American Gods

“Look,” said Whiskey Jack. “This is not a good country for gods. My people figured that out early on. There are creator spirits who found the earth or made it or shit it out, but you think about it: who’s going to worship Coyote? He made love to Porcupine Woman and got his dick shot through with more needles than a pincushion. He’d argue with rocks and the rocks would win.

“So, yeah, my people figured that maybe there’s something at the back of it all, a creator, a great spirit, and so we say thank you to it, because it’s always good to say thank you. But we never built churches. We didn’t need to. The land was the church. The land was the religion. The land was older and wiser than the people who walked on it. It gave us salmon and corn and buffalo and passenger pigeons. It gave us wild rice and walleye. It gave us melon and squash and turkey. And we were the children of the land, just like the porcupine and the skunk and the blue jay.”

He finished his second beer and gestured toward the river at the bottom of the waterfall. “You follow that river for a way, you’ll get to the lakes where the wild rice grows. In wild rice time, you go out in your canoe with a friend, and you knock the wild rice into your canoe, and cook it, and store it, and it will keep you for a long time. Different places grow different foods. Go far enough south there are orange trees, lemon trees, and those squashy green guys, look like pears—“

“Avocados.”

“Avocados,” agreed Whiskey Jack. “That’s them. They don’t grow up this way. This is wild rice country. Moose country. What I’m trying to say is that America is like that. It’s not good growing country for gods. They don’t grow well here. They’re like avocados trying to grow in wild rice country.”

“They may not grow well,” said Shadow, remembering, “but they’re going to war.”

That was the only time he ever saw Whiskey Jack laugh. It was almost a bark, and it had little humor in it. “Hey Shadow,” said Whiskey Jack. “If all your friends jumped off a cliff, would you jump off too?”

“Maybe.” Shadow felt good. He didn’t think it was just the beer. He couldn’t remember the last time he had felt so alive, and so together.

“It’s not going to be a war.”

“Then what is it?”

Whiskey Jack crushed the beer can between his hands, pressing it until it was flat. “Look,” he said, and pointed to the waterfall. The sun was high enough that it caught the waterfall spray: a rainbow nimbus hung in the air. Shadow thought it was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

“It’s going to be a bloodbath,” said Whiskey Jack, flatly.

Shadow saw it then. He saw it all, stark in its simplicity. He shook his head, then he began to chuckle, and he shook his head some more, and the chuckle became a full-throated laugh.

“You okay?”

“I’m fine,” said Shadow. “I just saw the hidden Indians. Not all of them. But I saw them anyhow.”

“Probably Ho Chunk, then. Those guys never could hide worth a damn.” He looked up at the sun. “Time to go back,” he said. He stood up.

“It’s a two-man con,” said Shadow. “It’s not a war at all, is it?”

Whiskey Jack patted Shadow’s arm. “You’re not so dumb,” he said.

They walked back to Whiskey Jack’s shack. He opened the door. Shadow hesitated. “I wish I could stay here with you,” he said. “This seems like a good place.”

“There are a lot of good places,” said Whiskey Jack. “That’s kind of the point. Listen, gods die when they are forgotten. People too. But the land’s still here. The good places, and the bad. The land isn’t going anywhere. And neither am I.”

Shadow closed the door. Something was pulling at him. He was alone in the darkness once more, but the darkness became brighter and brighter until it was burning like the sun.

And then the pain began.

Easter walked through the meadow, and spring flowers blossomed where she had passed.

She walked by a place where, long ago, a farmhouse had stood. Even today several walls were still standing, jutting out of the weeds and the meadow grass like rotten teeth. A thin rain was falling. The clouds were dark and low, and it was cold.

A little way beyond the place where the farmhouse had been there was a tree, a huge silver-gray tree, winter-dead to all appearances, and leafless, and in front of the tree, on the grass, were frayed clumps of colorless fabric. The woman stopped at the fabric, and bent down, and picked up something brownish-white: it was a much-gnawed fragment of bone which might, once, have been a part of a human skull. She tossed it back down onto the grass.

Then she looked at the man on the tree and she smiled wryly. “They just aren’t as interesting naked,” she said. “It’s the unwrapping that’s half the fun. Like with gifts, and eggs.”

The hawk-headed man who walked beside her looked down at his penis and seemed, for the first time, to become aware of his own nakedness. He said, “I can look at the sun without even blinking.”

“That’s very clever of you,” Easter told him, reassuringly. “Now, let’s get him down from there.”