American Gods

by Neil Gaiman

  His hand hurt, but the side window was undamaged.

  He thought about running at it—he could kick the window in, he was certain, if he didn’t skid and fall on the wet ice. But the last thing he wanted to do was to disturb the klunker enough that the ice beneath it would crack.

  He looked at the car. Then he reached for the radio antenna—it was the kind that was supposed to go up and down, but that had stuck in the up position a decade ago—and, with a little waggling, he broke it off at the base. He took the thin end of the antenna—it had once had a metal button on the end, but that was lost in time, and, with strong fingers, he bent it back up into a makeshift hook.

  Then he rammed the extended metal antenna down between the rubber and the glass of the front window, deep into the mechanism of the door. He fished in the mechanism, twisting, moving, pushing the metal antenna about until it caught: and then he pulled up.

  He felt the improvised hook sliding from the lock, uselessly.

  He sighed. Fished again, slower, more carefully. He could imagine the ice grumbling beneath his feet as he shifted his weight. And slow . . . and . . .

  He had it. He pulled up on the aerial and the front-door locking mechanism popped up. Shadow reached down one gloved hand and took the door handle, pressed the button, and pulled. The door did not open.

  It’s stuck, he thought, iced up. That’s all.

  He tugged, sliding on the ice, and suddenly the door of the klunker flew open, ice scattering everywhere.

  The miasma was worse inside the car, a stench of rot and illness. Shadow felt sick.

  He reached under the dashboard, found the black plastic handle that opened the trunk, and tugged on it, hard.

  There was a thunk from behind him as the trunk door released.

  Shadow walked out onto the ice, slipped and splashed around the car, holding on to the side of it as he went.

  It’s in the trunk, he thought.

  The trunk was open an inch. He reached down and opened it the rest of the way, pulling it up.

  The smell was bad, but it could have been much worse: the bottom of the trunk was filled with an inch or so of half-melted ice. There was a girl in the trunk. She wore a scarlet snowsuit, now stained, and her mousy hair was long and her mouth was closed, so Shadow could not see the blue rubber-band braces, but that they were there. The cold had preserved her, kept her as fresh as if she had been in a freezer.

  Her eyes were wide open, and she looked as if she had been crying when she died, and the tears that had frozen on her cheeks had still not melted.

  “You were here all the time,” said Shadow to Alison McGovern’s corpse. “Every single person who drove over that bridge saw you. Everyone who drove through the town saw you. The ice fishermen walked past you every day. And nobody knew.”

  And then he realized how foolish that was.

  Somebody knew. Somebody had put her here.

  He reached into the trunk—to see if he could pull her out. He put his weight on the car, as he leaned in. Maybe that was what did it.

  The ice beneath the front wheels went at that moment, perhaps from his movements, perhaps not. The front of the car lurched downward several feet into the dark water of the lake. Water began to pour into the car through the open driver’s door. Lake water splashed about Shadow’s ankles, although the ice he stood on was still solid. He looked around urgently, wondering how to get away—and then it was too late, and the ice tipped precipitously, throwing him against the car and the dead girl in the trunk; and the back of the car went down, and Shadow went down with it, into the cold waters of the lake. It was ten past nine in the morning on March the twenty-third.

  He took a deep breath before he went under, closing his eyes, but the cold of the lake water hit him like a wall, knocking the breath from his body.

  He tumbled downward, into the murky ice water, pulled down by the car.

  He was under the lake, down in the darkness and the cold, weighed down by his clothes and his gloves and his boots, trapped and swathed in his coat, which seemed to have become heavier and bulkier than he could have imagined.

  He was falling, still. He tried to push away from the car, but it was pulling him with it, and then there was a bang that he could hear with his whole body, not his ears, and his left foot was wrenched at the ankle, the foot twisted and trapped beneath the car as it settled on the lake bottom, and panic took him.

  He opened his eyes.

  He knew it was dark down there: rationally, he knew it was too dark to see anything, but still, he could see; he could see everything. He could see Alison McGovern’s white face staring at him from the open trunk. He could see other cars as well—the klunkers of bygone years, rotten hulk shapes in the darkness, half buried in the lake mud. And what else would they have dragged out on to the lake, Shadow wondered, before there were cars?

