American Gods (59 page)

Shadow hung from the tree while the lightning flickered and
forked across the sky, and the thunder subsided into an omnipresent rumbling,
with occasional bangs and roars like distant bombs exploding hi the night. The
wind tugged at Shadow, trying to pull him from the tree, flaying him, cutting
to the bone; and Shadow knew in his soul that the real storm had truly begun.

A strange joy rose within Shadow then, and he started
laughing as the rain washed his naked skin and the lightning flashed and
thunder rumbled so loudly that he could barely hear himself laugh. He exulted.

He was alive. He had never felt like this. Ever.

If he did die, he thought, if he died right now, here on the
tree, it would be worth it to have had this one, perfect, mad moment.

“Hey!” he shouted at the storm. “Hey! It’s me! I’m here!”

He trapped some water between his bare shoulder and the
trunk of the tree, and he twisted his head over and drank the trapped
rainwater, sucking and slurping at it, and he drank more and he laughed,
laughed with joy and delight, not madness, until he could laugh no more, until
he hung there too exhausted to move.

At the foot of the tree, on the ground, the rain had made
the sheet partly transparent, and had lifted it and pushed it forward so that
Shadow could see Wednesday’s dead hand, waxy and pale, and the shape of his
head, and he thought of the shroud of Turin and he remembered the open girl on
Jacquel’s table in Cairo, and then, as if to spite the cold, he observed that
he was feeling warm and comfortable, and the bark of the tree felt soft, and he
slept once more, and if he dreamed any dreams this time he could not remember
them.

By the following morning the pain was no longer local, not
confined to the places where the ropes cut into his flesh, or where the bark
scraped his skin. Now the pain was everywhere.

And he was hungry, with empty pangs down in the pit of him.
His head was pounding. Sometimes he imagined that he had stopped breathing,
that his heart had ceased to beat. Then he would hold his breath until he could
hear his heart pounding an ocean in his ears and he was forced to suck air like
a diver surfacing from the depths.

It seemed to him that the tree reached from—hell to heaven,
and that he had been hanging there forever. A brown hawk circled the tree,
landed on a broken branch near to him, and then took to the wing, flying west.

The storm, which had abated at dawn, began to return as the
day passed. Gray, roiling clouds stretched from horizon to horizon; a slow
drizzle began to fall. The body at the base of the tree seemed to have become
less, in its stained motel winding sheet, crumbling into itself like a sugar
cake left in the rain.

Sometimes Shadow burned, sometimes he froze.

When the thunder started once more he imagined that he heard
drums beating, kettledrums in the thunder and the thump of his heart, inside
his head or outside, it did not matter. He perceived the pain in colors: the
red of a neon bar sign, the green of a traffic light on a wet night, the blue
of an empty video screen.

The squirrel dropped from the bark of the trunk onto Shadow’s
shoulder, sharp claws digging into bis skin. “Ratatosk!” it chattered. The tip
of its nose touched his lips. “Ratatosk.” It sprang back onto the tree.

His skin was on fire with pins and needles, a pricking
covering his whole body. The sensation was intolerable.

His life was laid out below him, on the motel-sheet shroud:
literally laid out, like the items at some Dada picnic, a surrealist tableau:
he could see his mother’s puzzled stare, the American embassy in Norway, Laura’s
eyes on their wedding day ...

He chuckled through dry lips.

“What’s so funny, puppy?” asked Laura.

“Our wedding day,” he said. “You bribed the organist to
change from playing the Wedding March to the theme song from Scooby-Doo as you
walked toward me down the aisle. Do you remember?”

“Of course I remember, darling. ‘I would have made it too,
if it wasn’t for those meddling kids.’ “

“I loved you so much,” said Shadow.

He could feel her lips on his, and they were warm and wet
and living, not cold and dead, so he knew that this was another hallucination. “You
aren’t here, are you?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “But you are calling me, for the last time.
And I am coming.”

Breathing was harder now. The ropes cutting his flesh were
an abstract concept, like free will or eternity.

“Sleep, puppy,” she said, although he thought it might have
been his own voice he heard, and he slept.

