American Gods (41 page)

It was 9:30 A.M. when Chief of Police Chad Mulligan knocked
on the apartment door and asked Shadow if he knew a girl named Alison McGovera.

“I don’t think so,” said Shadow, sleepily.

“This is her picture,” said Mulligan. It was a high school
photograph. Shadow recognized the person in the picture immediately: the girl
with the blue rubber-band braces on her teeth, the one who had been learning
all about the oral uses of Alka-Seltzer from her friend.

“Oh, yeah. Okay. She was on the bus when I came into town.”

“Where were you yesterday, Mister Ainsel?”

Shadow felt his world begin to spin away from him. He knew
he had nothing to feel guilty about (You’re a parole-violating felon living
under an assumed name, whispered a calm voice in his mind. Isn’t that enough?).

“San Francisco,” he said. “California. Helping my uncle transport
a four-poster bed.”

“You got any ticket stubs? Anything like thai?”

“Sure.” He had both his boarding pass stubs in his back
pocket, pulled them out. “What’s going on?”

Chad Mulligan examined the boarding passes. “Alison McGovern’s
vanished. She helped out uplat the Lakeside Humane Society. Feed animals, walk
dogs. She’d come out for a few hours after school. So. Dolly Knopf, who runs
the Humane Society, she’d always run her home when they closed up for the
night. Yesterday Alison never got there.”

“She’s vanished.”

“Yup. Her parents called us last night. Silly kid used to
hitchhike up to the Humane Society. It’s out on County W, pretty isolated. Her
parents told her not to, but this isn’t the kind of place where things happen
... people here don’t lock their doors, you know? And you can’t tell kids. So,
look at the photo again.”

Alison McGovern was smiling. The rubber bands on her teeth
in the photograph were red, not blue.

“You can honestly say you didn’t kidnap her, rape her,
murder her, anything like mat?”

“I was in San Francisco. And I wouldn’t do that shit.”

“That was what I figured, pal. So you want to come help us
look for her?”

“Me?”

“You. We’ve had the K-9 guys out this morning—nothing so
far.” He sighed. “Heck, Mike. I just hope she turns up in the Twin Cities with
some dopey boyfriend.”

“You think it’s likely?”

“I think it’s possible. You want to join the hunting party?”

Shadow remembered seeing the girl in Hennings Farm and Home
Supplies, the flash of a shy blue-braced smile, how beautiful he had known she
was going to be, one day. “I’ll come,” he said.

There were two dozen men and women waiting in the lobby of
the fire station. Shadow recognized Hinzelmann, and several other faces looked
familiar. There were police officers, and some men and women in the brown
uniforms of the Lumber County Sheriff’s department.

Chad Mulligan told them what Alison was wearing when she
vanished (a scarlet snowsuit, green gloves, blue woollen hat under the hood of
her snowsuit) and divided the volunteers into groups of three. Shadow,
Hinzelmann, and a man named Brogan comprised one of the groups. They were
reminded how short the daylight period was, told that if, God forbid, they
found Alison’s body they were not repeat not to disturb anything, just to radio
back for help, but that if she was alive they were to keep her warm until help
came.

They were dropped off out on County W. Hinzelmann, Brogan,
and Shadow walked along the edge of a frozen creek. Each group of three had
been issued a small handheld walkie-talkie before they left.

The cloud cover was low, and the world was gray. No snow had
fallen in the last thirty-six hours. Footprints stood out in the glittering
crust of the crisp snow.

Brogan looked like a retired army colonel, with his slim mustache
and white temples. He told Shadow he was a retired high school principal. “I
wasn’t getting any younger. These days I still teach a little, do the school
play—that was always the high point of the year anyhow—and now I hunt a little
and have a cabin down on Pike Lake, spend too much time there.” As they set out
Brogan said, “On the one hand, I hope we find her. On the other, if she’s going
to be found, I’d be very grateful if it was someone else who got to find her,
and not us. You know what I mean?”

Shadow knew exactly what he meant.

The three men did not talk much. They walked, looking for a
red snowsuit, or green gloves, or a blue hat, or a white body. Now and again
Brogan, who had the walkie-talkie, would check in with Chad Mulligan.

At lunchtime they sat with the rest of the Search party on a
commandeered school bus and ate hot dogs and drank hot soup. Someone pointed
out a red-tailed hawk in a bare tree, and someone else said that it looked
morejiike a falcon, but it flew away and the argument was abandoned.

