American Gods (16 page)

He did it over and over and over again.

He wondered if they were going to kill him, and his hand trembled, just a little, and one of the quarters dropped from his fingertip onto the stained green baize of the card table.

And then, because he just couldn't do it anymore, he put the coins away, and took out the Liberty-head dollar that Zorya Polunochnaya had given him, and held onto it tightly, and waited.

 

At three in the morning, by his watch, the spooks returned to interrogate him. Two men in dark suits, with dark hair and shiny black shoes. Spooks. One was square-jawed, wide-shouldered, had great hair, looked like he had played football in high school, badly bitten fingernails, the other had a receding hairline, silver-rimmed round glasses, manicured nails. While they looked nothing alike, Shadow found himself suspecting that on some level, possibly cellular, the two men were identical. They stood on each side of the card table, looking down at him.

“How long have you been working for Cargo, sir?” asked one.

“I don't know what that is,” said Shadow.

“He calls himself Wednesday. Grimm. Olfather. Old guy. You've been seen with him, sir.”

“I've been working for him for a couple of days.”

“Don't lie to us, sir,” said the spook with the glasses.

“Okay,” said Shadow. “I won't. But it's still a couple of days.”

The square-jawed spook reached down and twisted Shadow's ear between finger and thumb. He squeezed as he twisted. The pain was intense. “We told you not to lie to us, sir,” he said, mildly. Then he let go.

Each of the spooks had a gun bulge under his jacket. Shadow did not try to retaliate. He pretended he was back in prison.
Do your own time
, thought Shadow.
Don't tell them anything they don't know already. Don't ask questions.

“These are dangerous people you're palling around with, sir,” said the spook with glasses. “You will be doing your country a service by turning state's evidence.” He smiled, sympathetically:
I'm the good cop
, said the smile.

“I see,” said Shadow.

“And if you don't want to help us, sir,” said the square-jawed spook, “you can see what we're like when we're not happy.” He hit Shadow an openhanded blow across the stomach, knocking the breath from him. It wasn't torture, Shadow thought, just punctuation:
I'm the bad cop.
He retched.

“I would like to make you happy,” said Shadow, as soon as he could speak.

“All we ask is your cooperation, sir.”

“Can I ask . . .” gasped Shadow (
don't ask questions
, he thought, but it was too late, the words were already spoken), “can I ask who I'll be cooperating with?”

“You want us to tell you our names?” asked the square-jawed spook. “You have to be out of your mind.”

“No, he's got a point,” said the spook with glasses. “It may make it easier for him to relate to us.” He looked at Shadow and smiled like a man advertising toothpaste. “Hi. I'm Mister Stone, sir. My colleague is Mister Wood.”

“Actually,” said Shadow, “I meant, what agency are you with? CIA? FBI?”

Stone shook his head. “Gee. It's not as easy as that anymore, sir. Things just aren't that simple.”

“The private sector,” said Wood, “the public sector. You know. There's a lot of interplay these days.”

“But I can assure you,” said Stone, with another smiley smile, “we
are
the good guys. Are you hungry, sir?” He reached into a pocket of his jacket, pulled out a Snickers bar. “Here. A gift.”

“Thanks,” said Shadow. He unwrapped the Snickers bar and ate it.

“I guess you'd like something to drink with that. Coffee? Beer?”

“Water, please,” said Shadow.

Stone walked to the door, knocked on it. He said something to the guard on the other side of the door, who nodded and returned a minute later with a polystyrene cup filled with cold water.

“CIA,” said Wood. He shook his head, ruefully. “Those bozos. Hey, Stone. I heard a new CIA joke. Okay: how can we be sure the CIA wasn't involved in the Kennedy assassination?”

“I don't know,” said Stone. “How
can
we be sure?”

“He's dead, isn't he?” said Wood.

They both laughed.

“Feeling better now, sir?” asked Stone.

“I guess.”

“So why don't you tell us what happened this evening, sir?”

“We did some tourist stuff. Went to the House on the Rock. Went out for some food. You know the rest.”

