American Gods

“Of course I am,” says the bearded man, smiling like a knife. “What do you expect? But look at it this way: it’s the only game in town.” He reaches out a pawlike hand and shakes the other man’s well-manicured hand. Then he walks away.

The thin waitress comes over, puzzled: there’s now only one man at the corner table, a sharply dressed man with dark hair in a charcoal-gray suit. “You doing okay?” she asks. “Is your friend coming back?”

The man with the dark hair sighs, and explains that his friend won’t be coming back, and thus she won’t be paid for her time, or for her trouble. And then, seeing the hurt in her eyes, and taking pity on her, he examines the golden threads in his mind, watches the matrix, follows the money until he spots a node, and tells her that if she’s outside Treasure Island at 6:00 A.M., thirty minutes after she gets off work, she’ll meet an oncologist from Denver who will just have won forty-thousand dollars at a craps table, and will need a mentor, a partner, someone to help him dispose of it all in the forty-eight hours before he gets on the plane home.

The words evaporate in the waitress’s mind, but they leave her happy. She sighs and notes that the guys in the corner have done a runner, and have not even tipped her; and it occurs to her that, instead of driving straight home when she gets off shift, she’s going to drive over to Treasure Island; but she would never, if you asked her, be able to tell you why.

“So who was that guy you were seeing?” asked Shadow as they walked back down the Las Vegas concourse. There were slot machines in the airport. Even at this time of the morning people stood in front of them, feeding them coins. Shadow wondered if there were those who never left the airport, who got off their planes, walked along the jetway into the airport building, and stopped there, trapped by the spinning images and the flashing lights until they had fed their last quarter to the machines, and then, with nothing left, just turned around and got onto the plane back home.

And then he realized that he had zoned out just as Wednesday had been telling him who the man in the dark suit they had followed in the taxi had been, and he had missed it.

“So he’s in,” said Wednesday. “It’ll cost me a bottle of Soma, though.”

“What’s Soma?”

“It’s a drink.” They walked onto the charter plane, empty but for them and a trio of corporate big spenders who needed to be back in Chicago by the start of the next business day.

Wednesday got comfortable, ordered himself a Jack Daniel’s. “My kind of people see your kind of people . . .” he hesitated. “It’s like bees and honey. Each bee makes only a tiny, tiny drop of honey. It takes thousands of them, millions perhaps, all working together to make the pot of honey you have on your breakfast table. Now imagine that you could eat nothing but honey. That’s what it’s like for my kind of people . . . we feed on belief, on prayers, on love.”

“And Soma is . . .”

“To take the analogy further, it’s a honey wine. Like mead.” He chuckled. “It’s a drink. Concentrated prayer and belief, distilled into a potent liqueur.”

They were somewhere over Nebraska eating an unimpressive in-flight breakfast when Shadow said, “My wife.”

“The dead one.”

“Laura. She doesn’t want to be dead. She told me. After she got me away from the guys on the train.”

“The action of a fine wife. Freeing you from durance vile and murdering those who would have harmed you. You should treasure her, Nephew Ainsel.”

“She wants to be really alive. Can we do that? Is that possible?”