American Gods (10 page)

One midwinter’s day, when the sun was as distant and cold as
a dull silver coin, they saw that the remains of the scraeling’s body had been
removed from the ash tree. That afternoon it began to snow, in huge, slow
flakes.

The men from the northlands closed the gates of their encampment,
retreated behind their wooden wall.

The scraeling war party fell upon them that night: five
hundred men to thirty. They climbed the wall, and over the following seven
days, they killed each of the thirty men, in thirty different ways. And the
sailors were forgotten, by history and their people.

The wall they tore down, the war party, and the village they
burned. The longboat, upside down and pulled high on the shingle, they also
burned, hoping that the pale strangers had but one boat, and that by burning it
they were ensuring that no other Northmen would come to their shores.

It was more than a hundred years before Leif the Fortunate,
son of Erik the Red, rediscovered that land, which he would call Vineland. His
gods were already waiting for him when he arrived: Tyr, one-handed, and gray
Odin gallows-god, and Thor of the thunders.

They were there.

They were waiting.

Let the Midnight Special Shine its light on me

Let the Midnight Special Shine its ever-lovin’light on me

—”The Midnight Special,” traditional

Shadow and Wednesday ate breakfast at a Country Kitchen
across the street from their motel. It was eight in the morning, and the world
was misty and chill.

“You still ready to leave Eagle Point?” asked Wednesday. “I
have some calls to make, if you are. Friday today. Friday’s a free day. A woman’s
day. Saturday tomorrow. Much to do on Saturday.”

“I’m ready,” said Shadow. “Nothing keeping me here.”

Wednesday heaped his plate high with several kinds of breakfast
meats. Shadow took some melon, a bagel, and a packet of cream cheese. They went
and sat down in a booth.

‘That was some dream you had last night,” said Wednesday.

“Yes,” said Shadow. “It was.” Laura’s muddy footprints had
been visible on the motel carpet when he got up that morning, leading from his
bedroom to the lobby and out the door.

“So,” said Wednesday. “Why’d they call you Shadow?”

Shadow shrugged. “It’s a name,” he said. Outside the plate
glass the world in the mist had become a pencil drawing executed in a dozen
different grays with, here and there, a smudge of electric red or pure white. “How’d
you lose your eye?”

Wednesday shoveled half a dozen pieces of bacon into his
mouth, chewed, wiped the fat from his lips with the back of his hand. “Didn’t
lose it,” he said. “I still know exactly where it is.”

“So what’s the plan?”

Wednesday looked thoughtful. He ate several vivid pink
slices of ham, picked a fragment of meat from his beard, dropped it onto his
plate. “Plan is as follows. Tomorrow night we shall be meeting with a number of
persons preeminent in their respective fields—do not let their demeanor
intimidate you. We shall meet at one of the most important places in the entire
country. Afterward we shall wine and dine them. I need to enlist them in my
current enterprise.”

“And where is this most important place?”

“You’ll see, m’boy. I said one of them. Opinions are
justifiably divided. I have sent word to my colleagues. We’ll stop off in Chicago
on the way, as I need to pick up some money. Entertaining, in the manner we
shall need to entertain, will take more ready cash than I currently have
available. Then on to Madison.” Wednesday paid aqd they left, walked back
across the road to the motel parking lot. Wednesday tossed Shadow the car keys.

He drove down to the freeway and out of town.

“You going to miss it?” asked Wednesday. He was sorting
through a folder filled with maps.

“The town? No. I didn’t really ever have a life here. I was
never in one place too long as a kid, and I didn’t get here until I was in my
twenties. So this town is Laura’s.”

“Let’s hope she stays here,” said Wednesday.

“It was a dream,” said Shadow. “Remember.”

“That’s good,” said Wednesday. “Healthy attitude to have.
Did you fuck her last night?”

Shadow took a breath. Then, “That is none of your damn business.
And no.”

“Did you want to?”

Shadow said nothing at all. He drove north, toward Chicago.
Wednesday chuckled, and began to pore over his maps, unfolding and refolding
them, making occasional notes on a yellow legal pad with a large silver
ballpoint pen.

Eventually he was finished. He put his pen away, put the
folder on the backseat. “The best thing about the states we’re heading for,”
said Wednesday, “Minnesota, Wisconsin, all around there, is they have the kind
of women I liked when I was younger. Pale-skinned and blue-eyed, hair so fair
it’s almost white, wine-colored lips, and round, full breasts with the veins
running through them like a good cheese.”

