American Gods (9 page)

“I guess.”

She stubbed out the cigarette in the ashtray. “You were in
prison,” she said. “And I needed someone to talk to. I needed a shoulder to cry
on. You weren’t there. I was upset.”

“I’m sorry.” Shadow realized something was different about
her voice, and he tried to figure out what it was.

“I know. So we’d meet for coffee. Talk about what we’d do
when you got out of prison. How good it would be to see you again. He really
liked you, you know. He was looking forward to giving you back your old job.”.

“Yes.”

“And then Audrey went to visit her sister for a week. This
was, oh, a year, thirteen months after you’d gone away.” Her voice lacked
expression; each word was flat and dull, like pebbles dropped, one by one, into
a deep well. “Robbie came over. We got drunk together. We did it on the floor
of the bedroom. It was good. It was really good.”

“I didn’t need to hear that.”

“No? I’m sorry. It’s harder to pick and choose when you’re
dead. It’s like a photograph, you know. It doesn’t matter as much.”

“It matters to me.”

Laura lit another cigarette. Her movements were fluid and
competent, not stiff. Shadow wondered, for a moment, if she was dead at all.
Perhaps this was some kind of elaborate trick. “Yes,” she said. “I see that.
Well, we carried on our affair—although we didn’t call it that, we did not call
it anything—for most of the last two years.”

“Were you going to leave me for him?”

“Why would I do that? You’re my big bear. You’re my puppy.
You did what you did for me. I waited three years for you to come back to me. I
love you.”

He stopped himself from saying / love you, too. He wasn’t going
to say that. Not anymore. “So what happened the other night?”

“The night I was killed?”

“Yes.”

“Well, Robbie and I went out to talk about your welcome-back
surprise party. It would have been so good. And I told him that we were done.
Finished. That now that you were back that was the way it had to be.”

“Mm. Thank you, babe.”

“You’re welcome, darling.” The ghost of a smile crossed her
face. “We got maudlin. It was sweet. We got stupid. I got very drunk. He didn’t.
He had to drive. We were driving home and I announced that I was going to give
him a goodbye blowjob, one last time with feeling, and I unzipped his pants,
and I did.”

“Big mistake.”

“Tell me about it. I knocked the gearshift with my shoulder,
and then Robbie was trying to push me out of the way to put the car back in
gear, and we were swerving, and there was a loud crunch and I remember the
world started to roll and to spin, and I thought, Tm going to die.’ It was very
dispassionate. I remember that. I wasn’t scared. And then I don’t remember
anything more.”

There was a smell like burning plastic. It was the cigarette,
Shadow realized: it had burned down to the filter. Laura did not seem to have
noticed.

“What are you doing here, Laura?”

“Can’t a wife come and see her husband?”

“You’re dead. I went to your funeral this afternoon.”

“Yes.” She stopped talking, stared into nothing. Shadow
stood up and walked over to her. He took the smoldering cigarette butt from her
fingers and threw it out of the window.

“Well?”

Her eyes sought his. “I don’t know much more than I did when
I was alive. Most of the stuff I know now that I didn’t know then I can’t put
into words.”

“Normally people who die stay in their graves,” said Shadow.

“Do they? Do they really, puppy? I used to think they did
too. Now I’m not so sure. Perhaps.” She climbed off the bed and walked over to
the window. Her face, in the light of the motel sign, was as beautiful as it
had ever been. The face of the woman he had gone to prison for.

His heart hurt in his chest as if someone had taken it in a
fist and squeezed. “Laura ... ?”

She did not look at him. “You’ve gotten yourself mixed up in
some bad things, Shadow. You’re going to screw it up, if someone isn’t there to
watch out for you. I’m watching out for you. And thank you for my present.”

“What present?”

She reached into the pocket of her blouse, and pulled out
the gold coin he had thrown into the grave earlier that day. There was still
black dirt on it. “I may have it put on a chain. It was very sweet of you.”

“You’re welcome.”

She turned then and looked at him with eyes that seemed both
to see and not to see him. “I think there are several aspects of our marriage
we’re going to have to work on.”

“Babes,” he told her. “You’re dead.”

