American Gods (65 page)

There was a murmur of disagreement from the crowd.

“No, listen. He’s right,” said an old man with iron-gray
hair: Czernobog. He was holding a small sledgehammer, resting the head of it on
his shoulder. “They have the high ground. The weather is against us. This is
madness, to begin this now.”

Something that looked a little like a wolf and a little more
like a man grunted and spat on the forest floor. “When better to attack them,
dedushkal Shall we wait until the weather clears, when they expect it? I say we
go now, I say we move.”

“There are clouds between us and them,” pointed out Is-ten
of the Hungarians. He had a fine black mustache, a large, dusty black hat, and
the grin of a man who makes his living selling aluminum siding and new roofs
and gutters to senior citizens but who always leaves town the ‘day after the
checks clear whether the work is done or not.”

A man in an elegant suit, who had until now said nothing,
put his hands together, stepped into the firelight, and made his point
succinctly and clearly. There were nods and mutters of agreement.

A voice came from one of three warrior-women who comprised
the Morrigan, standing so close together in the shadows that they had become an
arrangement of blue-tattooed limbs and dangling crow’s wings. She said, “It
doesn’t matter whether this is a good time or a bad time. This is the time.
They have been killing us. Better to die together, on the attack, like gods,
than to die fleeing and singly, like rats in a cellar.”

Another murmur, this time one of deep agreement. She had said
it for all of them. Now was the time.

“The first head is mine,” said a very tall Chinese man, with
a rope of tiny skulls around his neck. He began to walk, slowly and intently,
up the mountain, shouldering a staff with a curved blade at the end of it, like
a silver moon.

Even Nothing cannot last forever.

He might have been there, been Nowhere, for ten minutes or
for ten thousand years. It made no difference: time was an idea for which he no
longer had any need.

He could no longer remember his real name. He felt empty and
cleansed, in that place that was not a place.

He was without form, and void.

He was nothing.

And into that nothing a voice said, “Ho-hoka, cousin. We got
to talk.”

And something that might once have been Shadow said, “Whiskey
Jack?’

“Yeah,” said Whiskey Jack, in the darkness. “You are a hard
man to hunt down, when you’re dead. You didn’t go to any of the places I
figured. I had to look all over before I thought of checking here. Say, you
ever find your tribe?”

Shadow remembered the man and the girl in the disco beneath
the spinning mirror-ball. “I guess I found my family. But no, I never found my
tribe.”

“Sorry to have to disturb you.”

“Let me be. I got what I wanted. I’m done.”

“They are coming for you,” said Whiskey Jack. “They are going
to revive you.”

“But I’m done,” said Shadow. “It was all over and done.”

“No such thing,” said Whiskey Jack. “Never any such thing.
We’ll go to my place. You want a beer?”

He guessed he would like a beer, at that. “Sure.”

“Get me one too. There’s a cooler outside the door,” said
Whiskey Jack, and he pointed. They were in his shack.

Shadow opened the door to the shack with hands he had not
possessed moments before. There was a plastic cooler filled with chunks of
river ice out there, and, in the ice, a dozen cans of Budweiser. He pulled out
a couple of cans of beer and then sat in the doorway and looked out over the
valley.

They were at the top of a hill, near a waterfall, swollen
with melting snow and runoff. It fell in stages, maybe seventy feet below them,
maybe a hundred. The sun reflected from the ice that sheathed the trees that
overhung the waterfall basin.

“Where are we?” asked Shadow.

“Where you were last time,” said Whiskey Jack. “My place.
You planning on holding on to my Bud till it warms up?”

Shadow stood up and passed him the can of beer. “You didn’t
have a waterfall outside your place last time I was here,” he said.

Whiskey Jack said nothing. He popped the top of the Bud, and
drank half the can in one long slow swallow. Then he said, “You remember my
nephew? Henry Blue-jay? The poet? He traded his Buick for your Winnebago.
Remember?”

“Sure. I didn’t know he was a poet.”

Whiskey Jack raised his chin and looked proud. “Best damn
poet in America,” he said.

He drained the rest of his can of beer, belched, and got
another can, while Shadow popped openliis own can of beer, and the two men sat
outside on a rock, by the pale green ferns, in the morning sun, and they
watched the falling water and they drank their beer. There was still snow on
the ground, in the places where the shadows never lifted.

