American Gods

Then the first bird swung out of its glide toward him, blue lightning crackling in its wings. He pushed himself into a crevice of skulls, hollow eye-holes stared at him, a clutter of ivory teeth smiled at him, but he kept climbing, pulling himself up the mountain of skulls, every sharp edge cutting into his skin, feeling revulsion and terror and awe.

Another bird came at him, and one hand-sized talon sank into his arm.

He reached out and tried to grasp a feather from its wing—for if he returned to his tribe without a thunderbird’s feather he would be disgraced, he would never be a man—but the bird pulled up, so that he could not grasp a feather. The thunderbird loosened its grip and swung back onto the wind. Shadow continued to climb.

There must be a thousand skulls, thought Shadow. A thousand thousand. And not all of them are human. He stood at last on the top of the spire, the great birds, the thunderbirds, circling him slowly, navigating the gusts of the storm with tiny flicks of their wings.

He heard a voice, the voice of the buffalo man, calling to him on the wind, telling him who the skulls belonged to . . .

The tower began to tumble, and the biggest bird, its eyes the blinding blue-white of forked lightning, plummeted down toward him in a rush of thunder, and Shadow was falling, tumbling down the tower of skulls . . .

The telephone shrilled. Shadow had not even known that it was connected. Groggy, shaken, he picked it up.

“What the fuck,” shouted Wednesday, angrier than Shadow had ever heard him, “what the almighty flying fuck do you think you are playing at?”

“I was asleep,” said Shadow into the receiver, stupidly.

“What do you think is the fucking point of stashing you in a hiding place like Lakeside, if you’re going to raise such a ruckus that not even a dead man could miss it?”

“I dreamed of thunderbirds . . .” said Shadow. “And a tower. Skulls . . .” It seemed to him very important to recount his dream.

“I know what you were dreaming. Everybody damn well knows what you were dreaming. Christ almighty. What’s the point in hiding you, if you’re going to start to fucking advertise?”

Shadow said nothing.

There was a pause at the other end of the telephone. “I’ll be there in the morning,” said Wednesday. It sounded like the anger had died down. “We’re going to San Francisco. The flowers in your hair are optional.” And the line went dead.

Shadow put the telephone down on the carpet, and sat up, stiffly. It was 6:00 A.M. and still night-dark outside. He got up from the sofa, shivering. He could hear the wind as it screamed across the frozen lake. And he could hear somebody nearby crying, only the thickness of a wall away. He was certain it was Marguerite Olsen, and her sobbing was insistent and low and heartbreaking.

Shadow walked into the bathroom and pissed, then went into his bedroom and closed the door, blocking off the sound of the crying woman. Outside the wind howled and wailed as if it, too, was seeking a lost child.

San Francisco in January was unseasonably warm, warm enough that the sweat prickled on the back of Shadow’s neck. Wednesday was wearing a deep blue suit, and a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles that made him look like an entertainment lawyer.

They were walking along Haight Street. The street people and the hustlers and the moochers watched them go by, and no one shook a paper cup of change at them, no one asked them for anything at all.