American Gods (74 page)

“Bielebog?” Shadow walked to the center of the ash-stained
carpet. He went down on his knees. “You said you hadn’t seen him in a long
time.”

“Yes,” said the old man, raising the hammer. “It has been a long
winter, boy. A very long winter. But the winter is ending, now.” And. he shook
his head, slowly, as if he were remembering something. And he said, “Close your
eyes.”

Shadow closed his eyes and raised his head, and he waited.

The head of the sledgehammer was cold, icy cold, and it
touched his forehead as gently as a kiss.

“Pock! There,” said Czernobog. “Is done.” There was a smile
on his face that Shadow had never seen before, an easy, comfortable smile, like
sunshine on a summer’s day. The old man walked over to the case, and he put the
hammer away, and closed the bag, and pushed it back under the sideboard.

“Czernobog?’ asked Shadow. Then, “Are you Czernobog?”

“Yes. For today,” said the old man. “By tomorrow, it will
all be Bielebog. But today, is still Czernobog.”

“Then why? Why didn’t you kill me when you could?”

The old man took out an unfiltered cigarette from a packet
in his pocket. He took a large box of matches from the mantelpiece and lit the
cigarette with a match. He seemed deep in thought. “Because,” said the old man,
after some time, “there is blood. But there is also gratitude. And it has been
a long, long winter.”

Shadow got to his feet. There were dusty patches on the
knees of his jeans, where he had knelt, and he brushed the dust away.

“Thanks,” he said.

“You’re welcome,” said the old man. “Next time you want to
play checkers, you know where to find me. This time, I play white.”

“Thanks. Maybe I will,” said Shadow. “But not for a while.”
He looked into the old man’s twinkling eyes, and he wondered if they had always
been that cornflower shade of blue. They shook hands, and neither of them said
goodbye.

Shadow kissed Zorya Utrennyaya on the cheek on his way out,
and he kissed Zorya Vechernyaya on the back of her hand, and he took the stairs
out of that place two at a time.

POSTSCRIPT

Reykjavik, in Iceland, is a strange city, even for those who
have seen many strange cities. It is a volcanic city—the heat for the city
comes from deep underground.

There are tourists, but not as many of them as you might expect,
not even in early July. The sun was shining, as it had shone for weeks now: it
ceased shining for an hour or two in the small hours of the morning. There
would be a dusky dawn of sorts between two and three in the morning, and then
the day would begin once more.

The big tourist had walked most of Reykjavik that morning,
listening to people talk in a language that had changed little in a thousand
years. The natives here could read the ancient sagas as easily as they could
read a newspaper. There was a sense of continuity on this island that scared
him, and that he found desperately reassuring. He was very tired: the unending
daylight had made sleep almost impossible, and he had sat in his hotel room
through the whole long nightless night alternately reading a guidebook and
Bleak House, a novel he had bought in an airport in the last few weeks, but
which airport he could no longer remember. Sometimes he had stared out of the
window.

Finally the clock as well as the sun proclaimed it morning.

He bought a bar of chocolate at one of the many candy stores
and walked the sidewalk, occasionally finding himself reminded of the volcanic
nature of Iceland: he would turn a corner and notice, for a moment, a sulfurous
quality to the air. It put him in mind not of Hades but of rotten eggs. Many of
the women he passed were very beautiful: slender and pale. The kind of women
that Wednesday had liked. Shadow wondered what could have attracted Wednesday
to Shadow’s mother, who had been beautiful, but had been neither of those
things.

Shadow smiled at the pretty women, because they made him
feel pleasantly male, and he smiled at the other women too, because he was
having a good time.

He was not sure when he became aware that he was being observed.
Somewhere on his walk through Reykjavik he became certain that someone was
watching him. He would turn, from time to time, trying to get a glimpse of who
it was, and he would stare into store windows and out at the reflected street
behind him, but he saw no one out of the ordinary, no one who seemed to be
observing him.

He went into a small restaurant, where he ate smoked puffin
and cloudberries and arctic char and boiled potatoes, and he drank Coca-Cola,
which tasted sweeter, more sugary than he remembered it tasting back in the
States.

When the waiter brought his bill, he said, “Excuse me. You
are American?”

“Yes.”

“Then, happy Fourth of July,” said the waiter. He looked
pleased with himself.

Shadow had not realized that it was the fourth. Independence
Day. Yes. He liked the idea of independence. He left the money and a tip on the
table, and walked outside. There was a cool breeze coming in off the Atlantic,
and he buttoned up his coat.

