American Gods

Wednesday sighed, and looked down at the paper. “I am,” he said, “delighted that the air-traffic controllers’ dispute has been resolved without recourse to industrial action.”

“Not that,” said Shadow. “Look. It says it’s the fourteenth of February.”

“Happy Valentine’s Day.”

“So we set out January the what, twentieth, twenty-first. I wasn’t keeping track of the dates, but it was the third week of January. We were three days on the road, all told. So how is it the fourteenth of February?”

“Because we walked for almost a month,” said Wednesday. “In the Badlands. Backstage.”

“Hell of a shortcut,” said Shadow.

Wednesday pushed the paper away. “Fucking Johnny Appleseed, always going on about Paul Bunyan. In real life Chapman owned fourteen apple orchards. He farmed thousands of acres. Yes, he kept pace with the western frontier, but there’s not a story out there about him with a word of truth in it, save that he went a little crazy once. But it doesn’t matter. Like the newspapers used to say, if the truth isn’t big enough, you print the legend. This country needs its legends. And even the legends don’t believe it anymore.”

“But you see it.”

“I’m a has-been. Who the fuck cares about me?”

Shadow said softly, “You’re a god.”

Wednesday looked at him sharply. He seemed to be about to say something, and then he slumped back in his seat, and looked down at the menu, and said, “So?”

“It’s a good thing to be a god,” said Shadow.

“Is it?” asked Wednesday, and this time it was Shadow who looked away.

In a gas station twenty-five miles outside Lakeside, on the wall by the rest rooms, Shadow saw a homemade photocopied notice: a black-and-white photo of Alison McGovern and the handwritten question Have You Seen Me? above it. Same yearbook photograph: smiling confidently, a girl with rubber-band braces on her top teeth who wants to work with animals when she grows up.

Have you seen me?

Shadow bought a Snickers bar, a bottle of water, and a copy of the Lakeside News. The above-the-fold story, written by Marguerite Olsen, our Lakeside Reporter, showed a photograph of a boy and an older man, out on the frozen lake, standing by an outhouselike ice-fishing shack, and between them they were holding a big fish. They were smiling. Father and Son Catch Local Record Northern Pike. Full story inside.

Wednesday was driving. He said, “Read me anything interesting you find in the paper.”

Shadow looked carefully, and he turned the pages slowly, but he couldn’t find anything.

Wednesday dropped him off in the driveway outside his apartment. A smoke-colored cat stared at him from the driveway, then fled when he bent to stroke it.

Shadow stopped on the wooden deck outside his apartment and looked out at the lake, dotted here and there with green and brown ice-fishing huts. Many of them had cars parked beside them. On the ice nearer the bridge sat the old green klunker, just as it had sat in the newspaper. “March twenty-third,” said Shadow, encouragingly. “Round nine-fifteen in the morning. You can do it.”

“Not a chance,” said a woman’s voice. “April third. Six P.M. That way the day warms up the ice.” Shadow smiled. Marguerite Olsen was wearing a ski suit. She was at the far end of the deck, refilling the bird feeder.

“I read your article in the Lakeside News on the Town Record Northern Pike.”

“Exciting, huh?”

“Well, educational, maybe.”

“I thought you weren’t coming back to us,” she said. “You were gone for a while, huh?”

“My uncle needed me,” said Shadow. “The time kind of got away from us.”

She placed the last suet brick in its cage, and began to fill a net sock with thistle seeds from a plastic milk jug. Several goldfinches, olive in their winter coats, twitted impatiently from a nearby fir tree.

“I didn’t see anything in the paper about Alison McGovern.”

“There wasn’t anything to report. She’s still missing. There was a rumor that someone had seen her in Detroit, but it turned out to be a false alarm.”

“Poor kid.”

Marguerite Olsen screwed the top back onto the gallon jug. “I hope she’s dead,” she said, matter-of-factly.

Shadow was shocked. “Why?”

“Because the alternatives are worse.”

The goldfinches hopped frantically from branch to branch of the fir tree, impatient for the people to be gone.

You aren’t thinking about Alison, thought Shadow. You’re thinking of your son. You’re thinking of Sandy.

He remembered someone saying I miss Sandy. Who was that?

“Good talking to you,” he said.

“Yeah,” she said. “You too.”

February passed in a succession of short, gray days. Some days the snow fell, most days it didn’t. The weather warmed up, and on the good days it got above freezing. Shadow stayed in his apartment until it began to feel like a prison cell, and then, on the days that Wednesday did not need him to travel, he began to walk.