American Gods (39 page)

“What was he doing?” asked Shadow.

“Mm. Couldn’t say for certain. I reckon he was driving up to
Ironwood, maybe down to Green Bay. Guess he started out as a job hunter. Pretty
soon he was drinking the time away, getting stoned, more than probably meeting
the occasional working girl for a little instant gratification. He could have
been gambling. What I do know for certain is that he emptied out their joint
account in about ten weeks. It was only a matter of time before Margie figured
out—there we go!”

He swung the car out, flicked on the siren and the lights,
and scared the daylights but of a small man in a car with Iowa plates who had
just come down the hill at seventy.

The rogue lowan ticketed, Mulligan returned to his story.

“Where was I? Okay. So Margie kicks him out, sues for divorce.
It turned into a vicious custody battle. That’s what they call ‘em when they
get into People magazine. Vicious Custody Battle. She got the kids. Barren got
visitation rights and precious little else. Now, back then Leon was pretty
small. Sandy was older, a good kid, the kind of boy who worships his daddy.
Wouldn’t let Margie say nothing bad about him. They lost the house—had a nice
place down on Daniels Road. She moved into the apartment. He left town. Came
back every six months to make everybody miserable.

“This went on for a few years. He’d come back, spend money
on the kids, leave Margie in tears. Most of us just started wishing he’d never
come back at all. His mom and pop had moved to Florida when they retired, said
they couldn’t take another Wisconsin winter. So last year he came out, said he
wanted to take the boys to Florida for Christmas. Margie said not a hope, told
him to get lost. It got pretty unpleasant—at one point I had to go over there.
Domestic dispute. By the time I got there Darren was standing in the front yard
shouting stuff, the boys were barely holding it together, Margie was crying.

“I told Darren he was shaping up for a night in the cells. I
thought for a moment he was going to hit me, but he was sober enough not to do
that. I gave him a ride down to the trailer park south of town, told him to
shape up. That he’d hurt her enough ... Next day he left town.

“Two weeks later, Sandy vanished. Didn’t get onto the school
bus. Told his best friend that he’d be seeing his dad soon, that Darren was
bringing him a specially cool present to make up for having missed Christmas in
Florida. Nobody’s seen him since. Noncustodial kidnappings are the hardest. It’s
tough to find a kid who doesn’t want to be found, y’see?”

Shadow said that he did. He saw something else as well. Chad
Mulligan was in love with Marguerite Olsen himself. He wondered if the man knew
how obvious it was.

Mulligan pulled out once more, lights flashing, and pulled
over some teenagers doing sixty. He didn’t ticket them, “just put the fear of
God in them.”

That evening Shadow sat at the kitchen table trying to
figure out how to transform a silver dollar into a penny. It was a trick he had
found in Perplexing Parlour Illusions, but the instructions were infuriating,
unhelpful and vague. Phrases like “then vanish the penny in the usual way,”
occurred every sentence or so. In this context, Shadow wondered, what was “the
usual way”? A French drop? Sleeving it? Shouting “Oh my god, look out! A
mountain lion!” and dropping the coin into his side pocket while the audience’s
attention was diverted?

He tossed his silver dollar into the air, caught
it,-r$mem-bering the moon and the woman who gave it to himrthen he attempted
the illusion. It didn’t seem to work. He walked into the bathroom and tried it
in front of the mirror, and confirmed that he was right. The trick as written
simply didn’t work. He sighed, dropped the coins in his pocket and sat down on
the couch. He spread the cheap throw rug over his legs and flipped open the
Minutes of the Lakeside City Council 1872-1884. The type, in two columns, was
so small as to be almost unreadable. He flipped through the book, looking at
the reproductions of the photographs of the period, at the several incarnations
of the Lakeside City Council therein: long side whiskers and clay pipes and
battered hats and shiny hats, worn with faces that were, many of them,
peculiarly familiar. He was unsurprised to see that the portly secretary of the
1882 city council was a Patrick Mulligan: shave him, make him lose twenty
pounds and he’d be a dead ringer for Chad Mulligan, his—what, great-great-grandson?
He wondered if Hinzelmann’s pioneer grandfather was in the photographs, but it
did not appear that he had been city council material. Shadow thought he had
seen a reference to a Hinzelmann in the text, while flipping from photograph to
photograph, but it eluded him when he leafed back for it, and the tiny type
made Shadow’s eyes ache.

