American Gods

by Neil Gaiman

  Shadow squatted beside her, and he touched her cheek with his hand, and he said her name. Her eyes opened, and she lifted her head and turned it until she was looking at him.

  “Hello, puppy,” she said. Her voice was thin.

  “Hi, Laura. What happened here?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “Just stuff. Did they win?”

  “I stopped the battle they were trying to start.”

  “My clever puppy,” she said. “That man, Mister World, he said he was going to put a stick through your eye. I didn’t like him at all.”

  “He’s dead. You killed him, hon.”

  She nodded. She said, “That’s good.”

  Her eyes closed. Shadow’s hand found her cold hand, and he held it in his. In time she opened her eyes again.

  “Did you ever figure out how to bring me back from the dead?” she asked.

  “I guess,” he said. “I know one way, anyway.”

  “That’s good,” she said. She squeezed his hand with her cold hand. And then she said, “And the opposite? What about that?”

  “The opposite?”

  “Yes,” she whispered. “I think I must have earned it.”

  “I don’t want to do that.”

  She said nothing. She simply waited.

  Shadow said, “Okay.” Then he took his hand from hers and put it to her neck.

  She said, “That’s my husband.” She said it proudly.

  “I love you, babes,” said Shadow.

  “Love you, puppy,” she whispered.

  He closed his hand around the golden coin that hung around her neck. He tugged, hard, at the chain, which snapped easily. Then he took the gold coin between his finger and thumb, and blew on it, and opened his hand wide.

  The coin was gone.

  Her eyes were still open, but they did not move.

  He bent down then, and kissed her, gently, on her cold cheek, but she did not respond. He did not expect her to. Then he got up and walked out of the cavern, to stare into the night.

  The storms had cleared. The air felt fresh and clean and new once more.

  Tomorrow, he had no doubt, would be one hell of a beautiful day.

  Part Four

  EPILOGUE: SOMETHING THAT THE DEAD ARE KEEPING BACK

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  One describes a tale best by telling the tale. You see? The way one describes a story, to oneself or to the world, is by telling the story. It is a balancing act and it is a dream. The more accurate the map, the more it resembles the territory. The most accurate map possible would be the territory, and thus would be perfectly accurate and perfectly useless.

  The tale is the map that is the territory.

  You must remember this.

  —from the Notebooks of Mr. Ibis

  The two of them were in the VW bus, heading down to Florida on I-75. They’d been driving since dawn; or rather, Shadow had driven, and Mr. Nancy had sat up front in the passenger seat and, from time to time, and with a pained expression on his face, offered to drive. Shadow always said no.

  “Are you happy?” asked Mr. Nancy, suddenly. He had been staring at Shadow for several hours. Whenever Shadow glanced over to his right, Mr. Nancy was looking at him with his earth-brown eyes.

  “Not really,” said Shadow. “But I’m not dead yet.”

  “Huh?”

  “ ‘Call no man happy until he is dead.’ Herodotus.”

  Mr. Nancy raised a white eyebrow, and he said, “I’m not dead yet, and, mostly because I’m not dead yet, I’m happy as a clamboy.”

  “The Herodotus thing. It doesn’t mean that the dead are happy,” said Shadow. “It means that you can’t judge the shape of someone’s life until it’s over and done.”

  “I don’t even judge then,” said Mr. Nancy. “And as for happiness, there’s a lot of different kinds of happiness, just as there’s a hell of a lot of different kinds of dead. Me, I’ll just take what I can get when I can get it.”

  Shadow changed the subject. “Those helicopters,” he said. “The ones that took away the bodies, and the injured.”

  “What about them?”

  “Who sent them? Where did they come from?”

  “You shouldn’t worry yourself about that. They’re like valkyries or buzzards. They come because they have to come.”

  “If you say so.”

  “The dead and the wounded will be taken care of. You ask me, old Jacquel’s going to be very busy for the next month or so. Tell me somethin’, Shadow-boy.”

  “Okay.”

  “You learn anythin’ from all this?”

