American Gods (34 page)

And now he saw the faces in the firelight, all of them
looking at him as he was led out from the hut for the first time, which was the
only time. So that was what people looked like. Raised in darkness, he had
never seen faces. Everything was so new. So strange. The bonfire light hurt his
eyes. They pulled on the rope around his neck, to lead him to the place where
the man waited for him.

And when the first blade was raised in the firelight, what a
cheer went up from the crowd. The child from the darkness began to laugh with
them, in delight and in freedom.

And then the blade came down.

Shadow opened his eyes and realized that he was hungry and
cold, in an apartment with a layer of ice clouding the inside of the window
glass. His frozen breath, he thought. He got out of bed, pleased he did not have
to get dressed. He scraped at a window with a fingernail as he passed, felt the
ice collect under the nail, then melt to water.

He tried to remember his dream, but remembered nothing but
misery and darkness.

He put on his shoes. He figured he would walk into the town
center, walk across the bridge across the-nbrthern end of the lake, if he had
the geography of the-toWn right. He put on his thin jacket, remembering his
promise to himself that he would buy himself a warm winter coat, opened the
apartment door, and stepped out onto the wooden deck. The cold took his breath
away: he breathed in, and felt every hair in his nostrils freeze into rigidity.
The deck gave him a fine view of the lake, irregular patches of gray surrounded
by an expanse of white.

The cold snap had come, that was for sure. It could not be
much above zero, and it would not be a pleasant walk, but he was certain he
could make it into town without too much trouble. What did Hinzelmann say last
night—& ten-minute walk? And Shadow was a big man. He would walk briskly
and keep himself warm. He set off south, heading for the bridge.

Soon he began to cough, a dry, thin cough, as the bitterly
cold air touched his lungs. Soon his ears and face and lips hurt, and then his
feet hurt. He thrust his ungloved hands deep into his coat pockets, clenched
his fingers together trying to find some warmth. He found himself remembering
Low Key Lyesmith’s tall tales of the Minnesota winters—particularly the one
about a hunter treed by a bear during a hard freeze who took out his dick and
pissed an arching yellow stream of steaming urine that was already frozen hard
before it hit the ground, then slid down the rock-hard frozen-piss-pole to
freedom. A wry smile at the memory and another dry, painful cough.

Step after step after step. He glanced back. The apartment
building was not as far away as he had expected.

This walk, he decided, was a mistake. But he was already
three or four minutes from the apartment, and the bridge over the lake was in
sight. It made as much sense to press on as to go home (and then what? Call a
taxi on the dead phone? Wait for spring? He had no food in the apartment, he
reminded himself).

He kept walking, revising his estimates of the temperature
downward as he walked. Minus ten? Minus twenty? Minus forty, maybe, that
strange point on the thermometer when Celsius and Fahrenheit say the same
thing. Probably not that cold. But then there was wind chill, and the wind was
now hard and steady and continuous, blowing over the lake, coming down from the
Arctic across Canada.

He remembered, enviously, the chemical hand—and
foot-warmers. He wished he had them now.

Ten more minutes of walking, he guessed, and the bridge
seemed to be no nearer. He was too cold to shiver. His eyes hurt. This was not
simply cold: this was science fiction. This was a story set on the dark side of
Mercury, back when they thought Mercury had a dark side. This was somewhere out
on rocky Pluto, where the sun is just another star, shining only a little more
brightly in the darkness. This, thought Shadow, is just a hair away from the
places where air comes in buckets and pours just like beer.

The occasional cars that roared past him seemed unreal: spaceships,
little freeze-dried packages of metal and glass, inhabited by people dressed
more warmly than he was. An old song his mother had loved, “Walking in a Winter
Wonderland,” began to run through his head, and he hummed it through closed
lips, kept pace to it as he walked.

He had lost all sensation in his feet. He looked down at his
black leather shoes, at the thin cotton socks, and began, seriously, to worry
about frostbite.

This was beyond a joke. This had moved beyond foolishness,
slipped over the line into genuine twenty-four-karat
Jesus-Christ-I-screwed-up-big-time territory. His clothes might as well have
been netting or lace: the wind blew through him, froze his bones and the marrow
in his bones, froze the lashes of his eyes, froze the warm place under his
balls, which were retreating into his pelvic cavity.

