American Gods (32 page)

“Go,” said Wednesday, his voice a reassuring growl. “All is
well, and all is well, and all shall be well.”

Shadow showed his ticket to the driver. “Hell of a day to be
traveling,” she said. And then she added, with a certain grim satisfaction, “Merry
Christmas.”

The bus was almost empty. “When will we get into Lakeside?”
asked Shadow.

‘Two hours. Maybe a bit more,” said the driver. “They say
there’s a cold snap coming.” She thumbed a switch and the doors closed with a
hiss and a mump.

Shadow walked halfway down the bus, put the seat back as far
as it would go, and he started to think. The motion of the bus and the warmth
combined to lull him, and before he was aware that he was becoming sleepy, he
was asleep.

In the earth, and under the earth. The marks on the wall
were the red of wet clay: handprints, fingermarks, and, here and there, crude
representations of animals and people and birds.

The fire still burned and the buffalo man still sat on the
other side of the fire, staring at Shadow with huge eyes, eyes like pools of
dark mud. The buffalo lips, fringed with matted brown hair, did not move as the
buffalo voice said, “Well, Shadow? Do you believe yet?”

“I don’t know,” said Shadow. His mouth had not moved either,
he observed. Whatever words were passing between the two of them were not being
spoken, not iirsfiy way that Shadow understood speech. “Are you real?”

“Believe,” said the buffalo man.

“Are you ...” Shadow hesitated, and thenjne asked, “Are you
a god too?”

The buffalo man reached one hand into the flames of the fire
and he pulled out a burning brand. He held the brand in the middle. Blue and
yellow flames licked his red hand, but they did not burn.

“This is not a land for gods,” said the buffalo man. But it
was not the buffalo man talking anymore, Shadow knew, in his dream: it was the
fire speaking, the crackling and the burning of the flame itself that spoke to
Shadow in the dark place under the earth.

“This land was brought up from the depths of the ocean by a
diver,” said the fire. “It was spun from its own substance by a spider. It was
shat by a raven. It is the body of a fallen father, whose bones are mountains,
whose eyes are lakes.

“This is a land of dreams and fire,” said the flame.

The buffalo man put the brand back on the fire.

“Why are you telling me this stuff?” said Shadow. “I’m not
important. I’m not anything. I was an okay physical trainer, a really lousy
small-time crook, and maybe not so good a husband as I thought I was ...” He
trailed off.

“How do I help Laura?” Shadow asked the buffalo man. “She
wants to be alive again. I said I’d help her. I owe her that.”

The buffalo man said nothing. He pointed up toward the roof
of the cave. Shadow’s eyes followed. There was a thin, wintery light coming
from a tiny opening far above.

“Up there?” asked Shadow, wishing that one of his questions
would be answered. “I’m supposed to go up there?”

The dream took him then, the idea becoming the thing itself,
and Shadow was crushed into the rock and earth. He was like a mole, trying to
push through the earth, like a badger, climbing through the earth, like a
groundhog, pushing the earth out of his way, like a bear, but the earth was too
hard, too dense, and his breath was coming in gasps, and soon he could go no
farther, dig and climb no more, and he knew then that he would die somewhere in
the deep place beneath the world.

His own strength was not enough. His efforts became weaker.
He knew that though his body was riding in a hot bus through cold woods if he
stopped breathing here, beneath the world, he would stop breathing there as
well, that even now his breath was coming in shallow panting gasps.

He struggled and he pushed, ever more weakly, each movement
using precious air. He was trapped: could go no farther, and could not return
the way that he had come.

“Now bargain,” said a voice in his mind.

“What do I have to bargain with?” Shadow asked. “I have nothing.”
He could taste the clay now, thick and mud-gritty in his mouth.

And then Shadow said, “Except myself. I have myself, don’t
I?”

It seemed as if everything was holding its breath.

“I offer myself,” he said.

The response was immediate. The rocks and the earth that had
surrounded him began to push down on Shadow, squeezed him so hard that the last
ounce of air in his lungs was crushed out of him. The pressure became pain,
pushing him on every side. He reached the zenith of pain and hung there,
cresting, knowing that he could take no more, at that moment the spasm eased
and Shadow could breathe again. The light above him had grown larger.

