American Gods (29 page)

“It’s a woman. And I don’t know where she is. But no, I don’t
believe she would.”

Sweeney sighed, mournfully. “When I was but a young pup,” he
said, “there was a woman I met, under the stars, who let me play with her
hubbies, and she told me my fortune. She told me that I would be undone and
abandoned west of the sunset, and that a dead woman’s bauble would seal my
fate. And I laughed and poured more barley wine and played with her bubbies
some more, and I kissed her full on her pretty lips. Those were the good
days—the first of the gray monks had not yet come to our land, nor had they
ridden the green sea to westward. And now.” He stopped, midsentence. His head
turned and he focused on Shadow. “You shouldn’t trust him,” he said,
reproachfully.

“Who?”

“Wednesday. You mustn’t trust him.”

“I don’t have to trust him. I work for him.”

“Do you remember how to do it?”

“What?” Shadow felt he was having a conversation with half a
dozen different people. The self-styled leprechaun sputtered and jumped from
persona to persona, from theme to theme, as if the remaining clusters of brain
cells were igniting, flaming, and then going out for good.

“The coins, man. The coins. I showed you, remember?” He
raised two fingers to his face, stared at them, then pulled a gold coin from
his mouth. He tossed the coin to Shadow, who stretched out a hand to catch it,
but no coin reached him.

“I was drunk,” said Shadow. “I don’t remember.”

Sweeney stumbled across the road. It was light now and the
world was white and gray. Shadow followed him. Sweeney walked in a long, loping
stride, as if he were always falling, but his legs were there to stop him, to
propel him into another stumble. When they reached the bridge, he held onto the
bricks with one hand, and turned and said, “You got a few bucks? I don’t need
much. Just enough for a ticket out of this place. Twenty bucks will do me fine.
Just a lousy twenty?”

“Where can you go on a twenty dollar bus ticket?” asked
Shadow.

“I can get out of here,” said Sweeney. “I can get away
before the storm hits. Away from a world in which opiates have become the
religion of the masses. Away from.” He stopped, wiped his nose on the side of
his hand, then wiped his hand on his sleeve.

Shadow reached into his jeans, pulled out a twenty and
passed it to Sweeney. “Here.”

Sweeney crumpled it up and pushed it deep into the breast
pocket of his oil-stained denim jacket, under the sew-on patch showing two vultures
on a dead branch and, beneath them, the words PATIENCE MY ASS! I’M GOING TO
KILL SOMETHING! He nodded. “That’ll get me where I need to go,” he said.

He leaned against the bricks, fumbled in his pockets until
he found the unfinished stub of cigarette he had abandoned earlier. He lit it
carefully, trying not to burn his fingers or his beard. “I’ll tell you
something,” he said, as if he had said nothing that day. “You’re walking on
gallows ground, and there’s a rope around your neck and a raven-bird on each
shoulder waiting for your eyes, and the; galknvs tree has deep roots, for it
stretches from heaven to hell, and our world is only the branch from which the
rope is swinging.” He stopped. “I’ll rest here a spell,” he said, ojouching
down, his back resting against the black brickwork;

“Good luck,” said Shadow.

“Hell, I’m fucked,” said Mad Sweeney. “Whatever. Thanks.”

Shadow walked back toward the town. It was 8:00 A.M. and
Cairo was waking. He glanced back to the bridge and saw Sweeney’s pale face,
striped with tears and dirt, watching him go.

It was the last time Shadow saw Mad Sweeney alive. The brief
winter days leading up to Christmas were like moments of light between the
winter darknesses, and they fled fast in the house of the dead.

It was the twenty-third of December, and Jacquel and Ibis’s
played host to a wake for Lila Goodchild. Bustling women filled the kitchen
with tubs and with saucepans, and with skillets and with Tupperware, and the
deceased was laid out in her casket in the funeral home’s front room with
hothouse flowers around her. There was a table on the other side of the room
laden high with coleslaw and beans and cornmeal hush puppies and chicken and
ribs and black-eyed peas, and by midafternoon the house was filled with people
weeping and laughing and shaking hands with the minister, everything being
quietly organized and overseen by the sober-suited Messrs. Jacquel and Ibis.
The burial would be on the following morning.

