MIM Book Club - American Gods

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Shadow had done three years in prison. He was big enough and looked "don't-fuck-with-me" enough that his biggest problem was killing time. So he kept himself in shape, and taught himself coin tricks, and thought a lot about how much he loved his wife.The best thing-in Shadow's opinion, perhaps the only good thing-about being in prison was a feeling of relief. The feeling that he'd plunged as low as he could plunge and he'd hit bottom. He didn't worry that the man was going to get him, because the man had got him. He was no longer scared of what tomorrow might bring, because yesterday had brought it.

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It did not matter, Shadow decided, if you had done what you had been convicted of or not. In his experience everyone he met in prison was aggrieved about something: there was always something the authorities had got wrong, something they said you did when you didn't-or you didn't do quite like they said you did. What was important was that they had gotten you.He had noticed it in the first few days, when everything, from the slang to the bad food, was new. Despite the misery and the utter skin-crawling horror of incarceration, he was breathing relief. Shadow tried not to talk too much. Somewhere around the middle of year two he mentioned his theory to Low Key Lyesmith, his cellmate.

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Low Key, who was a grifter from Minnesota, smiled his scarred smile. 'Yeah,' he said. 'That's true. It's even better when you've been sentenced to death. That's when you remember the jokes about the guys who kicked their boots off as the noose flipped around their necks, because their friends always told them they'd die with their boots on.''Is that a joke?' asked Shadow. 'Damn right. Gallows humor. Best kind there is.' 'When did they last hang a man in this state?' asked Shadow. 'How the hell should I know?' Lyesmith kept his orange-blond hair pretty much shaved. You could see the lines of his skull. 'Tell you what, though. This country started going to hell when they stopped hanging folks. No gallows dirt. No gallows deals.'

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He practiced coin tricks from a book he found in the wasteland of the prison library; and he worked out; and he made lists in his head of what he'd do when he got out of prison.Shadow's lists got shorter and shorter. After two years he had it down to three things. First, he was going to take a bath. A real, long, serious soak, in a tub with bubbles. Maybe read the paper, maybe not. Some days he thought one way, some days the other. Second, he was going to towel himself off, put on a robe. Maybe slippers. He liked the idea of slippers. If he smoked he would be smoking a pipe about now, but he didn't smoke. He would pick up his wife in his arms ('Puppy,' she would squeal in mock horror and real delight, 'what are you doing?). He would carry her into the bedroom, and close the door. They'd call out for pizzas if they got hungry.

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Third, after he and Laura had come out of the bedroom, maybe a couple of days later, he was going to keep his head down and stay out of trouble for the rest of his life. 'And then you'll be happy?' asked Low Key Lyesmith. That day they were working in the prison shop, assembling bird feeders, which was barely more interesting than stamping out license plates.'Call no man happy,' said Shadow, 'until he is dead.' 'Herodotus,' said Low Key. 'Hey. You're learning.' 'Who the fuck's Herodotus?' asked the Iceman, slotting together the sides of a bird feeder and passing it to Shadow, who bolted and screwed it tight. 'Dead Greek,' said Shadow. 'My last girlfriend was Greek,' said the Iceman. 'The shit her family ate. You would not believe. Like rice wrapped in leaves. Shit like that.'

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The Iceman was the same size and shape as a Coke machine, with blue eyes and hair so blond it was almost white. He had beaten the crap out of some guy who had made the mistake of copping a feel off his girlfriend in the bar where she danced and the Iceman bounced. The guy's friends had called the police, who arrested the Iceman and ran a check on him which revealed that the Iceman had walked from a work-release program eighteen months earlier.'So what was I supposed to do?' asked the Iceman, aggrieved, when he had told Shadow the whole sad tale. 'I'd told him she was my girlfriend. Was I supposed to let him disrespect me like that? Was I? I mean, he had his hands all over her.' Shadow had said, 'You tell 'em,' and left it at that. One thing he had learned early, you do your own time in prison. You don't do anyone else's time for them.Keep your head down. Do your own time.

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Lyesmith had loaned Shadow a battered paperback copy of Herodotus's Histories several months earlier. 'It's not boring. It's cool,' he said, when Shadow protested that he didn't read books. 'Read it first, then tell me it's cool.'Shadow had made a face, but he had started to read, and had found himself hooked against his will. 'Greeks,' said the Iceman, with disgust. 'And it ain't true what they say about them, neither. I tried giving it to my girlfriend in the ass, she almost clawed my eyes out.'Lyesmith was transferred one day, without warning. He left Shadow his copy of Herodotus. There was a nickel hidden in the pages. Coins were contraband: you can sharpen the edges against a stone, slice open someone's face in a fight. Shadow didn't want a weapon; Shadow just wanted something to do with his hands.

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Shadow was not superstitious. He did not believe in anything he could not see. Still, he could feel disaster hovering above the prison in those final weeks, just as he had felt it in the days before the robbery. There was a hollowness in the pit of his stomach that he told himself was simply a fear of going back to the world on the outside. But he could not be sure. He was more paranoid than usual, and in prison usual is very, and is a survival skill. Shadow became more quiet, more shadowy, than ever. He found himself watching the body language of the guards, of the other inmates, searching for a clue to the bad thing that was going to happen, as he was certain that it would.A month before he was due to be released. Shadow sat in a chilly office, facing a short man with a port-wine birthmark on his forehead. They sat across a desk from each other; the man had Shadow's file open in front of him, and was holding a ballpoint pen. The end of the pen was badly chewed.

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'You cold, Shadow?' 'Yes,' said Shadow. 'A little.' The man shrugged. 'That's the system,' he said. 'Furnaces don't go on until December the first. Then they go off March the first. I don't make the rules.' He ran his forefinger down the sheet of paper stapled to the inside left of the folder. 'You're thirty-two years old?' 'Yes, sir.' 'You look younger.' 'Clean living.' 'Says here you've been a model inmate.' 'I learned my lesson, sir.'

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'Did you really?' He looked at Shadow intently, the birthmark on his forehead lowering. Shadow thought about telling the man some of his theories about prison, but he said nothing. He nodded instead, and concentrated on appearing properly remorseful.'Says here you've got a wife, Shadow.' 'Her name's Laura.' 'How's everything there?' 'Pretty good. She's come down to see me as much as she could-it's a long way to travel. We write and I call her when I can.'

