American Gods (58 page)

There was another part of him—maybe it was Mike Ain-sel, he
thought, vanished off into nothing at the press of a button in the Lakeside
Police Department—who was still trying to figure it all out, trying to see the
big picture..

“Hidden Indians,” he said out loud.

“What?” came Czernobog’s irritated croak from the front
seat.

“The pictures you’d get to color in as kids. ‘Can you see
the hidden Indians in this picture? There are ten Indians in this picture, can
you find them all?’ And at first glance you could only see the waterfall and
the rocks and the trees, then you see that if you just tip the picture on its
side that shadow is an Indian ...” He yawned.

“Sleep,” suggested ezemobog.

“But the big picture,” said Shadow. Then he slept, and
dreamed of hiddeaindians.

The tree was in Virginia. It was a long way away from anywhere,
on the back of an old farm. To get to the farm they had had to drive for almost
an hour south from Blacksburg, to drive roads with names like Penny winkle
Branch and Rooster Spur. They got turned around twice and Mr. Nancy and
Czer-nobog both lost their tempers with Shadow and with each other.

They stopped to get directions at a tiny general store, set
at the bottom of the hill in the place where the road forked. An old man came
out of the back of the store and stared at them: he wore Oshkosh B’Gosh denim
overalls and nothing else, not even shoes. Czernobog selected a pickled hog’s
foot from a jar on the counter and went outside to eat it on the deck, while
the man in the overalls drew Mr. Nancy maps on the back of napkins, marking off
turnings and local landmarks. They set off once more, with Mr. Nancy driving,
and they were there in ten minutes. A sign on the gate said ASH.

Shadow got out of the bus and opened the gate. The bus drove
through, jolting through the meadowland. Shadow closed the gate. He walked a
little behind the bus, stretching his legs, jogging when the bus got too far in
front of him, enjoying the sensation of moving his body.

He had lost all sense of time on the drive from Kansas. Had
they been driving for two days? Three days? He did not know.

The body in the back of the bus did not seem to be rotting.
He could smell it—a faint odor of Jack Daniel’s, overlaid with something that
might have been sour honey. But the smell was not unpleasant. From time to time
he would take out the glass eye from his pocket and look at it: it was
shattered deep inside, fractured from what he imagined was the impact of a
bullet, but apart from a chip to one side of the iris the surface was unmarred.
Shadow would run it through his hands, palming it, rolling it, pushing it along
with his fingers. It was a ghastly souvenir, but oddly comforting: and he
suspected that it would have amused Wednesday to know that his eye had wound up
in Shadow’s pocket.

The farmhouse was dark and shut up. The meadows were
overgrown and seemed abandoned. The farm roof was crumbling at the back; it was
covered, in black plastic sheeting. They jolted over a ridge and Shadow saw tne
tree.

It was silver-gray and it was higher than the farmhouse. It
was the most beautiful tree Shadow had ever seen: spectral and yet utterly real
and almost perfectly symmetrical. It also looked instantly familiar: he
wondered if he had dreamed it, then realized that no, he had seen it before, or
a representation of it, many times. It was Wednesday’s silver tie pin.

The VW bus jolted and buhiped across the meadow, and came to
a stop about twenty feet from the trunk of the tree. There were three women
standing by the tree. At first glance Shadow thought that they were the Zorya,
but no, they were three women he did not know. They looked tired and bored, as
if they had been standing there for a long time. Each of them held a wooden
ladder. The biggest also carried a brown sack. They looked like a set qf
Russian dolls: a tall one—she was Shadow’s height, or even taller—a middle-sized
one, and a woman so short and hunched mat at first glance Shadow wrongly
supposed her to be a child. They looked so much alike that Shadow was certain
that the women must be sisters.

The smallest of the women dropped to a curtsy when the bus
drew up. The other two just stared. They were sharing a cigarette, and they
smoked it down to the filter before one of them stubbed it out against a root.

Czernobog opened the back of the bus and the biggest of the
women pushed past him, and, as easily as if it were a sack of flour, she lifted
Wednesday’s body out of the back and carried it to the tree. She laid it in
front of the tree, about ten feet from the tyunk. She and her sisters unwrapped
Wednesday’s body. He looked worse by daylight than he had by candlelight in the
motel room, and after one quick glance Shadow looked away. The women arranged
his clothes, tidied his suit, then placed him at the corner of the sheet and
wound it around him once more.