The sun was a pewter coin in a leaden sky. Shadow was, he realized
slowly, awake, and he was cold. But the part of him that understood that seemed
very far away from the rest of him. Somewhere in the distance he was aware that
his mouth and throat were burning, painful, and cracked. Sometimes, in the
daylight, he would see stars fall; other times he saw huge birds, the size of delivery
trucks, flying toward him. Nothing reached him; nothing touched him.

“Ratatosk. Ratatosk.” The chattering had become a scolding.

The squirrel landed, heavily, with sharp claws, on his
shoulder and stared into his face. He wondered if he were hallucinating: the
animal was holding a walnut shell, like a doll’s-house cup, in its front paws.
The animal pressed the shell to Shadow’s lips. Shadow felt the water, and,
involuntarily, he sucked it into his mouth, drinking from the tiny cup. He ran
the water around his cracked lips, his dry tongue. He wet his mouth with it,
and swallowed what was left, which was not much.

The squirrel leapt back to the tree, and ran down it, toward
the roots, and then, in seconds, or minutes, or hours, Shadow could not tell
which (all the clocks in his mind were broken, he thought, and their gears and
cogs and springs were simply a jumble down there in the writhing grass), the
squirrel returned with its walnut-shell cup, climbing carefully, and Shadow
drank the water it brought to him.

The muddy-iron taste of the water filled himmouth, cooled
his parched throat. It eased his fatigue and his madness.

By the third walnut shell, he was no longer thirsty.

He began to struggle, then, pulling at the ropes, flailing
his body, trying to get down, to get free, to get away. He moaned.

The knots were good. The ropes were strong, and they held,
and soon he exhausted himself once more.

In his delirium, Shadow became the tree. Its roots went deep
into the loam of the earth, deep down into time, into the hidden springs. He
felt the spring of the woman called Urd, which is to say, Past. She was huge, a
giantess, an underground mountain of a woman, and the waters she guarded were
the waters of time. Other roots went to other places. Some of them were secret.
Now, when he was thirsty, he pulled water from his roots, pulled them up into
the body of his being.

He had a hundred arms that broke into a hundred thousand fingers,
and all of his fingers reached up into the sky. The weight of the sky was heavy
on his shoulders.

It was not that the discomfort was lessened, but the pain belonged
to the figure hanging from the tree, rather than to the tree itself. Shadow in
his madness was now so much more than the man on the tree. He was the tree, and
he was the wind rattling the bare branches of the world tree; he was the gray
sky and the tumbling clouds; he was Ratatosk the squirrel running from the
deepest roots to the highest branches; he was the mad-eyed hawk who sat on a broken
branch at the top of the tree surveying the world; he was the worm in the heart
of the tree.

The stars wheeled, and he passed his hundred hands over the
glittering stars, palming them, switching them, vanishing them ...

A moment of clarity, in the pain and the madness: Shadow
felt himself surfacing. He knew it would not be for long. The morning sun was
dazzling him. He closed his eyes, wishing he could shade them.

There was not long to go. He knew that, too.

When he opened his eyes, Shadow saw that there was a young
man in the tree with him.

His skin was dark brown. His forehead was high and his dark
hair was tightly curled. He was sitting on a branch high above Shadow’s head.
Shadow could see him clearly by craning his head. And the man was mad. Shadow could
see that at a glance.

“You’re naked,” confided the madman, in a cracked voice. “I’m
naked too.”

“I see that,” croaked Shadow.

The madman looked at him, then he nodded and twisted his
head down and around, as if he were trying to remove a crick from his neck.
Eventually he said, “Do you know me?”

“No,” said Shadow.

“I know you. I watched you in Cairo. I watched you after. My
sister likes you.”

“You are ....” the name escaped him. Eats roadkill. Yes. “You
are Horus.”

The madman nodded. “Horus,” he said. “I am the falcon of the
morning, the hawk of the afternoon. I am the sun, as you are. And I know the
true name of Ra. My mother told me.”

“That’s great,” said Shadow, politely.

The madman stared at the ground below them intently, saying
nothing. Then he dropped from the tree.

