American Gods (66 page)

She lowered her lips to Shadow’s lips, and she breathed into
his lungs, a gentle in and out, and then the breath became a kiss. Her kiss was
gentle, and it tasted of spring rains and meadow flowers. The wound in his side
began to flow with liquid blood once more—a scarlet blood, which oozed like
liquid rubies in the sunlight, and then the bleeding stopped.

She kissed his cheek and his forehead. “Come on,” she said. “Time
to get up. It’s all happening. You don’t want to miss it.”

His eyes fluttered, and then they opened, two eyes the gray
of evening, and he looked at her.

She smiled, and then she removed her hand from his chest.

He said, “You called me back.” He said it slowly, as if he
had forgotten how to speak English. There was hurt in his voice, and
puzzlement.

“Yes.”

“I was done. I was judged. It was over. You called me back.
You dared.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Yes.”

He sat up, slowly. He winced, and touched his side. Then he
looked puzzled: there was a beading of wet blood there, but there was no wound
beneath it.

He reached out a hand, and she put her ajnj around him and
helped him to his feet. He looked across the meadow as if he was trying to
remember the names of the things he was looking at: the flowers in the long
grass, the ruins of the farmhouse, the haze of green buds that fogged the
branches of the huge silver tree.

“Do you remember?” she asked. “Do you remember what you
learned?”

“I lost my name, and I lost my heart. And you brought me
back.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “They are going to fight, soon. The
old gods and the new ones.”

“You want me to fight for you? You wasted your time.”

“I brought you back because that was what I had to do,” she
said. “What you do now is whatever you have to do. Your call. I did my part.”

Suddenly, she became aware of his nakedness, and she blushed
a burning scarlet flush, and she looked down and away.

In the rain and the cloud, shadows moved up the side of the
mountain, up to the rock pathways. ‘

White foxes padded up the hill in company with red-haired
men in green jackets. There was a bull-headed mino-taur walking beside an
iron-fingered dactyl. A pig, a monkey and a sharp-toothed ghoul clambered up
the hillside in company with a blue-skinned man holding a flaming bow, a bear
with flowers twined into its fur, and a man in golden chain mail holding his
sword of eyes.

Beautiful Antinous, who was the lover of Hadrian, walked up
the hillside at the head of a company of leather queens, their arms and chests
steroid-sculpted into perfect shapes.

A gray-skinned man, his one cyclopean eye a huge cabo-chon
emerald, walked stiffly up the hill, ahead of several squat and swarthy men,
their impassive faces as regular as Aztec carvings: they knew the secrets that
the jungles had swallowed.

A sniper at the top of the hill took careful aim at a white
fox, and fired. There was an explosion, and a puff of cordite, gunpowder scent
on the wet air. The corpse was a young Japanese woman with her stomach blown
away, and her face all bloody. Slowly, the corpse began to fade.

The people continued up the hill, on two legs, on four legs,
on no legs at all.

The drive through the Tennessee mountain country had been
startlingly beautiful whenever the storm had eased, and nerve-wracking whenever
the rain had pelted down. Town and Laura had talked and talked and talked the
whole way. He was so glad he had met her. It was like meeting an old friend, a
really good old friend you’d simply never met before. They talked history and
movies and music, and she turned out to be the only person, the only other
person he had ever met who had seen a foreign film (Mr. Town was sure it was
Spanish, while Laura was just as certain it was Polish) from the sixties called
The Manuscript Found in Saragassa, a film he had been starting to believe he
had hallucinated.

When Laura pointed out the first SEE ROCK CITY barn to him
he chuckled and admitted that that was where he was headed. She said that was
so cool. She always wanted to visit those kinds of places, but she never made
the time, and always regretted it later. That was why she was on the road right
now. She was having an adventure.

She was a travel agent, she told him. Separated from her husband.
She admitted that she didn’t think they could ever get back together, and said
it was her fault.

“I can’t believe that.”

She sighed. “It’s true, Mack. I’m just not the woman he married
anymore.”

Well, he told her, people change, and before ,he could think
he was telling her everything he could tell—her about his life, he was even
telling her about Woody and Stoner, how the three of them were the three musketeers,
and the two of them were killed, you think you’d get hardened to that kind of
thing in government work, but ydy never did.

