American Gods

He found Laura stretched out on the ground in a side cavern, beside a diorama of mining gnomes straight out of Snow White. The floor beneath her was sticky with blood. She was on her side, where Loki must have dropped her after he had pulled the spear out of them both.

One of Laura’s hands clutched her chest. She looked dreadfully vulnerable. She looked dead, but then, Shadow was almost used to that by now.

Shadow squatted beside her, and he touched her cheek with his hand, and he said her name. Her eyes opened, and she lifted her head and turned it until she was looking at him.

“Hello, puppy,” she said. Her voice was thin.

“Hi, Laura. What happened here?”

“Nothing,” she said. “Just stuff. Did they win?”

“I stopped the battle they were trying to start.”

“My clever puppy,” she said. “That man, Mister World, he said he was going to put a stick through your eye. I didn’t like him at all.”

“He’s dead. You killed him, hon.”

She nodded. She said, “That’s good.”

Her eyes closed. Shadow’s hand found her cold hand, and he held it in his. In time she opened her eyes again.

“Did you ever figure out how to bring me back from the dead?” she asked.

“I guess,” he said. “I know one way, anyway.”

“That’s good,” she said. She squeezed his hand with her cold hand. And then she said, “And the opposite? What about that?”

“The opposite?”

“Yes,” she whispered. “I think I must have earned it.”

“I don’t want to do that.”

She said nothing. She simply waited.

Shadow said, “Okay.” Then he took his hand from hers and put it to her neck.

She said, “That’s my husband.” She said it proudly.

“I love you, babes,” said Shadow.

“Love you, puppy,” she whispered.

He closed his hand around the golden coin that hung around her neck. He tugged, hard, at the chain, which snapped easily. Then he took the gold coin between his finger and thumb, and blew on it, and opened his hand wide.

The coin was gone.

Her eyes were still open, but they did not move.

He bent down then, and kissed her, gently, on her cold cheek, but she did not respond. He did not expect her to. Then he got up and walked out of the cavern, to stare into the night.

The storms had cleared. The air felt fresh and clean and new once more.

Tomorrow, he had no doubt, would be one hell of a beautiful day.

Part FourEPILOGUE: SOMETHING THAT THE DEAD ARE KEEPING BACK

CHAPTER NINETEEN

One describes a tale best by telling the tale. You see? The way one describes a story, to oneself or to the world, is by telling the story. It is a balancing act and it is a dream. The more accurate the map, the more it resembles the territory. The most accurate map possible would be the territory, and thus would be perfectly accurate and perfectly useless.

The tale is the map that is the territory.

You must remember this.

—from the Notebooks of Mr. Ibis

The two of them were in the VW bus, heading down to Florida on I-75. They’d been driving since dawn; or rather, Shadow had driven, and Mr. Nancy had sat up front in the passenger seat and, from time to time, and with a pained expression on his face, offered to drive. Shadow always said no.

“Are you happy?” asked Mr. Nancy, suddenly. He had been staring at Shadow for several hours. Whenever Shadow glanced over to his right, Mr. Nancy was looking at him with his earth-brown eyes.

“Not really,” said Shadow. “But I’m not dead yet.”

“Huh?”

“ ‘Call no man happy until he is dead.’ Herodotus.”

Mr. Nancy raised a white eyebrow, and he said, “I’m not dead yet, and, mostly because I’m not dead yet, I’m happy as a clamboy.”

“The Herodotus thing. It doesn’t mean that the dead are happy,” said Shadow. “It means that you can’t judge the shape of someone’s life until it’s over and done.”

“I don’t even judge then,” said Mr. Nancy. “And as for happiness, there’s a lot of different kinds of happiness, just as there’s a hell of a lot of different kinds of dead. Me, I’ll just take what I can get when I can get it.”

Shadow changed the subject. “Those helicopters,” he said. “The ones that took away the bodies, and the injured.”

“What about them?”

“Who sent them? Where did they come from?”

“You shouldn’t worry yourself about that. They’re like valkyries or buzzards. They come because they have to come.”

“If you say so.”

“The dead and the wounded will be taken care of. You ask me, old Jacquel’s going to be very busy for the next month or so. Tell me somethin’, Shadow-boy.”

“Okay.”

“You learn anythin’ from all this?”