American Gods

Shadow unscrewed the top of the water and drank. Something clinked heavily in his jacket pocket. He put his hand into the pocket and pulled out a coin the size of a half-dollar. It was heavy, and a deep yellow in color. It was also slightly sticky. Shadow palmed it in his right hand, classic palm, then produced it from between his third and fourth fingers. He front-palmed it, holding it between his first and his little finger, so it was invisible from behind, then slipped his two middle fingers under it, pivoting it smoothly into a back-palm. Finally he dropped the coin back into his left hand, and he placed it into his pocket.

“What the hell was I drinking last night?” asked Shadow. The events of the night were crowding around him now, without shape, without sense, but he knew they were there.

Mr. Wednesday spotted an exit sign promising a gas station, and he gunned the engine. “You don’t remember?”

“No.”

“You were drinking mead,” said Wednesday. He grinned a huge grin.

Mead.

Yes.

Shadow leaned back in the seat, and sucked down water from the bottle, and let the night before wash over him. Most of it, he remembered. Some of it, he didn’t.

In the gas station Shadow bought a Clean-U-Up Kit, which contained a razor, a packet of shaving cream, a comb, and a disposable toothbrush packed with a tiny tube of toothpaste. Then he walked into the men’s restroom and looked at himself in the mirror.

He had a bruise under one eye—when he prodded it, experimentally, with one finger, he found it hurt deeply—and a swollen lower lip. His hair was a tangle, and he looked as if he had spent the first half of last night fighting and then the rest of the night fast asleep, fully dressed, in the back seat of a car. Tinny music played in the background: it took him some moments to identify it as the Beatles’ “Fool on the Hill.”

Shadow washed his face with the restroom’s liquid soap, then he lathered his face and shaved. He wet his hair and combed it back. He brushed his teeth. Then he washed the last traces of the soap and the toothpaste from his face with lukewarm water. Stared back at his reflection: clean-shaven, but his eyes were still red and puffy. He looked older than he remembered.

He wondered what Laura would say when she saw him, and then he remembered that Laura wouldn’t say anything ever again and he saw his face, in the mirror, tremble, but only for a moment.

He went out.

“I look like shit,” said Shadow.

“Of course you do,” agreed Wednesday.

Wednesday took an assortment of snack-food up to the cash register, and paid for that and their gas, changing his mind twice about whether he was doing it with plastic or with cash, to the irritation of the gum-chewing young lady behind the till. Shadow watched as Wednesday became increasingly flustered and apologetic. He seemed very old, suddenly. The girl gave him his cash back, and put the purchase on the card, and then gave him the card receipt and took his cash, then returned the cash and took a different card. Wednesday was obviously on the verge of tears, an old man made helpless by the implacable plastic march of the modern world.

Shadow checked out the payphone: an out-of-order sign hung on it.

They walked out of the warm gas station, and their breath steamed in the air.

“You want me to drive?” asked Shadow.

“Hell no,” said Wednesday.

The freeway slipped past them: browning grass meadows on each side of them. The trees were leafless and dead. Two black birds stared at them from a telegraph wire.

“Hey, Wednesday.”

“What?”

“The way I saw it in there, you never paid for the gas.”

“Oh?”

“The way I saw it, she wound up paying you for the privilege of having you in her gas station. You think she’s figured it out yet?”

“She never will.”

“So what are you? A two-bit con artist?”

Wednesday nodded. “Yes,” he said. “I suppose I am. Among other things.”

He swung out into the left lane to pass a truck. The sky was a bleak and uniform gray.

“It’s going to snow,” said Shadow.

“Yes.”

“Sweeney. Did he actually show me how he did that trick with the gold coins?”

“Oh yes.”

“I can’t remember.”

“It’ll come back. It was a long night.”

Several small snowflakes brushed the windshield, melting in seconds.

“Your wife’s body is on display at Wendell’s Funeral Parlor at present,” said Wednesday. “Then after lunch they will take her from there to the graveyard for the interment.”

“How do you know?”

“I called ahead while you were in the john. You know where Wendell’s Funeral Parlor is?”

Shadow nodded. The snowflakes whirled and dizzied in front of them.

“This is our exit,” said Shadow. The car stole off the interstate, and past the cluster of motels to the north of Eagle Point.

Three years had passed. Yes. The Super-8 motel had gone, torn down: in its place was a Wendy’s. There were more stoplights, unfamiliar storefronts. They drove downtown. Shadow asked Wednesday to slow as they drove past the Muscle Farm. CLOSED INDEFINITELY, said the hand-lettered sign on the door, DUE TO BEREAVEMENT.