  Each one, he knew, without any question, had a dead child in the trunk. There were scores of them . . . each had sat out on the ice, in front of the eyes of the world, all through the cold winter. Each had tumbled into the cold waters of the lake, when the winter was done.

  This was where they rested: Lemmi Hautala and Jessie Lovat and Sandy Olsen and Jo Ming and Sarah Lindquist and all the rest of them. Down where it was silent and cold . . .

  He pulled at his foot. It was stuck fast, and the pressure in his lungs was becoming unbearable. There was a sharp, terrible hurt in his ears. He exhaled slowly, and the air bubbled around his face.

  Soon, he thought, soon I’ll have to breathe. Or I’ll choke.

  He reached down, put both hands around the bumper of the klunker, and pushed, with everything he had, leaning into it. Nothing happened.

  It’s only the shell of a car, he told himself. They took out the engine. That’s the heaviest part of the car. You can do it. Just keep pushing.

  He pushed.

  Agonizingly slowly, a fraction of an inch at a time, the car slipped forward in the mud, and Shadow pulled his foot from the mud beneath the car, and kicked, and tried to push himself out into the cold lake water. He didn’t move. The coat, he told himself. It’s the coat. It’s stuck, or caught on something. He pulled his arms from his coat, fumbled with numb fingers at the frozen zipper. Then he pulled both hands on each side of the zipper, felt the coat give and rend. Hastily, he freed himself from its embrace, and pushed upward, away from the car.

  There was a rushing sensation but no sense of up, no sense of down, and he was choking and the pain in his chest and in his head was too much to bear, so that he was certain that he was going to have to inhale, to breathe in the cold water, to die. And then his head hit something solid.

  Ice. He was pushing against the ice on the top of the lake. He hammered at it with his fists, but there was no strength left in his arms, nothing to hold on to, nothing to push against. The world had dissolved into the chill blackness beneath the lake. There was nothing left but cold.

  This is ridiculous, he thought. And he thought, remembering some old Tony Curtis film he’d seen as a kid, I should roll onto my back and push the ice upward and press my face to it, and find some air, I could breathe again, there’s air there somewhere, but he was just floating and freezing and he could no longer move a muscle, not if his life depended on it, which it did.

  The cold became bearable. Became warm. And he thought, I’m dying. There was anger there this time, a deep fury, and he took the pain and the anger and reached with it, flailed, forced muscles to move that were ready never to move again.

  He pushed up with his hand, and felt it scrape the edge of the ice and move up into the air. He flailed for a grip, and felt another hand take his own, and pull.

  His head banged against the ice, his face scraped the underneath of the ice, and then his head was up in the air, and he could see that he was coming up through a hole in the ice, and for a moment all he could do was breathe, and let the black lake water run from his nose and his mouth, and blink his eyes, which could see nothing more than a blinding
daylight, and shapes, and someone was pulling him, now, forcing him out of the water, saying something about how he’d freeze to death, so come on, man, pull, and Shadow wriggled and shook like a bull seal coming ashore, shaking and coughing and shuddering.

  He breathed deep gasps of air, stretched flat out on the creaking ice, and even that would not hold for long, he knew, but it was no good. His thoughts were coming with difficulty, syrupy-slow.

  “Just leave me,” he tried to say. “I’ll be fine.” His words were a slur, and everything was drawing to a halt.

  He just needed to rest for a moment, that was all, just rest, and then he would get up and move on. Obviously he could not just lie there forever.

  There was a jerk; water splashed his face. His head was lifted up. Shadow felt himself being hauled across the ice, sliding on his back across the slick surface, and he wanted to protest, to explain that he just needed a little rest—maybe a little sleep, was that asking for so much?—and he would be just fine. If they just left him alone.

  He did not believe that he had fallen asleep, but he was standing on a vast plain, and there was a man there with the head and shoulders of a buffalo, and a woman with the head of an enormous condor, and there was Whiskey Jack standing between them, looking at him sadly, shaking his head.