Hinzelmann told them a story about his grandfather’s
trumpet, and how he tried playing it during a cold snap, and the weather was so
cold outside by the bam, where his grandfather had gone to practice, that no
music came out.

“Then after he came inside he put the trumpet down by the
woodstove to thaw. Well, the family’re all in bed that night and suddenly the
unfrozen tunes start coming out of that trumpet. Scared my grandmother so much
she nearly had kittens.”

The afternoon was endless, unfruitful, and depressing. The
daylight faded slowly: distances collapsed and the world turned indigo and the
wind blew cold enough to burn the skin on your face. When it was too dark to
continue, Mulligan radioed to them to call it off for the evening, and they
were picked up and driven back to the fire station.

In the block next to the fire station was the Buck Stops
Here Tavern, and that was where most of the searchers wound up. They were
exhausted and dispirited, talking to each other of how cold it had become, how
more than likely Alison would show up in a day or so, no idea of how much
trouble she’d caused everyone.

“You shouldn’t think badly of the town because of this,”
said Brogan. “It is a good town.”

“Lakeside,” said a trim woman whose name Shadow had forgotten,
if ever they’d been introduced, “is the best town in the North Woods. You know
how many people are unemployed in Lakeside?”

“No,” said Shadow.

“Less than twenty,” she said. “There’s over five thousand people
live in and around this town. We may not be rich, but everyone’s working. It’s
not like the mining towns up in the northeast—most of them are ghost towns now.
There were farming towns that were killed by the falling cost of milk, or the
low price of hogs. You know what the biggest cause of unnatural death is among
farmers in the Midwest?”

“Suicide?” Shadow hazarded.

She looked almost disappointed. “Yeah. That’s it. They kill
themselves.” She shook her head. Then she continued, “There are too many towns
hereabouts that only exist for the hunters and the vacationers, towns that just
take their money and send them home with their trophies and their bug bites.
Then there are the company towns, where everything’s just hunky-dory until
Wal-Mart relocates their distribution center or 3M stops manufacturing CD cases
there or whatever and suddenly there’s a boatload of folks who can’t pay their
mortgages. I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name.”

“Ainsel,” said Shadow. “Mike Ainsel.” The beer he was drinking
was a local brew, made with spring water. It was good.

“I’m Gallic Knopf,” she said. “Dolly’s sister.” Her face was
still ruddy from the cold. “So what I’m saying is that Lakeside’s lucky. We’ve
got a little of everything here—farm, light industry, tourism, crafts. Good
schools.”

Shadow looked at her in puzzlement. There was something
empty at the bottom of all her words. It was as if he were listening to a
salesman, a good salesman, who believed in his product, burstill wanted to make
sure you went home with all the brushes or the full set of encyclopedias.
Perhaps she could see it in his face. She said “I’m sorry. When you love something
you just don’t want to stop talking about it. What do you do, Mister Ainsel?”

“My uncle buys and sells antiques all over the country. He
uses me to move big, heavy things. It’s a good job, but not steady work.” A
black cat, the bar mascot, wound between Shadow’s legs, rubbing its forehead
jtfn’ his boot. It leapt up beside him onto the bench and wenfKfsleep.

“At least you get to travel,” said Brogan. “You do anything
else?”

“You got eight quarters on you?” asked (Shadow. Brogan fumbled
for his change. He found five quarters, pushed them across the table to Shadow.
Gallic Knopf produced another three quarters.

He laid out the coins, four in each row. Then, with scarcely
a fumble, he did the Coins Through the Table, appearing to drop half the coins
through the wood of the table, from his left hand into his right.

After that, he took all eight coins in his right hand, an
empty water glass in his left, covered the glass with a napkin and appeared to
make the coins vanish one by one from his right hand and land in the glass
beneath the napkin with an audible clink. Finally he opened his right hand to
show it was empty, then swept the napkin away to show the coins in the glass.

He returned their coins—three to Gallic, five to Brogan—then
took a quarter back from Brogan’s hand, leaving four coins. He blew on it, and
it was a penny, which he gave to Brogan, who counted his quarters and was
dumbfounded to find that he still had all five in his hand.

“You’re a Houdini,” cackled Hinzelmann in delight. “That’s
what you are!”