He was being pushed toward the surface.

As the next earth-spasm hit, Shadow tried to ride with it.
This time he felt himself being pushed upward.

The pain, on that last awful contraction, was impossible to
believe, as he felt himself being squeezed, crushed, and pushed through an
unyielding rock gap, his bones shattering, his flesh becoming something
shapeless! ftsfhis mouth and ruined head cleared the hole he began to scream,
in fear and pain.

He wondered, as he screamed, whether, back in the waking
world, he was also screaming—if he was screaming in his sleep back on the
darkened bus.

And as that final spasm ended Shadow was on the ground, his
fingers clutching the red earth.

He pulled himself into a sitting position, wiped the earth
from his face with his hand and looked up at the sky. It was twilight, a long, purple
twilight, and the stars were coming out, one by one, stars so much brighter and
more vivid than any stars he had ever seen or imagined.

“Soon,” said the crackling voice of the flame, coming from behind
him, “they will fall. Soon they will fall and the star people will meet the
earth people. There will be heroes among them, and men who will slay monsters
and bring knowledge, but none of them will be gods. This is a poor place for
gods.”

A blast of air, shocking in its coldness, touched his face.
It was like being doused in ice water. He could hear thg driver’s voice saying
that they were in Pinewood, “anyone who needs a cigarette or wants to stretch
their legs, we’ll be stopping here for ten minutes, then we’ll be back on the
road.”

Shadow stumbled off the bus. They were parked outside another
rural gas station, almost identical to the one they had left. The driver was
helping a couple of teenage girls onto the bus, putting their suitcases away in
the luggage compartment.

“Hey,” the driver said, when she saw Shadow. “You’re getting
off at Lakeside, right?”

Shadow agreed, sleepily, that he was.

“Heck, that’s a good town,” said the bus driver. “I think
sometimes that if I were just going to pack it all in, I’d move to Lakeside.
Prettiest town I’ve ever seen. You’ve lived there long?”

“My first visit.”

“You have a pasty at Mabel’s for me, you hear?”

Shadow decided not to ask for clarification. “Tell me,” said
Shadow, “was I talking in my sleep?”

“If you were, I didn’t hear you.” She looked at her watch. “Back
on the bus. I’ll call you when we get to Lakeside.”

The two girls—he doubted that either of them was much more
than fourteen years old—who had got on in Pinewood were now in the seat in
front of him. They were friends, Shadow decided, eavesdropping without meaning
to, not sisters. One of them knew almost nothing about sex, but knew a lot
about animals, helped out or spent a lot of time at some kind of animal
shelter, while the other was not interested in animals, but, armed with a
hundred tidbits gleaned from the Internet and from daytime television, thought
she knew a great deal about human sexuality. Shadow listened with a horrified
and amused fascination to the one who thought she was wise in the ways of the
world detail the precise mechanics of using Alka-Seltzer tablets to enhance
oral sex.

Shadow started to tune them out, blanked everything except
the noise of the road, and now only fragments of conversation would come back
every now and again.

Goldie is, like, such a good dog,, and he was a purebred retriever,
if only my dad would say okay, he wags his tail whenever he sees me.

It’s Christmas, he has to let me use the snowmobile.

You can write your name with your tongue on the side of his
thing.

I miss Sandy.

Yeah, I miss Sandy too.

Six inches tonight they said, but they just make it up, they
make up the weather and nobody ever calls them on it ....

And then the brakes of the bus were hissing and the driver
was shouting “Lakeside!” and the doors ducked open. Shadow followed the girls
out into the floodlit parking lot of a video store and tanning salon that
functioned, Shadow guessed, as Lakeside’s Greyhound station. The air was
dreadfully cold, but it was a fresh cold. It vJpke him up. He stared at the
lights of the town to the south and the west, and pale expanse of a frozen lake
to the east.

The girls were standing in the lot, stamping and blowing on
their hands dramatically. One of them, the younger one, snuck a look at Shadow,
smiled awkwardly when she realized that he had seen her do so.

“Merry Christmas,” said Shadow.

“Yeah,” said the other girl, perhaps a year or so older than
the first, “Merry Christmas to you too.” She had carroty red hair and a snub
nose covered with a hundred thousand freckles.

