Your comments have been noted, and will be conveyed to the appropriate authorities,” said the driver.

  The doors to the outside world opened. The snow was still falling, dizzying into the car’s headlights. The driver put his foot on the gas, and they were heading back down the street and on to Main Street.

  “You heard about Wednesday?” said the driver. His voice sounded different, now, older, and familiar. “He’s dead.”

  “Yeah. I know,” said Shadow. “I saw it on TV.”

  “Those fuckers,” said the white officer. It was the first thing he had said, and his voice was rough and accented and, like the driver’s, it was a voice that Shadow knew. “I tell you, they are fuckers, those fuckers.”

  “Thanks for coming to get me,” said Shadow.

  “Don’t mention it,” said the driver. In the light of an oncoming car his face already seemed to look older. He looked smaller, too. The last time Shadow had seen him he had been wearing lemon-yellow gloves and a check jacket. “We were in Milwaukee. Had to drive like demons when Ibis called.”

  “You think we let them lock you up and send you to the chair, when I’m still waiting to break your head with my hammer?” asked the white deputy gloomily, fumbling in his pocket for a pack of cigarettes. His accent was Eastern European.

  “The real shit will hit the fan in an hour or less,” said Mr. Nancy, looking more like himself with each moment, “when they really turn up to collect you. We’ll pull over before we get to Highway 53 and get you out of those shackles and back into your own clothes.” Czernobog held up a handcuff key and smiled.

  “I like the mustache,” said Shadow. “Suits you.”

  Czernobog stroked it with a yellowed finger. “Thank you.”

  “Wednesday,” said Shadow. “Is he really dead? This isn’t some kind of trick, is it?”

  He realized that he had been holding on to some kind of hope, foolish though it was. But the expression on Nancy’s face told him all he needed to know, and the hope was gone.

  COMING TO AMERICA

  14,000 B.C.

  Cold it was, and dark, when the vision came to her, for in the far north daylight was a gray dim time in the middle of the day that came, and went, and came again: an interlude between darknesses.

  They were not a large tribe as these things were counted then: nomads of the Northern Plains. They had a god, who was the skull of a mammoth, and the hide of a mammoth fashioned into a rough cloak. Nunyunnini, they called him. When they were not traveling, he rested on a wooden frame, at man height.

  She was the holy woman of the tribe, the keeper of its secrets, and her name was Atsula, the fox. Atsula walked before the two tribesmen who carried their god on long poles, draped with bearskins, that it should not be seen by profane eyes, nor at times when it was not holy.

  They roamed the tundra, with their tents. The finest of the tents was made of caribou hide, and it was the holy tent, and there were four of them inside it: Atsula, the priestess, Gugwei, the tribal elder, Yanu, the war leader, and Kalanu, the scout. She called them there, the day after she had her vision.

  Atsula scraped some lichen into the fire, then she threw in dried leaves with her withered left hand: they smoked, with an eye-stinging gray smoke, and gave off an odor that was sharp and strange. Then she took a wooden cup from the wooden platform, and she passed it to Gugwei. The cup was half filled with a dark yellow liquid.

  Atsula had found the pungh mushrooms—each with seven spots, only a true holy woman could find a seven-spotted mushroom—and had picked them at the dark of the moon, and dried them on a string of deer cartilage.

  Yesterday, before she slept, she had eaten the three dried mushroom caps. Her dreams had been confused and fearful things, of bright lights moving fast, of rock mountains filled with lights spearing upward like icicles. In the night she had woken, sweating, and needing to make water. She squatted over the wooden cup and filled it with her urine. Then she placed the cup outside the tent, in the snow, and returned to sleep.

  When she woke, she picked the lumps of ice out from the wooden cup, leaving a darker, more concent
rated liquid behind.

  It was this liquid she passed around, first to Gugwei, then to Yanu and to Kalanu. Each of them took a large gulp of the liquid, then Atsula took the final draft. She swallowed it, and poured what was left on the ground in front of their god, a libation to Nunyunnini.

  They sat in the smoky tent, waiting for their god to speak. Outside, in the darkness, the wind wailed and breathed.

  Kalanu, the scout, was a woman who dressed and walked as a man: she had even taken Dalani, a fourteen-year-old maiden, to be her wife. Kalanu blinked her eyes tightly, then she got up and walked over to the mammoth skull. She pulled the mammoth-hide cloak over herself, and stood so her head was inside the mammoth skull.

  “There is evil in the land,” said Nunyunnini in Kalanu’s voice. “Evil, such that if you stay here, in the land of your mothers and your mother’s mothers, you shall all perish.”

  The three listeners grunted.

  “Is it the slavers? Or the great wolves?” asked Gugwei, whose hair was long and white, and whose face was as wrinkled as the gray skin of a thorn tree.

  “It is not the slavers,” said Nunyunnini, old stone-hide. “It is not the great wolves.”

  “Is it a famine? Is a famine coming?” asked Gugwei.

  Nunyunnini was silent. Kalanu came out of the skull and waited with the rest of them.

  Gugwei put on the mammoth-hide cloak and put his head inside the skull.

  “It is not a famine as you know it,” said Nunyunnini, through Gugwei’s mouth, “although a famine will follow.”

  “Then what is it?” asked Yanu. “I am not afraid. I will stand against it. We have spears, and we have throwing rocks. Let a hundred mighty warriors come against us, still we shall prevail. We shall lead them into the marshes, and split their skulls with our flints.”