American Gods (30 page)

All this and more Mr. Ibis told them in the kitchen that
night. His shadow on the wall was stretched and birdlike, and as the whiskey
flowed Shadow imagined it head of a huge waterfowl, beak long and curved, and
it was somewhere in the middle of the second glass that Mad Sweeney himself
began to throw both details and’irrelevancies into Ibis’s narrative (“... such
a girl she was, wijh breasts cream-colored and spackled with freckles, with the
tips of them the rich reddish pink of the sunrise on a day when it’ll be
bucketing down before noon but glorious again by supper ...”) and then Sweeney
was trying, with both hands, to explain the history of the gods in Ireland,
wave after wave of them as they came in from Gaul and from Spain and from every
damn place, each wave of them transforming the last gods into trolls and
fairies and every damn creature until Holy Mother Church herself arrived and
every god in Ireland was transformed into a fairy or a saint or a dead King
without so much as a by-your-leave ...

Mr. Ibis polished his gold-rimmed spectacles and
explained—enunciating even more clearly and precisely than usual, so Shadow
knew he was drunk (his words, and the sweat that beaded on his forehead in that
chilly house, were the only indications of this)—with forefinger wagging, that
he was an artist and that his tales should ngt be seen as literal constructs
but as imaginative re-creations, truer than the truth, and Mad Sweeney said, “I’ll
show you an imaginative re-creation, my fist imaginatively re-creating your
fucken face for starters,” and Mr. Jacquel bared his teeth and growled at
Sweeney, the growl of a huge dog who’s not looking for a fight but can always
finish one by ripping out your throat, and Sweeney took the message and sat
down and poured himself another glass of whiskey.

“Have you remembered how I do my little coin trick?” he
asked Shadow with a grin.

“I have not.”

“If you can guess how I did it,” said Mad Sweeney, his lips
purple, his blue eyes beclouded, “I’ll tell you if you get warm.”

“It’s not a palm is it?” asked Shadow.

“It is not.”

“Is it a gadget of some kind? Something up your sleeve or
elsewhere that shoots the coins up for you to catch?”

“It is not that neither. More whiskey, anybody?”

“I read in a book about a way of doing the miser’s dream
with latex covering the palm of your hand, making a skin-colored pouch for the
coins to hide behind.”

“This is a sad wake for Great Sweeney who flew like a bird
across all of Ireland and ate watercress in his madness: to be dead and
unmourned save for a bird, a dog, and an idiot. No, it is not a pouch.”

“Well, that’s pretty much it for ideas,” said Shadow. “I
expect you just take them out of nowhere.” It was meant to be sarcasm, but then
he saw the expression on Sweeney’s face. “You do,” he said. “You do take them
from nowhere.

“Well, not exactly nowhere,” said Mad Sweeney. “But now you’re
getting the idea. You take them from the hoard.”

“The hoard,” said Shadow, starting to remember. “Yes.”

“You just have to hold it in your mind, and it’s yours to
take from. The sun’s treasure. It’s there in those moments when the world makes
a rainbow. It’s there in the moment of eclipse and the moment of the storm.”

And he showed Shadow how to do the thing.

This time Shadow got it.

Shadow’s head ached and pounded, and his tongue tasted and
felt like flypaper. He squinted at the glare of the daylight. He had fallen
asleep with his head on the kitchen table. He was fully dressed, although he
had at some point taken off his black tie.

He walked downstairs, to the mortuary, and was relieved but
unsurprised to see that John Doe was still on the embalming table. Shadow pried
the empty bottle of Jameson Gold from the corpse’s rigor-mortised fingers and
threw it away. He could hear someone moving about in the house above.

Mr. Wednesday was sitting at the kitchen stable when Shadow
went upstairs. He was eating leftoverpotato salad from a Tupperware container
with a plastic spoon. He wore a dark gray suit, a white shirt, and a deep gray
tie: the mom-ing sun glittered on the silver tie pin in the ghape of a tree. He
smiled at Shadow when he saw him.

“Ah, Shadow m’boy, good to see you’re up. I thought you were
going to sleep forever.”

“Mad Sweeney’s dead,” said Shadow.

“So I heard,” said Wednesday. “A great pity. Of course it
will come to all of us, in the end.” He tugged on an imaginary rope, somewhere
on the level of his ear, and then jerked his neck to one side, tongue
protruding, eyes bulging. As quick pantomimes went, it was disturbing. And then
he let go of the rope and smiled his familiar grin. “Would you like some potato
salad?”

