American Gods

by Neil Gaiman

  “Was it really counterfeit?” asked Shadow.

  “Of course not! Fresh banknotes, straight from the bank, only with a thumbprint and a smudge of green ink on a couple of them to make them a little more interesting.”

  Shadow sipped his coffee. It was worse than prison coffee. “So the cop was obviously no cop. And the necklace?”

  “Evidence,” said Wednesday. He unscrewed the top from the salt shaker, poured a little heap of salt on the table. “But the jeweler gets a receipt, and assurance that he’ll get the necklace straight back as soon as Soapy comes to trial. He is congratulated on being a good citizen, and he watches proudly, already thinking of the tale he’ll have to tell at the next meeting of the Oddfellows tomorrow night, as the policeman marches the man pretending to be a bishop out of the store, twelve-hundred-dollars in one pocket, a twelve hundred dollar diamond necklace in the other, on their way to a police station that’ll never see hide nor hair of either of them.”

  The waitress had returned to clear the table. “Tell me my dear,” said Wednesday. “Are you married?”

  She shook her head.

  “Astonishing that a young lady of such loveliness has not yet been snapped up.” He was doodling with his fingernail in the spilled salt, making squat, blocky, runelike shapes. The waitress stood passively beside him, reminding Shadow less of a fawn and more of a young rabbit caught in an eighteen-wheeler’s headlights, frozen in fear and indecision.

  Wednesday lowered his voice, so much so that Shadow, only across the table, could barely hear him. “What time do you get off work?”

  “Nine,” she said, and swallowed. “Nine-thirty latest.”

  “And what is the finest motel in this area?”

  “There’s a Motel 6,” she said. “It’s not much.”

  Wednesday touched the back of her hand, fleetingly, with the tips of his fingers, leaving crumbs of salt on her skin. She made no attempt to wipe them off. “To us,” he said, his voice an almost inaudible rumble, “it shall be a pleasure palace.”

  The waitress looked at him. She bit her thin lips, hesitated, then nodded and fled for the kitchen.

  “C’mon,” said Shadow. “She looks barely legal.”

  “I’ve never been overly concerned about legality,” Wednesday told him. “And I need her, not as an end in herself, but to wake me up a little. Even King David knew that there is one easy prescription to get warm blood flowing through an old frame: take one virgin, call me in the morning.”

  Shadow caught himself wondering if the girl on night duty in the hotel back in Eagle Point had been a virgin. “Don’t you ever worry about disease?” he asked. “What if you knock her up? What if she’s got a brother?”

  “No,” said Wednesday. “I don’t worry about diseases. I don’t catch them. Unfortunately—for the most part—people like me fire blanks, so there’s not a great deal of interbreeding. It used to happen in the old days. Nowadays, it’s possible, but so unlikely as to be almost unimaginable. So no worries there. And many girls have brothers, and fathers. It’s not my problem. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, I’ve left town already.”

  “So we’re staying here for the night?”

  Wednesday rubbed his chin. “I shall stay in the Motel 6,” he said. Then he put his hand into his coat pocket. He pulled out a front door key, bronze-colored, with a card tag attached on which was typed an address: 502 Northridge Rd, Apt #3. “You, on the other hand, have an apartment waiting for you, in a city far from here.” Wednesday closed his eyes for a moment. Then he opened them, gray and gleaming and fractionally mismatched, and he said, “The Greyhound bus will be coming through town in twenty minutes. It stops at the gas station. Here’s your ticket.” He pulled out a folded bus ticket, passed it across the table. Shadow picked it up and looked at it.

  “Who’s Mike Ainsel?” he asked. That was the name on the ticket.

  “You are. Merry Christmas.”

  “And where’s Lakeside?”

  “Your happy home in the months to come. And now, because good things come in threes . . .” He took a small, gift-wrapped package from his pocket, pushed it across the table. It sat beside the ketchup bottle with the black smears of dried ketchup on the top. Shadow made no move to take it.

  “Well?”

  Reluctantly, Shadow tore open the red wrapping paper to reveal a fawn-colored calfskin wallet, shiny from use. It was obviously somebody’s wallet. Inside the wallet was a driver’s license with Shadow’s photograph on it, in the name of Michael Ainsel, with a Milwaukee address, a MasterCard for M. Ainsel, and twenty crisp fifty-dollar bills. Shadow closed the wallet, put it into an inside pocket.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  “Think of it as a Christmas bonus. Now, let me walk you down to the Greyhound. I shall wave to you as you ride the gray dog north.”

  They walked outside the restaurant. Shadow found it hard to believe how much colder it had gotten in the last few hours. It felt too cold to snow, now. Aggressively cold. This was a bad winter.

  “Hey. Wednesday. Both of the scams you were telling me about—the violin scam and the bishop one, the bishop and the cop—“ He hesitated, trying to form his thought, to bring it into focus.

  “What of them?”

  Then he had it. “They’re both two-man scams. One guy on each side. Did you used to have a partner?” Shadow’s breath came in clouds. He promised himself that when he got to Lakeside he would spend some of his Christmas bonus on the warmest, thickest winter coat that money could buy.

  “Yes,” said Wednesday. “Yes. I had a partner. A junior partner. But, alas, those days are gone. There’s the gas station, and there, unless my eye deceives me, is the bus.” It was already signaling its turn into the parking lot. “Your address is on the key,” said Wednesday. “If anyone asks, I am your uncle, and I shall be rejoicing in the unlikely name of Emerson Borson. Settle in, in Lakeside, nephew Ainsel. I’ll come for you within the week. We shall be traveling together. Visiting the people I have to visit. In the meantime, keep your head down and stay out of trouble.”

  “My car . . . ?” said Shadow.

  “I’ll take good care of it. Have a good time in Lakeside,” said Wednesday. He thrust out his hand, and Shadow shook it. Wednesday’s hand was colder than a corpse’s.

  “Jesus,” said Shadow. “You’re cold.”

  “Then the sooner I am making the two-backed beast with the little hotsy-totsy lass from the restaurant in a back room of the Motel 6, the better.” And he reached out his other hand and squeezed Shadow’s shoulder.

  Shadow experienced a dizzying moment of double vision: he saw the grizzled man facing him, squeezing his shoulder, but he saw something else: so many winters, hundreds and hundreds of winters, and a gray man in a broad-brimmed hat walking from settlement to settlement, leaning on his staff, staring in through windows at the firelight and a joy and a burning life he would never be able to touch, never even be able to feel . . .

  “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 thump.

  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 wi
th 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 in any way that Shadow understood speech. “Are you real?”

  “Believe,” said the buffalo man.

  “Are you . . .” Shadow hesitated, and then he 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. As his 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 the 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 clunked 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 woke 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, s
miled 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.