American Gods (3 page)

“Thirty-two, sir.”

“And what are you? A spic? A gypsy?” ;

“Not that I know of, sir. Maybe.”

“Maybe you got nigger blood in you. You got nigger blood in
you, Shadow?”

“Could be, sir.” Shadow stood tall and looked straight
ahead, and concentrated on not allowing himself to be riled by this man.

“Yeah? Well, all I know is, you fucking spook me.” Wilson
had sandy blond hair and a sandy blond face and a sandy blond smile. “You
leaving us soon.”

“Hope so, sir.”

They walked through a couple of checkpoints. Wilson showed
his ID each time. Up a set of stairs, and they were standing outside the prison
warden’s office. It had the prison warden’s name—G. Patterson—on the door in
black letters, and beside the door, a miniature traffic light.

The top light burned red.

Wilson pressed a button below the traffic light.

They stood there in silence for a couple of minutes. Shadow
tried to tell himself that everything was all right, that on Friday morning he’d
be on the plane up to Eagle Point, but he did not believe it himself.

The red light went out and the green light went on, and
Wilson opened the door. They went inside.

Shadow had seen the warden a handful of times in the last
three years. Once he had been showing a politician around. Once, during a
lockdown, the warden had spoken to them in groups of a hundred, telling them that
the prison was overcrowded, and that, since it would remain overcrowded, they
had better get used to it.

Up close, Patterson looked worse. His face was oblong, with
gray hair cut into a military bristle cut. He smelled of Old Spice. Behind him
was a shelf of books, each with the word Prison in the title; his desk was
perfectly clean, empty but for a telephone and a tear-off-the-pages Far Side
calendar. He had a hearing aid in his right ear.

“Please, sit down.”

Shadow sat down. Wilson stood behind him.

The warden opened a desk drawer and took out a file, placed
it on his desk.

“Says here you were sentenced to six years for aggravated assault
and battery. You’ve served three years. You were due to be released on Friday.”

Were? Shadow felt his stomach lurch inside him. He wondered
how much longer he was going to have to serve—another year? Two years? All
three? All he said was “Yes, sir.”

The warden licked his lips. “What did you say?”

“I said, ‘Yes, sir.’ “

“Shadow, we’re going to be releasing you later this
afternoon. You’ll be getting out a couple of days early.” Shadow nodded, and he
waited for the other shoe to drop. The warden looked down at the paper on his
desk. “This came from the Johnson Memorial Hospital in Eagle Point ... Your
wife. She died in the early hours of this morning. It was an automobile accident.
I’m sorry.”

Shadow nodded once more.

Wilson walked him back to his cell, not saying anything. He
unlocked the cell door and let Shadow in. Then he said, “It’s like one of them
good news, bad news jokes, isn’t it? Good news, we’re letting you out early,
bad news, your wife is dead.” He laughed, as if it were genuinely funny.

Shadow said nothing at all.

Numbly, he packed up his possessions, gave most of them
away. He left behind Low Key’s Herodotus and the book of coin tricks, and, with
a momentary pang, he abandoned the blank metal disks be had smuggled out of the
workshop, which had served him for coins. There would be coins, real coins, on
the outside. He shaved. He dressed in civilian clothes. He walked through door
after door, knowing that he would never walk back through them again, feeling
empty inside.

The rain had started to gust from the gray sky, a freezing
rain. Pellets of ice stung Shadow’s face, while the rain soaked the thin
overcoat and they walked toward the yellow ex-school bus that would take them
to the nearest city.

By the time they got to the bus they were soaked. Eight of
them were leaving. Fifteen hundred still inside. Shadow sat on the bus and
shivered until the heaters started working, wondering what he was doing, where
he would go now.

Ghost images filled his head, unbidden. In his imagination
he was leaving another prison, long ago.

He had been imprisoned in a lightless room for far too long:
his beard was wild and his hair was a tangle. The guards had walked him down a
gray stone stairway and out into a plaza filled with brightly colored things,
with people and with objects. It was a market day and he was dazzled by the
noise and the color, squinting at the sunlight that filled the square, smelling
the salt-wet air and all the good things of the market, and on his left the sun
glittered from the water ...