He put the book down on his chest and realized his head was
nodding. It would be foolish to fall asleep on the couch, he decided soberly.
The bedroom was only a few feet away. On the other hand, the bedroom and the
bed would still be there in five minutes, and anyway, he was not going to go to
sleep, only to close his eyes for a moment ...

Darkness roared.

He stood on an open plain. Beside him was the place from which
he had once emerged, from which the earth had squeezed him. Stars were still
falling from the sky and each star that touched the red earth became a man or a
woman. The men had long black hair and high cheekbones. The women all looked
like Marguerite Olsen. These were the star people.

They looked at him with dark, proud eyes.

“Tell me about the thunderbirds,” said Shadow. “Please. It’s
not for me. It’s for my wife.”

One by one they turned their backs on him, and as he lost
their faces they were gone, one with the landscape. But the last of them, her
hair streaked white on dark gray, pointed before she turned away, pointed into
the wine-colored sky.

“Ask them yourself,” she said. Summer lightning flickered,
momentarily illuminating the landscape from horizon to horizon.

There were high rocks near him, peaks and spires of
sandstone, and Shadow began to climb the nearest. The spire was the color of
old ivory. He grabbed at a handhold and felt it slice into his hand. It’s bone,
thought Shadow. Not stone. It’s old dry bone.

It was a dream, and in dreams you have no choices: either
there are no decisions to be made, or they were made for you long before ever
the dream began. Shadow continued to climb. His hands hurt. Bone popped and
crushed and fragmented under his bare feet. The wind tugged at him, and he
pressed himself to the spire, and he continued to climb the tower.

It was made of only one kind of bone, he realized, repeated
over and over. Each of the bones was dry and ball-like. He imagined that they
might be the eggshells of some huge bird. But another flare of lightning told
him differently: they had holes for eyes, and they had teeth, which grinned
without humor.

Somewhere birds were calling. Rain spattered his face.

He was hundreds of feet above the ground, clinging to the
side of the tower of skulls, while flashes of lightning burned in the wings of
the shadowy bird$ who circled the spire—enormous, black, condorlike birds, each’
with a ruff of white at its neck. They were huge, graceful birds, and the beats
of their wings crashed like thunder on the night air.

They were circling the spire.

They must be fifteen, twenty feet from wingtip to wingtip,
thought Shadow.

Then the first bird swung out of its glide toward him, blue
lightning crackling in its wings. He pushed himself into a crevice of skulls,
hollow eye-holes stared at him, a clutter of ivory teeth smiled at him, but he
kept climbing, pulling himself up the mountain of skulls, every sharp edge
cutting into his skin, feeling revulsion and terror and awe.

Another bird came at him, and one hand-sized talon sank into
his arm.

He reached out and tried to grasp a feather from its wing—for
if he returned to his tribe without athunderbird’s feather he would be
disgraced, he would never be a man—but the bird pulled up, so that he could not
grasp a feather. The thunderbird loosened its grip and swung back onto the
wind. Shadow continued to climb.

There must be a thousand skulls, thought Shadow. A thousand
thousand. And not all of them are human. He stood at last on the top of the
spire, the great birds, the thunderbirds, circling him slowly, navigating the
gusts of the storm with tiny flicks of their wings.

He heard a voice, the voice of the buffalo man, calling to
him on the wind, telling him who the skulls belonged to ...

The tower began to tumble, and the biggest bird, its eyes
the blinding blue-white of forked lightning, plummeted down toward him in a
rush of thunder, and Shadow was falling, tumbling down the tower of skulls ...

The telephone shrilled. Shadow had not even known that it
was connected. Groggy, shaken, he picked it up.

“What the fuck,” shouted Wednesday, angrier than Shadow had
ever heard him, “what the almighty flying fuck do you think you are playing at?”

“I was asleep,” said Shadow into the receiver, stupidly.

“What do you think is the fucking point of stashing you in a
hiding place like Lakeside, if you’re going to raise such a ruckus that not
even a dead man could miss it?”

