American Gods (69 page)

Shadow held his ground, although he felt slightly sick.

When the spider got close enough, it said, in Mr. Nancy’s
voice, “That was a good job. Proud of you. You done good, kid.”

“Thank you,” said Shadow.

“We should get you back. Too long in this place is goin’ to
mess you up.” It rested one brown-haired spider leg on Shadow’s shoulder ...

... and, back on Seven States Flag Court, Mr. Nancy coughed.
His right hand rested on Shadow’s shoulder. The rain had stopped. Mr. Nancy
held his left hand across his side, as if it hurt. Shadow asked if he was okay.

“I’m tough as old nails,” said Mr. Nancy. “Tougher.” He did
not sound happy. He sounded like an old man in pain.

There were dozens of them, standing or sitting on the ground
or on the benches. Some of them looked badly injured.

Shadow could hear a rattling noise in the sky, approaching
from the south. He looked at Mr. Nancy. “Helicopters?”

Mr. Nancy nodded. “Don’t you worry about them. Not anymore.
They’ll just clean up the mess, and leave.”

“Got it.”

Shadow knew that there was one part of the mess he wanted to
see for himself, before it was cleaned up. He borrowed a flashlight from a
gray-haired man who looked like a retired news anchor and began to hunt.

He found Laura stretched out on the ground in a side cavern,
beside a diorama of mining gnomes straight out of Snow White. The floor beneath
her was sticky with blood. She was on her side, where Loki must have dropped
her after he had pulled the spear out of them both.

One of Laura’s hands clutched her chest. She looked
dreadfully vulnerable. She looked dead, but then, Shadow was almost used to
that by now.

Shadow squatted beside her, and he touched her cheek with
his hand, and he said her name. Her eyes opened, and she lifted her head and
turned it until she was looking at him.

“Hello, puppy,” she said. Her voice was thin.

“Hi, Laura. What happened here?”

“Nothing,” she said. “Just stuff. Did they win?”

“I stopped the battle they were trying to start.”

“My clever puppy,” she said. “That man, Mister World, he
said he was going to put a stick through your eye. I didn’t like him at all.”

“He’s dead. You killed him, hon.”

She nodded. She said, “That’s good.”.

Her eyes closed. Shadow’s hand found her cold hand, and he
held it in his. In time she opened her eyes again.

“Did you ever figure out how to bring me back from the dead?”
she asked.

“I guess,” he said. “I know one way, anyway.”

“That’s good,” she said. She squeezed his hand with her cold
hand. And then she said, “And the opposite? What about that?”

“The opposite?”

“Yes,” she whispered. “I think I must have earned it.”

“I don’t want to do that.”

She said nothing. She simply waited.

Shadow said, “Okay.” Then he took his hand from hers and put
it to her neck.

She said, “That’s my husband.” She said it proudly.

“I love you, babes,” said Shadow.

“Love you, puppy,” she whispered.

He closed his hand around the golden coin that hung around
her neck. He tugged, hard, at the chain, which snapped easily. Then he took the
gold coin between his finger and thumb, and blew on it, and opened his hand
wide.

The coin was gone.

Her eyes were still open, but they did not move.

He bent down then, and kissed her, gently, on her cold
cheek, but she did not respond. He did not expect her to. Then he got up and
walked out of the cavern, to stare into the night.

The storms had cleared. The air felt fresh and clean and new
once more.

Tomorrow, he had no doubt, would be one hell of a beautiful
day.

One describes a tale best by telling the tale. You see? The
way one describes a story, to oneself or to the world, is by telling the story.
It is a balancing act and it is a dream. The more accurate the map, the more it
resembles the territory. The most accurate map possible would be the territory,
and thus would be perfectly accurate and perfectly useless.

The tale is the map that is the territory.

You must remember this.

—from the Notebooks of Mr. Ibis.

The two of them were in the VW bus, heading down to Florida
on 1-75. They’d been driving since dawn; or rather, Shadow had driven, and Mr.
Nancy had sat up front in the passenger seat and, from time to time, and-with a
pained expression on his face, offered to drive. Shadow always said no.

“Are you happy?” asked Mr. Nancy, suddenly. He had been
staring at Shadow for several hours. Whenever Shadow glanced over to his right,
Mr. Nancy was looking at him with his earth-brown eyes.

