American Gods (36 page)

“No?” asked Shadow. He was playing straight man, and enjoying
it enormously.

“Not since the winter of ‘49, and you’d be too young to remember
that one. That was a winter. I see you bought yourself a ve-hicle.”

“Yup. What do you think?”

‘Truth to tell, I never liked that Gunther boy. I had a trout
stream down in the woods a way, on back of my property, way back, well it’s
town land but I’d put down stones in the river, made little pools and places
where the trout liked to live. Caught me some beauties too—one fellow must have
been a six-, seven-pound brook trout, and that little Gunther so-and-so he
kicked down each of the pools and threatened to report me to the DNR. Now he’s
in Green Bay, and soon enough he’ll be back here. If there were any justice in
the world he’d’ve gone off into the world as a winter runaway, but nope, sticks
like a cockleburr to a woolen vest.” He began to arrange the contents of Shadow’s
welcome basket on the counter. “This is Katherine Powdermaker’s crabapple
jelly. She’s been giving me a pot for Christmas for longer than you’ve been
alive, and the sad truth is I’ve never opened a one. They’re down in my
basement, forty, fifty pots. Maybe I’ll open one and discover that I like the
stuff. Meantime, here’s a pot for you. Maybe you’ll like it.”

“What’s a winter runaway?”

“Mm.” The old man pushed his woolen cap above his ears,
rubbed his temple with a pink forefinger. “Well, it ain’t unique to Lakeside—we’re
a good town, better than most, but we’re not perfect. Some winters, well, maybe
a kid gets a bit stir crazy, when it gets so cold that you can’t go out, and
the snow’s so dry that you can’t make so much as a snowball without it crumbling
away ...”

“They run off?”

The old man nodded, gravely. “I blame the television,
showing all the kids things they’ll never have—Dallas and Dynasty, all of that
nonsense. I’ve not had a television since the fall of ‘83, except for a
black-and-white set I keep in a closet for if folk come in from out of town and
there’s a big game on.”

“Can I get you anything, Hinzelmann?”

“Not coffee. Gives me heartburn. Just water.” Hinzelmann
shook his head. “Biggest problem in this part of the world is poverty. Not the
poverty we had in the Depression but something more in ... what’s the word,
means it creeps in at the edges, like cock-a-roaches?”

“Insidious?”

“Yeah. Insidious. Logging’s dead. Mining’s dead. Tourists
don’t drive farther north than the Dells, ‘cept for a handful of hunters and
some kids going to camp on the lakes—and they aren’t spending their money in
the towns.”

“Lakeside seems kind of prosperous, though.”

The old man’s blue eyes blinked. “And believe me, it takes a
lot of work,” he said. “Hard work. But this is a good town, and all the work
all the people here put into it is worthwhile. Not that my family weren’t poor
as kids. Ask me how poor we was as kids.”

Shadow put on his straight-man face and said, “How poor were
you as kids, Mister Hinzelmann?”

“Just Hinzelmann, Mike. We were so poor that we couldn’t afford
a fire. Come New Year’s Eve my father would suck on a peppermint, and us kids,
we’d stand around with our hands outstretched, basking in the glow.”

Shadow made a rimshot noise. Hinzelmann put on his ski mask
and did up his huge plaid coat, pulled, out his car keys from his pocket, and
then, last of all, putted on his great gloves. “You get too bored up here, you
just come down to the store and ask for me. I’ll show you my collection of
hand-tied fishing flies. Bore you so mucWmat getting back here will be a
relief.” His voice was muffled, but audible.

“I’ll do that,” said Shadow with a smile. “How’s Tessie?”

“Hibernating. She’ll be out in the spring. You take care
now, Mr. Ainsel.” And he closed the door behind him as he left.

The apartment grew ever colder.

Shadow put on his coat and his gloves. Then he put on his
boots. He could hardly see through the windows now for the ice on the inside of
the panes which turned the view of the lake into an abstract image.

His breath was clouding in the air. He went out of his apartment
onto the wooden deck and knocked on the door next door. He heard a woman’s
voice shouting at someone to for heaven’s sake shut up and turn that television
down—a kid, he thought, adults don’t shout like that at other adults. The door
opened and a tired woman with very long, very black hair was staring at him
warily.

“Yes?”