Keep walking, he told himself. Keep walking. I can stop and
drink a pail of air when I get home. A Beatles song started in his head, and he
adjusted his pace tonflatch it. It was only when he got to the chorus that he
realized that he was humming “Help.”

He was almost at the bridge now. Then ha had to walk across
it, and he would still be another ten minutes from the stores on the west of
the lake—maybe a little more ...

A dark car passed him, stopped, then reversed in a foggy
cloud of exhaust smoke and came to a halt beside him. A window slid down, and
the haze and steam from the window mixed with the exhaust to form a dragon’s
breath mat surrounded the car. “Everything okay here?” said a cop inside.

Shadow’s first, automatic instinct was to say Yup,
everything’s just fine andjimdandy thank you officer. But it was too late for
that, and he started to say, “I think I’m freezing. I was walking into Lakeside
to buy food and clothes, but I underestimated the length of the walk”—he was
that far through the sentence in his head, when he realized that all that had
come out was “F-f-freezing,” and a chattering noise, and he said, “So s-sorry.
Cold. Sorry.”

The cop pulled open the back door of the car and said, “You
get in there this moment and warm yourself up, okay?” Shadow climbed in
gratefully, and he sat in the back and rubbed his hands together, trying not to
worry about frostbitten toes. The cop got back in the driver’s seat. Shadow
stared at him through the metal grille. Shadow tried not to think about the
last time he’d been in the back of a police car, or to notice that there were
no door handles in the back, and to concentrate instead on rubbing life back
into his hands. His face hurt and his red fingers hurt, and now, in the warmth,
his toes were starting to hurt once more. That was, Shadow figured, a good
sign.

The cop put the car in drive and moved off. “You know, that
was,” he said, not turning to look at Shadow, just talking a little louder, “if
you’ll pardon me saying so, a real stupid thing to do. You didn’t hear any of the
weather advisories? It’s minus thirty out there. God alone knows what the
wind-chill is, minus sixty, minus seventy, although I figure when you’re down
at minus thirty, windchill’s the least of your worries.”

“Thanks,” said Shadow. “Thanks for stopping. Very, very
grateful.”

“Woman in Rhinelander went out this morning to fill her birdfeeder
in her robe and carpet slippers and she froze, literally froze, to the
sidewalk. She’s in intensive care now. It was on the TV this morning. You’re
new in town.” It was almost a question, but the man knew the answer already.

“I came in on the Greyhound last night. Figured today I’d
buy myself some warm clothes, food, and a car. Wasn’t expecting this cold.”

“Yeah,” said the cop. “It took me by surprise as well. I was
too busy worrying about global warming. I’m Chad Mulligan. I’m the chief of
police here in Lakeside.”

“Mike Ainsel.”

“Hi, Mike. Feeling any better?”

“A little, yes.”

“So where would you like me to take you first?”

Shadow put his hands down to the hot-air stream, painful on
his fingers, then he pulled them away. Let it happen in its own time. “Can you
just drop me off in the town center?”

“Wouldn’t hear of it. Long as you don’t need me to drive a
getaway car for your bank robbery I’ll happily take you wherever you need to
go. Think of it as the town welcome wagon.”

“Where would you suggest we start?”

“You only moved in last night.”

“That’s right.”

“You eaten breakfast yet?”

“Not yet.”

“Well, that seems like a heck of a good starting place to
me,” said Mulligan.

They were over the bridge now, and enterinjphe northwest
side of the town. “This is Main Street,” said Mulligan, “and this,” he said,
crossing Main Street and turning right, “is the town square.”

Even in the winter the town square was impressive, but Shadow
knew that this place was meant to be seen in summer: it would be a riot of
color, of poppies and irises and flowers of every kind, and the clump of birch
trees in one corner would be a green and silver bower. Now it was colorless,
beautiful in a skeletal way, the bandshell empty, the fountain turned off for
the winter, the brownstone city hall capped by white snow.

“... and this,” concluded Chad Mulligan, bringing the car to
a stop outside a high glass-fronted old building on the west of the square, “is
Mabel’s.”

He got out of the car, opened the passenger door for Shadow.
The two men put their heads down against the cold and the wind, and hurried
across the sidewalk and into a warm room, fragrant with the smells of new-baked
bread, of pastry and soup and bacon.

