American Gods (27 page)

The door creaked open and the cat slipped between the doorpost
and the door and padded across the room, then up on the windowsill. “Hey,” he
said to the cat. “I did shut that door. I know I shut that door.” She looked at
him, interested. Her eyes were dark yellow, the color of amber. Then she jumped
down from the sill onto the bed, where she wrapped herself into a curl of fur
and went back to sleep, a circle of cat upon the old counterpane.

Shadow left the bedroom door open, so the cat could leave
and the room air a little, and he walked downstairs. The stairs creaked and
grumbled as he walked down them, protesting his weight, as if they just wanted
to be left in peace.

“Damn, you look good,” said Jacquel. He was waiting at the
bottom of the stairs, and was now himself dressed in a black suit similar to
Shadow’s. “You ever driven a hearse?”

“No.”

“First time for everything, then,” said Jacquel. “It’s
parked out front.”

An old woman had died. Her name had been Lila Good-child. At
Mr. Jacquel’s direction, Shadow carried the folded aluminum gurney up the
narrow stairs to her bedroom and unfolded it next to her bed. He took out a
translucent blue plastic body bag, laid it next to the dead woman oa the bed,
and unzipped it open. She wore a pink nightgown and a quilted robe. Shadow
lifted her and wrapped her, fragile and almost weightless, in a blanket, and
placed it onto the bag. He zipped the bag shut and put it on the gurney. While
Shadow did this, Jacquel talked to a very old man who had, when she was alive,
been married to Lila Goodchild. Or rather, Jacquel listened while the old man
talked. As Shadow had zipped Mrs. Goodchild away, the old man had been
explaining how ungrateful his children had been, and grandchildren too, though
that wasn’t their fault, that was their parents’, the apple didn’t fall far
from the tree, and he thought he’d raised them better than that.

Shadow and Jacquel wheeled the loaded gurney to the narrow
flight of stairs. The old man followed them, still talking, mostly about money,
and greed, and ingratitude. He wore bedroom slippers. Shadow carried the
heavier bottom end of the gurney down the stairs and out onto the street, then
he wheeled it along the icy sidewalk to the hearse. Jacquel opened the hearse’s
rear door. Shadow hesitated, and Jacquel said, “Just push it on in there. The
supports’ll fold up out of the way.” Shadow pushed the gurney, anjl the
supports snapped up, the wheels rotated, and the gurney rolled right onto the
floor of the hearse. Jacquel showed him how to strap it in securely, and Shadow
closed up the hearse while Jacquel listened to the old man who had been married
to Lila Goodchild, unmindful of the cold, an old man in his slippers and his
bathrobe out on the wintry sidewalk telling Jacquel how his children were
vultures, no better than hovering vultures, waiting to take what little he and
Lila had scraped together, and how the two of them had fled to St. Louis, to
Memphis, to Miami, and how they wound up in Cairo, and how relieved he was that
Lila had not died in a nursing home, how scared he was that he would.

They walked the old man back into the house, up the stairs
to his room. A small TV set droned from one corner of the couple’s bedroom. As
Shadow passed it he noticed that the newsreader was grinning and winking at him.
When he was sure that no one was looking in his direction he gave the set the
finger.

“They’ve got no money,” said Jacquel when they were back in
the hearse. “He’ll come in to see Ibis tomorrow. He’ll choose the cheapest
funeral. Her friends will persuade him to do her right, give her a proper
send-off in the front room, I expect. But he’ll grumble. Got no money. Nobody
around here’s got money these days. Anyway, he’ll be dead in six months. A year
at the outside.”

Snowflakes tumbled and drifted in front of the headlights.
The snow was coming south. Shadow said, “Is he sick?”

“It ain’t that. Women survive their men. Men—men like
him—don’t live long when their women are gone. You’ll see—he’ll just start
wandering, all the familiar things are going to be gone with her. He gets tired
and he fades and then he gives up and then he’s gone. Maybe pneumonia will take
him or maybe it’ll be cancer, or maybe his heart will stop. Old age, and all
the fight gone out of you. Then you die.”

Shadow thought. “Hey, Jacquel?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you believe in the soul?” It wasn’t quite the question
he had been going to ask, and it took him by surprise to hear it coming from
his mouth. He had intended to say something less direct, but there was nothing
less direct that he could say.

“Depends. Back in my day, we had it all set up. You lined up
when you died, and you’d answer for your evil deeds and for your good deeds,
and if your evil deeds outweighed a feather, we’d feed your soul and your heart
to Ammet, the Eater of Souls.”

“He must have eaten a lot of people.”

“Not as many as you’d think. It was ;a really heavy feather.
We had it made special. You had to be p,retty damn evil to tip the scales on
that baby. Stop here, thargas station. We’ll put in a few gallons.”