“How do you do, ma’am. I’m Mike Ainsel. I’m your next-door
neighbor.”

Her expression did not change, not by a hair. “Yes?”

“Ma’am. It’s freezing in my apartment. There’s a little heat
coming out of the grate, but it’s not warming the place up, not at all.”

She looked him up and down, then a ghost of a smile touched
the edges of her lips and she said, “Come in, then. If you don’t there’ll be no
heat in here, either.”

He stepped inside her apartment. Plastic, multicolored toys
were strewn all over the floor. There were small heaps of torn Christmas
wrapping paper by the wall. A small boy sat inches away from the television
set, a video of the Disney Hercules playing, an animated satyr stomping and
shouting his way across the screen. Shadow kept his back to the TV set.

“Okay,” she said. “This is what you do. First you seal the
windows, you can buy the stuff down at Hennings, it’s just like Saran Wrap but
for windows. Tape it to windows, then if you want to get fancy you run a
blow-dryer on it, it stays there the whole winter. That stops the heat leaving
through the windows. Then you buy a space heater or two. The building’s furnace
is old, and it can’t cope with the real cold. We’ve had some easy winters
recently, I suppose we should be grateful.” Then she put out her hand. “Marguerite
Olsen.”

“Good to meet you,” said Shadow. He pulled off a glove and
they shook hands. “You know, ma’am, I’d always thought of Olsens as being
blonder than you.”

“My ex-husband was as blond as they come. Pink and blond.
Couldn’t tan at gunpoint.”

“Missy Gunther told me you write for the local paper.”

“Missy Gunther tells everybody everything. I don’t see why
we need a local paper with Missy Gunther around.” She nodded. “Yes. Some news
reporting here and there, but my editor writes most of the news. I write the
nature column, the gardening column, an opinion column every Sunday and the ‘News
from the Community’ column, which tells, in mind-numbing detail, who went to
dinner with who for fifteen miles around. Or is that whom?”

“Whom,” said Shadow, before he could stop himself. “It’s the
objective case.”

She looked at him with her black eyes, and Shadow experienced
a moment of pure deja vu. I’ve been here before, he thought.

No, she reminds me of someone.

“Anyway, that’s how you heat up your apartment,” she said.

“Thank you,” said Shadow. “When it’s warm you and your little
one must come over.”

“His name’s Leon,” she said. “Good meethjg you, Mister ... I’m
sorry ...”

“Ainsel,” said Shadow. “Mike Ainsel.”

“And what sort of a name is Ainsel?” she asked.

Shadow had no idea. “My name,” he sail. “I’m,afraid I was
never very interested in family history.

“Norwegian, maybe?” she said.

“We were never close,” he said. Then he remembered Uncle
Emerson Borson, and added, “On that side, anyway.”

By the time Mr. Wednesday arrived, Shadow had put clear
plastic sheeting across all the windows, and had one space heater running in
the main room and one in the bedroom at the back. It was practically cozy.

“What the hell is that purple piece of shit you’re driving?”
asked Wednesday, by way of greeting.

“Well,” said Shadow, “you drove off with my white piece of
shit. Where is it, by the way?”

“I traded it in in Duluth,” said Wednesday. “You can’t be
too careful. Don’t worry—you’ll get your share when all this is done.”

“What am I doing here?” asked Shadow. “In Lakeside, I mean.
Not in the world.”

Wednesday smiled his smile, the one that made Shadow want to
hit him. “You’re living here because it’s the last place they’ll look for you.
I can keep you out of sight here.”

“By ‘they’ you mean the black hats?”

“Exactly. I’m afraid the House on the Rock is now out of
bounds. It’s a little difficult, but we’ll cope. Now it’s just stamping our
feet and flag-waving, caracole and saunter until the action starts—a little
later than any of us expected. I think they’ll hold off until spring. Nothing
big can happen until then.”

“How come?”

“Because they may babble on about micromilliseconds and virtual
worlds and paradigm shifts and what-have-you, but they still inhabit this
planet and are still bound by the cycle of the year. These are the dead months.
A victory in these months is a dead victory.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” said Shadow.
That was not entirely true. He had a vague idea, and he hoped it was wrong.

“It’s going to be a bad winter, and you and I are going to
use our time as wisely as we can. We shall rally our troops and pick our
battleground.”