“Not really,” said Shadow. “But I’m not dead yet.”

“Huh?”

“ ‘Call no man happy until he is dead.’ Herodotus.”

Mr. Nancy raised a white eyebrow, and he said, “I’m not dead
yet, and, mostly because I’m not dead yet, I’m happy as a clamboy.”

‘The Herodotus thing. It doesn’t mean that the dead are
happy,” said Shadow. “It means that you can’t judge the shape of someone’s life
until it’s over and done.”

“I don’t even judge then,” said Mr. Nancy. “And as for happiness,
there’s a lot of different kinds of happiness, just as there’s a hell of a lot
of different kinds of dead. Me, I’ll just take what I can get when I can get
it.”

Shadow changed the subject. “Those helicopters,” he said. “The
ones that took away the bodies, and the injured.”

“What about them?”

“Who sent them? Where did they come from?”

“You shouldn’t worry yourself about that. They’re like valkyries
or buzzards. They come because they have to come.”

“If you say so.”

‘The dead and the wounded will be taken care of. You ask me,
old Jacquel’s going to be very busy for the next month or so. Tell me somethin’,
Shadow-boy.” . “Okay.”

“You learn anythin’ from all this?”

Shadow shrugged. “I don’t know. Most of what I learned on
the tree I’ve already forgotten,” he said. “I think I met some people. But I’m
not certain of anything anymore. It’s like one of those dreams that changes
you. You keep some of the dream forever, and you know things down deep inside
yourself, because it happened to you, but when you go looking for details they
kind of just slip out of your head.”

“Yeah,” said Mr. Nancy. And then he said, grudgingly, “You’re
not so dumb.”

“Maybe not,” said Shadow. “But I wish I could have kept more
of what passed through my hands, since I got out of prison. I was given so many
things, and I lost them again.”

“Maybe,” said Mr. Nancy, “you kept more than you think.”

“No,” said Shadow.

They crossed the border into Florida, and Shadow saw his
first palm tree. He wondered if they’d planted it there on purpose, at the
border, just so that you knew you were in Florida now.

Mr. Nancy began to snore, and Shadow glanced over at him.
The old man still looked very gray, and his breath was rasping. Shadow
wondered, not for the first time, if he had sustained some kind of chest or
lung injury in the fight. Nancy had refused any medical attention.

Florida went on for longer than Shadow had imagined, and it
was late by the time he pulled up outside a small, one-story wooden house, its
windows tightly shuttered, on the outskirts of Fort Pierce. Nancy, who had
directed him through the last five miles, invited him to stay the night.

“I can get a room in a motel,” said Shadow. “It’s not a problem,”

“You could do that, and I’d be hurt. Obviously I wouldn’t
say anythin’. But I’d be real hurt, real bad,” said Mr. Nancy. “So you better
stay here, and I’ll make you’abed up on the couch.”

Mr. Nancy unlocked the hurricane shutters, and pulled open
the windows. The house smelted musty and damp, and a little sweet, as if it
were haunted by the ghosts of long-dead cookies.

Shadow agreed, reluctantly, to stay the night there, just as
he agreed, even more reluctantly, to walk with Mr. Nancy to the bar at the end
of the road, for just one late-night drink while the house aired out.

“Did you see Czernobog?” asked Nancy, as they strolled
through the muggy Floridian night. The air was alive with whirring palmetto
bugs and the ground crawled with creatures that scuttled and clicked. Mr. Nancy
lit a cigarillo, and coughed and choked on it. Still, he kept right on smoking.

“He was gone when I came out of the cave.”

“He will have headed home. He’ll be waitin’ for you there,
you know.”

“Yes.”

They walked in silence to the end of the road. It wasn’t
much of a bar, but it was open.

“I’ll buy the first beers,” said Mr. Nancy.

“We’re only having one beer, remember,” said Shadow.

“What are you,” asked Mr. Nancy. “Some kind of cheapskate?”

Mr. Nancy bought them their first beers, and Shadow bought
the second round. He stared in horror as Mr. Nancy talked the barman into
turning on the karaoke machine, and then watched in fascinated embarrassment as
the old man belted his way through “What’s New Pussycat?” before crooning out a
moving, tuneful version of “The Way You Look Tonight.” He had a fine voice, and
by the end the handful of people still in” the bar were cheering and applauding
him.

