American Gods (37 page)

As the shift ends the doors are opened, and the n\an in the
charcoal suit leaves the room and walks, with—the guards, through the
corridors, their feet shushing along the monogrammed carpets. The money, in
strongboxes, is wheeled to an interior loading bay, where it is loaded into
armored cars. As the ramp door swings open, to allow\the armored car out onto
the early streets of Las Vegas, the man in the charcoal suit walks, Unnoticed,
through, the doorway, and saunters up the ramp, out onto the sidewalk. He does
not even glance up to see the imitation of New York on his left.

Las Vegas has become a child’s picture-book dream of a
city—here a storybook castle, there a sphinx-flanked black pyramid beaming white
light into the darkness as a landing beam for UFOs, and everywhere neon oracles
and twisting screens predict happiness and good fortune, announce singers and
comedians and magicians in residence or on their way, and the lights always
flash and beckon and call. Once every hour a volcano erupts in light and flame.
Once every hour a pirate ship sinks a man o’ war.

The man in the charcoal suit ambles comfortably along the
sidewalk, feeling the flow of the money through the town. In the summer the
streets are baking, and each store doorway he passes breathes wintry A/C out
into the Sweaty warmth and chills the sweat on his face. Now, in the desert
winter, there’s a dry cold, which he appreciates. In his mind the movement of
money forms a fine latticework, a three dimensional cat’s cradle of light and motion.
What he finds attractive about this desert city is the speed of movement, the
way the money moves from place to place and hand to hand: it’s a rush for him,
a high, and it pulls him like an addict to the street.

A taxi follows him slowly down the street, keeping its
distance. He does not notice it; it does not occur to him to notice it: he is
so rarely noticed himself that he finds the concept that he could be being
followed almost inconceivable.

It’s four in the morning, and he finds himself drawn to a
hotel and casino that has been out of style for thirty years, still running
until tomorrow or six months from now when they ‘II implode it and knock it
down and build a pleasure palace where it was, and forget it forever. Nobody
knows him, nobody remembers him, but the lobby bar is tacky and quiet, and the
air is blue with old cigarette smoke and someone’s about to drop several
million dollars on a poker game in a private room upstairs. The man in the
charcoal suit settles himself in the bar several floors below the game, and is
ignored by a waitress. A Muzak version of “Why Can’t He Be You?” is playing,
almost subliminally. Five Elvis Presley impersonators, each man wearing a
different-colored jumpsuit, watch a late night rerun of a football game on the
bar TV.

A big man in a light gray suit sits at the man in the
charcoal suit’s table, and, noticing him even if she does not notice the man in
the charcoal suit, the waitress, who is too thin to be pretty, too obviously
anorectic to work Luxor or the Tropicana, and who is counting the minutes until
she gets off work, comes straight over and smiles. He grins widely at her. “You
‘re looking a treat tonight, m ‘dear, a fine sight for these poor old eyes,” he
says, and, scenting a large tip, she smiles broadly at him. The man in the
light gray suit orders a Jack Daniel’s for himself and a Laphroaig and water
for the man in the charcoal suit sitting beside him.

“You know,” says the man in the light gray suit, when his drink
arrives, “the finest line of poetry ever uttered in the history of this whole
damn country was said by Canada Bill Jones in 1853, in Baton Rouge, while he
was being robbed blind in a crooked game of faro. George Devol, who was, like
Canada Bill, not a man who was averse to fleecing the odd sucker, drew Bill
aside and asked him if he couldn ‘t see that the game was crooked. And Canada
Bill sighed, and shrugged his shoulders, and said 7 know. But it’s the only
game in town.’And he went back to the game.”

Dark eyes stare at the man in the light gray suit
mistrustfully. The man in the charcoal suit says something in reply. ‘The man
in the light suit, who has a graying reddish beard, shakes his head. ‘ ‘““‘“‘,

“Look,” he says, “I’m sorry about what went down in Wisconsin.
But I got you all out safely, didn ‘t I? No one was hurt.”

The man in the dark suit sips his Laphroaig and water,
savoring the marshy taste, the body-in-the-bog quality of the whiskey. He asks
a question.

