American Gods

Goldie is, like, such a good dog, and he was a purebred retriever, if only my dad would say okay, he wags his tail whenever he sees me.

It’s Christmas, he has to let me use the snowmobile.

You can write your name with your tongue on the side of his thing.

I miss Sandy.

Yeah, I miss Sandy too.

Six inches tonight they said, but they just make it up, they make up the weather and nobody ever calls them on it . . .

And then the brakes of the bus were hissing and the driver was shouting “Lakeside!” and the doors clunked open. Shadow followed the girls out into the floodlit parking lot of a video store and tanning salon that functioned, Shadow guessed, as Lakeside’s Greyhound station. The air was dreadfully cold, but it was a fresh cold. It woke him up. He stared at the lights of the town to the south and the west, and pale expanse of a frozen lake to the east.

The girls were standing in the lot, stamping and blowing on their hands dramatically. One of them, the younger one, snuck a look at Shadow, smiled awkwardly when she realized that he had seen her do so.

“Merry Christmas,” said Shadow.

“Yeah,” said the other girl, perhaps a year or so older than the first, “Merry Christmas to you too.” She had carroty red hair and a snub nose covered with a hundred thousand freckles.

“Nice town you got here,” said Shadow.

“We like it,” said the younger one. She was the one who liked animals. She gave Shadow a shy grin, revealing blue rubber-band braces stretching across her front teeth. “You look like somebody,” she told him, gravely. “Are you somebody’s brother or somebody’s son or something?”

“You are such a spaz, Alison,” said her friend. “Everybody’s somebody’s son or brother or something.”

“That wasn’t what I meant,” said Alison. Headlights framed them all for one brilliant white moment. Behind the headlights was a station wagon with a mother in it, and in moments it took the girls and their bags away, leaving Shadow standing alone in the parking lot.

“Young man? Anything I can do for you?” The old man was locking up the video store. He pocketed his keys. “Store ain’t open Christmas,” he told Shadow cheerfully. “But I come down to meet the bus. Make sure everything was okay. Couldn’t live with myself if some poor soul’d found ‘emselves stranded on Christmas Day.” He was close enough that Shadow could see his face: old but contented, the face of a man who had sipped life’s vinegar and found it, by and large, to be mostly whiskey, and good whiskey at that.

“Well, you could give me the number of the local taxi company,” said Shadow.

“I could,” said the old man, doubtfully, “but Tom’ll be in his bed this time of night, and even if you could rouse him you’ll get no satisfaction—I saw him down at the Buck Stops Here earlier this evening, and he was very merry. Very merry indeed. Where is it you’re aiming to go?”

Shadow showed him the address tag on the door key.

“Well,” he said, “that’s a ten-, mebbe a twenty-minute walk over the bridge and around. But it’s no fun when it’s this cold, and when you don’t know where you’re going it always seems longer—you ever notice that? First time takes forever, and then ever after it’s over in a flash?”

“Yes,” said Shadow. “I’ve never thought of it like that. But I guess it’s true.”

The old man nodded. His face cracked into a grin. “What the heck, it’s Christmas. I’ll run you over there in Tessie.”

Shadow followed the old man to the road, where a huge old roadster was parked. It looked like something that gangsters might have been proud to drive in the Roaring Twenties, running boards and all. It was a deep dark color under the sodium lights that might have been red and might have been green. “This is Tessie,” the old man said. “Ain’t she a beaut?” He patted her proprietorially, where the hood curved up and arched over the front nearside wheel.

“What make is she?” asked Shadow.

“She’s a Wendt Phoenix. Wendt went under in ’31, name was bought by Chrysler, but they never made anymore Wendts. Harvey Wendt, who founded the company, was a local boy. Went out to California, killed himself in, oh, 1941, ’42. Great tragedy.”

The car smelled of leather and old cigarette smoke—not a fresh smell, but as if enough people had smoked enough cigarettes and cigars in the car over the years that the smell of burning tobacco had become part of the fabric of the car. The old man turned the key in the ignition and Tessie started first time.