And she reached out one hand—it was cold enough that he
turned up the car’s heating—and squeezed his hand tightly in hers.

Lunchtime, they ate bad Japanese food while a thunderstorm
lowered on Knoxville, and Town didn’t care that the food was late, that the
miso soup was cold, or that the sushi was warm.

He loved the fact that she was out, with him, having an adventure.

“Well,” confided Laura, “I hated the idea of getting stale.
I was just rotting away where I was. So I set off without my car and without my
credit cards. I’m just relying on the kindness of strangers.”

“Aren’t you scared?” he asked. “I mean, you could be stranded,
you could be mugged, you could starve.”

She shook her head. Then she said, with a hesitant smile, “I
met you, didn’t I?” and he couldn’t find anything to say.

When the meal was over they ran through the storm to his car
holding Japanese-language newspapers to cover their heads, and they laughed as
they ran, like schoolchil-dren in the rain.

“How far can I take you?” he asked, when they made it back
into the car.

“I’ll go as far as you’re going, Mack,” she told him, shyly.

He was glad he hadn’t used the Big Mack line. This woman
wasn’t a barroom one-nighter, Mr. Town knew that in his soul. It might have
taken him fifty years to find her, but this was finally it, this was the one,
this wild, magical woman with the long dark hair.

This was love.

“Look,” he said, as they approached Chattanooga. The wipers
slooshed the rain across the windshield, blurring the gray of the city. “How
about I find a motel for you tonight? I’ll pay for it. And once I make my
delivery, we can. Well, we can take a hot bath together, for a start. Warm you
up.”

“That sounds wonderful,” said Laura. “What are you delivering?”

“That stick,” he told her, and chuckled. “The one on the backseat.”

“Okay,” she said, humoring him. “Then don’t tell me, Mister
Mysterious.”

He told her it would be best if she waited in the car in the
Rock City parking lot while he made his delivery. He drove up the side of
Lookout Mountain in the driving rain, never breaking thirty miles per hour,
with his headlights burning. They parked at the back of the parking lot. He
turned off the engine.

“Hey, Mack. Before you get out of the car, don’t I get a
hug?” asked Laura with a smile.

“You surely do,” said Mr. Town, and he put his arms around
her, and she snuggled close to him while the rain pattered a tattoo on the roof
of the Ford Explorer. He could smell her hair. There was a faintly unpleasant
scent beneath the smell of the perfume. Travel would do it, every time. That
bath, he decided, was a real must for both of them. He wondered if there was
anyplace in Chattanooga where he could get those lavender bath-bombs his first
wife had loved so much. Laura raised her head against his, and her hand stroked
the line of his neck, absently.

“Mack ... I keep thinking. You must really want to know what
happened to those friends of yours?” she asked. “Woody and Stone. Do you?”

“Yeah,” he said, moving his lips down to hers, for their
first kiss. “Sure I do.”

So she showed him.

Shadow walked the meadow, making his own slew circles around
the trunk of the tree, gradually widening his circle. Sometimes he would stop
and pick something up: a flower, or a leaf, or a pebble, or a twig, or a blade
ef grass. He would examine it minutely, as if concentrating entirely on the
twigness of the twig, the leajhess of the leaf.

Easter found herself reminded of the gaze of a baby, at the
point where it learns to focus.

She did not dare to talk to him. At that moment, it would
have been sacrilegious. She watched him, exhausted as she was, and she
wondered.

About twenty feet out from the base of the tree,
half-overgrown with long meadow grass and dead creepers, he found a canvas bag.
Shadow picked it up, untied the knots at the top of the bag, loosened the
drawstring. The clothes he pulled out were his own. They were old, but still
serviceable. He turned the shoes over in his hands. He stroked the fabric of
the shirt, the wool of the sweater, stared at them as if he were looking at
them across a million years.

One by one, he put them on.

He put his hands into his pockets, and looked puzzled as he
pulled one hand out, holding what looked to Easter like a white-and-gray
marble.