“Okay,” said Shadow. He knew that Wednesday was telling him
the truth, or a part of a truth. War was coming. No, that was not it: the war
had already begun. The battle was coming. “Mad Sweeney said that he was working
for you when we met him that first night. He said that before he died.”

“And would I have wanted to employ someone who could not
even best a sad case like that in a bar fight? But never fear, you’ve repaid my
faith in you a dozen times over. Have you ever been to Las Vegas?”

“Las Vegas, Nevada?”

“That’s the one.”

“No.”

“We’re flying in there from Madison later tonight, on a gentleman’s
red-eye, a charter plane for high rollers. I’ve convinced them that we should
be on it.”

“Don’t you ever get tired of lying?” asked Shadow. He said
it gently, curiously.

“Not in the slightest. Anyway, it’s true. We are playing for
the highest stakes of all. It shouldn’t take us more than a couple of hours to
get to Madison, the roads are clear. So lock your door and turn off the
heaters. It would be a terrible thing if you burned down the house in your
absence.”

“Who are we going to see in Las Vegas?”

Wednesday told him.

Shadow turned off the heaters, packed some clothes into an
overnight bag, then turned back to Wednesday and said, “Look, I feel kind of
stupid. I know you, just told me who we’re going to see, but I dunno. I just had
a brain-fart or something. It’s gone. Who is it again?”

Wednesday told him once more.

This time Shadow almost had it. The name was there on the
tip of his mind. He wished he’d been paying closer attention when Wednesday
told him. He let it go.

“Who’s driving?” he asked Wednesday.

“You are,” said Wednesday. They walked out of the house,
down the wooden stairs and the icy path to where a black Lincoln Town Car was
parked.

Shadow drove.

Entering the casino, one is beset at every side by
invitation—invitations such that it would take a man of stone, heartless, mindless,
and curiously devoid of avarice, to decline them.

Listen: a machine-gun rattle of silver coins as they tumble
and spurt down into a slot machine tray and overflow onto monogrammed carpets
is replaced by the siren clangor of the slots, the jangling, blippeting chorus
swallowed by the huge room, muted to a comforting background chatter by the
time one reaches the card tables, the distant sounds only loud enough to keep
the adrenaline flowing through the gamblers’veins.

There is a secret that the casinos possess, a secret they
hold and guard and prize, the holiest of their mysteries. For most people do
not gamble to win money, after all, although that is what is advertised, sold,
claimed, and dreamed. But that is merely the easy lie that gets them through
the enormous, ever-open, welcoming doors.

The secret is this: people gamble to lose money. They come
to the casinos for the moment in which they feel alive, to ride the spinning
wheel and turn with the cards and lose themselves, with the coins, in the
slots. They may brag about the nights they won, the money they took from the
casino, but they treasure, secretly treasure, the times they lost. It’s a
sacrifice, of sorts.

The money flows through the casino in an uninterrupted
stream of green and silver, streaming from hand to hand, from gambler to
croupier to cashier to the management to security, finally ending up in the
Holy of Holies, the innermost sanctum, the Counting Room. And it is here, in
the counting room of this casino, that you come to rest, here, where the
greenbacks are sorted, stacked, indexed, here in a space that is slowly
becoming redundant as more and more of the money that flows through the casino
is imaginary: an electrical sequence of ons and offs, sequences that flow down
telephone lines.

In the counting room you see three men, counting money under
the glassy stare of the cameras they can see, the insectile gazes of the tiny
cameras they cannot see. During the course of one shift each of the men counts more
money than he will see in all the pay packets of his life. Each man, when he
sleeps, dreams of counting money, of stacks and paper bands and numbers that
climb inevitably, that are sorted and lost. Each of the three men has idly wondered,
not less than once a week, how to evade the casino’s security systems and run
off with as much money as he could haul; and, reluctantly, each man has
inspected the dream and found it impractical, has settled for a steady
paycheck, avoided the twin specters of prison and an unmarked grave.

And here, in the sanctum sanctorum, there are the three men
who count the money, and there are the guards who watch and who bring money and
take it away; and then there is another person. His charcoal-gray suit is
immaculate, his hair is dark, he is clean-shaven, and his face and his demeanor
are, in every sense, forgettable. None of the other men has even observed that
he is there, or if they have noticed him, they have forgotten him on the
instant.