“That’s one of those aspects, obviously.” She paused. “Okay,”
she said. “I’m going now. It will be better if I go.” And, naturally and
easily, she turned and put her hands on Shadow’s shoulders, and went up on
tiptoes to kiss him goodbye, as she had always kissed him goodbye.

Awkwardly he bent to kiss her on the cheek, bjit she moved
her mouth as he did so and pushed her lips against his. Her breath smelled,
faintly, of mothballs.

Laura’s tongue flickered into Shadow’s mouth. It was cold,
and dry, and it tasted of cigarettes and of bile. If Shadow had had any doubts
as to whether his wife was dead or not, they ended then.

He pulled back.

“I love you,” she said, simply. “I’ll be looking out for
you.” She walked over to the motel room door. There was a strange taste in his
mouth. “Get some sleep, puppy,” she told him. “And stay out of trouble.”

She opened the door to the hall. The fluorescent light in
the hallway was not kind: beneath it, Laura looked dead, but then, it did that
to everyone.

“You could have asked me to stay the night,” she said, in
her cold-stone voice.

“I don’t think I could,” said Shadow.

“You will, hon,” she said. “Before all this is over. You
will.” She turned away from him, and walked down the corridor.

Shadow looked out of the doorway. The night clerk kept on
reading his John Grisham novel, and barely looked up as she walked past him.
There was thick graveyard mud clinging to her shoes. And then she was gone.

Shadow breathed out, a slow sigh. His heart was pounding arrhythmically
in his chest. He walked across the hall and knocked on Wednesday’s door. As he
knocked he got the weirdest notion, that he was being buffeted by black wings,
as if an enormous crow was flying through him, out into the hall and the world
beyond.

Wednesday opened the door. He had a white motel towel wrapped
around his waist, but was otherwise naked. “What the hell do you want?” he
asked.

“Something you should know,” said Shadow. “Maybe it was a
dream—but it wasn’t—or maybe I inhaled some of the fat kid’s synthetic
toad-skin smoke, or probably I’m just going mad ...”

“Yeah, yeah. Spit it out,” said Wednesday. “I’m kind of in
the middle of something here.”

Shadow glanced into the room. He could see that there was
someone in the bed, watching him. A sheet pulled up over small breasts. Pale
blonde hair, something rattish about the face. He lowered his voice. “I just
saw my wife,” he said. “She was in my room.”

“A ghost, you mean? You saw a ghost?”

“No. Not a ghost. She was solid. It was her. She’s dead all
right, but it wasn’t any kind of a ghost. I touched her. She kissed me.”

“I see.” Wednesday darted a look at the woman in the bed. “Be
right back, m’dear,” he said.

They crossed the hall to Shadow’s room. Wednesday turned on
the lamps. He looked at the cigarette butt in the ashtray. He scratched his
chest. His nipples were dark, old-man nipples, and his chest hair was grizzled.
There was a white scar down one side of his torso. He sniffed the air. Then he
shrugged.

“Okay,” he said. “So your dead wife showed up. You scared?”

“A little.”

“Very wise. The dead always give me the screaming mimis.
Anything else?”

“I’m ready to leave Eagle Point. Laura’s mother can sort out
the apartment, all that. She hates me anyway. I’m ready to go when you are.”

Wednesday smiled. “Good news, my boy. We’ll leave in the
morning. Now, you should get some sleep. I have some scotch in my room, if you
need help sleeping. Yes?”

“No. I’ll be fine.”

“Then do not disturb me further. I have a long night ahead
of me.”

“Good night,” said Shadow.

“Exactly,” said Wednesday, and he closed the door as he went
out.

Shadow sat down on the bed. The smell of cigarettes and preservatives
lingered in the air. He wished that he were mourning Laura: it seemed more
appropriate than being troubled by her or, he admitted it to himself now that
she had gone, just a little scared by her. It was time to mourn. He turned the
lights out, and lay on the bed, and thought of Laura as she was before he went
to prison. He remembered their marriage when they were young and happy and
stupid and unable to keep their hands off each other.

It had been a very long time since Shadow had cried, so long
he thought he had forgotten how. He had not even wept when his mother died.