Stone sighed, heavily. Wood shook his head, as if disappointed, and kicked Shadow in the kneecap. The pain was excruciating. Then Wood pushed a fist slowly into Shadow's back, just above the right kidney, and knuckled it, hard, and the pain was worse than the pain in Shadow's knee.

I'm bigger than either of them,
he thought.
I can take them.
But they were armed; and even if he—somehow—killed or subdued them both, he'd still be locked in the cell with them. (But he'd have a gun. He'd have two guns.) (
No.
)

Wood was keeping his hands away from Shadow's face. No marks. Nothing permanent: just fists and feet on his torso and knees. It hurt, and Shadow clutched the Liberty dollar tight in the palm of his hand, and waited for it to be over.

And after far too long a time the beating ended.

“We'll see you in a couple of hours, sir,” said Stone. “You know, Woody really hated to have to do that. We're reasonable men. Like I said, we are the good guys. You're on the wrong side. Meantime, why don't you try to get a little sleep?”

“You better start taking us seriously,” said Wood.

“Woody's got a point there, sir,” said Stone. “Think about it.”

The door slammed closed behind them. Shadow wondered if they would turn out the light, but they didn't, and it blazed into the room like a cold eye. Shadow crawled across the floor to the yellow foam-rubber pad and climbed onto it, pulling the thin blanket over himself, and he closed his eyes, and he held onto nothing, and he held onto dreams.

Time passed.

He was fifteen again, and his mother was dying, and she was trying to tell him something very important, and he couldn't understand her. He moved in his sleep and a shaft of pain moved him from half-sleep to half-waking, and he winced.

Shadow shivered under the thin blanket. His right arm covered his eyes, blocking out the light of the bulb. He wondered whether Wednesday and the others were still at liberty, if they were even still alive. He hoped that they were.

The silver dollar remained cold in his left hand. He could feel it there, as it had been during the beating. He wondered idly why it did not warm to his body temperature. Half asleep, now, and half delirious, the coin, and the idea of Liberty, and the moon, and Zorya Polunochnaya somehow became intertwined in one woven beam of silver light that shone from the depths to the heavens, and he rode the silver beam up and away from the pain and the heartache and the fear, away from the pain and, blessedly, back into dreams . . .

From far away he could hear some kind of noise, but it was too late to think about it: he belonged to sleep now.

A half-thought: he hoped it was not people coming to wake him up, to hit him or to shout at him. And then, he noticed with pleasure, he was really asleep, and no longer cold.

 

Somebody somewhere was calling for help, loudly, in his dream or out of it.

Shadow rolled over on the foam rubber, in his sleep, finding new places that hurt as he rolled.

Someone was shaking his shoulder.

He wanted to ask them not to wake him, to let him sleep and leave him be, but it came out as a grunt.

“Puppy?” said Laura. “You have to wake up. Please wake up, hon.”

And there was a moment's gentle relief. He had had such a strange dream, of prisons and con men and down-at-heel gods, and now Laura was waking him to tell him it was time for work, and perhaps there would be time enough before work to steal some coffee and a kiss, or more than a kiss; and he put out his hand to touch her.

Her flesh was cold as ice, and sticky.

Shadow opened his eyes.

“Where did all the blood come from?” he asked.

“Other people,” she said. “It's not mine. I'm filled with formaldehyde, mixed with glycerin and lanolin.”

“Which other people?” he asked.

“The guards,” she said. “It's okay. I killed them. You better move. I don't think I gave anyone a chance to raise the alarm. Take a coat from out there, or you'll freeze your butt off.”

“You killed them?”

She shrugged, and half smiled, awkwardly. Her hands looked as if she had been finger-painting, composing a picture that had been executed solely in crimsons, and there were splashes and spatters on her face and clothes (the same blue suit in which she had been buried) that made Shadow think of Jackson Pollock, because it was less problematic to think of Jackson Pollock than to accept the alternative.

“It's easier to kill people, when you're dead yourself,” she told him. “I mean, it's not such a big deal. You're not so prejudiced anymore.”

“It's still a big deal to me,” said Shadow.

“You want to stay here until the morning crew comes?” she said. “You can if you like. I thought you'd like to get out of here.”

