American Gods

Swish went the windshield wipers, pushing the snow to the side, bunching the flakes up into knots and swirls of clear ice.

A traffic light turned momentarily yellow and then red, and Shadow put his foot on the brake. The hearse fishtailed and swung around on the empty road before it stopped.

The light turned green. Shadow took the hearse up to ten miles per hour, which seemed enough on the slippery roads. It was perfectly happy cruising in second gear: he guessed it must have spent a lot of its time at that speed, holding up traffic.

“That’s good,” said Jacquel. “So, yeah, Jesus does pretty good over here. But I met a guy who said he saw him hitchhiking by the side of the road in Afghanistan and nobody was stopping to give him a ride. You know? It all depends on where you are.”

“I think a real storm’s coming,” said Shadow. He was talking about the weather.

Jacquel, when, eventually, he began to answer, wasn’t talking about the weather at all. “You look at me and Ibis,” he said. “We’ll be out of business in a few years. We got savings put aside for the lean years, but the lean years have been here for a long while, and every year they just get leaner. Horus is crazy, really bugfuck crazy, spends all his time as a hawk, eats roadkill, what kind of a life is that? You’ve seen Bast. And we’re in better shape than most of them. At least we’ve got a little belief to be going along with. Most of the suckers out there have barely got that. It’s like the funeral business—the big guys are going to buy you up one day, like it or not, because they’re bigger and more efficient and because they work. Fighting’s not going to change a damned thing, because we lost this particular battle when we came to this green land a hundred years ago or a thousand or ten thousand. We arrived and America just didn’t care that we’d arrived. We get bought out, or we press on, or we hit the road. So, yes. You’re right. The storm’s coming.”

Shadow turned onto the street where the houses were, all but one of them, dead, their windows blind and boarded. “Take the back alley,” said Jacquel.

He backed the hearse up until it was almost touching the double doors at the rear of the house. Ibis opened the hearse, and the mortuary doors, and Shadow unbuckled the gurney and pulled it out. The wheeled supports rotated and dropped as they cleared the bumper. He wheeled the gurney to the embalming table. He picked up Lila Goodchild, cradling her in her opaque bag like a sleeping child, and placed her carefully on the table in the chilly mortuary, as if he were afraid to wake her.

“You know, I have a transfer board,” said Jacquel. “You don’t have to carry her.”

“Ain’t nothing,” said Shadow. He was starting to sound more like Jacquel. “I’m a big guy. It doesn’t bother me.”

As a kid Shadow had been small for his age, all elbows and knees. The only photograph of Shadow as a kid that Laura had liked enough to frame showed a solemn child with unruly hair and dark eyes standing beside a table laden high with cakes and cookies. Shadow thought the picture might have been taken at an embassy Christmas party, as he had been dressed in a bow tie and his best clothes.

They had moved too much, his mother and Shadow, first around Europe, from embassy to embassy, where his mother had worked as a communicator in the Foreign Service, transcribing and sending classified telegrams across the world, and then, when he was eight years old, back to the United States, where his mother, now too sporadically sick to hold down a steady job, had moved from city to city restlessly, spending a year here or a year there, temping when she was well enough. They never spent long enough in any place for Shadow to make friends, to feel at home, to relax. And Shadow had been a small child . . .