American Gods (21 page)

“Say ‘Nevermore,’ “ said Shadow.

“Fuck you,” said the raven. It said nothing else as they
went through the woodland together.

In half an hour they reached a blacktop road on the edge of
a town, and the raven flew back into the wood. Shadow observed a Culvers Frozen
Custard Butterburgers sign, and, next to it, a gas station. He went into the
Culvers, which was empty of customers. There was a keen young man with a shaven
head behind the cash register. Shadow ordered two butterburgers and french
fries. Then he went into the rest room to clean up. He looked a real mess. He
did an inventory of the contents of his pockets: he had a few coins, including
the silver Liberty dollar, a disposable toothbrush and toothpaste, three
Snickers bars, five chemical heater pads, a wallet (with nothing more in it
than his driver’s license and a credit card—he wondered how much longer the
credit card had to live), and in the coat’s inside pocket, a thousand dollars
in fifties and twenties, his take from yesterday’s bank job. He washed his face
and hands in hot water, slicked down his dark hair, then went back into the
restaurant and ate his burgers and fries and drank his coffee.

He went back to the counter. “You want frozen’custard?”
asked the keen young man.

“No. No thanks. Is there anywhere around here I could rent a
car? My car died, back down the road a way.”

The young man scratched his head-stubblfj. “Not around here,
Mister. If your car died you could call Triple-A. Or talk to the gas station
next door about a tow.”

“A fine idea,” said Shadow. “Thanks.”

He walked across the—melting snow, from the Culvers parking
lot to the gas station. He bought candy bars and beef jerky sticks and more
chemical hand and feet warmers.

“Anywhere hereabouts I could rent a car?” he asked the woman
behind the cash register. She was immensely plump, and bespectacled, and was
delighted to have someone to talk to.

“Let me think,” she said. “We’re kind of out of the way here.
They do that kind of thing over in Madison. Where you going?”

“Kay-ro,” he said. “Wherever that is.”

“I know where that is,” she said. “Hand me an Illinois map
from that rack over there.” Shadow passed her a plastic-coated map. She
unfolded it, then pointed in triumph to the bottom-most corner of the state. “There
it is.”

“Cairo?”

“That’s how they pronounce the one in Egypt. But the one in
Little Egypt, they call that one Kayro. They got a Thebes down there, all
sorts. My sister-in-law comes from Thebes. I asked her about the one in Egypt,
she looked at me as if I had a screw loose.” The woman chuckled like a drain.

“Any pyramids?” The city was five hundred miles away, almost
directly south.

“Not that they ever told me. They call it Little Egypt
because back, oh, mebbe a hundred, hundred and fifty years back, there was a
famine all over. Crops failed. But they didn’t fail down there. So everyone
went there to buy food. Like in the Bible. Joseph and the Technicolor
Dreamcoat. Off we go to Egypt, bad-a-boom.”

“So if you were me, and you needed to get there, how would
you go?” asked Shadow.

“Drive.”

“Car died a few miles down the road. It was a pieceashit if
you’ll pardon my language,” said Shadow.

“Pee-Oh-Esses,” she said. “Yup. That’s what my
brother-in-law calls ‘em. He buys and sells cars in a small way. He’ll call me
up, say Mattie, I just sold another Pee-Oh-Ess. Say, maybe he’d be interested
in your old car. For scrap or something.”

“It belongs to my boss,” said Shadow, surprising himself
with the fluency and ease of his lies. “I need to call him, so he can come pick
it up.” A thought struck him. “Your brother-in-law, is he around here?”

“He’s in Muscoda. Ten minutes south of here. Just over the
river. Why?”

“Well, does he have a Pee-Oh-Ess he’d like to sell me for,
mm, five, six hundred bucks?”

She smiled sweetly. “Mister, he doesn’t have a car on that
back lot you couldn’t buy with a full tank of gas for five hundred dollars. But
don’t you tell him I said so.”

“Would you call him?” asked Shadow.

“I’m way ahead of you,” she told him, and she picked up the phone.
“Hon? It’s Mattie. You get over here this minute. I got a man here wants to buy
a car.”

