American Gods

Harry Bluejay’s car was missing its side mirrors, and its tires were the baldest Shadow had ever seen: perfectly smooth black rubber. Harry Bluejay told them the car drank oil, but as long as you kept pouring oil in, it would just keep running forever, unless it stopped.

Harry Bluejay filled a black garbage bag with shit from the car (said shit including several screw-top bottles of cheap beer, unfinished, a small packet of cannabis resin wrapped in silver foil and badly hidden in the car’s ashtray, a skunk-tail, two dozen country and western cassettes and a battered, yellowing copy of Stranger in a Strange Land). “Sorry I was jerking your chain before,” said Harry Bluejay to Wednesday, passing him the car keys. “You know when I’ll get the Winnebago?”

“Ask your uncle. He’s the fucking used-car dealer,” growled Wednesday.

“Wisakedjak is not my uncle,” said Harry Bluejay. He took his black garbage bag and went into the nearest house, and closed the door behind him.

They dropped Johnny Chapman in Sioux Falls, outside a whole-food store.

Wednesday said nothing on the drive. He was brooding.

In a family restaurant just outside St. Paul Shadow picked up a newspaper someone else had put down. He looked at it once, then again, then he showed it to Wednesday. Wednesday was in a black sulk, as he had been since they left Whiskey Jack’s place.

“Look at that,” said Shadow.

Wednesday sighed, and looked down at the paper with an expression of pain, as if lowering his head hurt more than he could put into words. “I am,” he said, “delighted that the air-traffic controllers’ dispute has been resolved without recourse to industrial action.”

“Not that,” said Shadow. “Look. It says it’s the fourteenth of February.”

“Happy Valentine’s Day.”

“So we set out January the what, twentieth, twenty-first? I wasn’t keeping track of the dates, but it was the third week of January. We were three days on the road, all told. So how is it the fourteenth of February?”

“Because we walked for almost a month,” said Wednesday. “In the Badlands. Backstage.”

“Hell of a shortcut,” said Shadow.

Wednesday pushed the paper away. “Fucking Johnny Appleseed, always going on about Paul Bunyan. In real life Chapman owned fourteen apple orchards. He farmed thousands of acres. Yes, he kept pace with the western frontier, but there’s not a story out there about him with a word of truth in it, save that he went a little crazy once. But it doesn’t matter. Like the newspapers used to say, if the truth isn’t big enough, you print the legend. This country needs its legends. And even the legends don’t believe it any more.”

“But you see it.”

“I’m a has-been. Who the fuck cares about me?”

Shadow said softly, “You’re a god.”

Wednesday looked at him sharply. He seemed to be about to say something, and then he slumped back in his seat, and looked down at the menu and said, “So?”

“It’s a good thing to be a god,” said Shadow.

“Is it?” asked Wednesday, and this time it was Shadow who looked away.

In a gas station twenty-five miles outside Lakeside, on the wall by the restrooms, Shadow saw a homemade photocopied notice: a black and white photo of Alison McGovern and the handwritten question Have You Seen Me? above it. Same yearbook photograph: smiling confidently, a girl with rubber-band braces on her top teeth who wants to work with animals when she grows up. Have you seen me?

Shadow bought a Snickers bar, a bottle of water, and a copy of the Lakeside News. The above-the-fold story, written by Marguerite Olsen, our Lakeside Reporter, showed a photograph of a boy and an older man, out on the frozen lake, standing by an outhouse-like ice-fishing shack, and between them they were holding a big fish. They were smiling. Father and Son Catch Record Northern Pike. Full story inside.

Wednesday was driving. He said, “Read me anything interesting you find in the paper.”

Shadow looked carefully, and he turned the pages slowly, but he couldn’t find anything.

Wednesday dropped him off in the driveway outside his apartment. A smoke-colored cat stared at him from the driveway, then fled when he bent to stroke it.

Shadow stopped on the wooden deck outside his apartment and looked out at the lake, dotted here and there with green and brown ice-fishing huts. Many of them had cars parked beside them. On the ice nearer the bridge sat the old green klunker, just as it had sat in the newspaper. “March the twenty-third,” said Shadow, encouragingly. “Round nine fifteen in the morning. You can do it.”

“Not a chance,” said a woman’s voice. “April third. Six P.M. That way the day warms up the ice.” Shadow smiled. Marguerite Olsen was wearing a ski suit. She was at the far end of the deck, refilling the bird feeder with white blocks of suet.

“I read your article in the Lakeside News on the Town Record Northern Pike.”

“Exciting, huh?”

“Well, educational, maybe.”