American Gods

In his pocket was the Liberty dollar. He took it out of his pocket, held it up in his right hand, making sure the boy could see it. He finger-palmed it into his left hand, displayed both hands empty, raised his left hand to his mouth and coughed once, letting the coin tumble from his left hand into his right.

The boy looked at him wide-eyed and scampered away, returning a few moments later, dragging an unsmiling Marguerite Olsen, who looked at Shadow suspiciously and said, “Hello, Mister Ainsel. Leon says you were doing magic for him.”

“Just a little prestidigitation, ma’am.”

“Please don’t,” she said.

“I’m sorry. I was just trying to entertain him.”

She shook her head, tautly. Drop it. Shadow dropped it. He said, “I never did say thank you for your advice about heating the apartment. It’s warm as toast in there right now.”

“That’s good.” Her icy expression had not begun to thaw.

“It’s a lovely library,” said Shadow.

“It’s a beautiful building. But the city needs something more efficient and less beautiful. You going to the library sale downstairs?”

“I wasn’t planning on it.”

“Well, you should. It’s for a good cause. Makes money for new books, cleans out shelf space, and it’s raising money to put in computers for the children’s section. But the sooner we get a whole new library built, the better.”

“I’ll make a point of getting down there.”

“Head out into the hall and then go downstairs. Good seeing you, Mister Ainsel.”

“Call me Mike,” he said.

She said nothing, just took Leon’s hand and walked the boy over to the children’s section.

“But, Mom,” Shadow heard Leon say, “it wasn’t pressed igitation. It wasn’t. I saw it vanish and then it fell out of his nose. I saw it.”

An oil portrait of Abraham Lincoln gazed down from the wall at him. Shadow walked down the marble and oak steps to the library basement, through a door into a large room filled with tables, each table covered with books of all kinds, indiscriminately assorted and promiscuously arranged: paperbacks and hardcovers, fiction and non-fiction, periodicals and encyclopedias all side by side upon the tables, spines up or spines out.

Shadow wandered to the back of the room where there was a table covered with old-looking leather-bound books, each with a library catalog number painted in white on the spine. “You’re the first person over in that corner all day,” said the man sitting by the stack of empty boxes and bags and the small, open, metal cashbox. “Mostly folk just take the thrillers and the children’s books and the Harlequin Romances. Jenny Kerton, Danielle Steel, all that.” The man was reading Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. “Everything on the tables is fifty cents a book, or you can take three for a dollar.”

Shadow thanked him and continued to browse. He found a copy of Herodotus’s Histories bound in peeling brown leather. It made him think of the paperback copy he had left behind in prison. There was a book called Perplexing Parlour Illusions, which looked like it might have some coin effects. He carried both the books over to the man with the cashbox.

“Buy one more, it’s still a dollar,” said the man. “And if you take another book away, you’ll be doing us a favor. We need the shelf-space.”

Shadow walked back to the old leather-bound books. He decided to liberate the book that was least likely to be bought by anyone else, and found himself unable to decide between Common Diseases of the Urinary Tract with Illustrations by a Medical Doctor and Minutes of the Lakeside City Council 1872–1884. He looked at the illustrations in the medical book and decided that somewhere in the town there was a teenage boy who could use the book to gross out his friends. He took the Minutes to the man on the door, who took his dollar and put all the books into a Dave’s Finest Food brown paper sack.

Shadow left the library. He had a clear view of the lake, all the way to the northeastern corner. He could even see his apartment building, a small brown box on the bank up past the bridge. And there were men on the ice near the bridge, four or five of them, pushing a dark green car into the center of the white lake.

“March the twenty-third,” Shadow said to the lake, under his breath. “Nine A.M. to nine twenty-five A.M.” He wondered if the lake or the klunker could hear him—and if they would pay any attention to him, even if they could. He doubted it. In Shadow’s world, luck, the good kind, was something that other people had, not him.

The wind blew bitter against his face.

Officer Chad Mulligan was waiting outside Shadow’s apartment when he got back. Shadow’s heart began to pound when he saw the police car, to relax a little when he observed that the policeman was doing paperwork in the front seat.

He walked over to the car, carrying his paper sack of books.