The place was almost empty. Mulligan sat dowfa at a table
and Shadow sat opposite him. He suspected that Mulligan was doing this to get a
feel for the stranger in town. Then again, the police chief might simply be
what he appeared: friendly, helpful, good.

A woman bustled over to their table, not fat but big, a big
woman in her sixties, her hair bottle-bronze.

“Hello, Chad,” she said. “You’ll want a hot chocolate while
you’re thinking.” She handed them two laminated menus.

“No cream on the top, though,” he agreed. “Mabel knows me
too well,” he said to Shadow. “What’ll it be, pal?”

“Hot chocolate sounds great,” said Shadow. “And I’m happy to
have the whipped cream on the top.”

“That’s good,” said Mabel. “Live dangerously, hon. Are you
going to introduce me, Chad? Is this young man a new officer?”

“Not yet,” said Chad Mulligan, with a flash of white teeth. “This
is Mike Ainsel. He moved to Lakeside last night. Now, if you’ll excuse me.” He
got up, walked to the back of the room, through the door marked POINTERS. It
was next to a door marked SETTERS.

“You’re the new man in the apartment up on Northridge Road.
The old Pilsen place. Oh, yes,” she said, happily, “I know just who you are.
Hinzelmann was by this morning for his morning pasty, he told me all about you.
You boys only having hot chocolate or you want to look at the breakfast menu?”

“Breakfast for me,” said Shadow. “What’s good?”

“Everything’s good,” said Mabel. “I make it. But this is the
farthest south and east of the yoopie you can get pasties, and they are
particularly good. Warming and filling too. My speciality.”

Shadow had no idea what a pasty was, but he said that would
be fine, and in a few moments Mabel returned with a plate with what looked like
a folded-over pie on it. The lower half was wrapped in a paper napkin. Shadow
picked it up with the napkin and bit into it: it was warm and filled with meat,
potatoes, carrots, onions. “First pasty I’ve ever had,” he said. “It’s real
good.”

‘They’re a yoopie thing,” she told him. “Mostly you need to
be at least up Ironwood way to get one. The Cornish men who came over to work
the iron mines brought them over.”

“Yoopie?”

“Upper Peninsula. U.P. Yoopie. It’s the little chunk of Michigan
to the northeast.”

The chief of police came back. He picked up the hot
chocolate and slurped it. “Mabel,” he said, “are you forcing this nice young
man to eat one of your pasties?”

“It’s good,” said Shadow. It was too, a savory delight
wrapped in hot pastry.

“They go straight to the belly,” said Chad Mulligan, patting
his own stomach. “I warn you. Okay: S&ryou need a car?” With his parka off,
he was revealed (as a lanky man with a round, apple-belly gut on him. He looked
harassed and competent, more like an engineer than cop.

Shadow nodded, mouth full.

“Right. I made some calls. Justin Liebowitz’s selling his
jeep, wants four thousand dollars for it, will settle for three. The Gunthers
have had their Toyota 4-Runner for sale for eight months, ugly sonofabitch, but
at this point they’d probably pay you to take it out of their driveway. And if
you don’t care about ugly, it’s got to be a great deal. I used the phone in the
men’s room, left a message for Missy Gunther down at Lakeside Realty, but she
wasn’t in yet, probably getting her hair done down at Sheila’s.”

The pasty remained good as Shadow chewed his way through it.
It was astonishingly filling. “Stick-to-your-ribs food,” as his mother would
have said. “Sticks to your sides.”

“So,” said Chief of Police Chad Mulligan, wiping the
hot-chocolate foam from around his lips. “I figure we stop off next at Hennings
Farm and Home Supplies, get you a real winter wardrobe, swing by Dave’s Finest
Food so you can fill your larder, then I’ll drop you up by Lakeside Realty. If
you can put down a thousand up front for the car they’ll be happy, otherwise
five hundred a month for four months should see them okay. It’s an ugly car,
like I said, but if the kid hadn’t painted it purple it’d be a
ten-thousand-dollar car, and reliable, and you’ll need something like that to
get around this winter, you ask me.”

“This is very good of you,” said Shadow. “But shouldn’t you
be out catching criminals, not helping newcomers? Not that I’m complaining, you
understand.”