American Gods (46 page)

“To believe.”

“Good advice. Are you going to follow it?”

“Kind of. I guess.” They were talking without words, without
mouths, without sound. Shadow wondered if, for the other two men in the room,
they were standing, unmov-ing, for a heartbeat or for a fraction of a
heartbeat.

“When you find your tribe, come back and see me,” said
Whiskey Jack. “I can help.”

“I shall.”

Whiskey Jack lowered his hand. Then he turned to Wednesday. “Are
you going to fetch your Ho Chunk?”

“My what?”

“Ho Chunk. It’s what the Winnebago call themselves.”

Wednesday shook his head. “It’s too risky. Retrieving it
could be problematic. They’ll be looking for it.”

“Is it stolen?”

Wednesday looked affronted. “Not a bit of it. The papers are
in the glove compartment.”

“And the keys?”

“I’ve got them,” said Shadow.

“My nephew, Harry Bluejay, has an ‘81 Buick. Why don’t you
give me the keys to your camper? You can take his car.”

Wednesday bristled. “What kind of trade is that?”

Whiskey Jack shrugged. “You know how hard it will be to
bring back your camper from where you abandoned it? I’m doing you a favor. Take
it or leave it. I don’t care.” He closed his knife-wound mouth.

Wednesday looked angry, and then the anger became rue, and
he said, “Shadow, give the man the keys to the Winnebago.” Shadow passed the
car keys to Whiskey Jack.

“Johnny,” said Whiskey Jack, “will you take these men down
to find Harry Bluejay? Tell him I said, feriiim to give them his car.”

“Be my pleasure,” said John Chapman.’

He got up and walked to the door, picked up a small burlap
sack sitting next to it, opened the door, and walked outside. Shadow and
Wednesday followed him. Whiskey Jack waited in the doorway. “Hey,” he said to
Wednesday. “Don’t come back here, you. You are not welcome.”

Wednesday extended his finger heavenward. “Rotate on this,”
he said affably.

They walked downhill through the snow, pushing their way
through the drifts. Chapman walked in front, his bare feet red against the
crust-topped snow. “Aren’t you cold?” asked Shadow.

“My wife was Choctaw,” said Chapman.

“And she taught you mystical ways to keep out the cold?”

“Nope. She thought I was crazy,” said Chapman. “She used t’say,
‘Johnny, why don’t you jes’ put on boots?’ “ The slope of the hill became
steeper, and they were forced to stop talking. The three men stumbled and
slipped on the snow, using the trunks of birch trees on the hillside to steady
themselves, and to stop themselves from falling. When the ground became
slightly more level, Chapman said, “She’s dead now, a’course. When she died I
guess maybe I went a mite crazy. It could happen to anyone. It could happen to
you.” He clapped Shadow on the arm. “By Jesus and Jehosophat, you’re a big man.”

“So they tell me,” said Shadow.

They trudged down that hill for about half an hour, until
they reached the gravel road that wound around the base of it, and the three
men began to walk along it, toward the cluster of buildings they had seen from
high on the hill.

A car slowed and stopped. The woman driving it reached over,
wound down the passenger window, and said, “You bozos need a ride?”

“You are very gracious, madam,” said Wednesday. “We’re looking
for a Mister Harry Bluejay.”

“He’ll be down at the rec hall,” said the woman. She was in
her forties, Shadow guessed. “Get in.”

They got in. Wednesday took the passenger seat, John Chapman
and Shadow climbed into the back. Shadow’s legs were too long to sit in the
back comfortably, but he did the best he could. The car jolted forward, down
the gravel road.

“So where did you three come from?” asked the driver.

“Just visiting with a friend,” said Wednesday.

“Lives on the hill back there,” said Shadow.

“What hill?” she asked.

Shadow looked back through the dusty rear window, looking
back at the hill. But there was no high hill back there; nothing but clouds on
the plains.

“Whiskey Jack,” he said.

“Ah,” she said. “We call him Inktomi here. I think it’s the
same guy. My grandfather used to tell some pretty good stories about him. Of
course, all the best of them were kind of dirty.” They hit a bump in the road,
and the woman swore. “You okay back there?”

“Yes ma’am,” said Johnny Chapman. He was holding onto the
backseat with both hands.

“Rez roads,” she said. “You get used to them.”

“Are they all like this?” asked Shadow.

