American Gods

The restaurant was a big and barn-like structure, ten minutes up the road. Wednesday had told each of his guests that tonight’s dinner was on him, and had organized rides to the restaurant for any of them that didn’t have their own transportation.

Shadow wondered how they had gotten to the House on the Rock without their own transportation, and how they were going to get away again, but he said nothing. It seemed the smartest thing to say.

Shadow had a carful of Wednesday’s guests to ferry to the restaurant: the woman in the red sari sat in the front seat beside him. There were two men in the back seat: a peculiar-looking young man whose name Shadow had not properly caught, but thought might be Elvis, and another man, in a dark suit, who Shadow could not remember.

He had stood beside the man as he got into the car, had opened and closed the door for him, and was unable to remember anything about him. He turned around in the driver’s seat and looked at him, carefully noting his face, his hair, his clothes, making certain he would know him if he met him again, and turned back to start the car, to find that the man had slipped from his mind. An impression of wealth was left behind, but nothing more.

I’m tired, thought Shadow. He glanced to his right and snuck a glance at the Indian woman. He noted the tiny silver necklace of skulls that circled her neck, her charm bracelet of heads and hands that jangled, like tiny bells, when she moved. There was a dark blue jewel on her forehead. She smelled of spices, of cardamom and nutmeg and flowers. Her hair was pepper-and-salt, and she smiled when she saw him look at her.

“You call me Mama-ji,” she said.

“I am Shadow, Mama-ji,” said Shadow.

“And what do you think of your employer’s plans, Mister Shadow?”

He slowed, as a large black truck sped past, overtaking them with a spray of slush. “I don’t ask, he don’t tell,” he said.

“If you ask me, he wants a last stand. He wants us to go out in a blaze of glory. That’s what he wants. And we are old enough, or stupid enough, that maybe some of us will say yes.”

“It’s not my job to ask questions, Mama-ji,” said Shadow. The inside of the car filled with her tinkling laughter.

The man in the back seat—not the peculiar-looking young man, the other one—said something, and Shadow replied to him, but a moment later he was damned if he could remember what had been said.

The peculiar-looking young man had said nothing, but now he started to hum to himself, a deep, melodic, bass humming that made the interior of the car vibrate and rattle and buzz.

The peculiar-looking man was of average height, but of an odd shape: Shadow had heard of men who were barrel-chested before, but had no image to accompany the metaphor. This man was barrel-chested, and he had legs like, yes, like tree-trunks, and hands like, exactly, ham-hocks. He wore a black parka with a hood, several sweaters, thick dungarees, and, incongruously, in the winter and with those clothes, a pair of white tennis shoes, which were the same size and shape as shoe boxes. His fingers resembled sausages, with flat, squared-off fingertips.

“That’s some hum you got,” said Shadow from the driver’s seat.

“Sorry,” said the peculiar young man, in a deep, deep voice, embarrassed. He stopped humming.

“No, I enjoyed it,” said Shadow. “Don’t stop.”

The peculiar young man hesitated, then commenced to hum once more, his voice as deep and reverberant as before. This time there were words interspersed in the humming. “Down down down,” he sang, so deeply that the windows rattled. “Down down down, down down, down down.”

Christmas lights were draped across the eaves of every house and building that they drove past. They ranged from discreet golden lights that dripped twinkles to giant displays of snowmen and teddy bears and multicolored stars.

Shadow pulled up at the restaurant and he let his passengers off by the front door, then he got back into the car. He would park it at the back of the parking lot. He wanted to make the short walk back to the restaurant on his own, in the cold, to clear his head.

He parked the car beside a black truck. He wondered if it was the same one that had sped past him earlier.

He closed the car door, and stood there in the parking lot, his breath steaming.

Inside the restaurant, Shadow could imagine Wednesday already sitting all his guests down around a big table, working the room. Shadow wondered whether he had really had Kali in the front of his car, wondered what he had been driving in the back…

“Hey, bud, you got a match?” said a voice that was half-familiar, and Shadow turned to apologize and say no, he didn’t have a match, but the gun barrel hit him over the left eye, and he started to fall. He put out an arm to steady himself as he went down. Someone pushed something soft into his mouth, to stop him crying out, and taped it into position: easy, practiced moves, like a butcher gutting a chicken.