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'What does your wife do?' 'She's a travel agent. Sends people all over the world.' 'How'd you meet her?' Shadow could not decide why the man was asking. He considered telling him it was none of his business, then said, 'She was my best buddy's wife's best friend. They set us up on a blind date. We hit it off.' 'And you've got a job waiting for you?' 'Yessir. My buddy, Robbie, the one I just told you about, he owns the Muscle Farm, the place I used to train. He says my old job is waiting for me.'

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An eyebrow raised. 'Really?' 'Says he figures I'll be a big draw. Bring back some old-timers, and pull in the tough crowd who want to be tougher.' The man seemed satisfied. He chewed the end of his ballpoint pen, then turned over the sheet of paper. 'How do you feel about your offense?' Shadow shrugged. 'I was stupid,' he said, and meant it. The man with the birthmark sighed. He ticked off a number of items on a checklist. Then he riffled through the papers in Shadow's file. 'How're you getting home from here?' he asked. 'Greyhound?'

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'Flying home. It's good to have a wife who's a travel agent.' The man frowned, and the birthmark creased. 'She sent you a ticket?' 'Didn't need to. Just sent me a confirmation number. Electronic ticket. All I have to do is turn up at the airport in a month and show 'em my ID, and I'm outta here.' The man nodded, scribbled one final note, then he closed the file and put down the ballpoint pen. Two pale hands rested on the gray desk like pink animals. He brought his hands close together, made a steeple of his forefingers, and stared at Shadow with watery hazel eyes.'You're lucky,' he said. 'You have someone to go back to, you got a job waiting. You can put all this behind you. You got a second chance. Make the most of it.'

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The man did not offer to shake Shadow's hand as he rose to leave, nor did Shadow expect him to. The last week was the worst. In some ways it was worse than the whole three years put together. Shadow wondered if it was the weather: oppressive, still, and cold. It felt as if a storm was on the way, but the storm never came.He had the jitters and the heebie-jeebies, a feeling deep in his stomach that something was entirely wrong. In the exercise yard the wind gusted. Shadow imagined that he could smell snow on the air.He called his wife collect. Shadow knew that the phone companies added a three-dollar surcharge on every call made from a prison phone. That was why operators are always real polite to people calling from prisons, Shadow had decided: they knew that he paid their wages.

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'Something feels weird,' he told Laura. That wasn't the first thing he said to her. The first thing was 'I love you,' because it's a good thing to say if you can mean it, and Shadow did. 'Hello,' said Laura. 'I love you too. What feels weird?''I don't know,' he said. 'Maybe the weather. It feels like if we could only get a storm, everything would be okay.' 'It's nice here,' she said. 'The last of the leaves haven't quite fallen. If we don't get a storm, you'll be able to see them when you get home.' 'Five days,' said Shadow. 'A hundred and twenty hours, and then you come home,' she said. 'Everything okay there? Nothing wrong?'

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'Everything's fine. I'm seeing Robbie tonight. We're planning your surprise welcome-home party.''Surprise party?''Of course. You don't know anything about it, do you?' 'Not a thing.' 'That's my husband,' she said. Shadow realized that he was smiling. He had been inside for three years, but she could still make him smile. 'Love you, babes,' said Shadow. 'Love you, puppy,' said Laura. Shadow put down the phone.

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'When they got married Laura told Shadow that she wanted a puppy, but their landlord had pointed out they weren't allowed pets under the terms of their lease. 'Hey,' Shadow had said, 'I'll be your puppy. What do you want me to do? Chew your slippers? Piss on the kitchen floor? Lick your nose? Sniff your crotch? I bet there's nothing a puppy can do I can't do!' And he picked her up as if she weighed nothing at all and began to lick her nose while she giggled and shrieked, and then he carried her to the bed.

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In the food hall Sam Fetisher sidled over to Shadow and smiled, showing his old teeth. He sat down beside Shadow and began to eat his macaroni and cheese. 'We got to talk,' said Sam Fetisher. Sam Fetisher was one of the blackest men that Shadow had ever seen. He might have been sixty. He might have been eighty. Then again, Shadow had met thirty-year-old crackheads who looked older than Sam Fetisher.'Mm?' said Shadow.'Storm's on the way,' said Sam. 'Feels like it,' said Shadow. 'Maybe it'll snow soon.' 'Not that kind of storm. Bigger storm than that coming. I tell you, boy, you're better off in here than out on the street when the big storm comes.'

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'Done my time,' said Shadow. 'Friday, I'm gone.' Sam Fetisher stared at Shadow. 'Where you from?' he asked. 'Eagle Point. Indiana.' 'You're a lying fuck,' said Sam Fetisher. 'I mean originally. Where are your folks from?' 'Chicago,' said Shadow. His mother had lived in Chicago as a girl, and she had died there, half a lifetime ago.'Like I said. Big storm coming. Keep your head down, Shadow-boy. It's like…what do they call those things continents ride around on? Some kind of plates?' 'Tectonic plates?' Shadow hazarded.'That's it. Tectonic plates. It's like when they go riding, when North America goes skidding into South America, you don't want to be in the middle. You dig me?' 'Not even a little.'

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One brown eye closed in a slow wink. 'Hell, don't say I didn't warn you,' said Sam Fetisher, and he spooned a trembling lump of orange Jell-O into his mouth. 'I won't.' Shadow spent the night half-awake, drifting in and out of sleep, listening to his new cellmate grunt and snore in the bunk below him. Several cells away a man whined and howled and sobbed like an animal, and from time to time someone would scream at him to shut the fuck up. Shadow tried not to hear. He let the empty minutes wash over him, lonely and slow.Two days to go. Forty-eight hours, starting with oatmeal and prison coffee, and a guard named Wilson who tapped Shadow harder than he had to on the shoulder and said, 'Shadow? This way.' Shadow checked his conscience. It was quiet, which did not, he had observed, in a prison, mean that he was not in deep shit. The two men walked more or less side by side, feet echoing on metal and concrete.

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Shadow tasted fear in the back of his throat, bitter as old coffee. The bad thing was happening… There was a voice in the back of his head whispering that they were going to slap another year onto his sentence, drop him into solitary, cut off his hands, cut off his head. He told himself he was being stupid, but his heart was pounding fit to burst out of his chest.'I don't get you, Shadow,' said Wilson, as they walked. 'What's not to get, sir?' 'You. You're too fucking quiet. Too polite. You wait like the old guys, but you're what? Twenty-five? Twenty-eight?' 'Thirty-two, sir.' 'And what are you? A spic? A gypsy?' 'Not that I know of, sir. Maybe.' 'Maybe you got nigger blood in you. You got nigger blood in you, Shadow?' 'Could be, sir.' Shadow stood tall and looked straight ahead, and concentrated on not allowing himself to be riled by this man.