“Just an amateur,” said Shadow. “I’ve got a long way to go.”
Still, he felt a whisper of pride. They had been his first adult audience.

He stopped at the food store on the way home to buy a carton
of milk. The ginger-haired girl at the checkout counter looked familiar, and
her eyes were red-rimmed from crying. Her face was one big freckle.

“I know you,” said Shadow. “You’re—” and he was about to say
the Alka-Seltzer girl, but bit it back and finished, “you’re Alison’s friend.
From the bus. I hope she’s going to be okay.”

She sniffed and nodded. “Me too.” She blew her nose on a tissue,
hard, and pushed it back into her sleeve.

Her badge said Hi! I’M SOPHIE! ASK ME HOW YOU CAN LOSE 20
LBS. IN 30 DAYS!

“I spent today looking for her. No luck yet.”

Sophie nodded, blinked back tears. She waved the milk carton
in front of a scanner and it chirped its price at them. Shadow passed her two
dollars.

“I’m leaving this fucking town,” said the girl in a sudden,
choked voice. “I’m going to live with my mom in Ashland. Alison’s gone. Sandy
Olsen went last year. Jo Ming the year before that. What if it’s me next year?”

“I thought Sandy Olsen was taken by his father.”

“Yes,” said the girl, bitterly. “I’m sure he was. And Jo Ming
went out to California, and Sarah Lindquist got lost on a trail hike and they
never found her. Whatever.-I want to go to Ashland.”

She took a deep breath and held it for a moment. Then, unexpectedly,
she smiled at him. There was nothing insincere about that smile. It was just,
he guessed, that she had been told to smile when she gave somebody change. She
told him to have a nice day. Then she turned to the woman with the full
shopping cart behind him and began to unload and scan.

Shadow took his milk and drove away, past the gas station
and the klunker on the ice, and over the bridge and home.

1778

There was a girl, and her uncle sold her, wrote Mr. Ibis in
his perfect copperplate handwriting. That is the tale; the rest is detail.
There are accounts that, if we open our hearts to them, will cut us too deeply.
Look—here is a good man, good by his own lights and the lights of his friends:
Vt is faithful and true to his wife, he adores and lavishes attention on his
little children, he cares about his country, he does his job punctiliously, as
best he can. So, efficiently and good-naturedly, he exterminates Jews: he
appreciates the music that plays in the background to pacify them; he advises
the Jews not to forget their identification numbers as they go into the showers—many
people, he tells them, forget their numbers, and take the wrong clothes when
they come out of the showers. This calms the Jews. There will be life, they assure
themselves, after the showers. Our man supervises the detail taking the bodies
to the ovens; and if there is anything he feels bad about, it is that he still
allows the gassing of vermin to affect him. Were he a truly good man, he knows,
he would feel nothing but joy as the earth is cleansed of its pests.

There was a girl, and her uncle sold her. Put like that it
seems so simple.

No man, proclaimed Donne, is an Island, and he was wrong. If
we were not islands, we would be lost, drowned in each other’s tragedies. We
are insulated (a word that means, literally, remember, made into an island)
from the tragedy of others, by our island nature, and by the repetitive shape
and form of the stories. The shape does not change: there was a human being who
was born, lived, and then, by some means or another, died. There. You may fill
in the details from your own experience. As unoriginal as any other tale, as
unique as any other life. Lives are snowflakes—forming patterns we have seen
before, as like one another as peas in a pod (and have you ever looked at peas
in a pod? I mean, really looked at them? There’s not a chance you’d mistake one
for another, after a minute’s close inspection), but still unique.

Without individuals we see only numbers: a thousand dead, a
hundred thousand dead, “casualties may rise to a million.” With individual
stories, the statistics become people—but even that is a lie, for the people
continue to suffer in numbers that themselves are numbing and meaningless.
Look, see the child’s swollen, swollen belly, and the flies that crawl at the
corners of his eyes, his skeletal limbs: will it make it easier for you to know
his name, his age, his dreams, his fears? To see him from the inside? And if it
does, are we not doing a disservice to his sister, who lies in the searing dust
beside him, a distorted, distended caricature of a human child? And there, if
we feel for them, are they now more important to us than a thousand other
children touched by the same famine, a thousand other young lives who will soon
be food for the flies’ own myriad squirming children?