The earth was muddy and wet.

“Henry was diabetic,” continued Whiskey Jack. “It happens.
Too much. You people came to America, you take our sugar cane, potatoes, and
corn, then you sell us potato chips and caramel popcorn, and we’re the ones who
get sick.” He sipped his beer, reflecting. “He’d won a couple of prizes for his
poetry. There were people in Minnesota who wanted to

‘  put his poems into a book. He was driving to
Minnesota in a sports car to talk to them. He had traded your ‘Bago for a
yellow Miata. The doctors said they think he went into a coma while he was
driving, went off the road, ran the car into one of your road signs. Too lazy
to look at where you are, to read the mountains and the clouds, you people need
road signs everywhere. And so Henry Bluejay went away forever, went to live
with brother Wolf. So I said, nothing keeping me there any longer. I came
north. Good fishing up here.”

“I’m sorry about your nephew.”

“Me too. So now I’m living here in the north. Long way from
white man’s diseases. White man’s roads. White man’s road signs. White man’s
yellow Miatas. White man’s caramel popcorn.”

“White man’s beer?”

Whiskey Jack looked at the can. “When you people finally
give up and go home, you can leave us the Budweiser breweries,” he said.

“Where are we’?” asked Shadow. “Am I on the tree? Am I dead?
Am I here? I thought everything was finished. What’s real?”

“Yes,” said Whiskey Jack.

“ ‘Yes’? What kind of an answer is ‘Yes’?”

“It’s a good answer. True answer, too.”

Shadow said, “Are you a god as well?”

Whiskey Jack shook his head. “I’m a culture hero,” he said. “We
do the same shit gods do, we just screw up more and nobody worships us. They
tell stories about us, but they tell the ones that make us look bad along with
the ones where we came out fairly okay.”

“I see,” said Shadow. And he did see, more or less.

“Look,” said Whiskey Jack. “This is not a good country for
gods. My people figured that out early on. There are creator spirits who found
the earth or made it or shit it out, but you think about it: who’s going to
worship Coyote? He made love to Porcupine Woman and got his dick shot through
with more needles than a pincushion. He’d argue with rocks and the rocks would
win.

“So, yeah, my people figured that maybe there’s something at
the back of it all, a creator, a great spirit, and so we say thank you to it,
because it’s always good to say thank you. But we never built churches. We didn’t
need to. The land was the church. The land was the religion. The land was older
and wiser than the people who walked on it. It gave us salmon and corn and
buffalo and passenger pigeons. It gave us wild rice and walleye. It gave us
melon and squash and turkey. And we were the children of the land, just like
the porcupine and the skunk and the blue jay.”

He finished his second beer and gestured toward the river at
the bottom of the waterfall. “You follow that river for a way, you’ll get to
the lakes where the wild rice grows. In wild rice time, you go out in your canoe
with a friend, and you knock the wild rice into your canoe, and cook it, and
store it, and it will keep you for a long time. Different places grow different
foods. Go far enough south there are orange trees, lemon trees, and those
squashy green guys, look like pears—”

“Avocados.”

“Avocados,” agreed Whiskey Jack. “That’s them. They don’t
grow up this way. This is wild rice cftuntry. Moose country. What I’m trying to
say is that America is like that. It’s not good growing country for gods. They
don’t grow well here. They’re like avocados trying to grow in wild rice
country.”

“They may not grow well,” said Shadow, remembering, “but
they’re going to war.”

That was the only time he ever saw Whiskey Jack laugh. It
was almost a bark, and it had little humor in it. “Hey Shadow,” said Whiskey
Jack. “If all your friends jumped off a cliff, would you jump off too?”

“Maybe.” Shadow felt good. He didn’t think it was just the
beer. He couldn’t remember the last time he had felt so alive, and so together.

“It’s not going to be a war.”

“Then what is it?”

Whiskey Jack crushed the beer can between his hands,
pressing it until it was flat. “Look,” he said, and pointed to the waterfall.
The sun was high enough that it caught the waterfall spray: a rainbow nimbus
hung in the air. Shadow thought it was the most beautiful thing he had ever
seen.