He said, “No coins.” It was the first thing he had said in
several hours.

“No coins?” echoed Easter.

He shook his head. “They gave me something to do with my
hands.” He bent down to pull on his shoes.

Once he was dressed, he looked more normal. Grave, though.
She wondered how far he had traveled, and what it had cost him to return. He
was not the first whose return she had initiated; and she knew that, soon
enough, the million-year stare would fade, and the memories and the dreams that
he had brought back from the tree would be elided by the world of things you
could touch. That was the way it always went.

She led their way to the rear of the meadow. Her mount
waited in the trees.

“It can’t carry both of us,” she told him. “I’ll make my own
way home.”

Shadow nodded. He seemed to be trying to remember something.
Then he opened his mouth, and he screeched a cry of welcome and of joy.

The thunderbird opened its cruel beak, and it screeched a welcome
back at him.

Superficially, at least, it resembled a condor. Its feathers
were black, with a purplish sheen, and its neck was banded with white. Its beak
was black and cruel: a raptor’s beak, made for tearing. At rest, on the ground,
with its wings folded away, it was the size of a black bear, and its head was
on a level with Shadow’s own.

Horus said, proudly, “I brought him. They live in the mountains.”

Shadow nodded. “I had a dream of thunderbirds once,” he
said. “Damndest dream I ever had.”

The thunderbird opened its beak and made a surprisingly
gentle noise, crawroo? “You heard my dream too?” asked Shadow.

He reached out a hand and rubbed it gently against the bird’s
head. The thunderbird pushed up against him like an affectionate pony. He scratched
it from the nape of its neck up to the crown.

Shadow turned to Easter. “You rode him here?”

“Yes,” she said. “You can ride him back, if he lets you.”

“How do you ride him?”

“It’s easy,” she said. “If you don’t fall. Like riding the
lightning.”

“Will I see you back there?”

She shook her head. “I’m done, honey,” she told him. “You go
do what you need to do. I’m tired. Good luck.”

Shadow nodded. “Whiskey Jack. I saw—hHm. After I passed on.
He came and found me. We drank beer together.”

“Yes,” she said. “I’m sure you did.”

“Will I ever see you again?” asked Shadow.

She looked at him with eyes the green of ripening corn. She
said nothing. Then, abruptly, she shook her head. “I doubt it,” she said.

Shadow clambered awkwardly onto the thunderbird’s back. He felt
like a mouse on the back of a hawk. There was an ozone taste in his mouth,
metallic and blue. Something crackled. The thunderbird extended its wings, and
began to flap them, hard.

As the ground fell away beneath them, Shadow clung on, his
heart pounding in his chest like a wild thing.

It was exactly like riding the lightning. Laura took the
stick from the backseat of the car. She left Mr. Town in the front seat of the
Ford Explorer, climbed out of the car, and walked through the rain to
Rock-City. The ticket office was closed. The door to the gift shop was not
locked and she walked through it, past the rock candy and the display of SEE
ROCK CITY birdhouses, into the Eighth Wonder of the World.

Nobody challenged her, although she passed several men and women
on the path, in the rain. Many of them looked faintly artificial; several of
them were translucent. She walked across a swinging rope bridge. She passed the
white deer gardens, and pushed herself through the Fat Man’s Squeeze, where the
path ran between two rock walls.

And, in the end, she stepped over a chain, with a sign on it
telling her that this part of the attraction was closed, she went into a
cavern, and she saw a man sitting on a plastic chair, in front of a diorama of
drunken gnomes. He was reading the Washington Post by the light of a small
electric lantern. When he saw her he folded the paper and placed it beneath his
chair. He stood up, a tall man with close-cropped orange hair in an expensive
raincoat, and he gave her a small bow.

“I shall assume that Mister Town is dead,” he said. “Welcome,
spear-carrier.”

“Thank you. I’m sorry about Mack,” she said. “Were you
friends?”

“Not at all. He should have kept himself alive, if he wanted
to keep his job. But you brought his stick.” He looked her up and down with
eyes that glimmered like the orange embers of a dying fire. “I am afraid you
have the advantage of me. They call me Mister World, here at the top of the
hill.”