American Gods

Hinzelmann handed Shadow a photocopied sheet. The klunker was an old car with its engine and fuel tank removed, which would be parked out on the ice for the winter. Sometime in the spring the lake ice would melt, and when it was too thin to bear the car’s weight the car would fall into the lake. The earliest the klunker had ever tumbled into the lake was February the twenty-seventh (“That was the winter of 1998. I don’t think you could rightly call that a winter at all”), the latest was May the first (“That was 1950. Seemed that year that the only way that winter would end was if somebody hammered a stake through its heart”). The beginning of April appeared to be the most common time for the car to sink—normally in mid-afternoon.

All of the mid-afternoons in April had already gone, marked off in Hinzelmann’s lined notebook. Shadow bought a twenty-five-minute period on the morning of March the twenty-third, from 9:00 A.M. to 9: 25 A.M. He handed Hinzelmann forty dollars.

“I just wish everybody in town was as easy a sell as you are,” said Hinzelmann.

“It’s a thank-you for that ride you gave me that first night I was in town.”

“No, Mike,” said Hinzelmann. “It’s for the children.” For a moment he looked serious, with no trace of impishness on his creased old face. “Come down this afternoon, you can lend a hand pushing the klunker out onto the lake.”

He passed Shadow five blue cards, each with a date and time written on it in Hinzelmann’s old-fashioned handwriting, then entered the details of each in his notebook.

“Hinzelmann,” asked Shadow. “Have you ever heard of eagle stones?”

“Up north of Rhinelander? Nope, that’s Eagle River. Can’t say I have.”

“How about thunderbirds?”

“Well, there was the Thunderbird Framing Gallery up on Fifth Street, but that closed down. I’m not helping, am I?”

“Nope.”

“Tell you what, why don’t you go look at the library. Good people, although they may be kind of distracted by the library sale on this week. I showed you where the library was, didn’t I?”

Shadow nodded, and said so long. He wished he’d thought of the library himself. He got into the purple 4Runner and drove south on Main Street, following the lake around to the southernmost point, until he reached the castle-like building which housed the city library. He walked inside. A sign pointed to the basement: LIBRARY SALE, it said. The library proper was on the ground floor, and he stamped the snow off his boots and went in.

A forbidding woman with pursed, crimson-colored lips asked him pointedly if she could help him.

“I suppose I need a library card,” he said. “And I want to know all about thunderbirds.”

The woman had him fill out a form, then she told him it would take a week until he could be issued with his card. Shadow wondered if they spent the week sending out inquiries to ensure that he was not wanted in any other libraries across America for failure to return library books.

He had known a man in prison who had been imprisoned for stealing library books.

“Sounds kind of rough,” said Shadow, when the man told him why he was inside.

“Half a million dollars’ worth of books,” said the man, proudly. His name was Gary McGuire. “Mostly rare and antique books from libraries and universities. They found a whole storage locker filled with books from floor to ceiling. Open and shut case.”

“Why did you take them?” asked Shadow.

“I wanted them,” said Gary.

“Jesus. Half a million dollars’ worth of books.”

Gary flashed him a grin, lowered his voice and said, “That was just in the storage locker they found. They never found the garage in San Clemente with the really good stuff in it.”

Gary had died in prison, when what the infirmary had told him was just a malingering, feeling-lousy kind of day turned out to be a ruptured appendix. Now, here in the Lakeside library, Shadow found himself thinking about a garage in San Clemente with box after box of rare, strange and beautiful books in it rotting away, all of them browning and wilting and being eaten by mold and insects in the darkness, waiting for someone who would never come to set them free.

Native American Beliefs and Traditions was on a single shelf in one castle-like turret. Shadow pulled down some books and sat in the window seat. In several minutes he had learned that thunderbirds were mythical gigantic birds who lived on mountaintops, who brought the lightning and who flapped their wings to make the thunder. There were some tribes, he read, who believed that the thunderbirds had made the world. Another half-hour’s reading did not turn up anything more, and he could find no mention of eagle stones anywhere in the books’ indexes.

Shadow was putting the last of the books back on the shelf when he became aware of somebody staring at him. Someone small and grave was peeking at him from around the heavy shelves. As he turned to look, the face vanished. He turned his back on the boy, then glanced around to see that he was being watched once more.