When the telephone in the hall rang (it was Bakelite and
black and had an honest-to-goodness rotary dial on the front), Mr. Ibis
answered. Then he took Shadow aside. “That was the police,” he said. “Can you
make a pickup?”

“Sure.”

“Be discreet. Here.” He wrote down an address on a slip of paper,
then passed it to Shadow, who read the address, written in perfect copperplate
handwriting, and then folded it up and put it in his pocket. “There’ll be a
police car,” Ibis added.

Shadow went out back and got the hearse. Both Mr. Jacquel
and Mr. Ibis had made a point, individually, of explaining that, really, the
hearse should only be used for funerals, and they had a van that they used to
collect bodies, but the van was being repaired, had been for three weeks now,
and could he be very careful with the hearse? Shadow drove carefully down the
street. The snowplows had cleaned the roads by now, but he was comfortable
driving slowly. It seemed right to go slow in a hearse, although he could
barely remember the last time he had seen a hearse on the streets. Death had
vanished from the streets of America, thought Shadow; now it happened in
hospital rooms and in ambulances. We must not startle the living, thought
Shadow. Mr. Ibis had told him that they move the dead about in some hospitals
on the lower level of apparently empty covered gurneys, the deceased traveling
their own paths in their own covered ways.

A dark blue police cruiser was parked on a side street, and
Shadow pulled up the hearse behind it. There were two cops inside the cruiser,
drinking their coffee from thermos tops. They had the engine running to keep
warm. Shadow tapped on the side window.

“Yeah?”

“I’m from the funeral home,” said Shadow.

“We’re waiting for the medical examiner,” said the cop.
Shadow wondered if it was the same man who had spoken to him under the bridge.
The cop, who was black, got out of the car, leaving his colleague in the driver’s
seat, and walked Shadow back to a Dumpster. Mad Sweeney was sitting in the snow
beside the Dumpster. There was an empty green bottle in his lap, a dusting of
snow and ice on his face and baseball cap and shoulders. He didn’t Whlk”.

“Dead wino,” said the cop.

“Looks like it,” said Shadow.

“Don’t touch anything yet,” said the cop. “Medical examiner
should be here any time now. You ask me, the guy drank himself into a stupor and
froze his ass.”

“Yes,” agreed Shadow. “That’s certainly what it looks like.”

He squatted down and looked at the bottle in Mad Sweeney’s
lap. Jameson Irish whiskey: a twenty-dollar ticket out of this place. A small
green Nissan pulled up, and a harassed middle-aged man with sandy hair and a
sandy mustache got out, walked over. He touched the corpse’s neck. He kicks the
corpse, thought Shadow, and if it doesn’t kick him back ...

“He’s dead,” said the medical examiner. “Any ID?”

“He’s a John Doe,” said the cop.

The medical examiner looked at Shadow. “You working for
Jacquel and Ibis?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Shadow.

“Tell Jacquel to get dentals and prints for ID and identity
photos. We don’t need a post. He should just draw blood for toxicology. Got
that? Do you want me to write it down for you?”

“No,” said Shadow. “It’s fine. I can remember.”

The man scowled fleetingly, then pulled a business card from
his wallet, scribbled on it, and gave it to Shadow, saying, “Give this to
Jacquel.” Then the medical examiner said “Merry Christmas” to everyone, and was
on his way. The cops kept the empty bottle.

Shadow signed for the John Doe and put it on the gurney. The
body was pretty stiff, and Shadow couldn’t get it out of a sitting position. He
fiddled widi the gurney, and found out that he could prop up one end. He
strapped John Doe, sitting, to the gurney and put him in the back of the
hearse, facing forward. Might as well give him a good ride. He closed the rear
curtains. Then he drove back to the funeral home.

The hearse was stopped at a traffic light when Shadow heard
a voice croak, “And it’s a fine wake I’ll be wanting, with the best of
everything, and beautiful women shedding tears and their clothes in their
distress, and brave men lamenting and telling fine tales of me in my great
days.”

“You’re dead, Mad Sweeney,” said Shadow. “You take what you’re
given when you’re dead.”

“Aye, that I shall,” sighed the dead man sitting in the back
of the hearse. The junkie whine had vanished from his voice now, replaced with
a resigned flatness, as if the words were being broadcast from a long, long way
away, dead words being sent out on a dead frequency. The light turned green and
Shadow put his foot gently down on the gas.