  Shadow shrugged. “I don’t know. Most of what I learned on the tree I’ve already forgotten,” he said. “I think I met some people. But I’m not certain of anything anymore. It’s like one of those dreams that changes you. You keep some of the dream forever, and you know things down deep inside yourself, because it happened to you, but when you go looking for details they kind of just slip out of your head.”

  “Yeah,” said Mr. Nancy. And then he said, grudgingly, “You’re not so dumb.”

  “Maybe not,” said Shadow. “But I wish I could have kept more of what passed through my hands, since I got out of prison. I was given so many things, and I lost them again.”

  “Maybe,” said Mr. Nancy, “You kept more than you think.”

  “No,” said Shadow.

  They crossed the border into Florida, and Shadow saw his first palm tree. He wondered if they’d planted it there on purpose, at the border, just so that you knew you were in Florida now.

  Mr. Nancy began to snore, and Shadow glanced over at him. The old man still looked very gray, and his breath was rasping. Shadow wondered, not for the first time, if he had sustained some kind of chest or lung injury in the fight. Nancy had refused any medical attention.

  Florida went on for longer than Shadow had imagined, and it was late by the time he pulled up outside a small, one-story wooden house, its windows tightly shuttered, on the outskirts of Fort Pierce. Nancy, who had directed him through the last five miles, invited him to stay the night.

  “I can get a room in a motel,” said Shadow. “It’s not a problem.”

  “You could do that, and I’d be hurt. Obviously I wouldn’t say anythin’. But I’d be real hurt, real bad,” said Mr. Nancy. “So you better stay here, and I’ll make you a bed up on the couch.”

  Mr. Nancy unlocked the hurricane shutters, and pulled open the windows. The house smelled musty and damp, and little sweet, as if it were haunted by the ghosts of long-dead cookies.

  Shadow agreed, reluctantly, to stay the night there, just as he agreed, even more reluctantly, to walk with Mr. Nancy to the bar at the end of the road, for just one late-night drink while the house aired out.

  “Did you see Czernobog?” asked Nancy, as they strolled through the muggy Floridian night. The air was alive with whirring palmetto bugs and the ground crawled with creatures that scuttled and clicked. Mr. Nancy lit a cigarillo, and coughed and choked on it. Still, he kept right on smoking.

  “He was gone when I came out of the cave.”

  “He will have headed home. He’ll be waitin’ for you there, you know.”

  “Yes.”

  They walked in silence to the end of the road. It wasn’t much of a bar, but it was open.

  “I’ll buy the first beers,” said Mr. Nancy.

  “We’re only having one beer, remember,” said Shadow.

  “What are you,” asked Mr. Nancy. “Some kind of cheapskate?”

  Mr. Nancy bought them their first beers, and Shadow bought the second round. He stared in horror as Mr. Nancy talked the barman into turning on the karaoke machine, and then watched in fascinated embarrassment as the old man belted his way through “What’s New Pussycat?” before crooning out a moving, tuneful version of “The Way You Look Tonight.” He had a fine voice, and by the end the handful of people still in the bar were cheering and applauding him.

  When he came back to Shadow at the bar he was looking b
righter. The whites of his eyes were clear, and the gray pallor that had touched his skin was gone. “Your turn,” he said.

  “Absolutely not,” said Shadow.

  But Mr. Nancy had ordered more beers, and was handing Shadow a stained printout of songs from which to choose. “Just pick a song you know the words to.”

  “This is not funny,” said Shadow. The world was beginning to swim, a little, but he couldn’t muster the energy to argue, and then Mr. Nancy was putting on the backing tapes to “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood,” and pushing—literally pushing—Shadow up onto the tiny makeshift stage at the end of the bar.

  Shadow held the mike as if it was probably live, and then the backing music started and he croaked out the initial “’Baby . . .’” Nobody in the bar threw anything in his direction. And it felt good. “’Can you understand me now?’” His voice was rough but melodic, and rough suited the song just fine. “’Sometimes I feel a little mad. Don’t you know that no one alive can always be an angel . . .’”

