American Gods (47 page)

“Poor kid.”

Marguerite Olsen screwed the top back onto the gallon jug. “I
hope she’s dead,” she said, matter-of-factly.

Shadow was shocked. “Why?”

“Because the alternatives are worse.”

The goldfinches hopped frantically from branch to branch of
the fir tree, impatient for the people to be gone.

You aren’t thinking about Alison, thought Shadow. You’re
thinking of your son. You ‘re thinking of Sandy.

He remembered someone saying / miss Sandy. Who was that?

“Good talking to you,” he said.

“Yeah,” she said. “You too.”

February passed in a succession of short, gray days. Some
days the snow fell, most days it didn’t. The weather warmed up, and on the good
days it got above freezing. Shadow stayed in his apartment until it began to
feel like a prison cell, and then, on the days that Wednesday did not need him
to travel, he began to walk.

He would walk for much of the day, long trudges out of the
town. He walked, alone, until he reached the national forest to the north and
the west, or the cornfields and cow pastures to the south. He walked the Lumber
County Wilderness Trail, and he walked along the old railroad tracks, and he
walked the back roads. A couple of times he even walked along the frozen lake,
from north to south. Sometimes he’d see locals or winter tourists or joggers,
and he’d wave and say hi. Mostly he saw nobody at all, just crows and finches,
and a few times he spotted a hawk feasting on a roadkill possum or raccoon. On
one memorable occasion he watched an eagle snatch a silver fish from the middle
of the White Pine River, the water frozen at the edges, but still rushing and
flowing at the center. The fish wriggled and jerked in the eagle’s talons,
glittering in the midday sun; Shadow imagined the fish freeing itself and
swimming off across the sky, and he smiled, grimly.

If he walked, he discovered, he did not have to:think, and
that was just the way he liked it; when he thought, his mind went to places he
could not control, places that made him feel uncomfortable. Exhaustion was the
bei thing. When he was exhausted, his thoughts did not wander to Laura, or to
the strange dreams, or to things that were not and could not be. He would
return home from walking, and sleep without difficulty and without dreaming.

He ran into Police Chief Chad Mulligan in George’s Barber
Shop in the town square. Shadow always had high hopes for haircuts, but they
never lived up to his expectations. After every haircut he looked more or less
the same, only with shorter hair. Chad, seated in the barber’s chair beside
Shadow’s, seemed surprisingly concerned about his own appearance. When his
haircut was finished he gazed grimly at his reflection, as if he were preparing
to give it a speeding ticket.

“It looks good,” Shadow told him.

“Would it look good to you if you were a woman?”

“I guess.”

They went across the square to Mabel’s together, ordered
mugs of hot chocolate. Chad said, “Hey. Mike. Have you ever thought about a
career in law enforcement?”

Shadow shrugged. “I can’t say I have,” he said. “Seems like
there’s a whole lot of things you got to know.”

Chad shook his head. “You know the main part of police work,
somewhere like this? It’s just keeping your head. Something happens, somebody’s
screaming at you, screaming blue murder, you simply have to be able to say that
you’re sure that it’s all a mistake, and you’ll just sort it all out if they
just step outside quietly. And you have to be able to mean it.”

“And then you sort it but?”

“Mostly, that’s when you put handcuffs on them. But yeah,
you do what you can to sort it out. Let me know if you want a job. We’re
hiring. And you’re the kind of guy we want.”

“I’ll keep that in mind, if the thing with my uncle falls
through.”

They sipped their hot chocolate. Mulligan said, “Say, Mike,
what would you do if you had a cousin. Like a widow. And she started calling you?”

“Calling you how?”

“On the phone. Long distance. She lives out of state.” His
cheeks crimsoned. “I saw her last year at a family wedding. She was married,
back then, though, I mean, her husband was still alive, and she’s family. Not a
first cousin. Pretty distant.”

“You got a thing for her?”

Blush. “I don’t know about that.”

“Well then, put it another way. Does she have a thing for
you?”

“Well, she’s said a few things, when she called. She’s a
very fine-looking woman.”

“So ... what are you going to do about it?”

“I could ask her out here. I could do that, couldn’t I? She’s
kind of said she’d like to come up here.”