“I don’t know. Everything’s moving faster than I expected.
Everyone’s got a hard-on for the kid I hired to run errands—I’ve got him
outside, waiting in the taxi. Are you still in?”

The man in the dark suit replies.

The bearded man shakes his head. “She’s not been seen for
two hundred years. If she isn’t dead she’s taken herself out of the picture.”

Something else is said.

“Look,” says the bearded man, knocking back his Jack Daniel’s.
“You come in, be there when we needyou, and I’ll take care of you. Whaddayou
want? Soma? I can get you a bottle of Soma. The real stuff.”

The man in the dark suit stares. Then he nods hi&head,
reluctantly, and makes a comment.

“Of course I am,” says the bearded man, smiling like a
knife. “What do you expect? But look at it this way: it’s the only game in
town.” He reaches out a paw like hand and shakes the other man’s well-manicured
hand. Then he walks away.

The thin waitress comes over, puzzled: there’s now only one
man at the corner table, a sharply dressed man with dark hair in a
charcoal-gray suit. “You doing okay?” she asks. “Is your friend coming back?”

The man with the dark hair sighs, and explains that his
friend won’t be coming back, and thus she won’t be paid for her time, or for
her trouble. And then, seeing the hurt in her eyes, and taking pity on her, he
examines the golden threads in his mind, watches the matrix, follows the money
until he spots a node, and tells her that if she’s outside Treasure Island at
6:00 A.M., thirty minutes after she gets off work, she’ll meet an oncologist
from Denver who will just have won forty-thousand dollars at a craps table, and
will need a mentor, a partner, someone to help him dispose of it all in the
forty-eight hours before he gets on the plane home.

The words evaporate in the waitress’s mind, but they leave
her happy. She sighs and notes that the guys in the comer have done a runner,
and have not even tipped her; and it occurs to her that, instead of driving
straight home when she gets off shift, she’s going to drive over to Treasure
Island; but she would never, if you asked her, be able to tell you why.

“So who was that guy you were seeing?” asked Shadow as they
walked back down the Las Vegas concourse. There were slot machines in the
airport. Even at this time of the morning people stood in front of them,
feeding them coins. Shadow wondered if there were those who never left the
airport, who got off their planes, walked along the jetway into the airport
building, and stopped there, trapped by the spinning images and the flashing
lights until they had fed their last quarter to the machines, and then, with
nothing left, just turned around and got onto the plane back home.

And then he realized that he had zoned out just as Wednesday
had been telling him who the man in the dark suit they had followed in the taxi
had been, and he had missed it.

“So he’s in,” said Wednesday. “It’ll cost me a bottle of
Soma, though.”

“What’s Soma?”

“It’s a drink.” They walked onto the charter plane, empty
but for them and a trio of corporate big spenders who needed to be back in
Chicago by the start of the next business day.

Wednesday got comfortable, ordered himself a Jack Daniel’s. “My
kind of people see your kind of people ...” he hesitated. “It’s like bees and
honey. Each bee makes only a tiny, tiny drop of honey. It takes thousands of
them, millions perhaps, all working together to make the pot of honey you have
on your breakfast table. Now imagine that you could eat nothing but honey. That’s
what it’s like for my kind of people ... we feed on belief, on prayers, on
love.”

“And Soma is ...”

“To take the analogy further, it’s a honey wine. Like mead.”
He chuckled. “It’s a drink. Concentrated prayer and belief, distilled into a
potent liqueur.”

They were somewhere over Nebraska eating an unimpressive
in-flight breakfast when Shadow said, “My wife.”

“The dead one.”

“Laura. She doesn’t want to be dead. She told me. After she
got me away from the guys on the train.”

“The action of a fine wife. Freeing you from durance vile
and murdering those who would have harmed you. You should treasure her, Nephew
Ainsel.”

“She wants to be really alive. Can we do that? Is that possible?”

Wednesday said nothing for long enough that Shadow started
to wonder if he had heard the question, or if he had, possibly, fallen asleep
with his eyes open. Then he said, staring ahead of him as he talked, “I know a
charm that can cure pain and sickness, and lift the grief from the heart of the
grieving.

“I know a charm that will heal with a touch.

