American Gods

“That’s good,” she said. She squeezed his hand with her cold hand. And then she said, “And the opposite? What about that?”

“The opposite?”

“Yes,” she whispered. “I think I must have earned it.”

“I don’t want to do that.”

She said nothing. She simply waited.

Shadow said, “Okay.” Then he took his hand from hers and put it to her neck.

She said, “That’s my husband.” She said it proudly.

“I love you, babes,” said Shadow.

“Love you, puppy,” she whispered.

He closed his hand around the golden coin that hung around her neck. He tugged, hard, at the chain, which snapped easily. Then he took the gold coin between his finger and thumb, and blew on it, and opened his hand wide.

The coin was gone.

Her eyes were still open, but they did not move.

He bent down then, and kissed her, gently, on her cold cheek, but she did not respond. He did not expect her to. Then he got up and walked out of the cavern, to stare into the night.

The storms had cleared. The air felt fresh and clean and new once more.

Tomorrow, he had no doubt, would be one hell of a beautiful day.

PART FOUREpilogue: Something That the Dead Are Keeping Back

CHAPTER NINETEEN

One describes a tale best by telling the tale. You see? The way one describes a story, to oneself or to the world, is by telling the story. It is a balancing act and it is a dream. The more accurate the map, the more it resembles the territory. The most accurate map possible would be the territory, and thus would be perfectly accurate and perfectly useless. The tale is the map which is the territory. You must remember this.

—FROM THE NOTEBOOKS OF MR. IBIS

The two of them were driving the VW bus down to Florida on I-75. They’d been driving since dawn, or rather, Shadow had driven, and Mr. Nancy had sat up front in the passenger seat and, from time to time, and with a pained expression on his face, offered to drive. Shadow always said no.

“Are you happy?” asked Mr. Nancy, suddenly. He had been staring at Shadow for several hours. Whenever Shadow glanced over to his right, Mr. Nancy was looking at him with his earth-brown eyes.

“Not really,” said Shadow. “But I’m not dead yet.”

“Huh?”

“Call no man happy until he is dead. Herodotus.”

Mr. Nancy raised a white eyebrow, and he said, “I’m not dead yet, and, mostly because I’m not dead yet, I’m happy as a clamboy.”

“The Herodotus thing. It doesn’t mean that the dead are happy,” said Shadow. “It means that you can’t judge the shape of someone’s life until it’s over and done.”

“I don’t even judge then,” said Mr. Nancy. “And as for happiness, there’s a lot of different kinds of happiness, just as there’s a hell of a lot of different kinds of dead. Me, I’ll just take what I can get when I can get it.”

Shadow changed the subject. “Those helicopters,” he said. “The ones that took away the bodies, and the injured.”

“What about them?”

“Who sent them? Where did they come from?”

“You shouldn’t worry yourself about that. They’re like valkyries or buzzards. They come because they have to come.”

“If you say so.”

“The dead and the wounded will be taken care of. You ask me, old Jacquel’s going to be very busy for the next month or so. Tell me somethin’, Shadow-boy.”

“Okay.”

“You learn anythin’ from all this?”

Shadow shrugged. “I don’t know. Most of what I learned on the tree I’ve already forgotten,” he said. “I think I met some people. But I’m not certain of anything any more. It’s like one of those dreams that changes you. You keep some of the dream forever, and you know things down deep inside yourself, because it happened to you, but when you go looking for details they kind of just slip out of your head.”

“Yeah,” said Mr. Nancy. And then he said, grudgingly, “You’re not so dumb.”

“Maybe not,” said Shadow. “But I wish I could have kept more of what passed through my hands, since I got out of prison. I was given so many things, and I lost them again.”

“Maybe,” said Mr. Nancy, “you kept more than you think.”

“No,” said Shadow.

They crossed the border into Florida, and Shadow saw his first palm tree. He wondered if they’d planted it there on purpose, at the border, just so that you knew you were in Florida now.

Mr. Nancy began to snore, and Shadow glanced over at him. The old man still looked very gray, and his breath was rasping. Shadow wondered, not for the first time, if he had sustained some kind of chest or lung injury in the fight. Nancy had refused any medical attention.