American Gods

Another murmur, this time one of deep agreement. She had said it for all of them. Now was the time.

“The first head is mine,” said a very tall Chinese man, with a rope of tiny skulls around his neck. He began to walk, slowly and intently, up the mountain, shouldering a staff with a curved blade at the end of it, like a silver moon.

Even Nothing cannot last forever.

He might have been there, been Nowhere, for ten minutes or for ten thousand years. It made no difference: time was an idea for which he no longer had any need.

He could no longer remember his real name. He felt empty and cleansed, in that place that was not a place.

He was without form, and void.

He was nothing.

And into that nothing a voice said, “Ho-hoka, cousin. We got to talk.”

And something that might once have been Shadow said, “Whiskey Jack?”

“Yeah,” said Whiskey Jack, in the darkness. “You are a hard man to hunt down, when you’re dead. You didn’t go to any of the places I figured. I had to look all over before I thought of checking here. Say, you ever find your tribe?”

Shadow remembered the man and the girl in the disco beneath the spinning mirror-ball. “I guess I found my family. But no, I never found my tribe.”

“Sorry to have to disturb you.”

“Let me be. I got what I wanted. I’m done.”

“They are coming for you,” said Whiskey Jack. “They are going to revive you.”

“But I’m done,” said Shadow. “It was all over and done.”

“No such thing,” said Whiskey Jack. “Never any such thing. We’ll go to my place. You want a beer?”

He guessed he would like a beer, at that. “Sure.”

“Get me one too. There’s a cooler outside the door,” said Whiskey Jack, and he pointed. They were in his shack.

Shadow opened the door to the shack with hands he had not possessed moments before. There was a plastic cooler filled with chunks of river ice out there, and, in the ice, a dozen cans of Budweiser. He pulled out a couple of cans of beer and then sat in the doorway and looked out over the valley.

They were at the top of a hill, near a waterfall, swollen with melting snow and runoff. It fell in stages, maybe seventy feet below them, maybe a hundred. The sun reflected from the ice that sheathed the trees that overhung the waterfall basin.

“Where are we?” asked Shadow.

“Where you were last time,” said Whiskey Jack. “My place. You planning on holding on to my Bud till it warms up?”

Shadow stood up and passed him the can of beer. “You didn’t have a waterfall outside your place last time I was here,” he said.

Whiskey Jack said nothing. He popped the top of the Bud, and drank half the can in one long slow swallow. Then he said, “You remember my nephew? Henry Bluejay? The poet? He traded his Buick for your Winnebago. Remember?”

“Sure. I didn’t know he was a poet.”

Whiskey Jack raised his chin and looked proud. “Best damn poet in America,” he said.

He drained the rest of his can of beer, belched, and got another can, while Shadow popped open his own can of beer, and the two men sat outside on a rock, by the pale green ferns, in the morning sun, and they watched the falling water and they drank their beer. There was still snow on the ground, in the places where the shadows never lifted.

The earth was muddy and wet.

“Henry was diabetic,” continued Whiskey Jack. “It happens. Too much. You people came to America, you take our sugar cane, potatoes, and corn, then you sell us potato chips and caramel popcorn, and we’re the ones who get sick.” He sipped his beer, reflecting. “He’d won a couple of prizes for his poetry. There were people in Minnesota who wanted to put his poems into a book. He was driving to Minnesota in a sports car to talk to them. He had traded your ‘Bago for a yellow Miata. The doctors said they think he went into a coma while he was driving, went off the road, ran the car into one of your road signs. Too lazy to look at where you are, to read the mountains and the clouds, you people need road signs everywhere. And so Henry Bluejay went away forever, went to live with brother Wolf. So I said, nothing keeping me there any longer. I came north. Good fishing up here.”

“I’m sorry about your nephew.”

“Me too. So now I’m living here in the north. Long way from white man’s diseases. White man’s roads. White man’s road signs. White man’s yellow Miatas. White man’s caramel popcorn.”

“White man’s beer?”

Whiskey Jack looked at the can. “When you people finally give up and go home, you can leave us the Budweiser breweries,” he said.

“Where are we?” asked Shadow. “Am I on the tree? Am I dead? Am I here? I thought everything was finished. What’s real?”

“Yes,” said Whiskey Jack.

“ ‘Yes’? What kind of an answer is ‘Yes’?”

“It’s a good answer. True answer, too.”

Shadow said, “Are you a god as well?”

Whiskey Jack shook his head. “I’m a culture hero,” he said. “We do the same shit gods do, we just screw up more and nobody worships us. They tell stories about us, but they tell the ones that make us look bad along with the ones where we came out fairly okay.”

“I see,” said Shadow. And he did see, more or less.