“I dreamed of thunderbirds ...” said Shadow. “And a tower.
Skulls ...” It seemed to him very important to recount his dream.

“I know what you were dreaming. Everybody damn well knows
what you were dreaming. Christ almighty. What’s the point in hiding you, if you’re
going to start to rucking advertise?”

Shadow said nothing.

There was a pause at the other end of the telephone. “I’ll
be there in the morning,” said Wednesday. It sounded like the anger had died
down. “We’re going to San Francisco. The flowers in your hair are optional.”
And the line went dead.

Shadow put the telephone down on the carpet, and sat up,
stiffly. It was 6:00 A.M. and still night-dark outside. He got up from the
sofa, shivering. He could hear the wind as it screamed across the frozen lake.
And he could hear somebody nearby crying, only the thickness of a wall away. He
was certain it was Marguerite Olsen, and her sobbing was insistent and low and
heartbreaking.

Shadow walked into the bathroom and pissed, then went into
his bedroom and closed the door, blocking off the sound of the crying woman.
Outside the wind howled and wailed as if it, too, was seeking a lost child.

San Francisco in January was unseasonably warm, warm enough
that the sweat prickled on the back of Shadow’s neck. Wednesday was wearing a
deep blue suit, and a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles that made him look like an
entertainment lawyer.

They were walking along Haight Street. The ‘street people
and the hustlers and the moochers watched’tfiem go by, and no one shook a paper
cup of change at them, no one asked them for anything at all.

Wednesday’s jaw was set. Shadow had sejn immediately that
the man was still angry, and had asked no questions when the black Lincoln Town
Car had pulled up outside the apartment that morning. They had not talked on
the way to the airport. He had been relieved that Wednesday was in first class
and he was back in coach.

Now it was late in the afternoon. Shadow, who had not been
in San Francisco since he was a boy, who had only seen it since then as a
background to movies, was astonished at how familiar it was, how colorful and
unique the wooden houses, how steep the hills, how very much it didn’t feel
like anywhere else.

j k.

“It’s almost hard to believe that this is in the same
country as Lakeside,” he said.

Wednesday glared at him. Then he said, “It’s not. San Francisco
isn’t in the same country as Lakeside anymore than New Orleans is in the same
country as New York or Miami is in the same country as Minneapolis.” ».

“Is that so?” said Shadow, mildly.

“Indeed it is. They may share certain cultural signifiers—money,
a federal government, entertainment—it’s the same land, obviously—but the only
things that give it the illusion of being one country are the greenback, The
Tonight Show, and McDonald’s.” They were approaching a park at the end of the
road. “Be nice to the lady we are visiting. But not too nice.”

“I’ll be cool,” said Shadow.

They stepped onto the grass.

A young girl, no older than fourteen, her hair dyed green
and orange and pink, stared at them as they went by. She sat beside a dog, a
mongrel, with a piece of string for a collar and a leash. She looked hungrier
than the dog did. The dog yapped at them, then wagged its tail.

Shadow gave the girl a dollar bill. She stared at it as if
she was not sure what it was. “Buy dog food with it,” Shadow suggested. She nodded,
and smiled.

“Let me put it bluntly,” said Wednesday. “You must be very
cautious around the lady we are visiting. She might take a fancy to you, and
that would be bad.”

“Is she your girlfriend or something?”

“Not for all the little plastic toys in China,” said
Wednesday, agreeably. His anger seemed to have dissipated, or perhaps to have
been invested for the future. Shadow suspected that anger was the engine that
made Wednesday run.

There was a woman sitting on the grass, under a tree, with a
paper tablecloth spread in front of her, and a variety of Tupperware dishes on
the cloth.

She was—not fat, no, far from fat: what she was, a word that
Shadow had never had cause to use until now, was curvaceous. Her hair was so
fair that it was white, the kind of platinum-blonde tresses that should have
belonged to a long-dead movie starlet, her lips were painted crimson, and she
looked to be somewhere between twenty-five and fifty.

As they reached her she was selecting from a plate of
deviled eggs. She looked up as Wednesday approached her, put down the egg she
had chosen, and wiped her hand. “Hello, you old fraud,” she said, but she
smiled as she said it, and Wednesday bowed low, took her hand, and raised it to
his lips.