The streets were quiet, in the way that’streets only are
when the first snow falls. “It’s going to be % white Christmas,” said Shadow as
he pumped the gas.

“Yup. Shit. That boy was one lucky son of a virgin.”

“Jesus?”

“Lucky, lucky guy. He could fall in a cesspit and come up smelling
like roses. Hell, it’s not even his birthday, you know that? He took it from
Mithras. You run into Mithras yet? Red cap. Nice kid.”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Well ... I’ve never seen Mithras around here. He was an
army brat. Maybe he’s back in the Middle East, taking it easy, but I expect he’s
probably gone by now. It happens. One day every soldier in the empire has to
shower in the blood of your sacrificial bull. The next they don’t even remember
your birthday.”

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 ...

He had grown so fast. In the spring of his thirteenth year
the local kids had been picking on him, goading him into fights they knew they
could not fail to win and after which Shadow would run, angry and often
weeping, to the boys’ room to wash the mud or the blood from his face before
anyone could see it. Then came summer, a long, magical thirteenth summer, which
he spent keeping out of the way of the bigger kids, swimming in the local pool,
reading library books at poolside. At the start of the summer he could barely
swim. By the end of August he was swimming length after length in an easy
crawl, diving from the high board, ripening to a deep brown from the sun and
the water. In September, he returned to school to discover that the boys who
had made him miserable were small, soft things no longer capable of upsetting
him. The two whoNtried it were taught better manners, hard and fast and
painfully, and Shadow found that he had redefined himself: he could no longer
be a quiet kid, doing his best to remain unobtrusively at the back of things.
He was too big for that, too obvious. By the end of the year he was on the
swimming team and the weight-lifting team, and the coach was courting him for
the triathlon team. He liked being big and strong. It gave him an identity. He’d
been a shy, quiet, bookish kid, and that had been painful; now he was a big
dumb guy, and nobody expected him to be able to do anything more than move a
sofa into the next room on his own.

Nobody until Laura, anyway.

Mr. Ibis had prepared dinner: rice and boiled greens for
himself and Mr. Jacquel. “I am not a meat eater,” he explained. “While Jacquel
gets all the meat he needs in the course of his work.” Beside Shadow’s place
was a carton of chicken pieces from KFC and a bottle of beer. There was more
chicken than Shadow could eat, and he shared the leftovers with the cat, removing
the skin and crusty coating, then shredding the meat for her with his fingers.

“There was a guy in prison named Jackson,” said Shadow, as
he ate, “worked in the prison library. He told me that they changed the name
from Kentucky Fried Chicken to KFC because they don’t serve real chicken
anymore. It’s become this genetically modified mutant thing, like a giant
centipede with no head, just segment after segment of legs and breasts and
wings. It’s fed through nutrient tubes. This guy said the government wouldn’t
let them use the word chicken.”

Mr. Ibis raised his eyebrows. “You think that’s true?”

“Nope. Now, my old cellmate, Low Key, he said they changed
the name because the word ‘fried’ had become a bad word. Maybe they wanted
people to think that the chicken cooked itself.”

After dinner Jacquel excused himself and went down to the
mortuary. Ibis went to his study to write. Shadow sat in the kitchen for a
little longer, feeding fragments of chicken breast to the little brown cat,
sipping his beet’When the beer and the chicken were gone, he washed «p/the
plates and cutlery, put them on the rack to dry, and went upstairs.

By the time he reached the bedroom the little brown cat was
once more asleep at the bottom of the bed, curled into a fur crescent. In the
middle drawer of the vanity he found several pairs of striped cotton pajamas.
They looked seventy years old, but smelled fresh, and he pulled on a pair that,
like the black suit, fitted him as if they had been tailored for him.

There was a small stack of Reader’s Digests on the little
table beside the bed, none of them dated later than March 1960. Jackson, the
library guy—the same one who had sworn to the truth of the Kentucky Fried
Mutant Chicken Creature story, who had told him the story of the black freight
trains that the government uses to haul political prisoners off to Secret Northern
Californian Concentration Camps, moving across the country in the dead of the
night—Jackson had also told him that the CIA used the Reader’s Digest as a
front for their branch offices around the world. He said that every Reader’s
Digest office in every country was really CIA.

“A joke,” said the late Mr. Wood, in Shadow’s memory. “How
can we be sure the CIA wasn’t involved in the Kennedy assassination?”

Shadow cracked the window open a few inches—enough for fresh
air to get in, enough for the cat to be able to get out onto the balcony
outside. He turned on the bedside lamp, climbed into bed, and read for a
little, trying to turn off his mind, to get the last few days out of his head,
picking the dullest-looking articles in the dullest-looking Digests. He noticed
he was falling asleep halfway through “I Am Joe’s Pancreas.” He barely had time
enough to turn out the bedside light and put his head down on the pillow before
his eyes closed for the night.