American Gods (70 page)

“We should get back into the kitchen,” said Mr. Nancy, his expression
becoming stony. “Those pans won’t wash themselves.”

Mr. Nancy washed the pans and the dishes. Shadow dried them
and put them away. Somewhere in there the headache began to ease. They went
back into the sitting room.

Shadow stared at the old trunk some more, willing himself to
remember. “If I don’t go to see Czernobog,” he said, “what will happen?”

“You’ll see him,” said Mr. Nancy flatly. “Maybe he’ll find
you. Or maybe he’ll bring you to him. But one way or another, you’ll see him!”

Shadow nodded. Something started to fall into place. A
dream, on the tree. “Hey,” he said. “Is there a god with an elephant’s head?”

“Ganesh? He’s a Hindu god. He removes obstacles, and makes
journeys easier. Good cook, too.”

Shadow looked up. “ ‘It’s in the trunk,’” he said. “I knew
it was important, but I didn’t know why.’I thought maybe it meant the trunk of
the tree. But he wasn’t talking about that at all, was he?”

Mr. Nancy frowned. “You lost me.”

“It’s in the trunk,” said Shadow. He knew it was true. He
did not know why it should be true, not quite. But of that he was completely
certain.

He got to his feet. “I got to go,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

Mr. Nancy raised an eyebrow. “Why the hurry?”

“Because,” said Shadow, simply, “the ice is melting.”

Shadow drove the rental out of the forest at about 8:30 in
the morning, came down the hill doing under forty-five miles per hour, and
entered the town of Lakeside three weeks after he was certain he had left it
for good.

He drove through the city, surprised at how little it had
changed in the last few weeks, which were a lifetime, and he parked halfway down
the driveway that led to the lake. Then he got out of the car.

There were no more ice-fishing huts on the frozen lake any
longer, no SUVs, no men sitting at a fishing hole with a line and a
twelve-pack. The lake was dark: no longer covered with a blind white layer of
snow, now there were reflective patches of water on the surface of the ice, and
the water under the ice was black, and the ice itself was clear enough that the
darkness beneath showed through. The sky was gray, but the icy lake was bleak
and empty.

Almost empty.

There was one car remaining on the ice, parked out on the frozen
lake almost beneath the bridge, so that anyone driving through the town, anyone
crossing the town, could not help but see it. It was a dirty green in color;
the sort of car that people abandon in parking lots. It had no engine. It was a
symbol of a wager, waiting for the ice to become rotten enough and soft enough
and dangerous enough to allow the lake to take it forever.

There was a chain across the short driveway that led down to
the lake, and a warning sign forbidding entrance to people or to vehicles. THIN
ICE, it read. Beneath it was a hand-painted sequence of pictograms with lines
through them: NO CARS, NO PEDESTRIANS, NO SNOWMOBILES.

DANGER.

Shadow ignored the warnings and scrambled down the bank. It
was slippery—the snow had already melted, turning the earth to mud under his
feet, and the brown grass barely offered traction. He skidded and slid, down to
the lake and walked, carefully, out onto a short wooden jetty, and from there
he stepped down onto the ice.

The layer of water on the ice, made up of melted ice and
melted snow, was deeper than it had looked from above, and the ice beneath the
water was slicker and more slippery than any skating rink, so that Shadow was
forced to fight to keep his footing. He splashed though the water as it covered
his boots to the laces and seeped inside. Ice water. It numbed where it
touched. He felt strangely distant as he trudged across the frozen lake, as if
he were watching himself on a movie screen—a movie in which he was the hero: a
detective, perhaps.

He walked toward the klunker, painfully aware that the ice
was too rotten for this, and that the water beneath the ice was as cold as
water could be without freezing. He kept walking, and he slipped and slid.
Several times he fell.

He passed empty beer bottles and cans left to litter the
ice, and he passed round holes cut into the ice, for fishing, holes that had
not frozen again, each hole filled with black water.

The klunker seemed farther away than it had looked from the
road. He heard a loud crack from the south of the lake, like a stick breaking,
followed by the sound of something huge thrumming, as if a bass string the size
of a lake were vibrating. Massively, the ice creaked and groaned, like an old
door protesting being opened. Shadow kept walking, as steadily as he could.

