American Gods

The brief winter daylight was already fading when Wednesday dropped Shadow outside his apartment. The freezing temperature when Shadow opened the car door felt even more science fictional when compared to Las Vegas.

“Don’t get into any trouble,” said Wednesday. “Keep your head below the parapet. Make no waves.”

“All at the same time?”

“Don’t get smart with me, m’boy. You can keep out of sight in Lakeside. I pulled in a big favor to keep you here, safe and sound. If you were in a city they’d get your scent in minutes.”

“I’ll stay put and keep out of trouble.” Shadow meant it as he said it. He’d had a lifetime of trouble and he was ready to let it go forever. “When are you coming back?” he asked.

“Soon,” said Wednesday, and he gunned the Lincoln’s engine, slid up the window and drove off into the frigid night.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.

—BEN FRANKLIN, POOR RICHARD’S ALMANACK

Three cold days passed. The thermometer never made it up to the zero mark, not even at midday. Shadow wondered how people had survived this weather in the days before electricity, before thermal face masks and lightweight thermal underwear, before easy travel.

He was down at the Video, Tanning, Bait, and Tackle store, being shown Hinzelmann’s hand-tied trout flies. They were more interesting than he had expected: colorful fakes of life, made of feather and thread, each with a hook hidden inside it.

He asked Hinzelmann.

“For real?” asked Hinzelmann.

“For real,” said Shadow.

“Well,” said the older man. “Sometimes they didn’t survive it, and they died. Leaky chimneys and badly ventilated stoves and ranges killed as many people as the cold. But those days were hard—they’d spend the summer and the fall laying up the food and the firewood for the winter. The worst thing of all was the madness. I heard on the radio, they were saying how it was to do with the sunlight, how there isn’t enough of it in the winter. My daddy, he said folk just went stir-crazy—winter madness they called it. Lakeside always had it easy, but some of the other towns around here, they had it hard. There was a saying still had currency when I was a kid, that if the serving girl hadn’t tried to kill you by February she hadn’t any backbone.

“Storybooks were like gold-dust—anything you could read was treasured, back before the town had a lending library. When my grampaw got sent a storybook from his brother in Bavaria, all the Germans in town met up in the town hall to hear him read it, and the Finns and the Irish and the rest of them, they’d make the Germans tell them the stories.

“Twenty miles south of here, in Jibway, they found a woman walking mother-naked in the winter with a dead babe at her breast, and she’d not suffer them to take it from her.” He shook his head meditatively, closed the fly cabinet with a click. “Bad business. You want a video rental card? Eventually they’ll open a Blockbuster here, and then we’ll soon be out of business. But for now we got a pretty fair selection.”

Shadow reminded Hinzelmann that he had no television and no VCR. He enjoyed Hinzelmann’s company—the reminiscences, the tall tales, the goblin grin of the old man. It could make things awkward between them were Shadow to admit that television had made him uncomfortable ever since it had started to talk to him.

Hinzelmann fished in a drawer, and took out a tin box—by the look of it, it had once been a Christmas Box, of the kind that contained chocolates or cookies: a mottled Santa Claus, holding a tray of Coca-Cola bottles, beamed up from its lid. Hinzelmann eased off the metal top of the box, revealing a notebook and books of blank tickets, and said, “How many you want me to put you down for?”

“How many of what?”

“Klunker tickets. She’ll go out onto the ice today, so we’ve started selling tickets. Each ticket is ten dollars, five for forty, ten for seventy-five. One ticket buys you five minutes. Of course we can’t promise it’ll go down in your five minutes, but the person who’s closest stands to win five hundred bucks, and if it goes down in your five minutes, you win a thousand dollars. The earlier you buy your tickets, the more times aren’t spoken for. You want to see the info sheet?”

“Sure.”