  Whiskey Jack turned and walked slowly away from Shadow. The buffalo man walked away beside him. The thunderbird woman also walked, and then she ducked and kicked and she was gliding out into the skies.

  Shadow felt a sense of loss. He wanted to call to them, to plead with them to come back, not to give up on him, but everything was becoming formless and without shape: they were gone, and the plains were fading, and everything became void.

  The pain was intense: it was as if every cell in his body, every nerve, was melting and waking and advertising its presence by burning him and hurting him.

  There was a hand at the back of his head, gripping it by the hair, and another hand beneath his chin. He opened his eyes, expecting to find himself in some kind of hospital.

  His feet were bare. He was wearing jeans. He was naked from the waist up. There was steam in the air. He could see a shaving mirror on the wall facing him, and a small basin, and a blue toothbrush in a toothpaste-stained glass.

  Information was processed slowly, one datum at a time.

  His fingers burned. His toes burned.

  He began to whimper from the pain.

  “Easy now, Mike. Easy there,” said a voice he knew.

  “What?” he said, or tried to say. “What’s happening?” It sounded strained and strange to his ears.

  He was in a bathtub. The water was hot. He thought the water was hot, although he could not be certain. The water was up to his neck.

  “Dumbest thing you can do with a fellow freezing to death is to put him in front of a fire. The second dumbest thing you can do is to wrap him in blankets—especially if he’s in cold wet clothes already. Blankets insulate him—keep the cold in. The third dumbest thing—and this is my private opinion—is to take the fellow’s blood out, warm it up and put it back. That’s what doctors do these days. Complicated, expensive. Dumb.” The voice was coming from above and behind his head.

  “The smartest, quickest thing you can do is what sailors have done to men overboard for hundreds of years. You put the fellow in hot water. Not too hot. Just hot. Now, just so you know, you were basically dead when I found you on the ice back there. How are you feeling now, Houdini?”

  “It hurts,” said Shadow. “Everything hurts. You saved my life.”

  “I guess maybe I did, at that. Can you hold your head up on your own now?”

  “Maybe.”

  “I’m going to let you go. If you start sinking below the water I’ll pull you back up again.”

  The hands released their grip on his head.

  He felt himself sliding forward in the tub. He put out his hands, pressed them against the side of the tub, and leaned back. The bathroom was small. The tub was metal, and the enamel was stained and scratched.

  An old man moved into his field of vision. He looked concerned.

  “Feeling better?” asked Hinzelmann. “You just lay back and relax. I’ve got the den nice and warm. You tell me when you’re ready, I got a robe you can wear, and I can throw your jeans into the dryer with the rest of your clothes. Sound good, Mike?”

  “That’s not my name.”

  “If you say so.” The old man’s goblin face twisted into an expression of discomfort.

  Shadow had no real sense of time: he lay in the bathtub until the burning stopped and his toes and fingers flexed without real discomfort. Hinzelmann helped Shadow to his feet and let out the warm water. Shadow sat on the side of the bathtub and together they pulled off his jeans.

  He squeezed, without much difficulty, into a terrycloth robe too small for him, and, leaning on the old man, he went into the den and flopped down on an ancient sofa. He was tired and weak: deeply fatigued, but alive. A log fire burned in the fireplace. A handful of surprised-looking deer heads peered down dustily from around the walls, where they jostled for space with several large varnished fish.

  Hinzelmann went away with Shadow’s jeans, and from the room next door Shadow could hear a brief pause in the rattle of a clothes dryer before it resumed. The old man returned with a steaming mug.

  “It’s coffee,” he said, “which is a stimulant. And I splashed a little schnapps into it. Just a little. That’s what we always did in the old days. A doctor wouldn’t recommend it.”

  Shadow took the coffee with both hands. On the side of the mug was a picture of a mosquito and the message, GIVE BLOOD—VISIT WISCONSIN!!

  “Thanks,” he said.

  “It’s what friends are for,” said Hinzelmann. “One day, you can save my life. For now, forget about it.”

