American Gods (38 page)

“All at the same time?”

“Don’t get smart with me, m’boy. You can keep out of sight
in Lakeside. I pulled in a big favor to keep you here, safe and sound. If you
were in a city they’d get your scent in minutes.”

“I’ll stay put and keep out of trouble.” Shadow meant it as
he said it. He’d had a lifetime of trouble and he was ready to let it go
forever. “When are you coming back?” he asked.

“Soon,” said Wednesday, and he gunned the Lincoln’s engine,
slid up the window, and drove off into the frigid night.

Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.

—Ben Franklin,
Poor Richard’s Almanack
.

Three cold days passed. The thermometer never made it up to
the zero mark, not even at midday. Shadow wondered how people had survived this
weather in the days before electricity, before thermal face masks and
lightweight thermal underwear, before easy travel.

He was down at the video, tanning, bait and tackle store,
being shown Hinzelmann’s hand-tied trout flies. They were more interesting than
he had expected: colorful fakes of life, made of feather and thread, each with
a hook hidden inside it.

He asked Hinzelmann.

“For real?” asked Hinzelmann.

“For real,” said Shadow.

“Well,” said the older man. “Sometimes they didn’t survive
it, and they died. Leaky chimneys and badly ventilated stoves and ranges killed
as many people as the cold. But those days were hard—they’d spend the summer
and the fall laying up the food and the firewood for the winter. The worst
thing of all was the madness. I heard on the radio, they were saying how it has
to do with the sunlight, how there isn’t enough of it in the winter. My daddy,
he said folk just went stir crazy—winter madness they called it. Lakeside
always had it easy, but some of the other towns around here, they had it hard.
There was a saying still had currency when I was a kid, that if the serving
girl hadn’t tried to kill you by February she hadn’t any backbone.

“Storybooks were like gold dust—anything you could read was
treasured, back before the town had a lending library. When my grampaw got sent
a storybook from his brother in Bavaria, all the Germans in town met up in the
town hall to hear him read it, and the Finns and the Irish and the rest of
them, they’d make the Germans tell them the stories.

‘Twenty miles south of here, in Jibway, they found a woman
walking mother-naked in the winter with a dead babe at her breast, and she’d
not suffer them to take it from her.” He shook his head meditatively, closed
the fly cabinet with a click. “Bad business. You want a video rental card?
Eventually they’ll open a Blockbusters here, and then we’ll soon be out of business.
But for now we got a pretty fair selection.”

Shadow reminded Hinzelmann that he had no television, and no
VCR. He enjoyed Hinzelmann’s cotftpany—the reminiscences, the tall tales, the
goblin grin ofthe old man. It could make things awkward between them were
Shadow to admit that television had made him uncomfortable ever since it had
started to talk to him.

Hinzelmann fished in a drawer, «id took out a tin box—by the
look of it, it had once been a Christmas box, of the kind that contained
chocolates or cookies: a mottled Santa Claus, holding a tray of Coca-Cola
bottles, beamed up from its lid. Hinzelmann eased off the metal top of the box,
revealing a notebook and books of blank tickets, and said, “How many you want
me to put you down for?”

“How many of what?”

“Klunker tickets. She’ll go out onto the ice today, so we’ve
started selling tickets. Each ticket is five dollars, ten for forty, twenty for
seventy-five. One ticket buys you five minutes. Of course we can’t promise it’ll
go down in your five minutes, but the person who’s closest stands to win five
hundred bucks, and if it goes down in your five minutes, you win a thousand
dollars. The earlier you buy your tickets, the more times aren’t spoken for.
You want to see the info sheet?”

“Sure.”

Hinzelmann handed Shadow a photocopied sheet. The klunker
was an old car with its engine and fuel tank removed, which would be parked out
on the ice for the winter. Sometime in the spring the lake ice would melt, and
when it was too thin to bear the car’s weight the car would fall into the lake.
The earliest the klunker had ever tumbled into the lake was February the
twenty-seventh (“That was the winter of 1998.1 don’t think you could rightly
call that a winter at all”), the latest was May the first (“That was 1950.
Seemed that year that the only way that winter would end was if somebody
hammered a stake through its heart”). The beginning of April appeared to be the
most common time for the car to sink—normally in midafternoon.