“They'll think I did it,” he said, stupidly.

“Maybe,” she said. “Put on a coat, hon. You'll freeze.”

He walked out into the corridor. At the end of the corridor was a guardroom. In the guardroom were four dead men: three guards, and the man who had called himself Stone. His friend was nowhere to be seen. From the blood-colored skid marks on the floor, two of them had been dragged into the guardroom and dropped onto the floor.

His own coat was hanging from the coat rack. His wallet was still in the inside pocket, apparently untouched. Laura pulled open a couple of cardboard boxes filled with candy bars.

The guards, now he could see them properly, were wearing dark camouflage uniforms, but there were no official tags on them, nothing to say who they were working for. They might have been weekend duck hunters, dressed for the shoot.

Laura reached out her cold hand and squeezed Shadow's hand in hers. She had the gold coin he had given her around her neck, on a golden chain.

“That looks nice,” he said.

“Thanks.” She smiled, prettily.

“What about the others,” he asked. “Wednesday, and the rest of them? Where are they?” Laura passed him a handful of candy bars, and he filled his pockets with them.

“There wasn't anybody else here. A lot of empty cells, and one with you in it. Oh, and one of the men had gone into the cell down there to jack off with a magazine. He got such a shock.”

“You killed him while he was jerking himself off?”

She shrugged. “I guess,” she said, uncomfortably. “I was worried they were hurting you. Someone has to watch out for you, and I told you I would, didn't I? Here, take these.” They were chemical hand and foot warmers: thin pads—you broke the seal and they heated up and stayed that way for hours. Shadow pocketed them.

“Look out for me? Yes,” he said, “you did.”

She reached out a finger, stroked him above his left eyebrow. “You're hurt,” she said.

“I'm okay,” he said.

He opened a metal door in the wall. It swung open slowly. There was a four-foot drop to the ground, and he swung himself down to what felt like gravel. He picked up Laura by the waist, swung her down, as he used to swing her, easily, without a second thought. . . .

The moon came out from behind a thick cloud. It was low on the horizon, ready to set, but the light it cast onto the snow was enough to see by.

They had emerged from what turned out to be the black-painted metal car of a long freight train, parked or abandoned in a woodland siding. The series of wagon cars went on as far as he could see, into the trees and away. He had been on a train. He should have known.

“How the hell did you find me here?” he asked his dead wife.

She shook her head slowly, amused. “You shine like a beacon in a dark world,” she told him. “It wasn't that hard. Now, just go. Go as far and as fast as you can. Don't use your credit cards and you should be fine.”

“Where should I go?”

She pushed a hand through her matted hair, flicking it back out of her eyes. “The road's that way,” she told him. “Do whatever you can. Steal a car if you have to. Go south.”

“Laura,” he said, and hesitated. “Do you know what's going on? Do you know who these people are? Who you killed?”

“Yeah,” she said. “I think I do know.”

“I owe you,” said Shadow. “I'd still be in there if it wasn't for you. I don't think they had anything good planned for me.”

“No,” she said. “I don't think they did.”

They walked away from the empty train cars. Shadow wondered about the other trains he'd seen, blank windowless metal cars that went on for mile after mile, hooting their lonely way through the night. His fingers closed around the Liberty dollar in his pocket, and he remembered Zorya Polunochnaya, and the way she had looked at him in the moonlight.
Did you ask her what she wanted? It is the wisest thing to ask the dead. Sometimes they will tell you.

“Laura . . . What do you want?” he asked.

“You really want to know?”

“Yes. Please.”

Laura looked up at him with dead blue eyes. “I want to be alive again,” she said. “Not in this half-life. I want to be
really
alive. I want to feel my heart pumping in my chest again. I want to feel blood moving through me—hot, and salty, and real. It's weird, you don't think you can feel it, the blood, but believe me, when it stops flowing, you'll know.” She rubbed her eyes, smudging her face with red from the mess on her hands. “Look, it's hard. You know why dead people only go out at night, puppy? Because it's easier to pass for real, in the dark. And I don't want to have to pass. I want to be alive.”