“You’re both adults; I’d say go for it.”

Chad nodded, and blushed, and nodded again.

The telephone in Shadow’s apartment was silent and dead. He
thought about getting it connected, but could think of no one he wanted to
call. Late one night he picked it up and listened, and was convinced that he
could hear a wind blowing and a distant conversation between a group of people
talking in voices too low to properly make out. He said, “Hello?” and “Who’s
there?” but there was no reply, only a sudden silence and then the faraway
sound of laughter, so faint he was not certain he was not imagining it.

Shadow made more journeys with Wednesday in the weeks that
followed.

He waited in the kitchen of a Rhode Island’Coltiage, and listened
while Wednesday sat in a darkened bedroom and argued with a woman who would not
get out of bed, nor would she let Wednesday or Shadow look at her face. In the
refrigerator was a plastic bag filled with crickets, and another filled with
the corpses of baby mice.

In a rock club in Seattle, Shadow watched Wednesday shout
his greeting, over the noise of the band, to a young woman with short red hair
and blue-spiral tattoos. That talk must have gone well, for Wednesday came away
from it grinning delightedly.

Five days later Shadow was waiting in the rental when
Wednesday walked, scowling, from the lobby of an office building in Dallas.
Wednesday slammed the car door when he got in, and sat there in silence, his
face red with rage. He said, “Drive.” Then he said, “Fucking Albanians. Like
anybody cares.”

Three days after that they flew to Boulder, where they had a
pleasant lunch with five young Japanese women. It was a meal of pleasantries
and politeness, and Shadow walked away from it unsure of whether anything had
been agreed to or decided. Wednesday, though, seemed happy enough.

Shadow had begun to look forward to returning to Lakeside.
There was a peace there, and a welcome, that he appreciated.

Each morning when he was not traveling he would drive across
the bridge to the town square. He would buy two pasties at Mabel’s; he would
eat one pasty then and there, and drink a coffee. If someone had left a
newspaper out he would read it, although he was never interested enough in the
news to purchase a newspaper himself.

He would pocket the second pasty, wrapped in its paper bag,
and eat it for his lunch.

He was reading USA Today one morning when Mabel said, “Hey,
Mike. Where you going today?”

The sky was pale blue. The morning mist had left the trees
covered with hoarfrost. “I don’t know,” said Shadow. “Maybe I’ll walk the
wilderness trail again.”

She refilled his coffee. “You ever gone east on County Q? It’s
kind of pretty out thataway. That’s the little road that starts acrost from the
carpet store on Twentieth Avenue.”

“No. Never have.”

“Well,” she said, “it’s kind of pretty.”

It was extremely pretty. Shadow parked his car at the edge
of town, and walked along the side of the road, a winding, country road that
curled around the hills to the east of the town. Each of the hills was covered
with leafless maple trees, bone-white birches, dark firs and pines.

At one point a small dark cat kept pace with him beside the
road. It was the color of dirt, with white forepaws. He walked over to it. It
did not run away.

“Hey cat,” said Shadow, unselfconsciously.

The cat put its head on one side, looked up at him with
emerald eyes. Then it hissed—not at him, but at something over on the side of
the road, something he could not see.

“Easy,” said Shadow. The cat stalked away across the road,
and vanished into a field of old unharvested corn.

Around the next bend in the road Shadow came upon a tiny
graveyard. The headstones were weathered, although several of them had sprays
of fresh flowers resting against them. There was no wall about the graveyard,
and no fence, only low mulberry trees, planted at the margins, bent over with
ice and age. Shadow stepped over the piled-up ice and slush at the side of the
road. There were two stone gateposts marking the entry to the graveyard,
although there was no gate between them. He walked into the graveyard between
the two posts.

He wandered around the graveyard, looking at the headstones.
There were no inscriptions later than 1969. He brushed the snow from a
solid-looking granite aiigel, and he leaned against it.

He took the paper bag from his pocket, and removed the pasty
from it. He broke off the top: it breathed a faint wisp of steam into the
wintry air. It smelled realM’ good, too. He bit into it.

