by Neil Gaiman
“We could try it,” continued Wednesday. “But I would end up with ten fingers, ten toes, and five nights in your bed. So don’t tell me they worship you and keep your festival day. They mouth your name, but it has no meaning to them. Nothing at all.”
Tears stood out in her eyes. “I know that,” she said, quietly. “I’m not a fool.”
“No,” said Wednesday. “You’re not.”
He’s pushed her too far, thought Shadow.
Wednesday looked down, ashamed. “I’m sorry,” he said. Shadow could hear the real sincerity in his voice. “We need you. We need your energy. We need your power. Will you fight beside us when the storm comes?”
She hesitated. She had a chain of blue forget-me-nots tattooed around her left wrist.
“Yes,” she said, after a while. “I guess I will.”
I guess it’s true what they say, thought Shadow. If you can fake sincerity, you’ve got it made. Then he felt guilty for thinking it.
Wednesday kissed his finger, touched it to Easter’s cheek. He called their waitress over and paid for their coffees, counting out the money carefully, folding it over with the check and presenting it to her.
As she walked away, Shadow said, “Ma’am? Excuse me? I think you dropped this.” He picked up a ten-dollar bill from the floor.
“No,” she said, looking at the wrapped bills in her hand.
“I saw it fall, ma’am,” said Shadow, politely. “You should count them.”
She counted the money in her hand, looked puzzled, and said, “Jesus. You’re right. I’m sorry.” She took the ten-dollar bill from Shadow, and walked away.
Easter walked out onto the sidewalk with them. The light was just starting to fade. She nodded to Wednesday, then she touched Shadow’s hand and said, “What did you dream about, last night?”
“Thunderbirds,” he said. “A mountain of skulls.”
She nodded. “And do you know whose skulls they were?”
“There was a voice,” he said. “In my dream. It told me.”
She nodded and waited.
He said, “It said they were mine. Old skulls of mine. Thousands and thousands of them.”
She looked at Wednesday, and said, “I think this one’s a keeper.” She smiled her bright smile. Then she patted Shadow’s arm and walked away down the sidewalk. He watched her go, trying—and failing—not to think of her thighs rubbing together as she walked.
In the taxi on the way to the airport, Wednesday turned to Shadow. “What the hell was that business with the ten dollars about?”
“You shortchanged her. It comes out of her wages if she’s short.”
“What the hell do you care?” Wednesday seemed genuinely irate.
Shadow thought for a moment. Then he said, “Well, I wouldn’t want anyone to do it to me. She hadn’t done anything wrong.”
“No?” Wednesday stared off into the middle distance, and said, “When she was seven years old she shut a kitten in a closet. She listened to it mew for several days. When it ceased to mew, she took it out of the closet, put it into a shoebox, and buried it in the backyard. She wanted to bury something. She consistently steals from everywhere she works. Small amounts, usually. Last year she visited her grandmother in the nursing home to which the old woman is confined. She took an antique gold watch from her grandmother’s bedside table, and then went prowling through several of the other rooms, stealing small quantities of money and personal effects from the twilight folk in their golden years. When she got home she did not know what to do with her spoils, scared someone would come after her, so she threw everything away except the cash.”
“I get the idea,” said Shadow.
“She also has asymptomatic gonorrhea,” said Wednesday. “She suspects she might be infected but does nothing about it. When her last boyfriend accused her of having given him a disease she was hurt, offended, and refused to see him again.”
“This isn’t necessary,” said Shadow. “I said I get the idea. You could do this to anyone, couldn’t you? Tell me bad things about them.”
“Of course,” agreed Wednesday. “They all do the same things. They may think their sins are original, but for the most part they are petty and repetitive.”
“And that makes it okay for you to steal ten bucks from her?”
Wednesday paid the taxi and the two men walked into the airport, wandered up to their gate. Boarding had not yet begun. Wednesday said, “What the hell else can I do? They don’t sacrifice rams or bulls to me. They don’t send me the souls of killers and slaves, gallows-hung and raven-picked. They made me. They forgot me. Now I take a little back from them. Isn’t that fair?”
“My mom used to say, ‘Life isn’t fair,’ “ said Shadow.