“Only when you were younger?” asked Shadow. “Looked like you
were doing pretty good last night.”

“Yes.” Wednesday smiled. “Would you like to know the secret
of my success?”

“You pay them?”

“Nothing so crude. No, the secret is charm. Pure and simple.”

“Charm, huh? Well, like they say, you either got it or you
ain’t.”

“Charms can be learned,” said Wednesday.

Shadow tuned the radio to an oldies station, and listened to
songs that were current before he was born. Bob Dylan sang about a hard rain
that was going to fall, and Shadow wondered if that rain had fallen yet, or if
it was something that was still going to happen. The road ahead of them was
empty and the ice crystals on the asphalt glittered like diamonds in the
morning sun.

Chicago happened slowly, like a migraine. First they were
driving through countryside, then, imperceptibly, the occasional town became a
low suburban sprawl, and the sprawl became the city.

They parked outside a squat black brownstone. The sidewalk
was clear of snow. They walked to the lobby. Wednesday pressed the top button
on the gouged metal intercom box. Nothing happened. He pressed it again. Then,
experimentally, he began to press the other buttons, for other tenants, with no
response.

“It’s dead,” said a gaunt old woman, coming down the steps. “Doesn’t
work. We call the super, ask him when he going to fix, when he going to mend
the heating, he does not care, goes to Arizona for the winter for his chest.”
Her accent was thick, Eastern European, Shadow guessed.

Wednesday bowed low. “Zorya, my dear, may I say how unutterably
beautiful you look? A radiant creature. You have not aged.”

The old woman glared at him. “He don’t want to see you. I
don’t want to see you neither. You bad news.”

“That’s because I don’t come if it isn’t important.”

The woman sniffed. She carried an empty string shopping bag,
and wore an old red coat, buttoned up to her chin. She looked at Shadow
suspiciously.

“Who is the big man?” she asked Wednesday. “Another one of
your murderers?”

“You do me a deep disservice, good lady. Thjs gentleman is
called Shadow. He is working for me, yes, but on your behalf. Shadow, may I
introduce you to the lovely Miss Zorya Vechernyaya.”

“Good to meet you,” said Shadow.

Birdlike, the old woman peered up at him. “Shadow,” she
said. “A good name. When the shadows are long, that is my time. And you are the
long shadow.” She looked him up and down, then she smiled. “You may kiss my
hand,” she said, and extended a cold hand to him.

Shadow bent down and kissed her thin hand. She had a large
amber ring on her middle finger.

“Good boy,” she said. “I am going to buy groceries. You see,
I am the only one of us who brings in any money. The other two cannot make
money fortune-telling. This is because they only tell the truth, and the truth
is not what people want to hear. It is a bad thing, and it troubles people, so
they do not come back. But I can lie to them, tell them what they want to hear.
So I bring home the bread. Do you think you will be here for supper?”

“I would hope so,” said Wednesday.

“Then you had better give me some money to buy more food,”
she said. “I am proud, but I am not stupid. The others are prouder than I am,
and he is the proudest of all. So give me money and do not tell them that you
give me money.”

Wednesday opened his wallet, and reached in. He took out a
twenty. Zorya Vechernyaya plucked it from his fingers, and waited. He took out
another twenty and gave it to her.

“Is good,” she said. “We will feed you like princes. Now, go
up the stairs to the top. Zorya Utrennyaya is awake, but our other sister is
still asleep, so do not be making too much noise.”

Shadow and Wednesday climbed the dark stairs. The landing
two stories up was half filled with black plastic garbage bags and it smelled
of rotting vegetables.

“Are they gypsies?” asked Shadow.

“Zorya and her family? Not at all. They’re not Rom. They’re
Russian. Slavs, I believe.”

“But she does fortune-telling.”

“Lots of people do fortune-telling. I dabble in it myself.”
Wednesday was panting as they went up the final flight of stairs. “I’m out of
shape.”

The landing at the top of the stairs ended in a single door
painted red, with a peephole in it.

Wednesday knocked at the door. There was no response. He
knocked again, louder this time.

