American Gods (64 page)

“And we shall fight them, and we shall kill them, every one,”
said the girl. “And we shall take their heads as trophies, and the crows shall
have their eyes and their corpses.” The dot had become a bird, its wings
outstretched, riding the gusty morning winds above them.

Easter cocked her head on one side. “Is that some hidden war
goddess knowledge?” she asked. “The whole who’s-going-to-win thing? Who gets
whose head?”

“No,” said the girl, “I can smell the battle, but that’s
all. But we’ll win. Won’t we? We have to. I saw what they did to the
All-Father. It’s them or us.”

“Yeah,” said Easter. “I suppose it is.”

The girl smiled again, in the half-light, and made her way
back to the camp. Easter put her hand down and touched a green shoot that
stabbed up from the earth like a knife blade. As she touched it it grew, and
opened, and twisted, and changed, until she was resting her hand on a green
tulip head. When the sun was high the flower would open.

Easter looked up at the hawk. “Can I help you?” she said.

The hawk circled about fifteen feet above Easter’s head,
slowly, then it glided down to her, and landed on the ground nearby. It looked
up at her with mad eyes.

“Hello, cutie,” she said. “Now, what do you really look
like, eh?”

The hawk hopped toward her, uncertainly, and then it was no
longer a hawk, but a young man. He looked at her, and then looked down at the
grass. “You?” he said. His glance went everywhere, to the grass, to the sky, to
the bushes. Not to her.

“Me,” she said. “What about me?”

“You.” He stopped. He seemed to be tryfrig”to muster his
thoughts; strange expressions flitted and swam across his face. He spent too
long a bird, she thought He has forgotten how to be a man. She waited
patiently. Eventually, he said, “Will you come with me?”

“Maybe. Where do you want me to go?”

“The man on the tree. He needs you. A ghost hurt, in his
side. The blood came, then it stopped. I think he is dead.”

“There’s a war on. I can’t just go running away.”

The naked man said nothing, just moved from one foot to another
as if he were uncertain of his weight, as if he were used to resting on the air
or on a swaying branch, not on the solid earth. Then he said, “If he is gone
forever, it is all over.”

“But the battle—”

“If he is lost, it will not matter who wins.” He looked like
he needed a blanket, and a cup of sweet coffee, and someone to take him
somewhere he could just shiver and babble until he got his mind back. He held
his arms stiffly against his sides..

“Where is this? Nearby?”

He stared at the tulip plant, and shook his head. “Way away.”

“Well,” she said, “I’m needed here. And I can’t just leave.
How do you expect me to get there? I can’t fly, like you, you know.”

“No,” said Horus, “You can’t.” Then he looked up, gravely,
and pointed to the other dot that circled them, as it dropped from the
darkening clouds, growing in size. “He can.”

Another several hours’ pointless driving, and by now Town
hated the global positioning system almost as much as he hated Shadow. There
was no passion in the hate, though. He had thought finding his way to the farm,
to the great silver ash tree, had been hard; finding his way away from the farm
was much harder. It did not seem to matter which road he took, which direction
he drove down the narrow country lanes—the twisting Virginia back roads that
must have begun, he was sure, as deer trails and cowpaths—eventually he would
find himself passing the farm once more, and the hand-painted sign, ASH.

This was crazy, wasn’t it? He simply had to retrace his way,
take a left turn for every right he had taken on his way here, a right turn for
every left.

Only that was what he had done last time, and now here he
was, back at the farm once more. There were heavy storm clouds coming in, it
was getting dark fast, it felt like night, not morning, and he had a long drive
ahead of him: he would never get to Chattanooga before afternoon at this rate.

His cell phone gave him only a No Service message. The
fold-out map in the car’s glove compartment showed the main roads, all the
interstates and the real highways, but as far as it was concerned nothing else
existed.

Nor was there anyone around that he could ask. The houses
were set back from the roads; there were no welcoming lights. Now the fuel
gauge was nudging Empty. He heard a rumble of distant thunder, and a single
drop of rain splashed heavily onto his windshield.

So when Town saw the woman, walking along the side of the
road, he found himself smiling, involuntarily. “Thank God,” he said, aloud, and
he drew up beside her. He thumbed down the window. “Ma’am? I’m sorry. I’m kind
of lost. Can you tell me how to get to Highway Eighty-one from here?”