“I know a charm that will turn aside the weapons of an
enemy.

“I know another charm to free myself from all bonds and
locks.

“A fifth charm: I can catch an arrow in flight and take no
harm from it.”

His words were quiet, urgent. Gone was the hectoring tone,
gone was the grin. Wednesday spoke as if he were reciting the words of a religious
ritual, or remembering something dark and painful.

“A sixth: spells sent to hurt me will hurt only the sender.

“A seventh charm I know: I can quench a fire simply by looking
at it.

“An eighth: if any man hates me, I can win his friendship.

“A ninth: I can sing the wind to sleep and calm a storm for
long enough to bring a ship to shore.

“Those were the first nine charms I learned. Nine nights I
hung on the bare tree, my side pierced with a spear’s point. I swayed and blew
in the cold winds and the hot winds, without food, without water, a sacrifice
of myself to myself, and the worlds opened to me.

“For a tenth charm, I learned to dispel witches, to spin
them around in the skies so that they will never find their way back to their
own doors again.

“An eleventh: if I sing it when a battle rages it can take
warriors through the tumult unscathed and unhurt, and bring them safely back to
their hearths and their homes.

“A twelfth charm I know: if I see a hanged man I can bring
him down from the gallows to whisper to us all he remembers.

“A thirteenth: if I sprinkle water on a child’s head, that
child will not fall in battle.

“A fourteenth: I know the names of all the gods. Every
damned one of them.

“A fifteenth: I have a dream of power, of glory, and of
wisdom, and I can make people believe my dreams.”

His voice was so low now that Shadow had to strain to hear
it over the plane’s engine noise.

“A sixteenth charm I know: if I need love I can turn the
mind and heart of any woman.

“A seventeenth, that no woman I want will ever want another.

“And I know an eighteenth charm, and that charm is the greatest
of all, and that charm I can tell to no man, for a secret that no one knows but
you is the most powerful secret there can ever be.”

He sighed, and then stopped talking.

Shadow could feel his skin crawl. It was as if he had just
seen a door open to another place, somewMere worlds away where hanged men blew
in the wind at every crossroads, where witches shrieked overhead in the night.

“Laura,” was all he said.

Wednesday turned his head, stared into Shadow’s pale gray
eyes with his own. “I can’t make her live again,” he said. “I don’t even know
why she isn’t as dead as she ought to be.”

“I think I did it,” said Shadow. “It was my fault.”

Wednesday raised an eyebrow.

“Mad Sweeney gave me a golden coin, back when he showed me
how to do that trick. From what he said, he gave me the wrong coin. What he
gave me was something more powerful than what he thought he was giving me. I
passed it on to Laura.”

Wednesday grunted, lowered his chin to his chest, frowned.
Then he sat back. “That could do it,” he said. “And no, I can’t help you. What
you do in your own time is yqur own affair, of course.”

“What,” asked Shadow, “is that supposed to mean?”

“It means that I can’t stop you from hunting eagle stones
and thunderbirds. But I would infinitely prefer that you spend your days
quietly sequestered in Lakeside, out of sight, and, I hope, out of mind. When
things get hairy we’ll need all hands to the wheel.”

He looked very old as he said this, and fragile, and his
skin seemed, almost transparent, and the flesh beneath was gray.

Shadow wanted, wanted very much, to reach out and put his
hand over Wednesday’s gray hand. He wanted to tell him that everything would be
okay—something that Shadow did not feel, but that he knew had to be said. There
were men in black trains out there. There was a fat kid in a stretch limo and
there were people in the television who did not mean them well.

He did not touch Wednesday. He did not say anything.

Later, he wondered if he could have changed things, if that
gesture would have done any good, if it could have averted any of the harm that
was to come. He told himself it wouldn’t. He knew it wouldn’t. But still,
afterward, he wished that, just for a moment on that slow flight home, he had
touched Wednesday’s hand.

The brief winter daylight was already fading when Wednesday
dropped Shadow outside his apartment. The freezing temperature when Shadow
opened the car door felt even more science fictional when compared to Las
Vegas.

“Don’t get into any trouble,” said Wednesday. “Keep your
head below the parapet. Make no waves.”