The bus shuddered to a halt at a red light.

The wind howled about the bus, and the wipers slooshed heavily
back and forth across the windshield, smearing the city into a red and yellow
neon wetness. It was early afternoon, but it looked like night through the
glass.

“Shit,” said the man in the seat behind Shadow, rubbing the
condensation from the window with his hand, staring at a wet figure hurrying
down the sidewalk. “There’s pussy out there.”

Shadow swallowed. It occurred to him that he had not cried
yet—had in fact felt nothing at all. No tears. No sorrow. Nothing.

He found himself thinking about a guy named Johnnie Larch he’d
shared a cell with when he’d first been put inside, who told Shadow how he’d
once got out after five years behind bars with one hundred dollars and a ticket
to Seattle, where his sister lived.

Johnnie Larch had got to the airport, and he handed his ticket
to the woman on the counter, and she asked to see his driver’s license.

He showed it to her. It had expired a couple of years
earlier. She told him it was not valid as ID. He told her it might not be valid
as a driver’s license, but it sure as hell was fine identification, and damn
it, who else did she think he was, if he wasn’t him?

She said she’d thank him to keep his voice down.

He told her to give him a fucking boarding pass, or she was
going to regret it, and that he wasn’t going to be disrespected. You don’t let
people disrespect you in prison.

Then she pressed a button, and a few moments later the
airport security showed up, and they tried to persuade Johnnie Larch to leave
the airport quietly, and he did not wish to leave, and there was something of
an altercation.

The upshot of it all was that Johnnie Larch never actually
made it to Seattle, and he spent the next couple of days in town in bars, and
when his one hundred dollars was gone he held up a gas station with a toy gun
for money to keep drinking, and the police finally picked him up for pissing in
the street. Pretty soon he was back inside serving the rest of his sentence and
a little extra for the gas station job.

And the moral of this story, according to Johnnie Larch, was
this: don’t piss off people who work in airports.

“Are you sure it’s not something like “The kind of behavior
that works in a specialized environment, such as prison, can fail to work and
in fact become harmful when used outside such an environment’?” said Shadow,
when Johnnie Larch told him the story.

“No, listen to me, I’m telling you, man,” said Johnnie
Larch, “don’t piss off those bitches in airports.”

Shadow half smiled at the memory. His own driver’s license
had several months still to go before it expired.

“Bus station! Everybody out!”

The building stank of piss and sour beer. Shadow climbed
into a taxi and told the driver to take him to the airport. He told him that
there was an extra five dollars if he could do it in silence. They made it in
twenty minutes and the driver never said a word.

Then Shadow was stumbling through the brightly lit airport
terminal. Shadow worried about the whole e-ticket business. He knew he had a
ticket for a flight on Friday, but he didn’t know if it would work today.
Anything electronic seemed fundamentally magical to Shadow, and liable to
evaporate at any moment.

Still, he had his wallet, back in his possession for the
first time in three years, containing several expired credit cards and one Visa
card, which, he was pleasantly surprised to discover, didn’t expire until the
end of January. He had a reservation number. And, he realized, he had the
certainty that once he got home everything would, somehow, be okay. Laura would
be fine again. Maybe it was some kind of scam to spring him a few days early.
Or perhaps it was a simple mix-up: some other Laura Moon’s body had been
dragged from the highway wreckage.

Lightning flickered outside the airport, through the
windows-walls. Shadow realized he was holding his breath, waiting for
something. A distant boom of thunder. He exhaled.

A tired white woman stared at him from behind the counter.

“Hello,” said Shadow. You’re the first strange woman I’ve
spoken to, in the flesh, in three years. “I’ve got an e-ticket number. I was
supposed to be traveling on Friday but I have to go today. There was a death in
my family.”

“Mm. I’m sorry to hear that.” She tapped at the keyboard,
stared at the screen, tapped again. “No problem. I’ve put you on the
three-thirty. It may be delayed because of the storm, so keep an eye on the
screens. Checking any baggage?”