“Pretty much,” said the woman. “All the ones around here.
And don’t you go asking about all the money from casinos, because who in their
right mind wants to come all the way out here to go to a casino? We don’t see
none of that money out here.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.” She changed gear with a crash and a groan. “You
know the white population all around here is falling? You go out there, you find
ghost towns. How you going to keep them down on the farm, after they seen the
world on their television screens? And it’s not worth-jcnyone’s while to farm
the Badlands anyhow. They tookourtands, they settled here, now they’re leaving.
They go south. They go west. Maybe if we wait for enough of them to move to New
York and Miami and L.A. we can take thf whole of the middle back without a
fight.”

“Good luck,” said Shadow.

They found Harry Bluejay in the rec hall, at the pool table,
doing trick shots to impress a group of several girls. He had a blue jay
tattooed on the back of his right hand, and multiple piercings in his right
ear.

“Ho hoka, Harry Bluejay,” said John Chapman.

“Fuck off, you crazy barefoot white ghost,” said Harry
Bluejay, conversationally. “You give me the creeps.”

There were older men at the far end of the room, some of
them playing cards, some of them talking. There were other men, younger men of
about Harry Bluejay’s age, waiting for their turn at the pool table. It was a
full-sized pool table, and a rip in the green baize on one side had been
repaired with silver-gray duct tape.

“I got a message from your uncle,” said Chapman, un-fazed. “He
says you’re to give these two your car.”

There must have been thirty, maybe even forty people in that
hall, and now they were every one of them looking intently at their playing
cards, or their feet, or their fingernails, and pretending as hard as they
could not to be listening.

“He’s not my uncle.”

A cigarette-smoke fug hung over the hall. Chapman smiled
widely, displaying the worst set of teeth that Shadow had seen in a human
mouth. “You want to tell your uncle that? He says you’re the only reason he
stays among the Lakota.”

“Whiskey Jack says a lot of things,” said Harry Bluejay, petulantly.
But he did not say Whiskey Jack either. It sounded almost the same, to Shadow’s
ear, but not quite: Wisakedjak, he thought. That’s what they’re saying. Not
Whiskey Jack at all.

Shadow said, “Yeah. And one of the things he said was that
we’re trading our Winnebago for your Buick.”

“I don’t see a Winnebago.”

“He’ll bring you the Winnebago,” said John Chapman. “You
know he will.”

Harry Bluejay attempted a trick shot and missed. His hand
was not steady enough. “I’m not the old fox’s nephew,” said Harry Bluejay. “I
wish he wouldn’t say that to people.”

“Better a live fox than a dead wolf,” said Wednesday, in a
voice so deep it was almost a growl. “Now, will you sell us your car?”

Harry Bluejay shivered, visibly and violently. “Sure,” he
said. “Sure. I was only kidding. I kid a lot, me.” He put down the pool cue on
the pool table, and took a thick jacket, pulling it out from a cluster of
similar jackets hanging from pegs by the door. “Let me get my shit out of the
car first,” he said.

He kept darting glances at Wednesday, as if he were
concerned that the older man were about to explode.

Harry Bluejay’s car was parked a hundred yards away. As they
walked toward it, they passed a small whitewashed Catholic church, and a man in
a priest’s collar who stared at them from the doorway as they went past. He was
sucking on a cigarette as if he did not enjoy smoking it.

“Good day to you, father!” called Johnny Chapman, but the
man in the collar made no reply; he crushed his cigarette under his heel,
picked up the butt and dropped it into the bin beside the door, and went
inside.

Harry Bluejay’s car was missing its wing mirrors, and its
tires were the baldest Shadow had ever seen: perfectly smooth black rubber.
Harry Bluejay told them the car drank oil, but as long as you kept pouring oil
in, it would just keep running forever, unless it stopped.

Harry Bluejay filled a black garbage bag. with shit from the
car (said shit including several
stirewSp
bottles of cheap
beer, unfinished, a small packet of cannabis resin wrapped in silver foil and
badly hidden in the car’s ashtray, a skunk tail, two dozen country-and-western
cassettes and a battered, yellowing copy of
Stranger in a Strange Land
).
“Sorry I was jerking your chain before,” said Harry Bluejay to Wednesday,
passing him the car keys. “You know when I’ll get the Winnebago?”

“Ask your uncle. He’s the fucking used-car dealer,” growled
Wednesday.