“Nice town you got here,” said Shadow.

“We like it,” said the younger one. She was the one who
liked animals. She gave Shadow a shy grin, revealing blue rubber-band braces
stretching across her front teeth. “You look like somebody,” she told him,
gravely. “Are you somebody’s brother or somebody’s son or something?”

“You are such a spaz, Alison,” said her friend. “Everybody’s
somebody’s son or brother or something.”

“That wasn’t what I meant,” said Alison. Headlights framed
them all for one brilliant white moment. Behind the headlights was a station
wagon with a mother in it, and in moments it took the girls and their bags
away, leaving Shadow standing alone in the parking lot.

“Young man? Anything I can do for you?” The old man was
locking up the video store. He pocketed his keys. “Store ain’t open Christmas,”
he told Shadow cheerfully. “But I come down to meet the bus. Make sure
everything was okay. Couldn’t live with myself if some poor soul’d found ‘emselves
stranded on Christmas Day.” He was close enough that Shadow could see his face:
old but contented, the face of a man who had sipped life’s vinegar and found
it, by and large, to be mostly whiskey, and good whiskey at that.

“Well, you could give me the number of the local taxi company,”
said Shadow.

“I could,” said the old man, doubtfully, “but Tom’11 be in
his bed this time of night, and even if you could rouse him you’ll get no
satisfaction—I saw him down at the Buck Stops Here earlier this evening, and he
was very merry. Very merry indeed. Where is it you’re aiming to go?”

Shadow showed him the address tag on the door key.

“Well,” he said, “that’s a ten-, mebbe a twenty-minute walk
over the bridge and around. But it’s no fun when it’s this cold, and when you
don’t know where you’re going it always seems longer—you ever notice that?
First time takes forever, and then ever after it’s over in a flash?”

“Yes,” said Shadow. “I’ve never thought of it like that. But
I guess it’s true.”

The old man nodded. His face cracked into a grin. “What the
heck, it’s Christmas. I’ll run you over there in Tessie.”

Shadow followed the old man to the road, where a huge old
roadster was parked. It looked like something that gangsters might have been
proud to drive in the Roaring Twenties, running boards and all. It was a deep
dark color under the sodium lights that might have been red and might have been
green. “This is Tessie,” the old man said. “Ain’t she a beaut?” He patted her
proprietorially, where the hood curved up and arched over the front nearside
wheel.

“What make is she?” asked Shadow.

“She’s a Wendt Phoenix. Wendt went under in ‘31, name was
bought by Chrysler, but they never made any more Wendts. Harvey Wendt, who
founded the company, was a local boy. Went out to California, killed himself
in, oh, 1941, ‘42. Great tragedy.”

The car smelled of leather and old cigarette smoke—not a
fresh smell, but as if enough people had Smoked enough cigarettes and cigars in
the car over the years thauthe smell of burning tobacco had become part of the
fabric of the car. The old man turned the key in the ignition and Tessie
started first time.

‘Tomorrow,” he told Shadow, “she goes irao the garage. I’ll
cover her with a dust sheet, and that’s where she’ll stay until spring. Truth
of the matter is I shouldn’t be driving her right now, with the snow on the
ground.”

“Doesn’t she ride well in snow?”

“Rides just fine. It’s the salt they put on the roads. Rusts
these old beauties faster than you could believe. You want to go door to door,
or would you like the moonlight grand tour of the town?”

“I don’t want to trouble you—”

“It’s no trouble. You get to be my age, you’re grateful for
the least wink of sleep. I’m lucky if I get five hours a night nowadays—wake up
and my mind is just turning and turning. Where are my manners? My name’s
Hinzelmann. I’d say, call me Richie, but around here folks who know me just
call me plain Hinzelmann. I’d shake your hand, but I need two hands to drive
Tessie. She knows when I’m not paying attention.”

“Mike Ainsel,” said Shadow. “Pleased to meet you, Hinzelmann.”

“So we’ll go around the lake. Grand tour,” said Hinzelmann.

Main Street, which they were on, was a pretty street, even
at night, and it looked old-fashioned in the best sense of the word—as if, for
a hundred years, people had been caring for that street and they had not been
in a hurry to lose anything they liked.