American Gods

The moon came out from behind a thick cloud. It was low on the horizon, ready to set, but the light it cast onto the snow was enough to see by.

They had emerged from what turned out to be the black-painted metal car of a long freight train, parked or abandoned in a woodland siding. The series of cars went on as far as he could see, into the trees and away. Of course he had been on a train. He should have known.

“How the hell did you find me here?” he asked his dead wife.

She shook her head slowly, amused. “You shine like a beacon in a dark world,” she told him. “It wasn’t that hard. Now,” she told him, “you need to go. Just go. Go as far and as fast as you can. Don’t use your credit cards and you should be fine.”

“Where should I go?”

She pushed a hand through her matted hair, flicking it back out of her eyes. “The road’s that way,” she told him. “Do whatever you can. Steal a car if you have to. Go south.”

“Laura,” he said, and hesitated. “Do you know what’s going on? Do you know who these people are? Who did you kill?”

“Yeah,” she said. “I think I know.”

“I owe you,” said Shadow. “I’d still be in there if it wasn’t for you. I don’t think they had anything good planned for me.”

“No,” she said. “I don’t think they did.”

They walked away from the empty train cars. Shadow wondered about the other trains he’d seen, blank windowless metal cars which went on for mile after mile hooting their lonely way through the night. His fingers closed around the Liberty dollar in his pocket, and he remembered Zorya Polunochnaya, and the way she had looked at him in the moonlight. Did you ask her what she wanted?…It is the wisest thing to ask the dead. Sometimes they will tell you.

“Laura…What do you want?” he asked.

“You really want to know?”

“Yes. Please.”

Laura looked up at him with dead blue eyes. “I want to be alive again,” she said. “Not in this half-life. I want to be really alive. I want to feel my heart pumping in my chest again. I want to feel blood moving through me—hot, and salty, and real. It’s weird, you don’t think you can feel it, the blood, but believe me, when it stops flowing, you’ll know.” She rubbed her eyes, smudging her face with red from the mess on her hands. “Look, I don’t know why this happened to me. But it’s hard. You know why dead people only go out at night, puppy? Because it’s easier to pass for real, in the dark. And I don’t want to have to pass. I want to be alive.”

“I don’t understand what you want me to do.”

“Make it happen, hon. You’ll figure it out. I know you will.”

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll try. And if I do figure it out, how do I find you?”

But she was gone, and there was nothing left in the woodland but a gentle gray in the sky to show him where east was, and on the bitter December wind a lonely wail that might have been the cry of the last night bird or the call of the first bird of dawn.

Shadow set his face to the south, and he began to walk.

CHAPTER SEVEN

As the Hindu gods are “immortal” only in a very particular sense—for they are born and they die—they experience most of the great human dilemmas and often seem to differ from mortals in a few trivial details…and from demons even less. Yet they are regarded by the Hindus as a class of beings by definition totally different from any other; they are symbols in a way that no human being, however “archetypal” his life story, can ever be. They are actors playing parts that are real only for us; they are the masks behind which we see our own faces.

—WENDY DONIGER O’FLAHERTY, INTRODUCTION,

HINDU MYTHS (PENGUIN BOOKS, 1975)

Shadow had been walking south, or what he hoped was more or less south, for several hours, heading along a narrow and unmarked road through the woods somewhere in, he imagined, southern Wisconsin. Several jeeps came down the road toward him at one point, headlights blazing, and he ducked well back into the trees until they had passed. The early morning mist hung at waist level. The cars were black.