The piece of shit he chose was a 1983 Chevy Nova, which he
bought, with a full tank of gas, for four hundred and fifty dollars. It had
almost a quarter of a million miles on the clock, and smelled faintly of
bourbon, tobacco, and more strongly of something that might well have been
bananas. He couldn’t tell what color it was, under the dirt and the snow.
Still, of all the vehicles in Mattie’s brother-in-law’s back lot, it was the
only one that looked like it might take him five hundred miles.

The deal was done in cash, and Mattie’s
brother
-in-law
never asked for Shadow’s name or social security number or for anything except
the money.

Shadow drove west, then south, with five hundred and fifty
dollars in his pocket, keeping off the interstate. The piece of shit had a
radio, but nothing happened when he turned it on. A sign said he’d left
Wisconsin and was now in Illinois. He passed a strip-mining works, huge blue
arc lights burning in the dim midwinter daylight.

He stopped and ate at a place called Mom’s, catching them
just before they closed for the afternoon.

Each town he passed through had an extra sign up beside the
sign telling him that he was now entering Our Town (pop. 720). The extra sign
announced that the town’s under-14s team was the third runner-up in the
interstate basketball tournament, or that the town was the home of the Illinois
girls’ under-16s wrestling semifinalist.

He drove on, head nodding, feeling more drained with every
minute that passed. He ran a stoplight, and was nearly side-swiped by a woman
in a Dodge. As soon as he got out into open country he pulled off onto an empty
tractor ptath on the side of the road, and he parked by a snow-spotted stubbly
field in which a slow procession of fat black wild turkeys walked like a line
of mourners; he turned off the engine, stretched out in the backseat, and fell
asleep.

Darkness; a sensation of falling—as if he were tumbling down
a great hole, like Alice. He fell for a hundred years into darkness. Faces
passed him, swimming out of the black, then each face was ripped up and away
before he could touch it ...

Abruptly, and without transition, he was not falling. Now he
was in a cave, and he was no longer alone. Shadow stared into familiar eyes:
huge, liquid black eyes. They blinked.

Under the earth: yes. He remembered this place. The stink of
wet cow. Firelight flickered on the wet cave walls, illuminating the buffalo
head, the man’s body, skin the color of brick clay.

“Can’t you people leave me be?” asked Shadow. “I just want
to sleep.”

The buffalo man nodded, slowly. His lips did not move, but a
voice in Shadow’s head said, “Where are you going, Shadow?”

“Cairo.”

“Why?”

“Where else have I got to go? It’s where Wednesday wants me
to go. I drank his mead.” In Shadow’s dream, with the power of dream logic
behind it, the obligation seemed unarguable: he drank Wednesday’s mead three
times, and sealed the pact—what other choice of action did he have?

The buffalo-headed man reached a hand into the fire,
stirring the embers and the broken branches into a blaze. “The storm is coming,”
he said. Now there was ash on his hands, and he wiped it onto his hairless
chest, leaving soot-black streaks.

“So you people keep telling me. Can I ask you a question?”

There was a pause. A fly settled on the furry forehead. The
buffalo man flicked it away. “Ask.”

“Is this true? Are these people really gods? It’s all so ...”
He paused. Then he said, “impossible,” which was not exactly the word he had
been going for but seemed to be the best he could do.

“What are gods?” asked the buffalo man.

“I don’t know,” said Shadow.

There was a tapping, relentless and dull. Shadow waited for
the buffalo man to say something more, to explain what gods were, to explain
the whole tangled nightmare that his life seemed to have become. He was cold.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

Shadow opened his eyes, and, groggily, sat up. He was freezing,
and the sky outside the car was the deep luminescent purple that divides the
dusk from the night.

Tap. Tap. Someone said, “Hey, mister,”, aad Shadow turned
his head. The someone was standing beside the car, no more than a darker shape
against the darkling sky. Shadow reached out a hand and cranked down the window
a few inches. He made some waking-up noises, and then he said, “Hi.”

“You all right? You sick? You been drinking?” The voice was
high—a woman’s or a boy’s.

“I’m fine,” said Shadow. “Hold on.” He opened the door, and
got out, stretching his aching limbs and neck as he did so. Then he rubbed his
hands together, to get the blood circulating and to warm them up.

“Whoa. You’re pretty big.”

“That’s what they tell me,” said Shadow. “Who are you?”

“I’m Sam,” said the voice.

“Boy Sam or girl Sam?”

“Girl Sam. I used to be Sammi with an i, and I’d do a smiley
face over the i, but then I got completely sick of it because like absolutely
everybody was doing it, so I stopped.”