This is suicide, whispered a sane voice in the back of his
mind. Can’t you just let it go ?

“No,” he said, aloud. “I have to know.” And he kept right on
walking.

He arrived at the klunker, and even before he reached it he
knew that he had been right. There was a miasma that hung about the car,
something that was at the same time a faint, foul smell and was also a bad
taste in the back of his throat. He walked around the car, looking inside. The
seats were stained, and ripped. The car was obviously empty. He tried the
doors. They were locked. He tried the trunk. Also locked.

He wished that he had brought a crowbar.

He made a fist of his hand, inside his glove. He counted to
three, then smashed his hand, hard, against the driver’s-side window glass.

His hand hurt, but the side window was undamaged.

He thought about running at it—he could kick the window in,
he was certain, if he didn’t skid and fall on the wet ice. But the last thing
he wanted to do was to disturb the klunker enough that the ice beneath it would
crack.

He looked at the car. Then he reached for the radio
antenna—it was the kind that was supposed to go up and down, but that had stuck
in the up position a decade ago—and, with a little waggling, he broke it off at
the base. He took the thin end of the antenna—it had once had a metal button on
the end, but that was lost in time, and, with strong fingers, he bent it back
up into a makeshift hook.

Then he rammed the extended metal antenna down between the
rubber and the glass of the front window, deep into the mechanism of the door.
He fished in the mechanism, twisting, moving, pushing the metal antenna about
until it caught: and then he pulled up.

He felt the improvised hook sliding from the lock,
uselessly.

He sighed. Fished again, slower, more carefully. He could
imagine the ice grumbling beneath his feet as he shifted his weight. And slow
... and ...

He had it. He pulled up on the aerial and the front-door
locking mechanism popped up. Shadow reached down one gloved hand and took the
door handle, pressed the button, and pulled. The door did not open.

It’s stuck, he thought, iced up. That’s all.

He tugged, sliding on the ice, and suddenly the door of the klunker
flew open, ice scattering everywhere.

The miasma was worse inside the car, a stench of rot and illness.
Shadow felt sick.

He reached under the dashboard, found the black plastic
handle that opened the trunk, and tugged on it, hard.

There was a thunk from behind him as the trunk door
released.

Shadow walked out onto the ice, slipped and splashed around
the car, holding on to the side of it as he went.

It’s in the trunk, he thought.

The trunk was open an inch. He reached down and opened it
the rest of the way, pulling it up.

The smell was bad, but it could have been much worse: the
bottom of the trunk was filled with an inch or so of half-melted ice. There was
a girl in the trunk. She wore a scarlet snowsuit, now stained, and her mousy
hair was long and her mouth was closed, so Shadow could not see the blue
rubber-band braces, but he knew that they were there. The cold had preserved
her, kept her as fresh as if she had been in a freezer..

Her eyes were wide open, and she looked as if she had been
crying when she died, and the tears that had frozen on her cheeks had still not
melted.

“You were here all the time,” said Shadow to Alison
Mc-Govern’s corpse. “Every single person who drove over that bridge saw you.
Everyone who drove through the town saw you. The ice fishermen walked past you
every day. And nobody knew.”

And then he realized how foolish that was.

Somebody knew. Somebody had put her here.

He reached into the trunk—to see if he could pull her out.
He put his weight on the car, as he leaned in. Maybe that was what did it.

The ice beneath the front wheels went at that moment,
perhaps from his movements, perhaps not. The front of the car lurched downward
several feet into the dark water of the lake. Water began to pour into the car
through the open driver’s door. Lake water splashed about Shadow’s ankles,
although the ice he stood on was still solid. He looked around urgently,
wondering how to get away—and then it was too late, and the ice tipped
precipitously, throwing him against the car and the dead girl in the trunk; and
the back of the car went down, and Shadow went down with it, into the cold
waters of the lake. It was ten past nine in the morning on March the
twenty-third.

