American Gods

“I’m going to let you go. If you start sinking below the water I’ll pull you back up again.”

The hands released their grip on his head.

He felt himself sliding forward in the bathtub. He put out his hands, pressed them against the sides of the tub, and leaned back. The bathroom was small. The tub was metal, and the enamel was stained and scratched.

An old man moved into his field of vision. He looked concerned.

“Feeling better?” asked Hinzelmann. “You just lay back and relax. I’ve got the den nice and warm. You tell me when you’re ready, I got a robe you can wear, and I can throw your jeans into the dryer with the rest of your clothes. Sound good, Mike?”

“That’s not my name.”

“If you say so.” The old man’s goblin face twisted into an expression of discomfort.

Shadow had no real sense of time: he lay in the bath until the burning stopped and his toes and fingers flexed without real discomfort. Hinzelmann helped Shadow to his feet and let out the warm water. Shadow sat on the side of the bath and together they pulled off his jeans.

He squeezed, without much difficulty, into a terrycloth robe too small for him, and, leaning on the old man, he went through to the den, and flopped down on an ancient sofa. He was tired and weak: deeply fatigued, but alive. A log fire burned in the fireplace. A handful of surprised-looking deer heads peered down dustily from around the walls, where they jostled for space with several large varnished fish.

Hinzelmann went away with Shadow’s jeans, and from the room next door Shadow could hear a brief pause in the rattle of a clothes dryer, before it resumed. The old man returned with a steaming mug.

“It’s coffee,” he said, “which is a stimulant. And I splashed a little schnapps into it. Just a little. That’s what we always did in the old days. A doctor wouldn’t recommend it.”

Shadow took the coffee with both hands. On the side of the mug was a picture of a mosquito and the message, GIVE BLOOD—VISIT WISCONSIN!!

“Thanks,” he said.

“It’s what friends are for,” said Hinzelmann. “One day, you can save my life. For now, forget about it.”

Shadow sipped the coffee. “I thought I was dead.”

“You were lucky. I was up on the bridge—I’d pretty much figured that today was going to be the big day, you get a feel for it, when you get to my age—so I was up there with my old pocket watch, and I saw you heading out onto the lake. I shouted, but I sure as heck don’t think you coulda heard me. I saw the car go down, and I saw you go down with it, and I thought I’d lost you, so I went out onto the ice. Gave me the heebie-jeebies. You must have been under the water for the best part of two minutes. Then I saw your hand come up through the place where the car went down—it was like seeing a ghost, seeing you there…” He trailed off. “We were both damn lucky that the ice took our weight as I dragged you back to the shore.”

Shadow nodded.

“You did a good thing,” he told Hinzelmann, and the old man beamed all over his goblin face.

Somewhere in the house, Shadow heard a door close. He sipped at his coffee.

Now that he was able to think clearly, he was starting to ask himself questions.

He wondered how an old man, a man half his height and perhaps a third his weight, had been able to drag him, unconscious, across the ice, or get him up the bank to a car. He wondered how Hinzelmann had gotten Shadow into the house and the bath.

Hinzelmann walked over to the fire, picked up the tongs and placed a thin log, carefully, onto the blazing fire.

“Do you want to know what I was doing out on the ice?”

Hinzelmann shrugged. “None of my business.”

“You know what I don’t understand…,” said Shadow. He hesitated, putting his thoughts in order. “I don’t understand why you saved my life.”

“Well,” said Hinzelmann, “the way I was brought up, if you see another fellow in trouble—”

“No,” said Shadow. “That’s not what I mean. I mean, you killed all those kids. Every winter. I was the only one to have figured it out. You must have seen me open the trunk. Why didn’t you just let me drown?”

Hinzelmann tipped his head on one side. He scratched his nose, thoughtfully, rocked back and forth as if he were thinking. “Well,” he said. “That’s a good question. I guess it’s because I owed a certain party a debt. And I’m good for my debts.”

“Wednesday?”

“That’s the fellow.”

“There was a reason he hid me in Lakeside, wasn’t there? There was a reason nobody should have been able to find me here.”

Hinzelmann said nothing. He unhooked a heavy black poker from its place on the wall, and he prodded at the fire with it, sending up a cloud of orange sparks and smoke. “This is my home,” he said, petulantly. “It’s a good town.”

Shadow finished his coffee. He put the cup down on the floor. The effort was exhausting. “How long have you been here?”

“Long enough.”

“And you made the lake?”