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'Yeah? Well, all I know is, you fucking spook me.' Wilson had sandy blond hair and a sandy blond face and a sandy blond smile. 'You leaving us soon.' 'Hope so, sir.' They walked through a couple of checkpoints. Wilson showed his ID each time. Up a set of stairs, and they were standing outside the prison warden's office. It had the prison warden's name-G. Patterson-on the door in black letters, and beside the door, a miniature traffic light.The top light burned red. Wilson pressed a button below the traffic light. They stood there in silence for a couple of minutes. Shadow tried to tell himself that everything was all right, that on Friday morning he'd be on the plane up to Eagle Point, but he did not believe it himself.The red light went out and the green light went on, and Wilson opened the door. They went inside.

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Shadow had seen the warden a handful of times in the last three years. Once he had been showing a politician around. Once, during a lockdown, the warden had spoken to them in groups of a hundred, telling them that the prison was overcrowded, and that, since it would remain overcrowded, they had better get used to it. Up close, Patterson looked worse. His face was oblong, with gray hair cut into a military bristle cut. He smelled of Old Spice. Behind him was a shelf of books, each with the word Prison in the title; his desk was perfectly clean, empty but for a telephone and a tear-off-the-pages Far Side calendar. He had a hearing aid in his right ear.

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'Please, sit down.' Shadow sat down. Wilson stood behind him. The warden opened a desk drawer and took out a file, placed it on his desk. 'Says here you were sentenced to six years for aggravated assault and battery. You've served three years. You were due to be released on Friday.' Were? Shadow felt his stomach lurch inside him. He wondered how much longer he was going to have to serve-another year? Two years? All three? All he said was 'Yes, sir.' The warden licked his lips. 'What did you say?' 'I said, 'Yes, sir.' '

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'Shadow, we're going to be releasing you later this afternoon. You'll be getting out a couple of days early.' Shadow nodded, and he waited for the other shoe to drop. The warden looked down at the paper on his desk. 'This came from the Johnson Memorial Hospital in Eagle Point…Your wife. She died in the early hours of this morning. It was an automobile accident. I'm sorry.' Shadow nodded once more.Wilson walked him back to his cell, not saying anything. He unlocked the cell door and let Shadow in. Then he said, 'It's like one of them good news, bad news jokes, isn't it? Good news, we're letting you out early, bad news, your wife is dead.' He laughed, as if it were genuinely funny. Shadow said nothing at all.

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Numbly, he packed up his possessions, gave most of them away. He left behind Low Key's Herodotus and the book of coin tricks, and, with a momentary pang, he abandoned the blank metal disks be had smuggled out of the workshop, which had served him for coins. There would be coins, real coins, on the outside. He shaved. He dressed in civilian clothes. He walked through door after door, knowing that he would never walk back through them again, feeling empty inside.The rain had started to gust from the gray sky, a freezing rain. Pellets of ice stung Shadow's face, while the rain soaked the thin overcoat and they walked toward the yellow ex-school bus that would take them to the nearest city.By the time they got to the bus they were soaked. Eight of them were leaving. Fifteen hundred still inside. Shadow sat on the bus and shivered until the heaters started working, wondering what he was doing, where he would go now.

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Ghost images filled his head, unbidden. In his imagination he was leaving another prison, long ago. He had been imprisoned in a lightless room for far too long: his beard was wild and his hair was a tangle. The guards had walked him down a gray stone stairway and out into a plaza filled with brightly colored things, with people and with objects. It was a market day and he was dazzled by the noise and the color, squinting at the sunlight that filled the square, smelling the salt-wet air and all the good things of the market, and on his left the sun glittered from the water… The bus shuddered to a halt at a red light. The wind howled about the bus, and the wipers slooshed heavily back and forth across the windshield, smearing the city into a red and yellow neon wetness. It was early afternoon, but it looked like night through the glass. "Shit," said the man in the seat behind Shadow, rubbing the condensation from the window with his hand, staring at a wet figure hurrying down the sidewalk. "There's pussy out there."

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Shadow swallowed. It occurred to him that he had not cried yet-had in fact felt nothing at all. No tears. No sorrow. Nothing. He found himself thinking about a guy named Johnnie Larch he'd shared a cell with when he'd first been put inside, who told Shadow how he'd once got out after five years behind bars with one hundred dollars and a ticket to Seattle, where his sister lived. Johnnie Larch had got to the airport, and he handed his ticket to the woman on the counter, and she asked to see his driver's license. He showed it to her. It had expired a couple of years earlier. She told him it was not valid as ID. He told her it might not be valid as a driver's license, but it sure as hell was fine identification, and damn it, who else did she think he was, if he wasn't him? She said she'd thank him to keep his voice down. He told her to give him a fucking boarding pass, or she was going to regret it, and that he wasn't going to be disrespected. You don't let people disrespect you in prison.

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Then she pressed a button, and a few moments later the airport security showed up, and they tried to persuade Johnnie Larch to leave the airport quietly, and he did not wish to leave, and there was something of an altercation. The upshot of it all was that Johnnie Larch never actually made it to Seattle, and he spent the next couple of days in town in bars, and when his one hundred dollars was gone he held up a gas station with a toy gun for money to keep drinking, and the police finally picked him up for pissing in the street. Pretty soon he was back inside serving the rest of his sentence and a little extra for the gas station job. And the moral of this story, according to Johnnie Larch, was this: don't piss off people who work in airports. "Are you sure it's not something like 'The kind of behavior that works in a specialized environment, such as prison, can fail to work and in fact become harmful when used outside such an environment'?" said Shadow, when Johnnie Larch told him the story.

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"No, listen to me, I'm telling you, man," said Johnnie Larch, "don't piss off those bitches in airports." Shadow half smiled at the memory. His own driver's license had several months still to go before it expired. "Bus station! Everybody out!" The building stank of piss and sour beer. Shadow climbed into a taxi and told the driver to take him to the airport. He told him that there was an extra five dollars if he could do it in silence. They made it in twenty minutes and the driver never said a word. Then Shadow was stumbling through the brightly lit airport terminal. Shadow worried about the whole e-ticket business. He knew he had a ticket for a flight on Friday, but he didn't know if it would work today. Anything electronic seemed fundamentally magical to Shadow, and liable to evaporate at any moment.