“Okay, girl Sam. You go over there, and look out at the
road.”

“Why? Are you a crazed killer or something?”

“No,” said Shadow, “I need to take a leak and I’d like just
the smallest amount of privacy.”

“Oh. Right. Okay. Got it. No problem. I am so with you. I
can’t even pee if there’s someone in the next stall. Major shy bladder
syndrome.”

“Now, please.”

She walked to the far side of the car, and Shadow took a few
steps closer to the field, unzipped his jeans, and pissed against a fence post
for a very long time. He walked back to the car. The last of the gloaming had
become night.

“You still there?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said. “You must have a bladder like Lake Erie. I
think empires rose and fell in the time it took you to pee. I could hear it the
whole time.”

“Thank you. Do you want something?”

“Well, I wanted to see if you were okay. I mean, if you were
dead or something I would have called the cops. But the windows were kind of
fogged up so I thought, well, he’s probably still alive.”

“You live around here?”

“Nope. Hitchhiking down from Madison.”

“That’s not safe.”

“I’ve done it five times a year for three years now. I’m still
alive. Where are you headed?”

“I’m going as far as Cairo.”

“Thank you,” she said. “I’m going to El Paso. Staying with
my aunt for the holidays.”

“I can’t take you all the way,” said Shadow.

“Not El Paso, Texas. The other one, in Illinois. It’s a few
hours south. You know where you are now?”

“No,” said Shadow. “I have no idea. Somewhere on Highway
Fifty-two?”

“The next town’s Peru,” said Sam. “Not the one in Peru. The
one in Illinois. Let me smell you. Bend down.” Shadow bent down, and the girl
sniffed his face. “Okay. I don’t smell booze. You can drive. Let’s go.”

“What makes you think I’m giving you a ride?”

“Because I’m a damsel in distress,” she said. “And you are a
knight in whatever. A really dirty car. You know someone wrote ‘Wash me!’ on
your rear window?” Shadow got into the car and opened the passenger door. The
light that goes on in cars when the front door is opened did not go on in this
car.

“No,” he said, “I didn’t.”

She climbed in. “It was me,” she said. “I wrote it. While
there was still enough light to see.”

Shadow started the car, turned on the headlights, and headed
back onto the road. “Left,”,said Sam helpfully. Shadow turned left, and he
drove. After several minutes the heater started to work, and blessed warnttlf
filled the car.

“You haven’t said anything yet,” said Sam. “Say something.”

“Are you human?” asked Shadoitf. “An honest-to-goodness,
born-of-man-and-woman, living, breathing human being?”

“Sure,” she said.

“Okay. Just checking. So what would you like me to say?”

“Something to reassure me, at this point. I suddenly have
that ‘oh shit I’m in the wrong car with a crazy man’ feeling.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I’ve had that one. What would you find reassuring?”

“Just tell me you’re not an escaped convict or a mass
murderer or something.”

He thought for a moment. “You know, I’m really not.”

“You had to think about it though, didn’t you?”

“Done my time. Never killed anybody.”

“Oh.”

They entered a small town, lit up by streetlights and
blinking Christmas decorations, and Shadow glancedtto his right. The girl had a
tangle of short dark hair and a face that was both attractive and, he decided,
faintly mannish: her features might have been chiseled out of rock. She was
looking at him.

“What were you in prison for?”

“I hurt a couple of people real bad. I got angry.”

“Did they deserve it?”

Shadow thought for a moment. “I thought so at the time.”

“Would you do it again?”

“Hell, no. I lost three years of my life in there.”

“Mm. You got Indian blood in you?”

“Not that I know of.”

“You looked like it, was all.”

“Sorry to disappoint you.”

“S’okay. You hungry?”

Shadow nodded. “I could eat,” he said.

“There’s a good place just past the next set of lights. Good
food. Cheap, too.”

Shadow pulled up in the parking lot. They got out of the
car. He didn’t bother to lock it, although he pocketed the keys. He pulled out
some coins to buy a newspaper. “Can you afford to eat here?” he asked.

“Yeah,” she said, raising her chin. “I can pay for myself.”

Shadow nodded. ‘Tell you what. I’ll toss you for it,” he
said. “Heads you pay for my dinner, tails, I pay for yours.”