“I would not.” Shadow darted a look around the kitchen and
out into the hall. “Do you know where Ibis and Jacquel are?”

“Indeed I do. They are burying Mrs. Lila Goodchild—something
that they would probably have liked your help in doing, but I asked them not to
wake you. You have a long drive ahead of you.”

“We’re leaving?”

“Within the hour.”

“I should say goodbye.”

“Goodbyes are overrated. You’ll see them again, I have no
doubt, before this affair is done.”

For the first time since that first night, Shadow observed, the
small brown cat was curled up in her basket. She opened her incurious amber
eyes and watched him go.

So Shadow left the house of the dead. Ice sheathed the
winter-black bushes and trees as if they’d been insulated, made into dreams.
The path was slippery.

Wednesday led the way to Shadow’s white Chevy Nova, parked
out on the road. It had been recently cleaned, and the Wisconsin plates had
been removed, replaced with Minnesota plates. Wednesday’s luggage was already
stacked in the backseat. Wednesday unlocked the car with keys that were
duplicates of the ones Shadow had in his own pocket.

“I’ll drive,” said Wednesday. “It’ll be at least an hour
before you’re good for anything.”

They drove north, the Mississippi on their left, a wide
silver stream beneath a gray sky. Shadow saw, perched on a leafless gray tree
beside the road, a huge brown-and-white hawk, which stared down at them with
mad eyes as they drove toward it, then took to the wing and rose in slow and
powerful circles.

Shadow realized it had only been a temporary reprieve, his
time in the house of the dead; and already it was beginning to feel like
something that happened to somebody else, a long time ago.

Not to mention mythic creatures in the rubble ...

—Wendy Cope, “A Policeman’s Lot”

As they drove out of Illinois late that evening, Shadow
asked Wednesday his first question. He saw the WELCOME TO WISCONSIN sign, and
said, “So who were the guys that grabbed me in the parking lot? Mister Wood and
Mister Stone? Who were they?”

The lights of the car illuminated the winter landscape.
Wednesday had announced that they were not to take freeways because he didn’t
know whose side the freeways were on, so Shadow was sticking to back roads.
He°3idn’t mind. He wasn’t even sure that Wednesday was crazy.

Wednesday grunted. “Just spooks. Members of the opposition.
Black hats.”

“I think,” said Shadow, “that they think they’re the white
hats.”

“Of course they do. There’s never been a true war that wasn’t
fought between two sets of people who were certain they were in the right. The
really dangerous people believe that they are doing whatever they are doing
solely and only because it is without question the right thing to do. And that
is what makes them dangerous.”

“And you!” asked Shadow. “Why are you doing what you’re
doing?”

“Because I want to,” said Wednesday. And then he grinned. “So
that’s all right.”

Shadow said, “How did you all get away? Or did you all get
away?”

“We did,” said Wednesday. “Although it was a close thing. If
they’d not stopped to grab you, they migljt have taken the lot of us. It
convinced several of the people who had been sitting on the fence that I might
not be completely crazy.”

“So how did you get out?”

Wednesday shook his head. “I don’t pay you to ask questions,”
he said. “I’ve told you before.”

Shadow shrugged.

They spent the night in a Super 8 motel south of La Crosse.

Christmas Day was spent on the road, driving north and east.
The farmland became pine forest. The towns seemed to come farther and farther
apart.

They ate their Christmas lunch late in the afternoon in a
hall-like family restaurant in northern central Wisconsin. Shadow picked
cheerlessly at the dry turkey, jam-sweet red lumps of cranberry sauce,
tough-as-wood roasted potatoes, and violently green canned peas. From the way
he attacked it, and the way he smacked his lips, Wednesday seemed to be
enjoying the food. As the meal progressed he became positively expansive—talking,
joking, and, whenever she came close enough, flirting with the waitress, a thin
blonde girl who looked scarcely old enough to have dropped out of high school.

“Excuse me, m’dear, but might I trouble you for another cup
of your delightful hot chocolate? And I trust you won’t think me too forward if
I say what a mightily fetching and becoming dress that is. Festive, yet classy.”

The waitress, who wore a bright red-and-green skirt edged
with glittering silver tinsel, giggled and colored and smiled happily, and went
off to get Wednesday another mug of hot chocolate.