  Shadow sipped the coffee. “I thought I was dead.”

  “You were lucky. I was up on the bridge—I’d pretty much figured that today was going to be the big day, you get a feel for it, when you get to my age—so I was up there with my old pocket watch, and I saw you heading out onto the lake. I shouted, but I sure as heck don’t think you coulda heard me. I saw the car go down, and I saw you go down with it, and I thought I’d lost you, so I went out onto the ice. Gave me the heebie-jeebies. You must have been under the water for the best part of two minutes. Then I saw your hand come up through the place where the car went down—it was like seeing a ghost, seeing you there . . .” He trailed off. “We were both damn lucky that the ice took our weight as I dragged you back to the shore.”

  Shadow nodded.

  “You did a good thing,” he told Hinzelmann, and the old man beamed all over his goblin face.

  Somewhere in the house, Shadow heard a door close. He sipped at his coffee.

  Now that he was able to think clearly, he was starting to ask himself questions.

  He wondered how an old man, a man half his height and perhaps a third his weight, had been able to drag him, unconscious, across the ice, or get him up the bank to a car. He wondered how Hinzelmann had gotten Shadow into the house and the bathtub.

  Hinzelmann walked over to the fire, picked up the tongs and placed a thin log, carefully, onto the blazing fire.

  “Do you want to know what I was doing out on the ice?”

  Hinzelmann shrugged. “None of my business.”

  “You know what I don’t understand . . .” said Shadow. He hesitated, putting his thoughts in order. “I don’t understand why you saved my life.”

  “Well,” said Hinzelmann, “the way I was brought up, if you see another fellow in trouble—“

  “No,” said Shadow. “That’s not what I mean. I mean, you killed all those kids. Every winter. I was the only one to have figured it out. You must have seen me open the trunk. Why didn’t you just let me drown?”

  Hinzelmann tipped his head on one side. He scratched his nose, thoughtfully, rocked back and forth as if he were thinking. “Well,” he said. “That’s a good
question. I guess it’s because I owed a certain party a debt. And I’m good for my debts.”

  “Wednesday?”

  “That’s the fellow.”

  “There was a reason he hid me in Lakeside, wasn’t there? There was a reason nobody should have been able to find me here.”

  Hinzelmann said nothing. He unhooked a heavy black poker from its place on the wall, and he prodded at the fire with it, sending up a cloud of orange sparks and smoke. “This is my home,” he said, petulantly. “It’s a good town.”

  Shadow finished his coffee. He put the cup down on the floor. The effort was exhausting. “How long have you been here?”

  “Long enough.”

  “And you made the lake?”

  Hinzelmann peered at him, surprised. “Yes,” he said. “I made the lake. They were calling it a lake when I got here, but it weren’t nothing more than a spring and a mill pond and a creek.” He paused. “I figured that this country is hell on my kind of folk. It eats us. I didn’t want to be eaten. So I made a deal. I gave them a lake, and I gave them prosperity . . .”

  “And all it cost them was one child every winter.”

  “Good kids,” said Hinzelmann, shaking his old head, slowly. “They were all good kids. I’d only pick ones I liked. Except for Charlie Nelligan. He was a bad seed, that one. He was, what, 1924? 1925? Yeah. That was the deal.”

  “The people of the town,” said Shadow. “Mabel. Marguerite. Chad Mulligan. Do they know?”

  Hinzelmann said nothing. He pulled the poker from the fire: the first six inches at the tip glowed a dull orange. Shadow knew that the handle of the poker must be too hot to hold, but it did not seem to bother Hinzelmann, and he prodded the fire again. He put the poker back into the fire, tip first, and left it there. Then he said, “They know that they live in a good place. While every other town and city in this county, heck, in this part of the state, is crumbling into nothing. They know that.”

  “And that’s your doing?”

  “This town,” said Hinzelmann. “I care for it. Nothing happens here that I don’t want to happen. You understand that? Nobody comes here that I don’t want to come here. That was why your father sent you here. He didn’t want you out there in the world, attracting attention. That’s all.”