American Gods

“Hey! Can you at least get me back to a real road?” called Shadow.

The raven flew up and away. Shadow looked at the corpse of the baby deer. He decided that if he were a real woodsman, he would slice off a steak and grill it over a wood fire. Instead, he sat on a fallen tree and ate a Snickers bar and knew that he really wasn’t a real woodsman.

The raven cawed from the edge of the clearing.

“You want me to follow you?” asked Shadow. “Or has Timmy fallen down another well?” The bird cawed again, impatiently. Shadow started walking toward it. It waited until he was close, then flapped heavily into another tree, heading somewhat to the left of the way Shadow had originally been going.

“Hey,” said Shadow. “Huginn or Muninn, or whoever you are.”

The bird turned, head tipped, suspiciously, on one side, and it stared at him with bright eyes.

“Say ‘Nevermore,’” said Shadow.

“Fuck you,” said the raven. It said nothing else as they went through the woodland together, the raven in the lead and flying from tree to tree, the man stomping heavily through the undergrowth trying to catch up.

The sky was a uniform gray. It was almost midday.

In half an hour they reached a blacktop road on the edge of a town, and the raven flew back into the wood. Shadow observed a Culver’s Frozen Custard ButterBurgers sign, and, next to it, a gas station. He went into the Culver’s, which was empty of customers. There was a keen young man with a shaven head behind the cash register. Shadow ordered two ButterBurgers and french fries. Then he went into the restroom to clean up. He looked a real mess. He did an inventory of the contents of his pockets: he had a few coins, including the silver Liberty dollar, a disposable toothbrush and toothpaste, three Snickers bars, five chemical heater pads, a wallet (with nothing more in it than his driver’s license and a credit card—he wondered how much longer the credit card had to live), and in the coat’s inside pocket, a thousand dollars in fifties and twenties, his take from yesterday’s bank job. He washed his face and hands in hot water, slicked down his dark hair, then went back into the restaurant and ate his burgers and fries, and drank his coffee.

He went back to the counter. “You want frozen custard?” asked the keen young man.

“No. No thanks. Is there anywhere around here I could rent a car? My car died, back down the road a way.”

The young man scratched his head-stubble. “Not around here, mister. If your car died you could call Triple-A. Or talk to the gas station next door about a tow.”

“A fine idea,” said Shadow. “Thanks.”

He walked across the melting snow, from the Culver’s parking lot to the gas station. He bought candy bars and beef jerky sticks and more chemical hand-and feetwarmers.

“Anywhere hereabouts I could rent a car?” he asked the woman behind the cash register. She was immensely plump, and bespectacled, and was delighted to have someone to talk to.

“Let me think,” she said. “We’re kind of out of the way here. They do that kind of thing over in Madison. Where you going?”

“Kay-ro,” he said. “Wherever that is.”

“I know where that is,” she said. “Hand me that map from that rack over there.” Shadow passed her a plastic-coated map of Illinois. She unfolded it, then pointed in triumph to the bottommost corner of the state. “There it is.”

“Cairo?”

“That’s how they pronounce the one in Egypt. The one in Little Egypt, they call that one Kayro. They got a Thebes down there, all sorts. My sister-in-law comes from Thebes. I asked her about the one in Egypt, she looked at me as if I had a screw loose.” The woman chuckled like a drain.

“Any pyramids?” The city was five hundred miles away, almost directly south.

“Not that they ever told me. They call it Little Egypt because back, oh, mebbe a hundred, hundred and fifty years back, there was a famine all over. Crops failed. But they didn’t fail down there. So everyone went there to buy food. Like in the Bible. Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat. Off we go to Egypt, bad-a-boom.”

“So if you were me, and you needed to get there, how would you go?” asked Shadow.

“Drive.”

“Car died a few miles down the road. It was a pieceashit if you’ll pardon my language,” said Shadow.

“Pee-Oh-Esses,” she said. “Yup. That’s what my brother-in-law calls ’em. He buys and sells cars in a small way. He’ll call me up, say, ‘Mattie, I just sold another Pee-Oh-Ess.’ Say, maybe he’d be interested in your old car. For scrap or something.”

“It belongs to my boss,” said Shadow, surprising himself with the fluency and ease of his lies. “I need to call him, so he can come pick it up.” A thought struck him. “Your brother-in-law, is he around here?”

“He’s in Muscoda. Ten minutes south of here. Just over the river. Why?”

“Well, does he have a Pee-Oh-Ess he’d like to sell me for, mm, five, six hundred bucks?”

She smiled sweetly. “Mister, he doesn’t have a car on that back lot you couldn’t buy with a full tank of gas for five hundred dollars. But don’t you tell him I said so.”