She looked at him through the open passenger-side window and
said, “You know. I don’t think I can explain it. But I can show you, if you
like.” She was pale, and her wet hair was long and dark.

“Climb in,” said Town. He didn’t even hesitate. “First
thing, we need to buy some gas.”

“Thanks,” she said. “I needed a ride.” ,§he got in. Her eyes
were astonishingly blue. “There’s a slick here, on the seat,” she said,
puzzled.

“Just throw it in the back. Where are you heading?” he
asked. “Lady, if you can get me to a gas station, and back to a freeway, I’ll
take you all the way to your own front door.”

She said, “Thank you. But I think I’m going farther than you
are. If you can get me to the freeway, that will be fine. Maybe a trucker will
give me a ride.” And she smiled, a crooked, determined smile. It was the smile
that did it.

“Ma’am,” he said, “I can give you a finer ride than any
trucker.” He could smell her perfume. It was heady and heavy, a cloying scent,
like magnolias or lilacs, but he did not mind.

“I’m going to Georgia,” she said. “It’s a long way.”

“I’m going to Chattanooga. I’ll take you as far as I can.”

“Mm,” she said. “What’s your name?”

“They call me Mack,” said Mr. Town. When he was talking to
women in bars, he would sometimes follow that up with “And the ones that know
me really well call me Big Mack.” That could wait. With a long drive ahead of
them, they would have many hours in each other’s company to get to know each
other. “What’s yours?”

“Laura,” she told him.

“Well, Laura,” he said, “I’m sure we’re going to be great
friends.”

The fat kid found Mr. World in the Rainbow Room—a walled
section of the path, its window glass covered in clear plastic sheets of green
and red and yellow film. He was walking impatiently from window to window,
staring out, in turn, at a golden world, a red world, a green world. His hair
was reddish-orange and close-cropped to his skull. He wore a Burberry raincoat.

The fat kid coughed. Mr. World looked up.

“Excuse me? Mister World?”

“Yes? Is everything on schedule?”

The fat kid’s mouth was dry. He licked his lips, and said, “I’ve
set up everything. I don’t have confirmation on the choppers.”

“The helicopters will be here when we need them.”

“Good,” said the fat kid. “Good.” He stood there, not saying
anything, not going away. There was a bruise on his forehead.

After a while Mr. World said, “Is there anything else I can
do for you?”

A pause. The boy swallowed and nodded. “Something else,” he
said. “Yes.”

“Would you feel more comfortable discussing it in private?”

The boy nodded again.

Mr. World walked with the kid back to his operations center:
a damp cave containing a diorama of drunken pixies making moonshine with a
still. A sign outside warned tourists away during renovations. The two men sat
down on plastic chairs.

“How can I help you?” asked Mr. World.

“Yes. Okay. Right, two things, Okay. One. What are we waiting
for? And two. Two is harder. Look. We have the guns. Right. We have the
firepower. They have. They have fucking swords and knives and fucking hammers
and stone axes. And like, tire irons. We have fucking smart bombs.”

“Which we will not be using,” pointed out the other man.

“I know that. You said that already. I know that. And that’s
doable. But. Look, ever since I did the job on that bitch in L.A., I’ve been
...” He stopped, made a face, seemed unwilling to go on.

“You’ve been troubled?”

“Yes. Good word. Troubled. Yes. Like a home for troubled
teens. Funny. Yes.”

“And what exactly is troubling you?”

“Well, we fight, we win.”

“And that is a source of trouble? I find it a matter of
triumph and delight, myself.”

“But. They’ll die out anyway. They are passenger pigeons and
thylacines. Yes? Who cares? This way, it’s going to be a bloodbath.”

“Ah.” Mr. World nodded.

He was following. That was good. The fat kid said, “Look, I’m
not the only one who feels this way. I’ve checked with the crew at Radio Modern,
and they’re all for settling this peacefully; and the intangibles are pretty
much in favor of letting market forces take care of it. I’m being. You know.
The voice of reason here.”

“You are indeed. Unfortunately, there is information you do
not have.” The smile that followed was twisted and scarred.

The boy blinked. He said, “Mister World? What happened to
your lips?”