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Still, he had his wallet, back in his possession for the first time in three years, containing several expired credit cards and one Visa card, which, he was pleasantly surprised to discover, didn't expire until the end of January. He had a reservation number. And, he realized, he had the certainty that once he got home everything would, somehow, be okay. Laura would be fine again. Maybe it was some kind of scam to spring him a few days early. Or perhaps it was a simple mix-up: some other Laura Moon's body had been dragged from the highway wreckage. Lightning flickered outside the airport, through the windows-walls. Shadow realized he was holding his breath, waiting for something. A distant boom of thunder. He exhaled. A tired white woman stared at him from behind the counter. "Hello," said Shadow. You're the first strange woman I've spoken to, in the flesh, in three years. "I've got an e-ticket number. I was supposed to be traveling on Friday but I have to go today. There was a death in my family."

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"Mm. I'm sorry to hear that." She tapped at the keyboard, stared at the screen, tapped again. "No problem. I've put you on the three-thirty. It may be delayed because of the storm, so keep an eye on the screens. Checking any baggage?" He held up a shoulder bag. "I don't need to check this, do I?" "No," she said. "It's fine. Do you have any picture ID?" Shadow showed her his driver's license. It was not a big airport, but the number of people wandering, just wandering, amazed him. He watched people put down bags casually, observed wallets stuffed into back pockets, saw purses put down, unwatched, under chairs. That was when he realized he was no longer in prison. Thirty minutes to wait until boarding. Shadow bought a slice of pizza and burned his lip on the hot cheese. He took his change and went to the phones. Called Robbie at the Muscle Farm, but the machine picked up.

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"Hey Robbie," said Shadow. "They tell me that Laura's dead. They let me out early. I'm coming home."Then, because people do make mistakes, he'd seen it happen, he called home, and listened to Laura's voice. "Hi," she said. "I'm not here or I can't come to the phone. Leave a message and I'll get back to you. And have a good day." Shadow couldn't bring himself to leave a message. He sat in a plastic chair by the gate, and held his bag so tight he hurt his hand. He was thinking about the first time he had ever seen Laura. He hadn't even known her name then. She was Audrey Burton's friend. He had been sitting with Robbie in a booth at Chi-Chi's when Laura had walked in a pace or so behind Audrey, and Shadow had found himself staring. She had long, chestnut hair and eyes so blue Shadow mistakenly thought she was wearing tinted contact lenses. She had ordered a strawberry daiquiri, and insisted that Shadow taste it, and laughed delightedly when he did.

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Laura loved people to taste what she tasted. He had kissed her good night that night, and she had tasted like strawberry daiquiris, and he had never wanted to kiss anyone else again. A woman announced that his plane was boarding, and Shadow's row was the first to be called. He was in the very back, an empty seat beside him. The rain pattered continually against the side of the plane: he imagined small children tossing down dried peas by the handful from the skies. As the plane took off he fell asleep. JEROME .. FINISH UNIT 1

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"I have taken the liberty," said Mr. Wednesday, washing his hands in the men's room of Jack's Crocodile Bar, "of ordering food for myself, to be delivered to your table. We have much to discuss, after all." "I don't think so," said Shadow. He dried his own hands on a paper towel and crumpled it, and dropped it into the bin. "You need a job," said Wednesday. "People don't hire ex-cons. You folk make them uncomfortable." "I have a job waiting. A good job." "Would that be the job at the Muscle Farm?" "Maybe," said Shadow. "Nope. You don't. Robbie Burton's dead. Without him the Muscle Farm's dead too." "You're a liar." "Of course. And a good one. The best you will ever meet. But, I'm afraid, I'm not lying to you about this." He reached into his pocket, produced a folded newspaper, and handed it to Shadow. "Page seven," he said. "Come on back to the bar. You can read it at the table."

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Shadow pushed open the door, back into the bar. The air was blue with smoke, and the Dixie Cups were on the jukebox singing "Iko Iko." Shadow smiled, slightly, in recognition of the old children's song. The barman pointed to a table in the corner. There was a bowl of chili and a burger at one side of the table, a rare steak and a bowl of fries laid in the place across from it. "Look at my king all dressed in red, Iko Iko all day, I bet you five dollars he'll kill you dead, Jockamo-feena-nay" Shadow took his seat at the table. He put the newspaper down. "This is my first meal as a free man. I'll wait until after I've eaten to read your page seven."

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Shadow ate his hamburger. It was better than prison hamburgers. The chili was good but, he decided, after a couple of mouthfuls, not the best in the state. Laura made a great chili. She used lean meat, dark kidney beans, carrots cut small, a bottle or so of dark beer, and freshly sliced hot peppers. She would let the chili cook for a while, then add red wine, lemon juice and a pitch of fresh dill, and, finally, measure out and add her chili powders. On more than one occasion Shadow had tried to get her to show him how she made it: he would watch everything she did, from slicing the onions and dropping them into the olive oil at the bottom of the pot. He had even written down the recipe, ingredient by ingredient, and he had once made Laura's chili for himself on a weekend when she had been out of town. It had tasted okay-it was certainly edible, but it had not been Laura's chili.

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The news item on page seven was the first account of his wife's death that Shadow had read. Laura Moon, whose age was given in the article as twenty-seven, and Robbie Burton, thirty-nine, were in Robbie's car on the interstate when they swerved into the path of a thirty-two-wheeler. The truck brushed Robbie's car and sent it spinning off the side of the road. Rescue crews pulled Robbie and Laura from the wreckage. They were both dead by the time they arrived at the hospital. Shadow folded the newspaper up once more and slid it back across the table, toward Wednesday, who was gorging himself on a steak so bloody and so blue it might never have been introduced to a kitchen flame. "Here. Take it back," said Shadow.

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Robbie had been driving. He must have been drunk, although the newspaper account said nothing about this. Shadow found himself imagining Laura's face when she realized that Robbie was too drunk to drive. The scenario unfolded in Shadow's mind, and there was nothing he could do to stop it: Laura shouting at Robbie-shouting at him to pull off the road, then the thud of car against truck, and the steering wheel wrenching over… …the car on the side of the road, broken glass glittering like ice and diamonds in the headlights, blood pooling in rubies on the road beside them. Two bodies being carried from the wreck, or laid neatly by the side of the road. "Well?" asked Mr. Wednesday. He had finished his steak, devoured it like a starving man. Now he was munching the french fries, spearing them with his fork. "You're right," said Shadow. "I don't have a job." Shadow took a quarter from his pocket, tails up. He flicked it up in the air, knocking it against his finger as it left his hand, giving it a wobble as if it were turning, caught it, slapped it down on the back of his hand.