“Fetching,” said Wednesday, thoughtfully, watching her go. “Becoming,”
he said. Shadow did not think he was talking about the dress. Wednesday
shoveled the final slice of turkey into his mouth, flicked at his beard with
his napkin, and pushed his plate forward. “Aaah. Good.” He looked around him,
at the family restaurant. In the background a tape of Christmas songs was
playing: the little drummer boy had no gifts to bring, parupapom-pom, rapappom
pom, rapappom pom.

“Some things may change,” said Wednesday, abruptly. “People,
however ... people stay the same. Some grifts last forever, others are
swallowed soon enough by time and by the world. My favorite grift of all is no
longer practical. Still, a surprising number of grifts are timeless—the Spanish
Prisoner, the Pigeon Drop, the Fawney Rig (that’s the Pigeon Drop but with a
gold ring instead of a wallet), the Fiddle Game ...”

“I’ve never heard of the Fiddle Game,” said Shadow. “I think
I’ve heard of the others. My old cellmate said he’d actually done the Spanish
Prisoner. He was a,grifter.”

“Ah,” said Wednesday, and his left eye sparkled. “The Fiddle
Game was a fine and wonderful coir. In its purest form it is a two-man grift.
It trades on cupidity and greed, as all great grifts do. You can always cheat
an honest man, but it takes more work. So. We are in a hotel or an inn or a
fine restaurant, and, dining there, we find a man—shabby, but shabby genteel,
not down-at-heel but certainly down on his luck. We shall call him Abraham. And
when the time comes to settle his bill—not a huge bill, you understand, fifty,
seventy-five dollars—an embarrassment! Where is his wallet? Good Lord, he must
have left it at a friend’s, not far away. He shall go and obtain his wallet
forthwith! But here, mine host, says-Abraham, take this old fiddle of mine for
security. It’s old, as you can see, but it’s how I make my living.”

Wednesday’s smile when he saw the waitress approaching was
huge and predatory. “Ah, the hot chocolate! Brought to me by my Christmas
Angel! Tell me my dear, could I have some more of your delicious bread when you
get a moment?”

The waitress—what was she, Shadow wondered: sixteen, seventeen?—looked
at the floor and her cheeks flushed crimson. She put down the chocolate with
shaking, hands and retreated to the edge of the room, by the slowly rotating
display of pies, where she stopped and stared at Wednesday. Then she slipped
into the kitchen to fetch Wednesday his bread.

“So. The violin—old, unquestionably, perhaps even a little
battered—is placed away in its case, and our temporarily impecunious Abraham
sets off in search of his wallet. But a well-dressed gentleman, only just done
with his own dinner, has been observing this exchange, and now he approaches
our host: could he, perchance, inspect the violin that honest Abraham left
behind?

“Certainly he can. Our host hands it over, and the
well-dressed man—let us call him Barrington—opens his mouth wide, then remembers
himself and closes it, examines the violin reverentially, like a man who has
been permitted into a holy sanctum to examine the bones of a prophet. ‘Why!’ he
says, ‘this is—it must be—no, it cannot be—but yes, there it is—my lord\ But
this is unbelievable?’ and he points to the maker’s mark, on a strip of
browning paper inside the violin—but still, he says, even without it he would
have known it by the color of the varnish, by the scroll, by the shape.

“Now Barrington reaches inside his pocket and produces an
engraved business card, proclaiming him to be a preeminent dealer in rare and
antique musical instruments. ‘So this violin is rare?’ asks mine host. ‘Indeed
it is,’ says Barring-ton, still admiring it with awe, ‘and worth in excess of a
hundred thousand dollars, unless I miss my guess. Even as a dealer in such
things I would pay fifty—no, seventy-five thousand dollars, good cash money,
for such an exquisite piece. I have a man on the West Coast who would buy it
tomorrow, sight unseen, with one telegram, and pay whatever I asked for it.’
And then he consults his watch, and his face falls. ‘My train—’ he says. ‘I
have scarcely enough time to catch my train! Good sir, when the owner of this
inestimable instrument should return, please give him my card, for, alas, I
must be away.’ And with that, Barrington leaves, a man who knows that time and
the train wait for no man.

“Mine host examines the violin, curiosity mingling with cupidity
in his veins, and a plan begins to bubble up through his mind. But the minutes
go by, and Abraham does not return. And now it is late, and through the door,
shabby but proud, comes our Abraham, our fiddle player, ai d he holds in his
hands a wallet, a wallet that has seen better days, a wallet that has never
contained more than a hundred dollars on its best day, and from it he takes the
money to pay for his meal or his stay, and he asks for the return of his
violin.