“Wisakedjak is not my uncle,” said Harry Bluejay. He took
his black garbage bag and went into the nearest house, and closed the door
behind him.

They dropped Johnny Chapman in Sioux Falls, outside a
whole-food store. Wednesday said nothing on the drive. He was in a black sulk,
as he had been since they left Whiskey Jack’s place.

In a family restaurant just outside St. Paul, Shadow picked
up a newspaper someone else had put down. He looked at it once, then again,
then he showed it to Wednesday,

“Look at that,” said Shadow.

Wednesday sighed, and looked down at the paper. “I am,” he
said, “delighted that the air-traffic controllers’ dispute has been resolved
without recourse to industrial action.”

“Not that,” said Shadow. “Look. It says it’s the fourteenth
of February.”

“Happy Valentine’s Day.”

“So we set out January the what, twentieth, twenty-first. I
wasn’t keeping track of the dates, but it was the third week of January. We
were three days on the road, all told. So how is it the fourteenth of February?”

“Because we walked for almost a month,” said Wednesday. “In
the Badlands. Backstage.”

“Hell of a shortcut,” said Shadow.

Wednesday pushed the paper away. “Fucking Johnny Appleseed,
always going on about Paul Bunyan. In real life Chapman owned fourteen apple
orchards. He farmed thousands of acres. Yes, he kept pace with the western
frontier, but there’s not a story out there about him with a word of truth in
it, save that he went a little crazy once. But it doesn’t matter. Like the
newspapers used to say, if the truth isn’t big enough, you print the legend.
This country needs its legends. And even the legends don’t believe it anymore.”

“But you see it.”

“I’m a has-been. Who the fuck cares about me?”

Shadow said softly, “You’re a god.”

Wednesday looked at him sharply. He seemed to be about to
say something, and then he slumped back in his seat, and looked down at the
menu, and said, “So?”

“It’s a good thing to be a god,” said Shadow.

“Is it?” asked Wednesday, and this time it was Shadow who
looked away.

In a gas station twenty-five miles outside Lakeside, on the
wall by the rest rooms, Shadow saw a homemade photocopied notice: a
black-and-white photo of Alison McGov-ern and the handwritten question Have You
Seen Me? above it. Same yearbook photograph: smiling confidently, a girl with
rubber-band braces on her top teeth who wants to work with animals when she
grows up.

Have you seen me?

Shadow bought a Snickers bar, a bottle of water, and a copy
of the Lakeside News. The above-the-fold story, written by Marguerite Olsen,
our Lakeside Reporter, showed a photograph of a boy and an older man, out on
the frozen lake, standing by an outhouselike ice-fishing shack, and between
them they were holding a big fish. They were smiling. Father and Son Catch
Local Record Northern Pike. Full story inside.

Wednesday was driving. He said, “Read me anything interesting
you find in the paper.”

Shadow looked carefully, and he turned the pages slowly, but
he couldn’t find anything.

Wednesday dropped him off in the driveway outside his apartment.
A smoke-colored cat stared at himtfrom the driveway, then fled when he bent to
stroke it.

Shadow stopped on the wooden deck outside his apartment and
looked out at the lake, dotted here and there with green and brown ice-fishing
huts. Many of them had cars parked beside them. On the ice nearer the bridge
sat the old green klunker, just as it had sat in the newspaper. “March
twenty-third,” said Shadow, encouragingly. “Round nine-fifteen in the morning.
You can do it.”

“Not a chance,” said a woman’s voice. “April third. Six P.M.
That way the day warms up the ice.” Shadow smiled.

Marguerite Olsen was wearing a ski suit. She was at the far
end of the deck, refilling the bird feeder.

“I read your article in the Lakeside News on the Town Record
Northern Pike.”

“Exciting, huh?”

“Well, educational, maybe.”

“I thought you weren’t coming back to us,” she said. “You
were gone for a while, huh?”

“My uncle needed me,” said Shadow. “The time kind of got
away from us.”

She placed the last suet brick in its cage, and began to
fill a net sock with thistle seeds from a plastic milk jug. Several
goldfinches, olive in their winter coats, twitted impatiently from a nearby fir
tree.

“I didn’t see anything in the paper about Alison Mc-Govern.”

“There wasn’t anything to report. She’s still missing. There
was a rumor that someone had seen her in Detroit, but it turned out to be a
false alarm.”