American Gods

“Okay,” said Shadow. He knew that Wednesday was telling him the truth, or a part of a truth. War was coming. No, that was not it: the war had already begun. The battle was coming. “Mad Sweeney said that he was working for you when we met him that first night. He said that before he died.”

“And would I have wanted to employ someone who could not even best a sad case like that in a bar fight? But never fear, you’ve repaid my faith in you a dozen times over. Have you ever been to Las Vegas?”

“Las Vegas, Nevada?”

“That’s the one.”

“No.”

“We’re flying in there from Madison later tonight, on a gentleman’s red-eye, a charter plane for high rollers. I’ve convinced them that we should be on it.”

“Don’t you ever get tired of lying?” asked Shadow. He said it gently, curiously.

“Not in the slightest. Anyway, it’s true. We are playing for the highest stakes of all. It shouldn’t take us more than a couple of hours to get to Madison, the roads are clear. So lock your door and turn off the heaters. It would be a terrible thing if you burned down the house in your absence.”

“Who are we going to see in Las Vegas?”

Wednesday told him.

Shadow turned off the heaters, packed some clothes into an overnight bag, then turned back to Wednesday and said, “Look, I feel kind of stupid. I know you just told me who we’re going to see, but I dunno. I just had a brain-fart or something. It’s gone. Who is it again?”

Wednesday told him once more.

This time Shadow almost had it. The name was there on the tip of his mind. He wished he’d been paying closer attention when Wednesday told him. He let it go.

“Who’s driving?” he asked Wednesday.

“You are,” said Wednesday. They walked out of the house, down the wooden stairs and the icy path to where a black Lincoln Town Car was parked.

Shadow drove.

* * *

Entering the casino, one is beset at every side by invitation—invitations such that it would take a man of stone, heartless, mindless, and curiously devoid of avarice, to decline them. Listen: a machine-gun rattle of silver coins as they tumble and spurt down into a slot machine tray and overflow onto monogrammed carpets is replaced by the siren clangor of the slots, the jangling, blippeting chorus swallowed by the huge room, muted to a comforting background chatter by the time one reaches the card tables, the distant sounds only loud enough to keep the adrenaline flowing through the gamblers’ veins.

There is a secret that the casinos possess, a secret they hold and guard and prize, the holiest of their mysteries. For most people do not gamble to win money, after all, although that is what is advertised, sold, claimed, and dreamed. But that is merely the easy lie that gets them through the enormous, ever-open, welcoming doors.

The secret is this: people gamble to lose money. They come to the casinos for the moment in which they feel alive, to ride the spinning wheel and turn with the cards and lose themselves, with the coins, in the slots. They may brag about the nights they won, the money they took from the casino, but they treasure, secretly treasure, the times they lost. It’s a sacrifice, of sorts.