  And he was still singing it as they walked home through the busy Florida night, the old man and the young, stumbling and happy.

  “’I’m just a soul whose intentions are good,’” he sang to the crabs and the spiders and the palmetto beetles and the lizards and the night. “’Oh lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood.’”

  Mr. Nancy showed him to the couch. It was much smaller than Shadow, who decided to sleep on the floor, but by the time he had finished deciding to sleep on the floor he was already fast asleep, half sitting, half lying on the tiny sofa.

  At first, he did not dream. There was just the comforting darkness. And then he saw a fire burning in the darkness and he walked toward it.

  “You did well,” whispered the buffalo man without moving his lips.

  “I don’t know what I did,” said Shadow.

  “You made peace,” said the buffalo man. “You took our words and made them your own. They never understood that they were here—and the people who worshiped them were here—because it suits us that they are here. But we can change our minds. And perhaps we will.”

  “Are you a god?” asked Shadow.

  The buffalo-headed man shook his head. Shadow thought, for a moment, that the creature was amused. “I am the land,” he said.

  And if there was more to that dream then Shadow did not remember it.

  He heard something sizzling. His head was aching, and there was a pounding behind his eyes.

  Mr. Nancy was already cooking breakfast: a towering stack of pancakes, sizzling bacon, perfect eggs, and coffee. He looked in the peak of health.

  “My head hurts,” said Shadow.

  “You get a good breakfast inside you, you’ll feel like a new man.”

  “I’d rather feel like the same man, just with a different head,” said Shadow.

  “Eat,” said Mr. Nancy.

  Shadow ate.

  “How do you feel now?”

  “Like I’ve got a headache, only now I’ve got some food in my stomach and I think I’m going to throw up.”

  “Come with me.” Beside the sofa, on which Shadow had spent the night, covered with an African blanket, was a trunk, made of some dark wood, which looked like an undersized pirate chest. Mr. Nancy undid the padlock and opened the lid. Inside the trunk there were a number of boxes. Nancy rummaged among the boxes. “It’s an ancient African herbal remedy,” he said. “It’s made of ground willow bark, things like that.”

  “Like aspirin?”

  “Yup,” said Mr. Nancy. “Just like that.” From the bottom of the trunk he produced a giant economy-sized bottle of generic aspirin. He unscrewed the top, and shook out a couple of white pills. “Here.”

  “Nice trunk,” said Shadow. He took the bitter pills, swallowed them with a glass of water.

  “My son sent it to me,” said Mr. Nancy. “He’s a good boy. I don’t see him as much as I’d like.”

  “I miss Wednesday,” said Shadow. “Despite everything he did. I keep expecting to see him. But I look up and he’s not there.” He kept staring at the pirate trunk, trying figure out what it reminded him of.

  You will lose many things. Do not lose this. Who said that?

  “You miss him? After what he put you through? Put us all through?”

  “Yes,” said Shadow. “I guess I do. Do you think he’ll be back?”

  “I think,” said Mr. Nancy, “that wherever two men are gathered together to sell a third man a twenty-dollar violin for ten thousand dollars, he will be there in spirit.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “We should get back into the kitchen,” said Mr. Nancy, his expression becoming stony. “Those pans won’t wash themselves.”

  Mr. Nancy washed the pans and the dishes. Shadow dried them and put them away. Somewhere in there the headache began to ease. They went back into the sitting room.

  Shadow stared at the old trunk some more, willing himself to remember. “If I don’t go to see Czernobog,” he said, “what will happen?”

  “You’ll see him,” said Mr. Nancy flatly. “Maybe he’ll find you. Or maybe he’ll bring you to him. But one way or another, you’ll see him.”

  Shadow nodded. Something started to fall into place. A dream, on the tree. “Hey,” he said. “Is there a god with an elephant’s head?”

  “Ganesh? He’s a Hindu god. He removes obstacles, and makes journeys easier. Good cook, too.”