All of the midafternoons in April had already gone, marked
off in Hinzelmann’s lined notebook. Shadow bought a thirty-minute period on the
morning of March 23, from 9:00 A.M. to 9:30 A.M. He handed Hinzelmann thirty
dollars.

“I just wish everybody in town was as easy a sell as you
are,” said Hinzelmann.

“It’s a thank-you for that ride you gave me that first night
I was in town.”

“No, Mike,” said Hinzelmann. “It’s for the children.” For a
moment he looked serious, with no trace of impishness on his creased old face. “Come
down this afternoon, you can lend a hand pushing the klunker out onto the lake.”

He passed Shadow six blue cards, each with a date and time
written on it in Hinzelmann’s old-fashioned handwriting, then entered the
details of each in his notebook.

“Hinzelmann,” asked Shadow. “Have you ever heard of eagle
stones?”

“Up north of Rhinelander? Nope, that’s Eagle River. Can’t
say I have.”

“How about thunderbirds?”

“Well, there was the Thunderbird Framing Gallery up on Fifth
Street, but that closed down. I’m not helping, am I?”

“Nope.”

“Tell you what, why don’t you go look at the library. Good
people, although they may be kind of distracted by the library sale on this
week. I showed you where the library was, didn’t I?”

Shadow nodded, and said so long. He wished he’d thought of
the library himself. He got into the purple 4-Runner and drove south on Main
Street, following the lake around to the southernmost point, until he reached
the castlelike building that housed the city library. He walked inside. A sign
pointed to the basement: LIBRARY SALE, it read. Thg library proper was on the
ground floor, and he stamped the snow off his boots. ,

A forbidding woman with pursed, crimson-colored lips asked
him pointedly if she could help him.

“I guess I need a library card,” he said. “And I want to
know all about thunderbirds.”

Native American Beliefs and Traditions were on a single
shelf in one castlelike turret. Shadow pulled down some books and sat in the
window seat: In several minutes he had learned that thunderbirds were mythical
gigantic birds who lived on mountaintops, who brought the lightning and who
flapped their wings to make the thunder. There were some tribes, he read, who
believed that the thunderbirds had made the world. Another half hour’s reading
did not turn up anything more, and he could,find no mention of eagle stones
anywhere in the books’ indexes.

Shadow was putting the last of the books back on the shelf
when he became aware of somebody staring at him. Someone small and grave was
peeking at him from around the heavy shelves. As he turned to look, the face
vanished. He turned his back on the boy, then glanced around to see that he was
being watched once more.

In his pocket was the Liberty dollar. He took it out of his
pocket and held it up in his right hand, making sure the boy could see it. He
finger-palmed it into his left hand, displayed both hands empty, raised his
left hand to his mouth and coughed once, letting the coin tumble from his left
hand into his right.

The boy looked at him wide-eyed and scampered away, returning
a few moments later, dragging an unsmiling Marguerite Olsen, who looked at
Shadow suspiciously and said, “Hello, Mister Ainsel. Leon says you were doing
magic for him.”

“Just a little prestidigitation, ma’am. Say, I never did say
thank you for your advice about heating the apartment. It’s warm as toast in
there right now.”

“That’s good.” Her icy expression had not begun to thaw.

“It’s a lovely library,” said Shadow.

“It’s a beautiful building. But the city needs something
more efficient and less beautiful. You going to the library sale downstairs?”

“I wasn’t planning on it.”

“Well, you should. It’s for a good cause.”

“I’ll make a point of getting down there.”

“Head out into the hall and then go downstairs. Good seeing
you, Mister Ainsel.”

“Call me Mike,” he said.

She said nothing, just took Leon’s hand and walked the boy
over to the children’s section.

“But Mom;” Shadow heard Leon say, “It wasn’t pressed igitation.
It wasn ‘t. I saw it vanish and then it fell out of his nose. I saw it.”

An oil portrait of Abraham Lincoln gazed down from the wall
at him. Shadow walked down the marble and oak steps to the library basement,
through a door into a large room filled with tables, each table covered with
books of all kinds, indiscriminately assorted and promiscuously arranged:
paperbacks and hardcovers, fiction and nonfiction, periodicals and
encyclopedias all side by side upon the tables, spines up or spines out.