He sat down on a grassy bank and looked at the city that surrounded
him, and thought, one day he would have to go home. And one day he would have
to make a home to go back to. He wondered whether home was a thing that
happened to a place after a while, or if it was something that you found in the
end, if you simply walked and waited and willed it long enough.

An old man came striding across the hillside toward him: he
wore a dark gray cloak, ragged at the bottom, as if he had done a lot of
traveling, and he wore a broad-brimmed blue hat, with a seagull feather tucked
into the band at a jaunty angle. He looked like an aging hippie, thought
Shadow. Or a long-retired gunfighter. The old man was ridiculously tall.

The man squatted beside Shadow on the hillside. He nodded,
curtly, to Shadow. He had a piratical black eyepatch over one eye, and a jutting
white chin-beard. Shadow wondered if the man was going to hit him up for a
cigarette.

“Hvernig gengur? Manst ])u eftir mer? “ said the old man.

“I’m sorry,” said Shadow. “I don’t speak Icelandic.” Then he
said, awkwardly, the-phrase he had learned from his phrase book in the daylight
of the small hours of that morning: “Eg tola bora ensku.” I speak only English.
And then, “American.”

The old man nodded slowly. He said, “My people went from
here to America a long time ago. They went there, and then they returned to
Iceland. They said it was a good place for men, but a bad place for gods. And
without their gods they felt too ... alone.” His English was fluent, but the
pauses and the beats of the sentences were strange. Shadow looked at him:
close-up, the man seemed older than Shadow had imagined possible. His skin was
lined with tiny wrinkles and cracks, like the cracks in granite.

The old man said, “I do know you, boy.”

“You do?”

“You and I, we have walked the same path. I also hung on the
tree for nine days, a sacrifice of myself to myself. I am the lord of the Acs.
I am the god of the gallows.”

“You are Odin,” said Shadow.

The man nodded thoughtfully, as if weighing up the name. ‘They
call me many things, but, yes, I am Odin, Bor’s son,” he said.

“I saw you die,” said Shadow. “I stood vigil for your body.
You tried to destroy so much for power. You would have sacrificed so much for
yourself. You did that.”

“I did not do that.”

“Wednesday did. He was you.”

“He was me, yes. But I am not him.” The man scratched the
side of his nose. His gull-feather bobbed. “Will you go back?” asked the Lord
of the Gallows. “To America?”

“Nothing to go back for,” said Shadow, and as he said it he
knew it was a lie.

“Things wait for you there,” said the old man. “But they will
wait until you return.”

A white butterfly flew crookedly past them. Shadow said nothing.
He had had enough of gods and their ways to last him several lifetimes. He
would take the bus to the airport, he decided, and change his ticket. Get a
plane to somewhere he had never been. He would keep moving.

“Hey,” said Shadow. “I have something for you.” His hand
dipped into his pocket, and palmed the object he needed. “Hold your hand out,”
he said.

Odin looked at him strangely and seriously. Then he
shrugged, and extended his right hand, palm down. Shadow reached over and
turned it so the palm was upward.

He opened his own hands, showed them, one after the other,
to be completely empty. Then he pushed the glass eye into the leathery palm of
the old man’s hand and left it there.

“How did you do that?”

“Magic,” said Shadow, without smiling.

The old man grinned and laughed and clapped his hands together.
He looked at the eye, holding it between finger and thumb, and nodded, as if he
knew exactly what it was, and then he slipped it into a leather bag that hung
by his waist. “Takk kcerlega. I shall take care of this.”

“You’re welcome,” said Shadow. He stood up, brushed the
grass from his jeans.

“Again,” said the Lord of Asgard, with an imperious motion
of his head, his voice deep and commanding. “More. Do again.”

“You people,” said Shadow. “You’re never satisfied. Okay.
This is one I learned from a guy who’s dead now.”

He reached into nowhere, and took a gold coin from the air.
It was a normal sort of gold coin. It couldn’t bring back the dead or heal the
sick, but it was a gold coin sure enough.

“And that’s all there is,” he said, displaying it between
finger and thumb. “That’s all she wrote.”

He tossed the coin into the air with a flick of his thumb.

It spun golden at the top of its arc, in the sunlight, and
it glittered and glinted and hung there in the midsummer sky as if it was never
going to come down. Maybe it never would. Shadow didn’t wait to see. He walked
away and he kept on walking. ,