  Shadow looked up. “’It’s in the trunk,’” he said. “I knew it was important, but I didn’t know why. I thought maybe it meant the trunk of the tree. But he wasn’t talking about that at all, was he?”

  Mr. Nancy frowned. “You lost me.”

  “It’s in the trunk,” said Shadow. He knew it was true. He did not know why it should be true, not quite. But of that he was completely certain.

  He got to his feet. “I got to go,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  Mr. Nancy raised an eyebrow. “Why the hurry?”

  “Because,” said Shadow, simply, “the ice is melting.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  it’s

  spring

  and

  the

  goat-footed

  balloonMan whistles

  far

  and

  wee

  —e. e. cummings

  Shadow drove the rental out of the forest at about 8:30 in the morning, came down the hill doing under forty-five miles per hour, and entered the town of Lakeside three weeks after he was certain he had left it for good.

  He drove through the city, surprised at how little it had changed in the last few weeks, which were a lifetime, and he parked halfway down the driveway that led to the lake. Then he got out of the car.

  There were no more ice-fishing huts on the frozen lake any longer, no SUVs, no men sitting at a fishing hole with a line and a twelve-pack. The lake was dark: no longer covered with a blind white layer of snow, now there were reflective patches of water on the surface of the ice, and the water under the ice was black, and the ice itself was clear enough that the darkness beneath showed through. The sky was gray, but the icy lake was bleak and empty.

  Almost empty.

  There was one car remaining on the ice, parked out on the frozen lake almost beneath the bridge, so that anyone driving through the town, anyone crossing the town, could not help but see it. It was a dirty green in color; the sort of car that people abandon in parking lots. It had no engine. It was a symbol of a wager, waiting for the ice to become rotten enough and soft enough and dangerous enough to allow the lake to take it forever.

  There was a chain across the short driveway that led down to the lake, and a warning sign forbidding entrance to people or to vehicles. THIN ICE, it read. Beneath it was a hand-painted sequence of pictograms with lines through them: NO CARS, NO PEDESTRIANS, NO SNOWMOBILES. DANGER.

  Shadow ignored the warnings and scrambled down the bank. It was slippery—the snow had already melted, turning the earth to mud under his feet, and the brown gr
ass barely offered traction. He skidded and slid down to the lake and walked, carefully, out onto a short wooden jetty, and from there he stepped down onto the ice.

  The layer of water on the ice, made up of melted ice and melted snow, was deeper than it had looked from above, and the ice beneath the water was slicker and more slippery than any skating rink, so that Shadow was forced to fight to keep his footing. He splashed though the water as it covered his boots to the laces and seeped inside. Ice water. It numbed where it touched. He felt strangely distant as he trudged across the frozen lake, as if he were watching himself on a movie screen—a movie in which he was the hero: a detective, perhaps.

  He walked toward the klunker, painfully aware that the ice was too rotten for this, and that the water beneath the ice was as cold as water could be without freezing. He kept walking, and he slipped and slid. Several times he fell.

  He passed empty beer bottles and cans left to litter the ice, and he passed round holes cut into the ice, for fishing, holes that had not frozen again, each hole filled with black water.

  The klunker seemed farther away than it had looked from the road. He heard a loud crack from the south of the lake, like a stick breaking, followed by the sound of something huge thrumming, as if a bass string the size of a lake were vibrating. Massively, the ice creaked and groaned, like an old door protesting being opened. Shadow kept walking, as steadily as he could.

  This is suicide, whispered a sane voice in the back of his mind. Can’t you just let it go?

  “No,” he said, aloud. “I have to know.” And he kept right on walking.

  He arrived at the klunker, and even before he reached it he knew that he had been right. There was a miasma that hung about the car, something that was at the same time a faint, foul smell and was also a bad taste in the back of his throat. He walked around the car, looking inside. The seats were stained, and ripped. The car was obviously empty. He tried the doors. They were locked. He tried the trunk. Also locked.

  He wished that he had brought a crowbar.

  He made a fist of his hand, inside his glove. He counted to three, then smashed his hand, hard, against the driver’s-side window glass.