Then the women came over to Shadow.

—You are the one? the biggest of them asked.

—The one who will mourn the All-Father? asked the
middle-sized one.

—You have chosen to take the vigil? asked the smallest.

Shadow nodded. Afterward, he was unable to remember whether
he had actually heard their voices. Perhaps he had simply understood what they
had meant from their looks and their eyes.

Mr. Nancy, who had gone back to the house to use the bathroom,
came walking back to the tree. He was smoking a cigarillo. He looked
thoughtful.

“Shadow,” he called. “You really don’t have to do this. We
can find somebody more suited.”

“I’m doing it,” said Shadow, simply.

“And if you die?” asked Mr. Nancy. “If it kills you?”

“Then,” said Shadow, “it kills me.”

Mr. Nancy flicked his cigarillo into the meadow, angrily. “I
said you had shit for brains, and you still have shit for brains. Can’t see
when somebody’s tryin’ to give you an out?”

“I’m sorry,” said Shadow. He didn’t say anything else. Nancy
walked back to the bus.

Czernobog walked over to Shadow. He did not look pleased. “You
must come through this alive,” he said. “Come through this safely for me.” And
then he tapped his knuckle gently against Shadow’s forehead and said, “Bam!” He
squeezed Shadow’s shoulder, patted his arm, and went to join Mr. Nancy.

The biggest woman, whose name seemed to be Urtha or Urder—Shadow
could not repeat it back to. her to her satisfaction—told him, in pantomime, to
take ofE&s clothes.

“All of them?”

The big woman shrugged. Shadow stripped to his briefs and
T-shirt. The women propped the laddegs against the tree. One of the ladders—it
was painted by hind, with little flowers and leaves twining up the struts—they
pointed out to him.

He climbed the nine steps. Then, at their urging, he stepped
onto a low branch.

The middle woman tipped out the contents of the sack onto
the meadow-grass. It was filled with a tangle of thin ropes, brown with age and
dirt, and the woman began to sort them out into lengths, and to lay them
carefully on the ground beside Wednesday’s body.

They climbed their own ladders now, and they began to knot
the ropes, intricate and elegant knots, and they wrapped the ropes first about
the tree, and then about Shadow. Unembarrassed, like midwives or nurses or
those who lay out corpses, they removed his T-shirt and briefs, then they bound
him, never tightly, but firmly and finally. He was amazed at how comfortably
the ropes and the knots bore his weight. The ropes went under his arms, between
his legs, around his waist, his ankles, his chest, binding him to the tree.

The final rope was tied, loosely, about his neck. It was, initially,
uncomfortable, but his weight was well distributed, and none of the ropes cut
his flesh.

His feet were five feet above the ground. The tree was
leafless and huge, its branches black against the gray sky, its bark a smooth
silvery gray.

They took the ladders away. There was a moment of panic as
all his weight was taken by the ropes, and he dropped a few inches. Still, he
made no sound.

The women placed the body, wrapped in its motel-sheet
shroud, at the foot of the tree, and they left him there.

They left him there alone.

Hang me, O hang me, and I’ll be dead and gone,

Hang me, O hang me, and I’ll be dead and gone,

I wouldn ‘t mind the hangin’, it’s bein ‘gone so long,

It’s lyin’in the grave so long.

—Old song

The first day that Shadow hung from the tree he experienced
only discomfort that edged slowly into pain, and fear, and, occasionally, an
emotion that was somewhere between boredom and apathy: a gray acceptance, a
waiting. He hung. The wind was still. After several hours fleeting bursts of
color started to explode across his vision in blossoms of crimson and gold,
throbbing and pulsing with a life of their own.

