American Gods

Shadow paid for his own breakfast and, over Chad Mulligan’s halfhearted protests, both hot chocolates.

Henning’s Farm and Home was a warehouse-sized building on the south of the town that sold everything from tractors to toys (the toys, along with the Christmas ornaments, were already on sale). The store was bustling with post-Christmas shoppers. Shadow recognized the younger of the girls who had sat in front of him on the bus. She was trailing after her parents. He waved at her and she gave him a hesitant, blue-rubber-banded smile. Shadow wondered idly what she’d look like in ten years’ time.

Probably as beautiful as the girl at the Henning’s Farm and Home checkout counter, who scanned in his purchases with a chattering hand-held gun, capable, Shadow had no doubt, of ringing up a tractor if someone drove it through.

“Ten pairs of long underwear?” said the girl. “Stocking up, huh?” She looked like a movie starlet.

Shadow felt fourteen again, and tongue-tied and foolish. He said nothing while she rang up the thermal boots, the gloves, the sweaters, and the goose-down-filled coat.

He had no wish to put the credit card that Wednesday had given him to the test, not with Chief of Police Mulligan standing helpfully beside him, so he paid for everything in cash. Then he took his bags into the men’s restroom, and came out wearing many of his purchases.

“Looking good, big fella,” said Mulligan.

“At least I’m warm,” said Shadow, and outside, in the parking lot, although the wind burned cold on the skin of his face, the rest of him was warm enough. At Mulligan’s invitation, he put his shopping bags in the back of the police car, and rode in the passenger seat, in the front.

“So, what do you do, Mister Ainsel?” asked the chief of police. “Big guy like you. What’s your profession, and will you be practicing it in Lakeside?”

Shadow’s heart began to pound, but his voice was steady. “I work for my uncle. He buys and sells stuff all over the country. I just do the heavy lifting.”

“Does he pay well?”

“I’m family. He knows I’m not going to rip him off, and I’m learning a little about the trade on the way. Until I figure out what it is I really want to do.” It was coming out of him with conviction, smooth as a snake. He knew everything about big Mike Ainsel in that moment, and he liked Mike Ainsel. Mike Ainsel had none of the problems that Shadow had. Ainsel had never been married. Mike Ainsel had never been interrogated on a freight train by Mr. Wood and Mr. Stone. Televisions did not speak to Mike Ainsel (You want to see Lucy’s tits? asked a voice in his head.) Mike Ainsel didn’t have bad dreams, or believe that there was a storm coming.

He filled his shopping basket at Dave’s Finest Foods, doing what he thought of as a gas-station stop—milk, eggs, bread, apples, cheese, cookies. Just some food. He’d do a real one later. As Shadow moved around, Chad Mulligan said hello to people and introduced Shadow to them. “This is Mike Ainsel, he’s taken the empty apartment at the old Pilsen place. Up around the back,” he’d say. Shadow gave up trying to remember names. He just shook hands with people and smiled, sweating a little, uncomfortable in his insulated layers in the hot store.

Chad Mulligan drove Shadow across the street to Lakeside Realty. Missy Gunther, her hair freshly set and lacquered, did not need an introduction—she knew exactly who Mike Ainsel was. Why that nice Mr. Borson, his uncle Emerson, such a nice man, he’d been by, what, about six, eight weeks ago now, and rented the apartment up at the old Pilsen place, and wasn’t the view just to die for up there? Well, honey, just wait until the spring, and we’re so lucky, so many of the lakes in this part of the world go bright green from the algae in the summer, it would turn your stomach, but our lake, well, come fourth of July you could still practically drink it, and Mr. Borson had paid for a whole year’s lease in advance, and as for the Toyota 4Runner, she couldn’t believe that Chad Mulligan still remembered it, and yes, she’d be delighted to get rid of it. Tell the truth, she’d pretty much resigned herself to giving it to Hinzelmann as this year’s klunker and just taking the tax write-off, not that the car was a klunker, far from it, no, it was her son’s car before he went to school in Green Bay, and, well, he’d painted it purple one day and, ha-ha, she certainly hoped that Mike Ainsel liked purple, that was all she had to say, and if he didn’t she wouldn’t blame him…

Chief of Police Mulligan excused himself near the middle of this litany. “Looks like they need me back at the office, good meeting you, Mike,” he said, and he moved Shadow’s shopping bags into the back of Missy Gunther’s station wagon.