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"Call it," he said. "Why?" asked Wednesday. "I don't want to work for anyone with worse luck than me. Call." "Heads," said Mr. Wednesday. "Sorry," said Shadow, without even bothering to glance at the quarter. "It was tails. I rigged the toss." "Rigged games are the easiest ones to beat," said Wednesday, wagging a square finger at Shadow. "Take another look at it." Shadow glanced down at it. The head was face up. "I must have fumbled the toss," he said, puzzled.

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"You do yourself a disservice," said Wednesday, and he grinned. "I'm just a lucky, lucky guy." Then he looked up. "Well I never. Mad Sweeney. Will you have a drink with us?" "Southern Comfort and Coke, straight up," said a voice from behind Shadow. "I'll go and talk to the barman," said Wednesday. He stood up, and began to make his way toward the bar. "Aren't you going to ask what I'm drinking?" called Shadow. "I already know what you're drinking," said Wednesday, and then he was standing by the bar. Patsy Cline started to sing "Walking After Midnight" on the jukebox again.

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The Southern Comfort and Coke sat down beside Shadow. He had a short ginger beard. He wore a denim jacket covered with bright sew-on patches, and under the jacket a stained white T-shirt. On the T-shirt was printed: IF YOU CAN'T EAT IT, DRINK IT, SMOKE IT, OR SNORT IT…THEN F*CK IT! He wore a baseball cap, on which was printed: THE ONLY WOMAN I HAVE EVER LOVED WAS ANOTHER MAN'S WIFE…MY MOTHER! He opened a soft pack of Lucky Strikes with a dirty thumbnail, took a cigarette, offered one to Shadow. Shadow was about to take one, automatically-he did not smoke, but a cigarette makes good barter material-when he realized that he was no longer inside. He shook his head.

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"You working for our man then?" asked the bearded man. He was not sober, although he was not yet drunk. "It looks that way," said Shadow. "What do you do?" The bearded man lit his cigarette. "I'm a leprechaun," he said, with a grin. Shadow did not smile. "Really?" he said. "Shouldn't you be drinking Guinness?" "Stereotypes. You have to learn to think outside the box," said the bearded man. "There's a lot more to Ireland than Guinness." "You don't have an Irish accent." "I've been over here too fucken long." "So you are originally from Ireland?" "I told you. I'm a leprechaun. We don't come from fucken Moscow." "I guess not."

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Wednesday returned to the table, three drinks held easily in his pawlike hands. "Southern Comfort and Coke for you, Mad Sweeney m'man, and a Jack Daniel's for me. And this is for you, Shadow." "What is it?" "Taste it."The drink was a tawny golden color. Shadow took a sip, tasting an odd blend of sour and sweet on his tongue. He could taste the alcohol underneath, and a strange blend of flavors. It reminded him a little of prison hooch, brewed in a garbage bag from rotten fruit and bread and sugar and water, but it was sweeter, and far stranger. "Okay," said Shadow. "I tasted it. What was it?" "Mead," said Wednesday. "Honey wine. The drink of heroes. The drink of the gods."Shadow took another tentative sip. Yes, he could taste the honey, he decided. That was one of the tastes. "Tastes kinda like pickle juice," he said. "Sweet pickle-juice wine."

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"Tastes like a drunken diabetic's piss," agreed Wednesday. "I hate the stuff.""Then why did you bring it for me?" asked Shadow, reasonably. Wednesday stared at Shadow with his mismatched eyes. One of them, Shadow decided, was a glass eye, but he could not decide which one. "I brought you mead to drink because it's traditional. And right now we need all the tradition we can get. It seals our bargain." "We haven't made a bargain." "Sure we have. You work for me now. You protect me. You transport me from place to place. You run errands. In an emergency, but only in an emergency, you hurt people who need to be hurt. In the unlikely event of my death, you will hold my vigil. And in return I shall make sure that your needs are adequately taken care of."

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"He's hustling you," said Mad Sweeney, rubbing his bristly ginger beard. "He's a hustler." "Damn straight I'm a hustler," said Wednesday. "That's why I need someone to look out for my best interests." The song on the jukebox ended, and for a moment, the bar fell quiet, every conversation at a lull. "Someone once told me that you only get those everybody-shuts-up-at-once moments at twenty past or twenty to the hour," said Shadow. Sweeney pointed to the clock above the bar, held in the massive and indifferent jaws of a stuffed alligator head. The time was 11:20. "There," said Shadow. "Damned if I know why that happens." "I know why," said Wednesday. "Drink your mead." Shadow knocked the rest of the mead back in one long gulp. "It might be better over ice," he said. "Or it might not," said Wednesday. "It's terrible stuff."

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"That it is," agreed Mad Sweeney. "You'll excuse me for a moment, gentlemen, but I find myself in deep and urgent need of a lengthy piss." He stood up and walked away, an impossibly tall man. He had to be almost seven feet tall, decided Shadow. A waitress wiped a cloth across the table and took their empty plates. Wednesday told her to bring the same again for everyone, although this time Shadow's mead was to be on the rocks. "Anyway," said Wednesday, "that's what I need of you." "Would you like to know what I want?" asked Shadow. "Nothing could make me happier." The waitress brought the drink. Shadow sipped his mead on the rocks. The ice did not help-if anything it sharpened the sourness, and made the taste linger in the mouth after the mead was swallowed. However, Shadow consoled himself, it did not taste particularly alcoholic. He was not ready to be drunk. Not yet.

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He took a deep breath. "Okay," said Shadow. "My life, which for three years has been a long way from being the greatest life there has ever been, just took a distinct and sudden turn for the worse. Now there are a few things I need to do. I want to go to Laura's funeral. I want to say goodbye. I should wind up her stuff. If you still need me, I want to start at five hundred dollars a week." The figure was a stab in the dark. Wednesday's eyes revealed nothing. "If we're happy working together, in six months' time you raise it to a thousand a week." He paused. It was the longest speech he'd made in years. "You say you may need people to be hurt. Well, I'll hurt people if they're trying to hurt you. But I don't hurt people for fun or for profit. I won't go back to prison. Once was enough." "You won't have to," said Wednesday. "No," said Shadow. "I won't." He finished the last of the mead.