He took a deep breath before he went under, closing his
eyes, but the cold of the lake water hit him like a wall, knocking the breath
from his body.

He tumbled downward, into the murky ice water, pulled down
by the car.

He was under the lake, down in the darkness and the cold, weighed
down by his clothes and his gloves and his boots, trapped and swathed in his
coat, which seemed to have become heavier and bulkier than he could have
imagined.

He was falling, still. He tried to push away from the car,
but it was pulling him with it, and then there was a bang that he could hear
with his whole body, not his ears, and his left foot was wrenched at the ankle,
the foot twisted and trapped beneath the car as it settled on the lake bottom,
and panic took him.

He opened his eyes.

He knew it was dark down there: rationally, he knew it was too
dark to see anything, but still, he could see; he could see everything. He
could see Alison McGovern’s white face staring at him from the open trunk. He
could see other cars as well—the klunkers of bygone years, rotten hulk shapes
in the darkness, half buried in the lake mud. And what else would they have
dragged out on to the lake, Shadow wondered, before there were cars?

Each one, he knew, without any question, had a dead child in
the trunk. There were scores of ftem ... each had sat out on the ice, in front
of the eyes of, the world, all through the cold winter. Each had tumbled into
the cold waters of the lake, when the winter was done.

This was where they rested: Lemmi Hautala and Jessie Lovat
and Sandy Olsen and Jo Ming and Sarah Lindquist and all the rest of them. Down
where it was silent and cold ...

He pulled at his foot. It was stuck fast, and the pressure
in his lungs was becoming unbearable. There was a sharp, terrible hurt in his
ears. He exhaled slowly, and the air bubbled around his face.

Soon, he thought, soon I’ll have to breathe. Or I’ll choke.

He reached down, put both hands around the bumper of the
klunker, and pushed, with everything he had, leaning into it. Nothing happened.

It’s only the shell of a car, he told himself. They took out
the engine. That’s the heaviest part of the car. You can do it. Just keep
pushing.

He pushed.

Agonizingly slowly, a fraction of an inch at a time, the car
slipped forward in the mud, and Shadow pulled his foot from the mud beneath the
car, and kicked, and tried to push himself out into the cold lake water. He
didn’t move. The coat, he told himself. It’s the coat. It’s stuck, or caught on
something. He pulled his arms from his coat, fumbled with numb fingers at the
frozen zipper. Then he pulled both hands on each side of the zipper, felt the
coat give and rend. Hastily, he freed himself from its embrace, and pushed
upward, away from the car.

There was a rushing sensation but no sense of up, no sense
of down, and he was choking and the pain in his chest and in his head was too
much to bear, so that he was certain that he was going to have to inhale, to
breathe in the cold water, to die. And then his head hit something solid.

Ice. He was pushing against the ice on the top of the lake.
He hammered at it with his fists, but there was no strength left in his arms,
nothing to hold on to, nothing to push against. The world had dissolved into
the chill blackness beneath the lake. There was nothing left but cold.

This is ridiculous, he thought. And he thought, remembering
some old Tony Curtis film he’d seen as a kid, / should roll onto my back and
push the’ice upward and press my face to it, and find some air, I could breathe
again, there’s air there somewhere, but he was just floating and freezing and
he could no longer move a muscle, not if his life depended on it, which it did.

The cold became bearable. Became warm. And he thought, I ‘m
dying. There was anger there this time, a deep fury, and he took the pain and
the anger and reached with it, flailed, forced muscles to move that were ready
never to move again.

He pushed up with his hand, and felt it scrape the edge of the
ice and move up into the air. He flailed for a grip, and felt another hand take
his own, and pull.

His head banged against the ice, his face scraped the underneath
of the ice, and then his head was up in the air, and he could see that he was
coming up through a hole in the ice, and for a moment all he could do was
breathe, and let the black lake water run from his nose and his mouth, and
blink his eyes, which could see nothing more than a blinding daylight, and
shapes, and someone was pulling him, now, forcing him out of the water, saying
something about how he’d freeze to death, so come on, man, pull, and Shadow
wriggled and shook like a bull seal coming ashore, shaking and coughing and
shuddering.