When he came back to Shadow at the bar he was looking
brighter. The whites of his eyes were clear, and the gray pallor that had
touched his skin was gone. “Your turn,” he said.

“Absolutely not,” said Shadow.

But Mr. Nancy had ordered more beers, and was handing Shadow
a stained printout of songs from which to choose. “Just pick a song you know
the words to.”

“This is not funny,” said Shadow. The world was beginning to
swim, a little, but he couldn’t muster the energy to argue, and then Mr. Nancy
was putting on the backing tapes to “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood,” and
pushing—literally pushing—Shadow up onto the tiny makeshift stage at the end of
the bar.

Shadow held the mike as if it was probably live, and then
the backing music started and he croaked out the initial “ ‘Baby ...’” Nobody
in the bar threw anything in his direction. And it felt good. “ ‘Can you
understand me now?’” His voice was rough but melodic, and rough suited the song
just fine. “ ‘Sometimes I feel a little mad. Don’t you know that no one alive
can always be an angel ...’”

And he was still singing it as they walked home through the
busy Florida night, the old man and the young, stumbling and happy.

‘“I’m just a soul whose intentions are good,’” he sang to
the crabs and the spiders and the palmetto beetles and the lizards and the
night. ‘“Oh lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood.’”

Mr. Nancy showed him to the couch. It was much smaller than
Shadow, who decided to sleep on the floor, but by the time he had finished
deciding to sleep on the floor he was already fast asleep, half sitting, half
lying on the tiny sofa.

At first, he did not dream. There was just the comforting
darkness. And then he saw a fire burning in the darkness and he walked toward
it.

“You did well,” whispered the buffalo man without moving his
lips.

“I don’t know what I did,” said Shadow.

“You made peace,” said the buffalo man. “You took our words
and made them your own. They never understood that they were here—and the
people who worshiped them were here—because it suits us that they are here. But
we can change our minds. And perhaps we will.”

“Are you a god?” asked Shadow.

The buffalo-headed man shook his head. Shadow thought, for a
moment, that the creature was amused. “I am the land,” he said.

And if there was more to that dream then Shadow did not remember
it.

He heard something sizzling. His head was aching, and there
was a pounding behind his eyes.

Mr. Nancy was already cooking breakfast: a towering stack of
pancakes, sizzling bacon, perfect eggs, and coffee. He looked in the peak of
health.

“My head hurts,” said Shadow.

“You get a good breakfast inside you, you’ll feel like a new
man.”

“I’d rather feel like the same man, just with a different
head,” said Shadow.

“Eat,” said Mr. Nancy.

Shadow ate.

“How do you feel now?”

“Like I’ve got a headache, only now I’ve got some food in my
stomach and I think I’m going to throw up.”

“Come with me.” Beside the sofa, on which Shadow had spent
the night, covered with an African blanket, was a trunk, made of some dark
wood, which looked like an undersized pirate chest. Mr. Nancy undid the padlock
and opened the lid. Inside the trunk there were a number of boxes. Nancy
rummaged among the boxes. “It’s an ancient African herbal remedy,” he said. “It’s
made of ground willow bark, things like that.”

“Like aspirin?”

“Yup,” said Mr. Nancy. “Just like that.” From the bottom of
the trunk he produced a giant economy-sized bottle of generic aspirin. He
unscrewed the top, and shook out a couple of white pills. “Here.”

“Nice trunk,” said Shadow. He took the bitter pills,
swallowed them with a glass of water.

“My son sent if to me,” said Mr. Nancy. “He’s a good boy. I
don’t see him as much as I’d like.”

“I miss Wednesday,” said Shadow. “Despite everything he did.
I keep expecting to see him. But I look up and he’s not there.” He kept staring
at the pirate trunk, trying to figure out what it reminded him of.

You will lose many things. Do not lose this. Who said that?

“You miss him? After what he put you through? Put us all
through?”

“Yes,” said Shadow. “I guess I do. Do you think he’ll be
back?”

“I think,” said Mr. Nancy, “that wherever two men are gathered
together to sell a third man a twenty-dollar violin for ten thousand dollars,
he will be there in spirit.”

“Yes, but—”