He held up a shoulder bag. “I don’t need to check this, do
IT

“No,” she said. “It’s fine. Do you have any picture ID?”

Shadow showed her his driver’s license.

It was not a big airport, but the number of people
wandering, just wandering, amazed him. He watched people put down bags
casually, observed wallets stuffed into back pockets, saw purses put down,
unwatched, under chairs. That was when he realized he was no longer in prison.

Thirty minutes to wait until boarding. Shadow bought a slice
of pizza and burned his lip on the hot cheese. He took his change and went to
the phones. Called Robbie at the Muscle Farm, but the machine picked up.

“Hey Robbie,” said Shadow. “They tell me that Laura’s dead.
They let me out early. I’m coming home.” ~

Then, because people do make mistakes, he’d seen it happen,
he called home, and listened to Laura’s voice.

“Hi,” she said. “I’m not here or I can’t come to the phone.
Leave a message and I’ll get back to you. And have a good day/’

Shadow couldn’t bring himself to leave a message.

He sat in a plastic chair by the gate, and held his bag so
tight he hurt his hand.

He was thinking about the first time he had ever seen Laura.
He hadn’t even known her name then. She was Audrey Burton’s friend. He had been
sitting with Robbie in a booth at Chi-Chi’s when Laura had walked in a pace or
so behind Audrey, and Shadow had found himself staring. She had long, chestnut
hair and eyes so blue Shadow mistakenly thought she was wearing tinted contact
lenses. She had ordered a strawberry daiquiri, and insisted that Shadow taste
it, and laughed delightedly when he did. Laura loved people to taste what she
tasted. He had kissed her good night that night, and she had tasted like
strawberry daiquiris, and he had never wanted to kiss anyone else again.

A woman announced that his plane was boarding, and Shadow’s
row was the first to be called. He was in the very back, an empty seat beside
him. The rain pattered continually against the side of the plane: he imagined
small children tossing down dried peas by the handful from the skies. As the
plane took off he fell asleep. Shadow was in a dark place, and the thing
staring at him wore a buffalo’s head, rank and furry with huge wet eyes. Its
body was a man’s body, oiled and slick.

“Changes are coming,” said the buffalo without moving its
lips. “There are certain decisions that will have to be made.”

Firelight flickered from wet cave walls. “Where am I?”
Shadow asked. “In the earth and under the earth,” said the buffalo man. “You
are where the forgotten wait.” His eyes were liquid black marbles, and his
voice was a rumble from beneath the world. He smelled like wet cow. “Believe,”
said the rumbling voice. “If you are to survive, you must believe.” “Believe
what?” asked Shadow. “What should I believer He stared at Shadow, the buffalo
man, and he drew himself up huge, and his eyes filled with fire. He opened bis
spit-flecked buffalo mouth and it was red inside with the flames that burned
inside him, under the earth. “Everything,” roared the buffalo man. The world
tipped and spun, and Shadow was on the plane once more; but the tipping
continued. In the front of the plane a woman screamed halfheartedly.

Lightning burst in blinding flashes around the plane. The captain
came on the intercom to tell them that he was going to try and gain some
altitude, to get away from the storm.

The plane shook and shuddered, and Shadow wondered, coldly
and idly, if he was going to die. It seemed possible, he decided, but unlikely.
He stared out of the window and watched the lightning illuminate the horizon.

Then he dozed once more, and dreamed he was back in prison
and that Low Key had whispered to him in the food line that someone had put out
a contract on his life, but that Shadow could not find out who or why; and when
he woke up they were coming in for a landing.

He stumbled off the plane, blinking into wakefulness.

All airports, he thought, look very much the same. It doesn’t
actually matter where you are, you are in an airport: tiles and walkways and
restrooms, gates and newsstands and fluorescent lights. This airport looked
like an airport. The trouble is, this wasn’t the airport he was going to. This
was a big airport, with way too many people, and way too many gates.

“Excuse me, ma’am?”

The woman looked at him over the clipboard. “Yes?”

“What airport is this?”

She looked at him, puzzled, trying to decide whether or not
he was joking, then she said, “St. Louis.” :

“I thought this was the plane to Eagle Point.”