“Okay! Okay! I heard you! I heard you!” The sound of locks
being undone, of bolts being pulled, the rattle of a chain. The red door opened
a crack.

“Who is it?” A man’s voice, old and cigarette-roughened.

“An old friend, Czernobog. With an associate.”

The door opened as far as the security chain would allow.
Shadow could see a gray face, in the shadows, peering out at them. “What do you
want, Votan?”

“Initially, simply the pleasure of your company. And I have
information to share. What’s that phrase? ... Oh yes. You may learn something
to your advantage.”

The door opened all the way. The man in the dusty bathrobe
was short, with iron-gray hair and craggy features. He wore gray pinstripe
pants, shiny from age, and slippers. He held an unfiltered cigarette with
square-tipped fingers, sucking the tip while keeping it cupped in his fist—like
a convict, thought Shadow, or a soldier. He extended his left hand to
Wednesday. “Welcome then, Votan.”

“They call me Wednesday these days,” he said, shaking the
old man’s hand.

A narrow smile; a flash of yellow teeth. “Yes,” he said. “Very
funny. And this is?”

“This is my associate. Shadow, meet Mr. Czernobog.”

“Well met,” said Czernobog. He shook Shadow’s left hand with
his own. His hands were rough and callused, and the tips of his fingers were as
yellow as if they had been dipped in iodine.

“How do you do, Mr. Czernobog?”

“I do old. My guts ache, and my back hurts, and I cough my
chest apart every morning.”

“Why you are standing at the door?” asked a woman’s voice.
Shadow looked over Czernobog’s shoulder, at the old woman standing behind him.
She was smaller and frailer than her sister, but her hair was long and still
golden. “I am Zorya Utrennyaya,” she said. “You must not stand there in the
hall. You must go in, sit down. I will bring you coffee.”

Through the doorway into an apartment that smelted like overboiled
cabbage and cat box and unaltered foreign cigarettes, and they were ushered
through a tiny hallway past several closed doors to the sitting room at the far
end of the corridor, and were seated on a huge old horsehair sofa, disturbing
an elderly gray cat in the process, who stretched, stood up, and walked,
stiffly, to a distant part of the sofa, where he lay down, warily stared at
each of them in turn, then closed one eye and went back to sleep. Czeriiobog
sat in an armchair across from them.

Zorya Utrennyaya found an empty ashtray and placed it beside
Czernobog. “How you want your coffee?” she asked her guests. “Here we take it
black as night, sweet as sin.”

“That’ll be fine, ma’am,” said Shadow. He looked out of the
window, at the buildings across the street.

Zorya Utrennyaya went out. Czernobog stared at her as she
left. “That’s a good woman,” he said. “Not like her sisters. One of them is a
harpy, the other, all she does is sleep.” He put his slippered feet up on a
long, low coffee table, a chess board inset in the middle, cigarette burns and
mug rings on its surface.

“Is she your wife?” asked Shadow.

“She’s nobody’s wife.” The old man sat in silence for a moment,
looking down at his rough hands. “No. We are all relatives. We come over here
together, long time ago.”

From the pocket of his bathrobe, Czernobog produced a pack
of unfiltered cigarettes. Wednesday pulled out a narrow gold lighter and lit
the old man’s cigarette. “First we come to New York,” said Czernobog. “All our
countrymen go to New York. Then, we come out here, to Chicago. Everything got
very bad. Even in the old country, they had nearly forgotten me. Here, I am
just a bad memory. You know what I did when I got to Chicago?”

“No,” said Shadow.

“I get a job in the meat business. On the kill floor. When
the steer comes up the ramp, I was a knocker. You know why we are called
knockers? Is because we take the sledgehammer and we knock the cow down with
it. Bam! It takes strength in the arms. Yes? Then the shackler chains the beef
up, hauls it up, then they cut the throat. They drain the blood first before
they cut the head off. We were the strongest, the knockers.” He pushed up the
sleeve of his bathrobe, flexed his upper arm to display the muscles “still visible
under the old skin. “Is not just strong though. There was an art to it. To the
blow. Otherwise the cow is just stunned, or angry. Then, in the fifties, they
give us the bolt gun. You put it to the forehead, bam! bam! Now you think,
anybody can kill. Not so.” He mimed putting a metal bolt through a cow’s head. “It
still takes skill.” He smiled at the memory, displaying an iron-colored tooth.