American Gods

“Then my grampaw would ride through the winter in comfort and never have to worry about running out of food or out of fuel. And when he saw that the true spring was coming he’d go to the flag, and he’d dig his way down through the snow, and he’d move the two-b’-fours, and he’d carry them in one by one and set the family in front of the fire to thaw. Nobody ever minded except one of the hired men who lost half an ear to a family of mice who nibbled it off one time my grampaw didn’t push those two-b’-fours all the way closed. Of course, in those days we had real winters. You could do that back then. These pussy winters we get nowadays it don’t hardly get cold enough.”

“No?” asked Shadow. He was playing straight man, and enjoying it enormously.

“Not since the winter of ’49, and you’d be too young to remember that one. That was a winter. I see you bought yourself a ve-hicle.”

“Yup. What do you think?”

“Truth to tell, I never liked that Gunther boy. I had a trout stream down in the woods a way, on back of my property, way back, well it’s town land but I’d put down stones in the river, made little pools and places where the trout liked to live. Caught me some beauties too—one fellow must have been a six-, seven-pound brook trout, and that little Gunther so-and-so he kicked down each of the pools and threatened to report me to the DNR. Now he’s in Green Bay, and soon enough he’ll be back here. If there were any justice in the world he’d’ve gone off into the world as a winter runaway, but nope, sticks like a cockleburr to a woolen vest.” He began to arrange the contents of Shadow’s welcome basket on the counter. “This is Katherine Powdermaker’s crabapple jelly. She’s been giving me a pot for Christmas for longer than you’ve been alive, and the sad truth is I’ve never opened a one. They’re down in my basement, forty, fifty pots. Maybe I’ll open one and discover that I like the stuff. Meantime, here’s a pot for you. Maybe you’ll like it.”

“What’s a winter runaway?”

“Mm.” The old man pushed his woolen cap above his ears, rubbed his temple with a pink forefinger. “Well, it ain’t unique to Lakeside—we’re a good town, better than most, but we’re not perfect. Some winters, well, maybe a kid gets a bit stir crazy, when it gets so cold that you can’t go out, and the snow’s so dry that you can’t make so much as a snowball without it crumbling away . . .”

“They run off?”

The old man nodded, gravely. “I blame the television, showing all the kids things they’ll never have—Dallas and Dynasty, all of that nonsense. I’ve not had a television since the fall of ’83, except for a black-and-white set I keep in a closet for if folk come in from out of town and there’s a big game on.”

“Can I get you anything, Hinzelmann?”

“Not coffee. Gives me heartburn. Just water.” Hinzelmann shook his head. “Biggest problem in this part of the world is poverty. Not the poverty we had in the Depression but something more in . . . what’s the word, means it creeps in at the edges, like cock-a-roaches?”

“Insidious?”

“Yeah. Insidious. Logging’s dead. Mining’s dead. Tourists don’t drive farther north than the Dells, ‘cept for a handful of hunters and some kids going to camp on the lakes—and they aren’t spending their money in the towns.”

“Lakeside seems kind of prosperous, though.”

The old man’s blue eyes blinked. “And believe me, it takes a lot of work,” he said. “Hard work. But this is a good town, and all the work all the people here put into it is worthwhile. Not that my family weren’t poor as kids. Ask me how poor we was as kids.”

Shadow put on his straight-man face and said, “How poor were you as kids, Mister Hinzelmann?”

“Just Hinzelmann, Mike. We were so poor that we couldn’t afford a fire. Come New Year’s Eve my father would suck on a peppermint, and us kids, we’d stand around with our hands outstretched, basking in the glow.”

Shadow made a rimshot noise. Hinzelmann put on his ski mask and did up his huge plaid coat, pulled out his car keys from his pocket, and then, last of all, pulled on his great gloves. “You get too bored up here, you just come down to the store and ask for me. I’ll show you my collection of hand-tied fishing flies. Bore you so much that getting back here will be a relief.” His voice was muffled, but audible.

“I’ll do that,” said Shadow with a smile. “How’s Tessie?”

“Hibernating. She’ll be out in the spring. You take care now, Mr. Ainsel.” And he closed the door behind him as he left.

The apartment grew ever colder.

Shadow put on his coat and his gloves. Then he put on his boots. He could hardly see through the windows now for the ice on the inside of the panes which turned the view of the lake into an abstract image.

His breath was clouding in the air.