American Gods

“You can walk on it. Drive on it too, but I wouldn’t want to risk it yet. It’s been cold up here for six weeks,” said Hinzelmann. “But you also got to allow that things freeze harder and faster up here in northern Wisconsin than they do most anyplace else there is. I was out hunting once—hunting for deer, and this was oh, thirty, forty years back, and I shot at a buck, missed him and sent him running off through the woods—this was over acrost the north end of the lake, up near where you’ll be living, Mike. Now he was the finest buck I ever did see, twenty point, big as a small horse, no lie. Now, I’m younger and feistier back then than I am now, and though it had started snowing before Halloween that year, now it was Thanksgiving and there was clean snow on the ground, fresh as anything, and I could see the buck’s footprints. It looked to me like the big fellow was heading for the lake in a panic.

“Well, only a damn fool tries to run down a buck, but there am I, a damn fool, running after him, and there he is, standing in the lake, in oh, eight, nine inches of water, and he’s just looking at me. That very moment, the sun goes behind a cloud, and the freeze comes—temperature must have fallen thirty degrees in ten minutes, not a word of a lie. And that old stag, he gets ready to run, and he can’t move. He’s frozen into the ice.

“Me, I just walk over to him slowly. You can see he wants to run, but he’s iced in and it just isn’t going to happen. But there’s no way I can bring myself to shoot a defenseless critter when he can’t get away—what kind of man would I be if I done that, heh? So I takes my shotgun and I fires off one shell, straight up into the air.

“Well the noise and the shock is enough to make that buck just about jump out of his skin, and seein’ that his legs are iced in, that’s just what he proceeds to do. He leaves his hide and his antlers stuck to the ice, while he charges back into the woods, pink as a newborn mouse and shivering fit to bust.

“I felt bad enough for that old buck that I talked the Lakeside Ladies Knitting Circle into making him something warm to wear all the winter, and they knitted him an all-over one-piece woolen suit, so he wouldn’t freeze to death. Course the joke was on us, because they knitted him a suit of bright orange wool so no hunter ever shot at it. Hunters in these parts wear orange at hunting season,” he added, helpfully. “And if you think there’s a word of a lie in that, I can prove it to you. I’ve got the antlers up on my rec room wall to this day.”

Shadow laughed, and the old man smiled the satisfied smile of a master craftsman. They pulled up outside a brick building with a large wooden deck, from which golden holiday lights hung and twinkled invitingly.

“That’s Five-oh-two,” said Hinzelmann. “Apartment three would be on the top floor, round the other side, overlooking the lake. There you go, Mike.”

“Thank you, Mr. Hinzelmann. Can I give you anything toward gas?”

“Just Hinzelmann. And you don’t owe me a penny. Merry Christmas from me and from Tessie.”

“Are you sure you won’t accept anything?”

The old man scratched his chin. “Tell you what,” he said. “Sometime in the next week or so I’ll come by and sell you some tickets. For our raffle. Charity. For now, young man, you can be getting on to bed.”

Shadow smiled. “Merry Christmas, Hinzelmann,” he said.

The old man shook Shadow’s hand with one red-knuckled hand. It felt as hard and as callused as an oak branch. “Now, you watch the path as you go up there, it’s going to be slippery. I can see your door from here, at the side there, see it? I’ll just wait in the car down here until you’re safely inside. You just give me the thumbs-up when you’re in okay, and I’ll drive off.”

He kept the Wendt idling until Shadow was safely up the wooden steps on the side of the house, and had opened the apartment door with his key. The door to the apartment swung open. Shadow made a thumbs-up sign and the old man in the Wendt—Tessie, thought Shadow, and the thought of a car with a name made him smile one more time—Hinzelmann and Tessie swung around and made their way back across the bridge.

Shadow shut the front door. The room was freezing. It smelled of people who had gone away to live other lives, and of all they had eaten and dreamed. He found the thermostat and cranked it up to 70 degrees. He went into the tiny kitchen, checked the drawers, opened the avocado-colored refrigerator, but it was empty. No surprise there. At least the fridge smelled clean inside, not musty.

There was a small bedroom with a bare mattress in it, beside the kitchen, next to an even tinier bathroom that was mostly shower stall. An aged cigarette butt floated in the toilet bowl, staining the water brown. Shadow flushed it away.

He found sheets and blankets in a closet, and made the bed. Then he took off his shoes, his jacket and his watch, and he climbed into the bed fully dressed, wondering how long it would take him to get warm.