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He wondered, suddenly, somewhere in the back of his head, whether the mead was responsible for loosening his tongue. But the words were coming out of him like the water spraying from a broken fire hydrant in summer, and he could not have stopped them if he had tried. "I don't like you, Mister Wednesday, or whatever your real name may be. We are not friends. I don't know how you got off that plane without me seeing you, or how you trailed me here. But I'm at a loose end right now. When we're done, I'll be gone. And if you piss me off, I'll be gone too. Until then, I'll work for you." "Very good," said Wednesday. "Then we have a compact. And we are agreed." "What the hell," said Shadow. Across the room, Mad Sweeney was feeding quarters into the jukebox. Wednesday spat in his hand and extended it. Shadow shrugged. He spat in his own palm. They clasped hands. Wednesday began to squeeze. Shadow squeezed back. After a few seconds his hand began to hurt. Wednesday held the grip a little longer, and then he let go. "Good," he said. "Good. Very good. So, one last glass of evil, vile fucking mead to seal our deal, and then we are done."

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"It'll be a Southern Comfort and Coke for me," said Sweeney, lurching back from the jukebox. The jukebox began to play the Velvet Underground's "Who Loves the Sun?" Shadow thought it a strange song to find on a jukebox. It seemed very unlikely. But then, this whole evening had become increasingly unlikely. Shadow took the quarter he had used for the coin toss from the table, enjoying the sensation of a freshly milled coin against his fingers, producing it in his right hand between forefinger and thumb. He appeared to take it into his left hand in one smooth movement, while casually finger-palming it. He closed his left hand on the imaginary quarter. Then he took a second quarter in his right hand, between finger and thumb, and, as he pretended to drop that coin into the left hand, he let the palmed quarter fall into his right hand, striking the quarter he held there on the way. The chink confirmed the illusion that both coins were in his left hand, while they were now both held safely in his right.

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"Coin tricks is it?" asked Sweeney, his chin raising, his scruffy beard bristling. "Why, if it's coin tricks we're doing, watch this." He took an empty glass from the table. Then he reached out and took a large coin, golden and shining, from the air. He dropped it into the glass. He took another gold coin from the air and tossed it into the glass, where it clinked against the first.He took a coin from the candle flame of a candle on the wall, another from his beard, a third from Shadow's empty left hand, and dropped them, one by one, into the glass. Then he curled his fingers over the glass, and blew hard, and several more golden coins dropped into the glass from his hand. He tipped the glass of sticky coins into his jacket pocket, and then tapped the pocket to show, unmistakably, that it was empty.

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"There," he said. "That's a coin trick for you." Shadow, who had been watching closely, put his head on one side. "I need to know how you did it." "I did it," said Sweeney, with the air of one confiding a huge secret, "with panache and style. That's how I did it." He laughed, silently, rocking on his heels, his gappy teeth bared. "Yes," said Shadow. "That is how you did it. You've got to teach me. All the ways of doing the Miser's Dream that I've read, you'd be hiding the coins in the hand that holds the glass, and dropping them in while you produce and vanish the coin in your right hand."

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"Sounds like a hell of a lot of work to me," said Mad Sweeney. "It's easier just to pick them out of the air." Wednesday said, "Mead for you, Shadow. I'll stick with Mister Jack Daniel's, and for the freeloading Irishman…?" "A bottled beer, something dark for preference," said Sweeney. "Freeloader, is it?" He picked up what was left of his drink, and raised it to Wednesday in a toast. "May the storm pass over us, and leave us hale and unharmed," he said, and knocked the drink back. "A fine toast," said Wednesday. "But it won't." Another mead was placed in front of Shadow. "Do I have to drink this?" "I'm afraid you do. It seals our deal. Third time's the charm, eh?" "Shit," said Shadow. He swallowed the mead in two large gulps. The pickled-honey taste filled his mouth. "There," said Mr. Wednesday. "You're my man, now." "So," said Sweeney, "you want to know the trick of how it's done?" "Yes," said Shadow. "Were you loading them in your sleeve?"

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"They were never in my sleeve," said Sweeney. He chortled to himself, rocking and bouncing as if he were a lanky, bearded volcano preparing to erupt with delight at his own brilliance. "It's the simplest trick in the world. I'll fight you for it." Shadow shook his head. "I'll pass." "Now there's a fine thing," said Sweeney to the room. "Old Wednesday gets himself a bodyguard, and the feller's too scared to put up his fists, even." "I won't fight you," agreed Shadow. Sweeney swayed and sweated. He fiddled with the peak of his baseball cap. Then he pulled one of his coins out of the air and placed it on the table. "Real gold, if you were wondering," said Sweeney. "Win or lose-and you'll lose-it's yours if you fight me. A big fellow like you-who'd'a thought you'd be a fucken coward?"

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"He's already said he won't fight you," said Wednesday. "Go away, Mad Sweeney. Take your beer and leave us in peace." Sweeney took a step closer to Wednesday. "Call me a freeloader, will you, you doomed old creature? You coldblooded, heartless old tree-hanger." His face was turning a deep, angry red. Wednesday put out his hands, palms up, pacific. "Foolishness, Sweeney. Watch where you put your words." Sweeney glared at him. Then he said, with the gravity of the very drunk, "You've hired a coward. What would he do if I hurt you, do you think?" Wednesday turned to Shadow. "I've had enough of this," he said. "Deal with it." Shadow got to his feet and looked up into Mad Sweeney's face: how tall was the man? he wondered. "You're bothering us," he said. "You're drunk. I think you ought to leave now." A slow smile spread over Sweeney's face.

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"There, now," he said. He swung a huge fist at Shadow. Shadow jerked back: Sweeney's hand caught him beneath the right eye. He saw blotches of light, and felt pain. And with that, the fight began. Sweeney fought without style, without science, with nothing but enthusiasm for the fight itself: huge, barreling roundhouse blows that missed as often as they connected. Shadow fought defensively, carefully, blocking Sweeney's blows or avoiding them. He became very aware of the audience around them. Tables were pulled out of the way with protesting groans, making a space for the men to spar. Shadow was aware at all times of Wednesday's eyes upon him, of Wednesday's humorless grin. It was a test, that was obvious, but what kind of a test? In prison Shadow had learned there were two kinds of fights: don't fuck with me fights, where you made it as showy and impressive as you could, and private fights, real fights, which were fast and hard and nasty, and always over in seconds.