Something rustled behind him. He thought for a moment it was
the cat, but then he smelled perfume, and under the perfume, the scent of
something rotten.

“Please don’t look at me,” she said, from behind him.

“Hello, Laura,” said Shadow.

Her voice was hesitant, perhaps, he thought, even a little
scared. She said, “Hello, puppy.”

He broke off some pasty. “Would you like some?” he asked.

She was standing immediately behind him, now. “No,” she
said. “You eat it. I don’t eat food anymore.”

He ate his pasty. It was good. “I want to look at you,” he
said.

“You won’t like it,” she told him.

“Please?”

She stepped around the stone angel. Shadow looked at her, in
the daylight. Some things were different and some things were the same. Her
eyes had not changed, nor had the crooked hopefulness of her smile. And she
was, very obviously, very dead. Shadow finished his pasty. He stood up and
tipped the crumbs out of the paper bag, then folded it up and put it back into
his pocket.

The time he had spent in the funeral home in Cairo made it
easier somehow for him to be in her presence. He did not know what to say to
her.

Her cold hand sought his, and he squeezed it gently. He
could feel his heart beating in his chest. He was scared, and what scared him
was the normality of the moment. He felt so comfortable with her at his side
that he would have been willing to stand there forever.

“I miss you,” he admitted.

“I’m here,” she said.

“That’s when I miss you most. When you’re here. When you
aren’t here, when you’re just a ghost from the past or a dream from another
life, it’s easier then.”

She squeezed his fingers.

“So,” he asked. “How’s death?”

“Hard,” she said. “It just keeps going.”

She rested her head on his shoulder, and it almost undid
him. He said, “You want to walk for a bit?”

“Sure.” She smiled up at him, a nervous, crooked smile in a
dead face.

They walked out of the little graveyard, and made their way
back down the road, toward the town, hand in hand. “Where have you been?” she
asked.

“Here,” he said. “Mostly.”

“Since Christmas,” she said, “I kind of lost you. Sometimes
I would know where you were, for a few hours, for a few days. You’d be all
over. Then you’d fade away again.”

“I was in this town,” he said. “Lakeside. It’s a good little
town.”

“Oh,” she said.

She no longer wore the blue suit in which she had been
buried. Now she wore several sweaters, a long, dark skirt, and high, burgundy
boots. Shadow commented on them.

Laura ducked her head. She smiled. “Aren’t they great boots?
I found them in this great shoe store in Chicago.”

“So what made you decide to come up from Chicago?”

“Oh, I’ve not been in Chicago for a while, puppy. I was heading
south. The cold was bothering me. You’d think I’d welcome it. But it’s
something to do with being dead, I guess. You don’t feel it as cold. You feel
it as a sort of nothing, and when you’re dead I guess the only thing that you’re
scared of is nothing. I was going to go to Texas. I planned to spend the winter
in Galveston. I think I used to winter in Galveston, when I was a kid.”

“I don’t think you did,” said Shadow. “YeurVe never mentioned
it before.”

“No? Maybe it was someone else, then. I don’t know. I remember
seagulls—throwing bread in the air for seagulls, hundreds of them, the whole
sky becoming nothing but seagulls as they flapped their wings and snatched the
bread from the air.” She paused. “If I didn’t see it, I guess someone else did.”

A car came around the corner. The driver waved them hello.
Shadow waved back. It felt wonderfully normal to walk with his wife.

“This feels good,” said Laura, as if she was reading his
mind.

“Yes,” said Shadow.

“When the call came I had to hurry back. I was barely into
Texas.”

“Call?”

She looked up at him. Around her neck the gold coin glinted.
“It felt like a call,” she said. “I started to think about you. About how much
I needed to see you. It was like a hunger.”

“You knew I was here, then?”

“Yes.” She stopped. She frowned, and her upper teeth pressed
into her blue lower lip, biting it gently. She put her head on one side and
said, “I did. Suddenly, I did. I thought you were calling me, but it wasn’t
you, was it?”

“No.”

“You didn’t want to see me.”

“It wasn’t that.” He hesitated. “No. I didn’t want to see
you. It hurts too much.”

The snow crunched beneath their feet and it glittered
diamonds as the sunlight caught it.