“Of course she did,” said Wednesday. “It’s one of those things that moms say, right up there with ‘If all your friends jumped off a cliff would you do it too?’ “
“You stiffed that girl for ten bucks, I slipped her ten bucks,” said Shadow, doggedly. “It was the right thing to do.”
Someone announced that their plane was boarding. Wednesday stood up. “May your choices always be so clear,” he said.
The cold snap was easing when Wednesday dropped Shadow off in the small hours of the morning. It was still obscenely cold in Lakeside, but it was no longer impossibly cold. The lighted sign on the side of the M&I Bank flashed alternately 3:30 A.M. and —5°F as they drove through the town.
It was 9:30 A.M. when Chief of Police Chad Mulligan knocked on the apartment door and asked Shadow if he knew a girl named Alison McGovern.
“I don’t think so,” said Shadow, sleepily.
“This is her picture,” said Mulligan. It was a high school photograph. Shadow recognized the person in the picture immediately: the girl with the blue rubber-band braces on her teeth, the one who had been learning all about the oral uses of Alka-Seltzer from her friend.
“Oh, yeah. Okay. She was on the bus when I came into town.”
“Where were you yesterday, Mister Ainsel?”
Shadow felt his world begin to spin away from him. He knew he had nothing to feel guilty about (You’re a parole-violating felon living under an assumed name, whispered a calm voice in his mind. Isn’t that enough?).
“San Francisco,” he said. “California. Helping my uncle transport a four-poster bed.”
“You got any ticket stubs? Anything like that?”
“Sure.” He had both his boarding pass stubs in his back pocket, pulled them out. “What’s going on?”
Chad Mulligan examined the boarding passes. “Alison McGovern’s vanished. She helped out up at the Lakeside Humane Society. Feed animals, walk dogs. She’d come out for a few hours after school. So. Dolly Knopf, who runs the Humane Society, she’d always run her home when they closed up for the night. Yesterday Alison never got there.”
“She’s vanished.”
“Yup. Her parents called us last night. Silly kid used to hitchhike up to the Humane Society. It’s out on County W, pretty isolated. Her parents told her not to, but this isn’t the kind of place where things happen . . . people here don’t lock their doors, you know? And you can’t tell kids. So, look at the photo again.”
Alison McGovern was smiling. The rubber bands on her teeth in the photograph were red, not blue.
“You can honestly say you didn’t kidnap her, rape her, murder her, anything like that?”
“I was in San Francisco. And I wouldn’t do that shit.”
“That was what I figured, pal. So you want to come help us look for her?”
“Me?”
“You. We’ve had the K-9 guys out this morning—nothing so far.” He sighed. “Heck, Mike. I just hope she turns up in the Twin Cities with some dopey boyfriend.”
“You think it’s likely?”
“I think it’s possible. You want to join the hunting party?”
Shadow remembered seeing the girl in Hennings Farm and Home Supplies, the flash of a shy blue-braced smile, how beautiful h
e had known she was going to be, one day. “I’ll come,” he said.
There were two dozen men and women waiting in the lobby of the fire station. Shadow recognized Hinzelmann, and several other faces looked familiar. There were police officers, and some men and women in the brown uniforms of the Lumber County Sheriff’s department.
Chad Mulligan told them what Alison was wearing when she vanished (a scarlet snowsuit, green gloves, blue woollen hat under the hood of her snowsuit) and divided the volunteers into groups of three. Shadow, Hinzelmann, and a man named Brogan comprised one of the groups. They were reminded how short the daylight period was, told that if, God forbid, they found Alison’s body they were not repeat not to disturb anything, just to radio back for help, but that if she was alive they were to keep her warm until help came.
They were dropped off out on County W.
Hinzelmann, Brogan, and Shadow walked along the edge of a frozen creek. Each group of three had been issued a small handheld walkie-talkie before they left.
The cloud cover was low, and the world was gray. No snow had fallen in the last thirty-six hours. Footprints stood out in the glittering crust of the crisp snow.