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"Hey, Sweeney," said Shadow, breathless, "why are we fighting?" "For the joy of it," said Sweeney, sober now, or at least, no longer visibly drunk. "For the sheer unholy fucken delight of it. Can't you feel the joy in your own veins, rising like the sap in the springtime?" His lip was bleeding. So was Shadow's knuckle. "So how'd you do the coin production?" asked Shadow. He swayed back and twisted, took a blow on his shoulder intended for his face. "I told you how I did it when first we spoke," grunted Sweeney. "But there's none so blind-ow! Good one!-as those who will not listen." Shadow jabbed at Sweeney, forcing him back into a table; empty glasses and ashtrays crashed to the floor. Shadow could have finished him off then. Shadow glanced at Wednesday, who nodded. Shadow looked down at Mad Sweeney. "Are we done?" he asked. Mad Sweeney hesitated, then nodded. Shadow let go of him, and took several steps backward. Sweeney, panting, pushed himself back up to a standing position.

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"Not on yer ass!" he shouted. "It ain't over till I say it is!" Then he grinned, and threw himself forward, swinging at Shadow. He stepped onto a fallen ice cube, and his grin turned to openmouthed dismay as his feet went out from under him, and he fell backward. The back of his head hit the barroom floor with a definite thud. Shadow put his knee into Mad Sweeney's chest. "For the second time, are we done fighting?" he asked. "We may as well be, at that," said Sweeney, raising his head from the floor, "for the joy's gone out of me now, like the pee from a small boy in a swimming pool on a hot day." And he spat the blood from his mouth and closed his eyes and began to snore, in deep and magnificent snores. Somebody clapped Shadow on the back. Wednesday put a bottle of beer into his hand. It tasted better than mead. Shadow woke up stretched out in the back of a sedan. The morning sun was dazzling, and his head hurt. He sat up awkwardly, rubbing his eyes. Wednesday was driving. He was humming tunelessly as he drove. He had a paper cup of coffee in the cup holder. They were heading along an interstate highway. The passenger seat was empty.

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"How are you feeling, this fine morning?" asked Wednesday, without turning around. "What happened to my car?" asked Shadow. "It was a rental." "Mad Sweeney took it back for you. It was part of the deal the two of you cut last night. After the fight." Conversations from the night before began to jostle uncomfortably in Shadow's head. "You got anymore of that coffee?" The big man reached beneath the passenger seat and passed back an unopened bottle of water. "Here. You'll be dehydrated. This will help more than coffee, for the moment. We'll stop at the next gas station and get you some breakfast. You'll need to clean yourself up, too. You look like something the goat dragged in." "Cat dragged in," said Shadow. "Goat," said Wednesday. "Huge rank stinking goat with big teeth." Shadow unscrewed the top of the water and drank. Something clinked heavily in his jacket pocket. He put his hand into the pocket and pulled out a coin the size of a half-dollar. It was heavy, and a deep yellow in color.

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In the gas station Shadow bought a Clean-U-Up Kit, which contained a razor, a packet of shaving cream, a comb, and a disposable toothbrush packed with a tiny tube of toothpaste. Then he walked into the men's rest room and looked at himself in the mirror. He had a bruise under one eye-when he prodded it, experimentally, with one finger, he found it hurt deeply-and a swollen lower lip. Shadow washed his face with the rest room's liquid soap, then he lathered his face and shaved. He cleaned his teeth. He wet his hair and combed it back. He still looked rough. He wondered what Laura would say when she saw him, and then he remembered that Laura wouldn't say anything ever again and he saw his face, in the mirror, tremble, but only for a moment. He went out. "I look like shit," said Shadow. "Of course you do," agreed Wednesday.

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Wednesday took an assortment of snack food up to the cash register and paid for that and their gas, changing his mind twice about whether he was doing it with plastic or with cash, to the irritation of the gum-chewing young lady behind the till. Shadow watched as Wednesday became increasingly flustered and apologetic. He seemed very old, suddenly. The girl gave him his cash back, and put the purchase on the card, and then gave him the card receipt and took his cash, then returned the cash and took a different card. Wednesday was obviously on the verge of tears, an old man made helpless by the implacable plastic march of the modern world. They walked out of the warm gas station, and their breath steamed in the air. On the road once more: browning grass meadows slipped past on each side of them. The trees were leafless and dead. Two black birds stared at them from a telegraph wire. "Hey, Wednesday."

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"What?" "The way I saw it in there, you never paid for the gas." "Oh?" "The way I saw it, she wound up paying you for the privilege of having you in her gas station. You think she's figured it out yet?" "She never will." "So what are you? A two-bit con artist?" Wednesday nodded. "Yes," he said. "I suppose I am. Among other things." He swung out into the left lane to pass a truck. The sky was a bleak and uniform gray. "It's going to snow," said Shadow. "Yes."

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"Sweeney. Did he actually show me how he did that trick with the gold coins?" "Oh, yes." "I can't remember." "It'll come back. It was a long night." Several small snowflakes brushed the windshield, melting in seconds. "Your wife's body is on display at Wendell's Funeral Parlor at present," said Wednesday. "Then after lunch they will take her from there to the graveyard for the interment." "How do you know?" "I called ahead while you were in the john. You know where Wendell's Funeral Parlor is?" Shadow nodded. The snowflakes whirled and dizzied in front of them. "This is our exit," said Shadow. The car stole off the interstate and past the cluster of motels to the north of Eagle Point.

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Three years had passed. Yes. There were more stoplights, unfamiliar storefronts. Shadow asked Wednesday to slow as they drove past the Muscle Farm. CLOSED INDEFINITELY, said the hand-lettered sign on the door, DUE TO BEREAVEMENT. Left on Main Street. Past a new tattoo parlor and the Armed Forces Recruitment Center, then the Burger King, and, familiar and unchanged, Olsen's Drug Store, finally the yellow-brick facade of Wendell's Funeral Parlor. A neon sign in the front window said HOUSE OF REST. Blank tombstones stood unchristened and uncarved in the window beneath the sign. Wednesday pulled up in the parking lot. "Do you want me to come in?" he asked. "Not particularly." "Good." The grin flashed, without humor. "There's business I can be getting on with while you say your goodbyes. I'll get rooms for us at the Motel America. Meet me there when you're done." Shadow got out of the car and watched it pull away. Then he walked in. The dimly lit corridor smelled of flowers and of furniture polish, with just the slightest tang of formaldehyde. At the far end was the Chapel of Rest.