Shadow wandered to the back of the room where there was a
table covered with old-looking leather-bound books, each with a catalog number
painted in white on the spine. “You’re the first person over in that corner all
day,” said the man sitting by the stack of empty boxes and bags and the small,
open metal cashbox. “Mostly folk just take the thrillers and the children’s
books and the Harlequin romances. Jenny Kerton, Danielle Steel, all that.” The
man was reading Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. “Everything on
the tables is fifty cents a book, or you can take three for a dollar.”

Shadow thanked him and continued to browse. He found a copy
of Herodotus’s Histories bound in’-peeling brown leather. It made him think of
the paperbadc”cbpy he had left behind in prison. There was a book called
Perplexing Parlour Illusions, which looked like it might have some coin
effects. He carried both the books over to the man with the cashbox.

“Buy one more, it’s still a dollar,” said the man. “And if
you take another book away, you’ll be doing us a favor. We need the
shelf-space.”

Shadow walked back to the old leather-bound books. He decided
to liberate the book that was least likely to be bought by anyone else, and
found himself unable to decide between Common Diseases of the Urinary Tract
with Illustrations by a Medical Doctor and Minutes of the Lakeside City Council
1872-1884. He looked at the illustrations in the medical book and decided that
somewhere in the town there was a teenage boy who could use the book to gross
out his friends. He took the Minutes to the man on the door, who took his
dollar and put all the books into a Dave’s Finest Food brown paper sack.

Shadow left the library. He had a clear view of the lake,
all the way back. He could even see his apartment building, like a dolL’s
house, up past the bridge. And there were men on the ice near the bridge, four
or five of them, pushing a dark green car into the center of the white lake.

“March the twenty-third,” Shadow said to the lake, under his
breath. “Nine A.M. to nine-thirty A.M.” He wondered if the lake or the klunker
could hear him—and if they would pay any attention to him, even if they could.
He doubted it.

The wind blew bitter against his face.

Officer Chad Mulligan was waiting outside Shadow’s apartment
when he got back. Shadow’s heart began to pound when he saw the police car, to
relax a little when he observed that the policeman was doing paperwork in the front
seat.

He walked over to the car, carrying his paper sack of books.

Mulligan lowered his window. “Library sale?” he said.

“Yes.”

“I bought a box of Robert Ludlum books there two, three
years back. Keep meaning to read them. My cousin swears by the guy. These days
I figure if I ever get marooned on a desert island and I got my box of Robert
Ludlum books with me, I can catch up on my reading.”

“Something particular I can do for you, Chief?”

“Not a darn thing, pal. Thought I’d stop by and see how you
were settling in. You remember that Chinese saying, you save a man’s life, you’re
responsible for him. Well, I’m not saying I saved your life last week. But I
still thought I should check in. How’s the Purple Gunther-mobile doing?”

“Good,” said Shadow. “It’s good. Running fine.”

“Pleased to hear it.”

“I saw my next-door neighbor in the library,” said Shadow. “Miz
Olsen. I was wondering ...”

“What crawled up her butt and died?”

“If you want to put it like that.”

“Long story. You want to ride along for a spell, I’ll tell
you all about it.”

Shadow thought about it for a moment. “Okay,” he said. He
got into the car, sat in the front passenger seat. Mulligan drove north of
town. Then he turned off his lights and parked beside the road.

“Darren Olsen met Marge at U.W. Stevens Point and he brought
her back north to Lakeside. She was a journalism major. He was studying, shit,
hotel management, something like that. When they got here, jaws dropped. This
was, what, thirteen, fourteen years ago. She was so beautiful ... that black
hair ...” he paused. “Darren managed the Motel America over in Camden, twenty
miles west of here. Except nobody ever seemed to want to stop in Camden and
eventually the motel closed. They had two boys. At that time Sandy was eleven.
The little one—Leon, is it?—was just a babe in arms.

“Darren Olsen wasn’t a brave man. He’d’Been a good high
school football player, but that was the last time he was flying high.
Whatever. He couldn’t find the courage to tell Margie that he’d lost his job.
So for a month, maybe for two months, he’d drive off early in the morning, come
home late in the evening complaining about the hard day he’d had at the motel.”