The pain in his arms and legs became, by degrees,
intolerable. If he relaxed them, let his body go slack and dangle, if he
flopped forward, then the rope around his neck would take up the slack and the
world would shimmer and swim. So he pushed himself back against the trunk of
the tree. He could feel his heart laboring in his chest, a pounding arrhythmic
tattoo as it pumped the blood through his body ... Emeralds and sapphires and
rubies crystallized and burst in front of his eyes. His breath came in shallow
gulps. The bark of the tree was rough against his back. The chill of the afternoon
on his naked skin made him shiver, made his flesh prickle and goose.

It’s easy, said someone in the back of his head. There’s a
trick to it. You do it or you die.

He was pleased with the thought, and repeated it over and
over in the back of his head, part mantra, part nursery rhyme, rattling along
to the drumbeat of his heart.

It’s easy, there’s a trick to it, you do it or you die. It’s
easy, there’s a trick to it, you do it or you die. It’s easy, there’s a trick
to it, you do it or you die. It’s easy, there’s a trick to it, you do it or you
die.

Time passed. The chanting continued. He could hear it. Someone
was repeating the words, only stopping when Shadow’s mouth began to dry out,
when his tongue turned dry and skinlike in his mouth. He pushed himself up and
away from the tree with his feet, trying to support his weight in a way that
would still allow him to fill his lungs.

He breathed until he could hold himself up no more, and then
he fell back into the bonds, and hung from the tree.

When the chattering started—an angry, laughing chattering
noise—he closed his mouth, concerned that it was he himself making it; but the noise
continued. It’s the world laughing at me, then, thought Shadow. His head lolled
to one side. Something ran down the tree trunk beside him, stopping beside his
head; It cluttered loudly in his ear, one word, which sounded a lot like “ratatosk.”
Shadow tried to repeat it, but his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. He
turned, slowly, and stared into the gray-brown face and pointed ears of a
squirrel.

In close-up, he learned, a squirrel looks a lot less cute
than it does from a distance. The creature was ratlike and dangerous, not sweet
or charming. And its teeth looked sharp. He hoped that it would not perceive
him as a threat, or as a food source. He did not think that squirrels were carnivorous
... but then, so many things he had thought were not had turned out to be so
...

He slept.

The pain woke him several times in the next few hours. It
pulled him from a dark dream in which dead children rose and came to him, their
eyes peeling, swollen pearls, and they reproached him for failing them. A
spider edged across his face, and he woke. He shook his head, dislodging or
frightening it, and returned to his dreams—and now an elephant-headed man,
potbellied, one tusk broken, was riding toward him on the back of a huge mouse.
The elephant-headed man curled his trunk toward Shadow and said, “If you had
invoked me before you began this journey, perhaps some of your troubles might
have been avoided.” Then the elephant took the mouse, which had, by some means
that Shadow could not perceive, become tiny while not changing in size at all,
and passed it from hand to hand to hand, fingers curling about it as the little
creature scampered from palm to palm, and Shadow was not at all surprised when
the elephant-headed god finally opened all four of his hands to reveal them perfectly
empty. He shrugged arm after arm after arm in a peculiar fluid motion, and
lobk&Tat Shadow, his face unreadable.

“It’s in the trunk,” Shadow told the elephant man. He had
been watching as the flickering tail vanished.

The elephant man nodded his huge head, and said, “Yes. In
the trunk. You will forget many things. You will give many things away. You
will lose many things. But do not lose this,” and then the rain began, and
Shadow was tumbled, shivering and wet, from deep sleep into full wakeful-ness.
The shivering intensified until it scared Shadow: he was shivering more violently
than he had ever imagined possible, a series of convulsive shudders that built
upon each other. He willed himself to stop, but still he shivered, his teeth
banging together, his limbs twitching and jerking beyond his control. There was
real pain there, too, a deep, knifelike pain that covered his body with tiny,
invisible wounds, intimate and unbearable.

He opened bis mouth to catch the rain as it fell, moistening
his cracked lips and his dry tongue, wetting the ropes that bound him to the
trunk of the tree. There was a flash of lightning so bright it felt like a blow
to his eyes, transforming the world into an intense panorama of image and
afterimage. Then the thunder, a crack and a boom and a rumble, and, as the
thunder echoed, the rain redoubled. In the rain and the night the shivering
abated; the knife blades were put away. Shadow no longer felt the cold, or
rather, he felt only the cold, but the cold had how become part of himself.