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Shadow realized that he was palming the gold coin, moving it compulsively from a back palm to a front palm to a Downs palm, over and over. The weight was reassuring in his hand. His wife's name was on a sheet of paper beside the door at the far end of the corridor. He walked into the Chapel of Rest. Shadow knew most of the people in the room: Laura's workmates, several of her friends. They all recognized him. He could see it in their faces. There were no smiles, though, no hellos. At the end of the room was a small dais, and, on it, a cream-colored casket with several displays of flowers arranged about it: scarlets and yellows and whites and deep, bloody purples. He took a step forward. He could see Laura's body from where he was standing. He did not want to walk forward; he did not dare to walk away. A man in a dark suit-Shadow guessed he worked at the funeral home-said, "Sir? Would you like to sign the condolence and remembrance book?" and pointed him to a leather-bound book, open on a small lectern. He wrote SHADOW and the date in his precise handwriting, then, slowly, he wrote (PUPPY) beside it, putting off walking toward the end of the room where the people were, and the casket, and the thing in the cream casket that was no longer Laura.

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A small woman walked in through the door, and hesitated. Her hair was a coppery red, and her clothes were expensive and very black. Widow's weeds, thought Shadow, who knew her well. Audrey Burton, Robbie's wife. Audrey was holding a sprig of violets, wrapped at the base with silver foil. It was the kind of thing a child would make in June, thought Shadow. But violets were out of season. She walked across the room, to Laura's casket. Shadow followed her. Laura lay with her eyes closed, and her arms folded across her chest. She wore a conservative blue suit he did not recognize. Her long brown hair was out of her eyes. It was his Laura and it was not: her repose, he realized, was what was unnatural. Laura was always such a restless sleeper. Audrey placed her sprig of summer violets on Laura's chest. Then she worked her mouth for a moment and spat, hard, onto Laura's dead face. The spit caught Laura on the cheek, and began to drip down toward her ear. Audrey was already walking toward the door. Shadow hurried after her.

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"Audrey?" he said. "Shadow? Did you escape? Or did they let you out?" He wondered if she were taking tranquilizers. Her voice was distant and detached. "Let me out yesterday. I'm a free man," said Shadow. "What the hell was that all about?" She stopped in the dark corridor. "The violets? They were always her favorite flower. When we were girls we used to pick them together." "Not the violets." "Oh, that," she said. She wiped a speck of something invisible from the corner of her mouth. "Well, I would have thought that was obvious." "Not to me, Audrey." "They didn't tell you?" Her voice was calm, emotionless. "Your wife died with my husband's cock in her mouth, Shadow." He went back in to the funeral home. Someone had already wiped away the spit. After lunch-Shadow ate at the Burger King-was the burial. Laura's cream-colored coffin was interred in the small nondenominational cemetery on the edge of town: un-fenced, a hilly woodland meadow filled with black granite and white marble headstones.

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He rode to the cemetery in the Wendell's hearse, with Laura's mother. Mrs. McCabe seemed to feel that Laura's death was Shadow's fault. "If you'd been here," she said, "this would never have happened. I don't know why she married you. I told her. Time and again, I told her. But they don't listen to their mothers, do they?" She stopped, looked more closely at Shadow's face. "Have you been fighting?" "Yes," he said. "Barbarian," she said, then she set her mouth, raised her head so her chins quivered, and stared straight ahead of her. To Shadow's surprise Audrey Burton was also at the funeral, standing toward the back. The short service ended, the casket was lowered into the cold ground. The people went away. Shadow did not leave. He stood there with his hands in his pockets, shivering, staring at the hole in the ground. Above him the sky was iron gray, featureless and flat as a mirror. It continued to snow, erratically, in ghostlike tumbling flakes. There was something he wanted to say to Laura, and he was prepared to wait until he knew what it was. The world slowly began to lose light and color. Shadow's feet were going numb, while his hands and face hurt from the cold. He burrowed his hands into his pockets for warmth, and his fingers closed about the gold coin. He walked over to the grave. "This is for you," he said.

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Several shovels of earth had been emptied onto the casket, but the hole was far from full. He threw the gold coin into the grave with Laura, then he pushed more earth into the hole, to hide the coin from acquisitive grave diggers. He brushed the earth from his hands and said, "Good night, Laura." Then he said, "I'm sorry." He turned his face toward the lights of the town, and began to walk back into Eagle Point. His motel was a good two miles away, but after spending three years in prison he was relishing the idea that he could simply walk and walk, forever if need be. He could keep walking north, and wind up in Alaska, or head south, to Mexico and beyond. He could walk to Patagonia, or to Tierra del Fuego. A car drew up beside him. The window hummed down. "You want a lift, Shadow?" asked Audrey Burton. "No," he said. "And not from you."

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He continued to walk. Audrey drove beside him at three miles an hour. Snowflakes danced in the beams of her headlights. "I thought she was my best friend," said Audrey. "We'd talk every day. When Robbie and I had a fight, she'd be the first one to know-we'd go down to Chi-Chi's for margaritas and to talk about what scumpots men can be. And all the time she was fucking him behind my back." "Please go away, Audrey." "I just want you to know I had good reason for what I did." He said nothing. "Hey!" she shouted. "Hey! I'm talking to you!" Shadow turned. "Do you want me to tell you that you were right when you spit in Laura's face? Do you want me to say it didn't hurt? Or that what you told me made me hate her more than I miss her? It's not going to happen, Audrey."

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She drove beside him for another minute, not saying anything. Then she said, "So, how was prison, Shadow?" "It was fine," said Shadow. "You would have felt right at home." She put her foot down on the gas then, making the engine roar, and drove on and away. With the headlights gone, the world was dark. Twilight faded into night. Shadow kept expecting the act of walking to warm him, to spread warmth through his icy hands and feet. It didn't happen. Back in prison, Low Key Lyesmith had once referred to the little prison cemetery out behind the infirmary as the Bone Orchard, and the image had taken root in Shadow's mind. That night he had dreamed of an orchard under the moonlight, of skeletal white-trees, their branches ending in bony hands, their roots going deep down into the graves. There was fruit that grew upon the trees in the bone orchard, in his dream, and there was something very disturbing about the fruit in the dream, but on waking he could no longer remember what strange fruit grew oh the trees, nor why he found it so repellent.

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