American Gods

Florida went on for longer than Shadow had imagined, and it was late by the time he pulled up outside a small, one-story wooden house, its windows tightly shuttered, on the outskirts of Fort Pierce. Nancy, who had directed him through the last five miles, invited him to stay the night.

“I can get a room in a motel,” said Shadow. “It’s not a problem.”

“You could do that, and I’d be hurt. Obviously I wouldn’t say anythin’. But I’d be real hurt, real bad,” said Mr. Nancy. “So you better stay here, and I’ll make you a bed up on the couch.”

Mr. Nancy unlocked the hurricane shutters, and pulled open the windows. The house smelled musty and damp, and a little sweet, as if it were haunted by the ghosts of long-dead cookies.

Shadow agreed, reluctantly, to stay the night there, just as he agreed, even more reluctantly, to walk with Mr. Nancy to the bar at the end of the road, for just one late-night drink while the house aired out.

“Did you see Czernobog?” asked Nancy, as they strolled through the muggy Floridian night. The air was alive with whirring palmetto bugs and the ground crawled with creatures that scuttled and clicked. Mr. Nancy lit a cigarillo, and coughed and choked on it. Still, he kept right on smoking.

“He was gone when I came out of the cave.”

“He will have headed home. He’ll be waitin’ for you there, you know.”

“Yes.”

They walked in silence to the end of the road. It wasn’t much of a bar, but it was open.

“I’ll buy the first beers,” said Mr. Nancy.

“We’re only having one beer, remember,” said Shadow.

“What are you?” asked Mr. Nancy. “Some kind of cheapskate?”

Mr. Nancy bought them their first beers, and Shadow bought the second round. He stared in horror as Mr. Nancy talked the barman into turning on the karaoke machine, and then watched in fascinated embarrassment as the old man belted his way through “What’s New Pussycat?” before crooning out a moving, tuneful version of “The Way You Look Tonight.” He had a fine voice, and by the end the handful of people still in the bar were cheering and applauding him.

When he came back to Shadow at the bar he was looking brighter. The whites of his eyes were clear, and the gray pallor that had touched his skin was gone. “Your turn,” he said.

“Absolutely not,” said Shadow.

But Mr. Nancy had ordered more beers and was handing Shadow a stained printout of songs from which to choose. “Just pick a song you know the words to.”

“This is not funny,” said Shadow. The world was beginning to swim, a little, but he couldn’t muster the energy to argue, and then Mr. Nancy was putting on the backing tape to “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood,” and pushing—literally pushing—Shadow up onto the tiny makeshift stage at the end of the bar.

Shadow held the mike as if it was probably live, and then the backing music started and he croaked out the initial “Baby…” Nobody in the bar threw anything in his direction. And it felt good. “Can you understand me now?” His voice was rough but melodic, and rough suited the song just fine. “Sometimes I feel a little mad. Don’t you know that no one alive can always be an angel…”

And he was still singing it as they walked home through the busy Florida night, the old man and the young, stumbling and happy.

“I’m just a soul whose intentions are good,” he sang to the crabs and the spiders and the palmetto beetles and the lizards and the night. “Oh lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood.”

Mr. Nancy showed him to the couch. It was much smaller than Shadow, who decided to sleep on the floor, but by the time he had finished deciding to sleep on the floor he was already fast asleep, half-sitting, half-lying, on the tiny sofa.

At first, he did not dream. There was just the comforting darkness. And then he saw a fire burning in the darkness and he walked toward it.

“You did well,” whispered the buffalo man without moving his lips.

“I don’t know what I did,” said Shadow.

“You made peace,” said the buffalo man. “You took our words and made them your own. They never understood that they were here—and the people who worshiped them were here—because it suits us that they are here. But we can change our minds. And perhaps we will.”

“Are you a god?” asked Shadow.

The buffalo-headed man shook his head. Shadow thought, for a moment, that the creature was amused. “I am the land,” he said.

And if there was more to that dream then Shadow did not remember it.

He heard something sizzling. His head was aching, and there was a pounding behind his eyes.

Mr. Nancy was already cooking breakfast: a pile of pancakes, sizzling bacon, perfect eggs, and coffee. He looked in the peak of health.

“My head hurts,” said Shadow.

“You get a good breakfast inside you, you’ll feel like a new man.”

“I’d rather feel like the same man, just with a different head,” said Shadow.

“Eat,” said Mr. Nancy.

Shadow ate.