American Gods

In ten minutes he was home.

He parked the car out on the street and walked up the outside steps to his cold apartment. He unpacked his shopping, put the food into the cupboards and the fridge, and then he opened the envelope Missy Gunther had given him.

It contained a passport. Blue, plasticated cover and, inside, a proclamation that Michael Ainsel (his name handwritten in Missy Gunther’s precise handwriting) was a citizen of Lakeside. There was a map of the town on the next page. The rest of it was filled with discount coupons for various local stores.

“I think I may like it here,” said Shadow, aloud. He looked out of the icy window at the frozen lake. “If it ever warms up.”

There was a bang at the front door at around 2:00 P.M. Shadow had been practicing the Sucker Vanish with a quarter, tossing it from one hand to the other undetectably. His hands were cold enough and clumsy enough that he kept dropping the coin onto the tabletop, and the knock at the door made him drop it again.

He went to the door and opened it.

A moment of pure fear: the man at the door wore a black mask which covered the lower half of his face. It was the kind of mask that a bank robber might wear on TV, or a serial killer from a cheap movie might wear to scare his victims. The top of the man’s head was covered by a black knit cap.

Still, the man was smaller and slighter than Shadow, and he did not appear to be armed. And he wore a bright plaid coat, of the kind that serial killers normally avoid.

“Ih hihelhan,” said the visitor.

“Huh?”

The man pulled the mask downward to reveal Hinzelmann’s cheerful face. “I said, ‘It’s Hinzelmann.’ You know, I don’t know what we did before they came up with these masks. Well, I do remember what we did. Thick knitted caps that went all around your face, and scarves and you don’t want to know what else. I think it’s a miracle what they come up with these days. I may be an old man, but I’m not going to grumble about progress, not me.”

He finished this speech by thrusting a basket at Shadow, filled high with local cheeses, bottles, jars, and several small salamis that proclaimed themselves to be venison summer sausage, and by coming inside. “Merry day after Christmas,” he said. His nose and ears and cheeks were red as raspberries, mask or no mask. “I hear you already ate a whole one of Mabel’s pasties. Brought you a few things.”

“That’s very kind of you,” said Shadow.

“Kind, nothing. I’m going to stick it to you next week for the raffle. The Chamber of Commerce runs it, and I run the Chamber of Commerce. Last year we raised almost seventeen thousand dollars for the children’s ward of Lakeside Hospital.”

“Well, why don’t you put me down for a ticket now?”

“It don’t start until the day the klunker hits the ice,” said Hinzelmann. He looked out of Shadow’s window toward the lake. “Cold out there. Must have dropped fifty degrees last night.”

“It happened really fast,” agreed Shadow.

“We used to pray for freezes like this back in the old days,” said Hinzelmann. “My daddy told me.”

“You’d pray for days like this?”

“Well, yah, it was the only way the settlers survived back then. Weren’t enough food for everyone, and you couldn’t just go down to Dave’s and fill up your shopping cart in the old days, no sir. So my grampaw, he got to figgerin’, and when a really cold day like this come along he’d take my grammaw, and the kids, my uncle and my aunt and my daddy—he was the youngest—and the serving girl and the hired man, and he’d go down with them to the creek, give ’em a little drink of rum and herbs, it was a recipe he’d got from the old country, then he’d pour creek water over them. Course they’d freeze in seconds, stiff and blue as so many Popsicles. He’d haul them to a trench they’d already dug and filled with straw, and he’d stack ’em down there, one by one, like so much cordwood in the trench, and he’d pack straw around them, then he’d cover the top of the trench with two-b’-fours to keep the critters out—in those days there were wolves and bears and all sorts you never see anymore around here, no hodags though, that’s just a story about the hodags and I wouldn’t ever stretch your credulity by telling you no stories, no sir—he’d cover the trench with two-b’-fours and the next snowfall would cover it up completely, save for the flag he’d planted to show him where the trench was.