Brogan looked like a retired army colonel, with his slim mustache and white temples. He told Shadow he was a retired high school principal. “I wasn’t getting any younger. These days I still teach a little, do the school play—that was always the high point of the year anyhow—and now I hunt a little and have a cabin down on Pike Lake, spend too much time there.” As they set out Brogan said, “On the one hand, I hope we find her. On the other, if she’s going to be found, I’d be very grateful if it was someone else who got to find her, and not us. You know what I mean?”
Shadow knew exactly what he meant.
The three men did not talk much. They walked, looking for a red snowsuit, or green gloves, or a blue hat, or a white body. Now and again Brogan, who had the walkie-talkie, would check in with Chad Mulligan.
At lunchtime they sat with the rest of the search party on a commandeered school bus and ate hot dogs and drank hot soup. Someone pointed out a red-tailed hawk in a bare tree, and someone else said that it looked more like a falcon, but it flew away and the argument was abandoned.
Hinzelmann told them a story about his grandfather’s trumpet, and how he tried playing it during a cold snap, and the weather was so cold outside by the barn, where his grandfather had gone to practice, that no music came out.
“Then after he came inside he put the trumpet down by the woodstove to thaw. Well, the family’re all in bed that night and suddenly the unfrozen tunes start coming out of that trumpet. Scared my grandmother so much she nearly had kittens.”
The afternoon was endless, unfruitful, and depressing. The daylight faded slowly: distances collapsed and the world turned indigo and the wind blew cold enough to burn the skin on your face. When it was too dark to continue, Mulligan radioed to them to call it off for the evening, and they were picked up and driven back to the fire station.
In the block next to the fire station was the Buck Stops Here Tavern, and that was where most of the searchers wound up. They were exhausted and dispirited, talking to each other of how cold it had become, how more than likely Alison would show up in a day or so, no idea of how much trouble she’d caused everyone.
“You shouldn’t think badly of the town because of this,” said Brogan. “It is a good town.”
“Lakeside,” said a trim woman whose name Shadow had forgotten, if ever they’d been introduced, “is the best town in the North Woods. You know how many people are unemployed in Lakeside?”
“No,” said Shadow.
“Less than twenty,” she said. “There’s over five thousand people live in and around this town. We may not be rich, but everyone’s working. It’s not like the mining towns up in the northeast—most of them are ghost towns now. There were farming towns that were killed by the falling cost of milk, or the low price of hogs. You know what the biggest cause of unnatural death is among farmers in the Midwest?”
“Suicide?” Shadow hazarded.
She looked almost disappointed. “Yeah. That’s it. They kill themselves.” She shook her head. Then she continued, “There are too many towns hereabouts that only exist for the hunters and the vacationers, towns that just take their money and send them home with their trophies and their bug bites. Then there are the company towns, where everything’s just hunky-dory until Wal-Mart relocates their distribution center or 3M stops manufacturing CD cases there or whatever and suddenly there’s a boatload of folks who can’t pay their mortgages. I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name.”
“Ainsel,” said Shadow. “Mike Ainsel.” The beer he was drinking was a local brew, made with spring water. It was good.
“I’m Callie Knopf,” she said. “Dolly’s sister.” Her face was still ruddy from the cold. “So what I’m saying is that Lakeside’s lucky. We’ve got a little of everything here—farm, light industry, tourism, crafts. Good schools.”
Shadow looked at her in puzzlement. There was something empty at the bottom of all her words. It was as if he were listening to a salesman, a good salesman, who believed in his product, but still wanted to make sure you went home with all the brushes or the full set of encyclopedias. Perhaps she could see it in his face. She said “I’m sorry. When you love something you just don’t want to stop talking about it. What do you do, Mister Ainsel?”
“My uncle buys and sells antiques all over the country. He uses me to move big, heavy things. It’s a good job, but not steady work.” A black cat, the bar mascot, wound between Shadow’s legs, rubbing its forehead on his boot. It leapt up beside him onto the bench and went to sleep.
“At least you get to travel,” said Brogan. “You do anything else?”
“You got eight quarters on you?” asked Shadow. Brogan fumbled for his change. He found five quarters, pushed them across the table to Shadow. Callie Knopf produced another three quarters.
He laid out the coins, four in each row. Then, with scarcely a fumble, he did the Coins Through the Table, appearing to drop half the coins through the wood of the table, from his left hand into his right.