World sighed. “The truth of the matter,” he said, “i$ that
somebody once sewed them together. A long time ago.”

“Whoa,” said the fat kid. “Serious omertb. shit.”

“Yes. You want to know what we’re waiting for? Why we didn’t
strike last night?”

The fat kid nodded. He was sweating, but it was a cold
sweat.

“We didn’t strike yet, because I’m waiting for a stick.”

“A stick?”

“That’s right. A stick. And do you know what I’m going to do
with the stick?”

A head shake. “Okay. I’ll bite. What?”

“I could tell you,” said Mr. World, soberly. “But then I’d
have to kill you.” He winked, and the tension in the room evaporated.

The fat kid began to giggle, a low, snuffling laugh in the
back of his throat and in his nose. “Okay,” he said. “Hee. Hee. Okay. Hee. Got
it. Message received on Planet Technical. Loud and clear. Ixnay on the
Estionsquay.”

Mr. World shook his head. He rested a hand on the fat kid’s
shoulder. “Hey,” he said. “You really want to know?”

“Sure.”

“Well,” said Mr World, “seeing that we’re friends, here’s
the answer: I’m going to take the stick, and I’m going to throw it over the
armies as they come together. As I throw it, it will become a spear. And then,
as the spear arcs over the battle, I’m going to shout ‘I dedicate this battle
to Odin.’ “

“Huh?” said the fat kid. “Why?”

“Power,” said Mr. World. He scratched his chin. “And food. A
combination of the two. You see, the outcome of the battle is unimportant. What
matters is the chaos, and the slaughter.”

“I don’t get it.” ‘

“Let me show you. It’ll be just like this,” said Mr. World. “Watch!”
He took the wooden-bladed hunter’s knife from the pocket of his Burberry and,
in one fluid movement, he slipped the blade of it into the soft flesh beneath
the fat kid’s chin, and pushed hard upward, toward the brain. “I dedicate this
death to Odin,” he said, as the knife sank in.

There was a leakage onto his hand of something that was not
actually blood, and a sputtering sparking noise behind the fat kid’s eyes. The
smell on the air was that of burning insulation wire.

The fat kid’s hand twitched spastically, and then he fell.
The expression on his face was one of puzzlement and misery. “Look at him,” said
Mr. World, conversationally, to the air. “He looks as if he just saw a sequence
of zeroes and ones turn into a flock of brightly colored birds and fly away.”

There was no reply from the empty rock corridor.

Mr. World shouldered the body as if it weighed very little,
and he opened the pixie diorama and dropped the body beside the still, covering
it with its long black raincoat. He would dispose of it that evening, he
decided, and he grinned his scarred grin: hiding a body on a battlefielfi would
almost be too easy. Nobody would ever notice. Nobody would care.

For a little while there was silence in that place. And then
a gruff voice, which was not Mr. World’s, cleared its throat in the shadows,
and said, “Good start.”

They tried to stand off the soldiers, but the men fired and
killed them both. So the song’s wrong about the jail, but that’s put in for
poetry. You can’t always have things like they are in poetry. Poetry ain’t what
you’d call truth. There ain ‘t room enough in the verses.

—a singer’s commentary on “The Ballad of Sam Bass,” in
A
Treasury of American Folklore
.

None of this can actually be happening. If it makes you more
comfortable, you could simply think of it as metaphor. Religions are, by
definition, metaphors, after all: God is a dream, a hope, a woman, an ironist,
a father, a city, a house of many rooms, a watchmaker who left his prize
chronometer in the desert, someone who loves you—even, perhaps, against all
evidence, a celestial being whose only interest is to make sure your football
team, army, business, or marriage thrives, prospers, and triumphs over all opposition.

Religions are places to stand and look and act, vantage
points from which to view the world.

So none of this is happening. Such things could not occur.
Never a word of it is literally true. Even so, the next thing that happened,
happened like this:

At the foot of Lookout Mountain men and women were gathered
around a small bonfire in the rain. They were standing beneath the trees, which
provided poor cover, and they were arguing.

The lady Kali, with her ink-black skin and her white, sharp
teeth, said, “It is time.”

Anansi, with lemon-yellow gloves and silvering hair, shook
his head. “We can wait,” he said. “While we can wait, we should wait.”