“It’s going to be a bloodbath,” said Whiskey Jack, flatly.

Shadow saw it then. He saw it all, stark in its simplicity.
He shook his head, then he began to chuckle, and he shook his head some more,
and the chuckle became a full-throated laugh.

“You okay?”

“I’m fine,” said Shadow. “I just saw the hidden Indians. Not
all of them. But I saw them anyhow.”

“Probably Ho Chunk, then. Those guys never could hide worth
a damn.” He looked up at the sun. “Time to go back,” he said. He stood up.

“It’s a two-man con,” said Shadow. “It’s not a war at all,
is it?”

Whiskey Jack patted Shadow’s arm. “You’re not so dumb,” he
said.

They walked back to Whiskey Jack’s shack. He opened the
door. Shadow hesitated. “I wish I could stay here with you,” he said. “This
seems like a good place.”

“There are a lot of good places,” said Whiskey Jack. “That’s
kind of the point. Listen, gods die when they are forgotten. People too. But
the land’s still here. The good places, and the bad. The land isn’t going
anywhere. And neither am I.”

Shadow closed the door. Something was pulling at him. He was
alone in the darkness once more, but the darkness became brighter and brighter
until it was burning like the sun.

And then the pain began. Easter walked through the meadow,
and spring flowers blossomed where she had passed.

She walked by a place where, long ago, a farmhouse had
stood. Even today several walls were still standing, jutting out of the weeds
and the meadow grass like rotten teeth. A thin rain was falling. The clouds
were dark and low, and it was cold.

A little way beyond the place where the farmhouse had been
there was a tree, a huge silver-gray tree, winter-dead to all appearances, and
leafless, and in front of the tree, on the grass, were frayed clumps of
colorless fabric. The woman stopped at the fabric, and bent down, and picked up
something brownish-white: it was a much-gnawed fragment of bone which might,
once, have been a part of a human skull. She tossed it back down onto the
grass.

Then she looked at the man on the tree and she smiled wryly.
“They just aren’t as interesting naked,” she said. “It’s the unwrapping that’s
half the fun. Like with gifts, and eggs.”

The hawk-headed man who walked beside her looked down at his
penis and seemed, for the first time; to become aware of his own nakedness. He
said, “I can look at the sun without even blinking.”

“That’s very clever of you,” Easter told him, reassuringly. “Now,
let’s get him down from there.”

The wet ropes that held Shadow to the tree had long ago
weathered and rotted, and they parted easily as the two people pulled on them.
The body on the tree slipped and slid down toward the roots. They caught him as
he fell, and they took him up, carrying him easily, although he was a very big
man, and they put him down in the gray meadow.

The body on the grass was cold, and it did not breathe.
There was a patch of dried black blood on its side, as if it had been stabbed
with a spear.

“What now?”

“Now,” she said, “we warm him. You know what you have to do.”

“I know. I cannot.”

“If you are not willing to help, then you should not have
called me here.”

She reached out a white hand to Horus, and she touched his
black hair. He blinked at her, intently. Then he shimmered, as if in a heat
haze.

The hawk eye that faced her glinted orange, as if a flame
had just been kindled inside it; a flame that had been long extinguished.

The hawk took to the air, and it swung upward, circling and
ascending in a rising gyre, circling the place in the gray clouds where the sun
might conceivably be, and as the hawk rose it became first a dot and then a
speck, and then, to the naked eye, nothing at all, something that could only be
imagined. The clouds began to thin and to evaporate, creating a patch of blue
sky through which the sun glared. The single bright sunbeam penetrating the
clouds and bathing the meadow was beautiful, but the image faded as more clouds
vanished. Soon the morning sun was blazing down on that meadow like a summer
sun at noon, burning the water vapor from the morning’s rain into mists and
burning the mist off into nothing at all.

The golden sun bathed the body on the floor of the meadow
with its radiance and its heat. Shades of pink and of warm brown touched the
dead thing.

The woman dragged the fingers of her right hand lightly
across the body’s chest. She imagined she could feel a shiver in his
breast—something that was not a heartbeat, but still ... She let her hand
remain there, on his chest, just above his heart.