After that, he took all eight coins in his right hand, an empty water glass in his left, covered the glass with a napkin and appeared to make the coins vanish one by one from his right hand and land in the glass beneath the napkin with an audible clink. Finally he opened his right hand to show it was empty, then swept the napkin away to show the coins in the glass.
He returned their coins—three to Callie, five to Brogan—then took a quarter back from Brogan’s hand, leaving four coins. He blew on it, and it was a penny, which he gave to Brogan, who counted his quarters and was dumbfounded to find that he still had all five in his hand.
“You’re a Houdini,” cackled Hinzelmann in delight. “That’s what you are!”
“Just an amateur,” said Shadow. “I’ve got a long way to go.” Still, he felt a whisper of pride. They had been his first adult audience.
He stopped at the food store on the way home to buy a carton of milk. The ginger-haired girl at the checkout counter looked familiar, and her eyes were red-rimmed from crying. Her face was one big freckle.
“I know you,” said Shadow. “You’re—” and he was about to say the Alka-Seltzer girl, but bit it back and finished, “You’re Alison’s friend. From the bus. I hope she’s going to be okay.”
She sniffed and nodded. “Me too.” She blew her nose on a tissue, hard, and pushed it back into her sleeve.
Her badge said HI! I’M SOPHIE! ASK ME HOW YOU CAN LOSE 20 LBS. IN 30 DAYS!
“I spent today looking for her. No luck yet.”
Sophie nodded, blinked back tears. She waved the milk carton in front of a scanner and it chirped its price at them. Shadow passed her two dollars.
“I’m leaving this fucking town,” said the girl in a sudden, choked voice. “I’m going to live with my mom in Ashland. Alison’s gone. Sandy Olsen went last year. Jo Ming the y
ear before that. What if it’s me next year?”
“I thought Sandy Olsen was taken by his father.”
“Yes,” said the girl, bitterly. “I’m sure he was. And Jo Ming went out to California, and Sarah Lindquist got lost on a trail hike and they never found her. Whatever. I want to go to Ashland.”
She took a deep breath and held it for a moment. Then, unexpectedly, she smiled at him. There was nothing insincere about that smile. It was just, he guessed, that she had been told to smile when she gave somebody change. She told him to have a nice day. Then she turned to the woman with the full shopping cart behind him and began to unload and scan.
Shadow took his milk and drove away, past the gas station and the klunker on the ice, and over the bridge and home.
COMING TO AMERICA
1778
There was a girl, and her uncle sold her, wrote Mr. Ibis in his perfect copperplate handwriting.
That is the tale; the rest is detail.
There are accounts that, if we open our hearts to them, will cut us too deeply. Look—here is a good man, good by his own lights and the lights of his friends: he is faithful and true to his wife, he adores and lavishes attention on his little children, he cares about his country, he does his job punctiliously, as best he can. So, efficiently and good-naturedly, he exterminates Jews: he appreciates the music that plays in the background to pacify them; he advises the Jews not to forget their identification numbers as they go into the showers—many people, he tells them, forget their numbers, and take the wrong clothes when they come out of the showers. This calms the Jews. There will be life, they assure themselves, after the showers. Our man supervises the detail taking the bodies to the ovens; and if there is anything he feels bad about, it is that he still allows the gassing of vermin to affect him. Were he a truly good man, he knows, he would feel nothing but joy as the earth is cleansed of its pests.
There was a girl, and her uncle sold her. Put like that it seems so simple.
No man, proclaimed Donne, is an Island, and he was wrong. If we were not islands, we would be lost, drowned in each other’s tragedies. We are insulated (a word that means, literally, remember, made into an island) from the tragedy of others, by our island nature, and by the repetitive shape and form of the stories. The shape does not change: there was a human being who was born, lived, and then, by some means or another, died. There. You may fill in the details from your own experience. As unoriginal as any other tale, as unique as any other life. Lives are snowflakes—forming patterns we have seen before, as like one another as peas in a pod (and have you ever looked at peas in a pod? I mean, really looked at them? There’s not a chance you’d mistake one for another, after a minute’s close inspection), but still unique.