“But give me a wake, nonetheless,” said Mad Sweeney. “Set me
a place at table and give me a stinking drunk wake tonight. You killed me,
Shadow. You owe me that much.”

“I never killed you, Mad Sweeney,” said Shadow. It’s twenty
dollars, he thought, for a ticket out of here. “It was the drink and the cold
killed you, not me.”

There was no reply, and there was silence in the car for the
rest of the journey. After he parked at the back, Shadow wheeled the gurney out
of the hearse and into the mortuary. He manhandled Mad Sweeney onto the
embalming table as if he were hauling a side of beef.

He covered the John Doe with a sheet and left him there,
with the paperwork beside him. As he went up the back stairs he thought he
heard a voice, quiet and muted, like a radio playing in a distant room, which
said, “And what would drink or cold be doing killing me, a leprechaun of the
blood? No, it was you losing the little golden sun killed me, Shadow, killed me
dead, as sure as water’s wet and days are long and a friend will always
disappoint you iri the end.”

Shadow wanted to point out to Mad; Sweeney that that was a
kind of bitter philosophy, but he suspected it was the being dead that made you
bitter.

He went upstairs to the main house, wljfere a number of middle-aged
women were putting Saran Wrap on casserole dishes, popping the Tupperware tops
onto plastic pots of cooling fried potatoes and macaroni and cheese.

Mr. Goodchild, the husband of the deceased, had Mr. Ibis
against a wall, and was telling him how he knew none of his children would come
out to pay their respects to their mother. The apple don’t fall far from the
tree, he told anyone who would listen to him. The apple don’t fall far from the
tree.

That evening Shadow laid an extra place at the table. He put
a glass at each place, and a bottle of Jameson Gold in the middle of the table.
It was the most expensive Irish whiskey they sold at the liquor store. After
they ate (a large platter of leftovers left for them by the women) Shadow
poured a generous tot into each glass—his, Ibis’s, JacqueFs, and,Mad Sweeney’s.

“So what if he’s sitting on a gurney in the cellar,” said
Shadow, as he poured, “on his way to a pauper’s grave. Tonight we’ll toast him,
and give him the wake he wanted.”

Shadow raised his glass to the empty place at the table. “I
only met Mad Sweeney twice, alive,” he said. “The first time I thought he was a
world-class jerk with the devil in him. The second time I thought he was a
major fuckup and I gave him the money to kill himself. He showed me a coin
trick I don’t remember how to do, gave me some bruises, and claimed he was a
leprechaun. Rest in peace, Mad Sweeney.” He sipped the whiskey, letting the
smoky taste evaporate in his mouth. The other two drank, toasting the empty
chair along with him.

Mr. Ibis reached into an inside pocket and pulled out a notebook,
which he flipped through until he found the appropriate page, and he read out a
summarized version of Mad Sweeney’s life.

According to Mr. Ibis, Mad Sweeney had started his Me as the
guardian of a sacred rock in a small Irish glade, over three thousand years
ago. Mr. Ibis told them of Mad Sweeney’s love affairs, his enmities, the
madness that gave him his power (“a later version of the tale is still told,
although the sacred nature, and the antiquity, of much of the verse has long
been forgotten”), the worship and adoration in his own land that slowly
transmuted into a guarded respect and then, finally into amusement; he told
them the story of the girl from Bantry who came to the New World, and who
brought her belief in Mad Sweeney the leprechaun with her, for hadn’t she seen
him of a night, down by the pool, and hadn’t he smiled at her and called her by
her own true name? She had become a refugee, in the hold of a ship of people
who had watched their potatoes turn to black sludge in the ground, who had watched
friends and lovers die of hunger, who dreamed of a land of full stomachs. The
girl from Bantry Bay dreamed, specifically, of a city where a girl would be
able to earn enough to bring her family over to the New World. Many of the
Irish coming into America thought of themselves as Catholics, even if they knew
nothing of the catechism, even if all they knew of religion was the Bean Sidhe,
the banshee, who came to wail at the walls of a house where death soon would
be, and Saint Bride, who was once Bridget of the two sisters (each of the three
was a Brigid, each was the same woman), and tales of Finn, of Ofsin, of Cdnan
the Bald—even of the leprechauns, the little people (and was that not the
biggest joke of the Irish, for the leprechauns in their day were the tallest of
the mound folk)...