But he began to cry now, in painful, lurching sobs, and for
the first time since he was a small boy, Shadow cried himself to sleep.

They navigated the green sea by the stars and by the shore,
and when the shore was only a memory and the night sky was overcast and dark
they navigated by faith, and they called on the All-Father to bring them safely
to land once more.

A bad journey they had of it, their fingers numb and with a
shiver in their bones that not even wine could burn off. They would wake in the
morning to see that the hoarfrost had touched their beards, and, until the sun
wanned them, they looked like old men, white-bearded before their time.

Teeth were loosening and eyes were deep-sunken in their sockets
when they made landfall on the green land to the west. The men said, “We are
far, far from our homes and our hearths, far from the seas we know and the
lands we love. Here on the edge of the world we will be forgotten by our gods.”

Their leader clambered to the top of a great rock, and he
mocked them for their lack of faith. “The All-Father made the world,” he
shouted. “He built it with his hands from the shattered bones and the flesh of
Ymir, his grandfather. He placed Ymir’s brains in the sky as clouds, and his
salt blood became the seas we crossed. If he made the world, do you not realize
that he created this land as well? And if we die here as men, shall we not be received
into his hall?”

And the men cheered and laughed. They set to, with a will,
to build a hall out of split trees and mud, inside a small stockade of
sharpened logs, although as far as they knew they were the only men in the new
land.

On the day that the hall was finished there was a storm: the
sky at midday became as dark as night, and the sky was rent with forks of white
flame, and the thunder-crashes were so loud that the men were almost deafened
by them, and the ship’s cat they had brought with them for good fortune hid
beneath their beached longboat. The storm was hard enough and vicious enough
that the men laughed and clapped each other on the back, and they said, “The
thun-derer is here with us, in this distant land,” and they gave thanks, and
rejoiced, and they drank until they were reeling.

In the smoky darkness of their hall, that night, the bard
sang them the old songs. He sang of Odin, the All-Father, who was sacrificed to
himself as bravely and as nobly as others were sacrificed to him. He sang of
the nine days that the AB-Father hung from the world-tree, his side pierced and
dripping from the spear-point’s wound, and he sang them all the things the
All-Father had learned in his agony: nine names, and nine runes, and twice-nine
charms. When he told them of the spear piercing Odin’s side, the bard shrieked
in pain as the All-Father himself had called out in his agony, and all the men
shivered, imagining his pain.

They found the scraeling the following day, which was the
all-father’s own day. He was a small man, his long hair black as a crow’s wing,
his skin the color of rich red clay. He spoke in words none of them could
understand, not even their bard, who had been on a ship that had sailed through
the pillars of Hercules and who could speak the trader’s pidgin men spoke all
across the Mediterranean. The stranger was dressed in feathers and in furs, and
there were small bones braided into his long hair.

They led him into their encampment, and they gave him
roasted meat to eat, and strong drink to quench his thirst. They laughed
riotously at the man as he stumbled and sang, at the way his head rolled and
lolled, and this on less than a drinking-horn of mead. They gave him more drink,
and soon enough he lay beneath the table with his head curled under his arm.

Then they picked him up, a man at each shoulder, a man at
each leg, carried him at shoulder height, the four men making him an
eight-legged horse, and they carried him at the head of a procession to an ash
tree on the hill overlooking the bay, where they put a rope around his neck and
hung him high in the wind, their tribute to the All-Father, the gallows lord.
The scraeling’s body swung in the wind, his face blackening, his tongue
protruding, his eyes popping, his penis hard enough to hang a leather helmet
on, while the men cheered and shouted and laughed, proud to be sending their
sacrifice to the heavens.

And, the next day, when two huge ravens landed upon the
scraeling’s corpse, one on each shoulder, and commenced to peck at its cheeks
and eyes, the men knew their sacrifice had been accepted.

It was a long winter, and they were hungry, but they were
cheered by the thought that, when spring came, they would send the boat back to
the northlands, and it would bring settlers, and bring women. As the weather
became colder, and the days became shorter, some of the men took to searching
for the scraeling village, hoping to find food, and women. They found nothing,
save for the places where fires had been, where small encampments had been
abandoned.