A hawk fell like a stone to the ground, pulled out of its
plummet into a swoop, beat its wings heavily and flew back to the tree, a baby
rabbit in its talons. It landed on a branch closer to Shadow.

“Are you hungry?” asked the madman.

“No,” said Shadow. “I guess I should be, but I’m not.”

“I’m hungry,” said the madman. He ate the rabbit rapidly,
pulling it apart, sucking, tearing, rending. At he finished with them, he
dropped the gnawed bones and the fur to the ground. He walked farther down the
branch until he was only an arm’s length from Shadow. Then he peered at Shadow
unselfconsciously, inspecting him with care and caution, from his feet to his
head. There was rabbit blood on his chin and his chest, and he wiped it off
with the back of his hand.

Shadow felt he had to say something. “Hey,” he said.

“Hey,” said the madman. He stood up on the branch, turned
away from Shadow and let a stream of dark urine arc out into the meadow below.
It went on for a long time. When he had finished he crouched down again on the
branch.

“What do they call you?” asked Horus.

“Shadow,” said Shadow.

The madman nodded. “You are the shadow. I,am the light,” he
said. “Everything that is, casts a shadow.” Then he said, “They will fight
soon. I was watching them as they started to arrive.”

And then the madman said, “You are dying. Aren’t you?’

But Shadow could no longer speak. A hawk took wing, and
circled slowly upward, riding the updrafts into the morning.

Moonlight.

A cough shook Shadow’s frame, a racking painful cough that
stabbed his chest and his throat. He gagged for bream.

“Hey, puppy,” called a voice that he knew.

He looked down.

The moonlight burned whitely through the branches of the
tree, bright as day, and there was a woman standing in the moonlight on the
ground below him, her face a pale oval. The wind rattled in the branches of the
tree.

“Hi, puppy,” she said.

He tried to speak, but he coughed instead, deep in his
chest, for a long time.

“You know,” she said, helpfully, “that doesn’t sound good.”

He croaked, “Hello, Laura.”

She looked up at him with dead eyes, and she smiled.

“How did you find me?” he asked.

She was silent, for a while, in the moonlight. Then she
said, “You are the nearest thing I have to life. You are the only thing I have
left, the only thing that isn’t bleak and flat and gray. I could be blindfolded
and dropped into the deepest ocean and I would know where to find you. I could
be buried a hundred miles underground and I would know where you are.”

He looked down at the woman in the moonlight, and his eyes
stung with tears.

‘Til cut you down,” she said, after a while. “I spend too
much time rescuing you, don’t I?”

He coughed again. Then, “No, leave me. I have to do this.”

She looked up at him, and shook her head. “You’re crazy,”
she said. “You’re dying up there. Or you’ll be crippled, if you aren’t already.”

“Maybe,” he said. “But I’m alive.”

“Yes,” she said, after a moment. “I guess you are.”

“You told me,” he said. “In the graveyard.”

“It seems like such a long time ago, puppy,” she said. Then
she said, “I feel better, here. It doesn’t hurt as much. You know what I mean?
But I’m so dry.”

The wind let up, and he could smell her now: a stink of
rotten meat and sickness and decay, pervasive and unpleasant.

“I lost my job,” she said. “It was a night job, but they
said people had complained. I told them I was sick, and they said they didn’t
care. I’m so thirsty.”

“The women,” he told her. “They have water; THe house.”

“Puppy ...” she sounded scared.

“Tell them ... tell them I said to give you water ...”

The white face stared up at him. “I should
go
,”
she told him. Then she hacked, and made a face, and spat a mass of something
white onto the grass. It broke up when it hit the ground, and wriggled away.

It was almost impossible to breathe. His chest felt heavy,
and his head was swaying.

“Stay” he said, in a breath that was almost a whisper,
unsure whether or not she could hear him. “Please don’t go.” He started to
cough. “Stay the night.”

“I’ll stop awhile,” she said. And then, like a mother to a
child, she said, “Nothing’s gonna hurt you when I’m here. You know that?”

Shadow coughed once more. He closed his eyes—only for a
moment, he thought, but when he opened them again the moon had set and he was
alone.

A crashing and a pounding in his head, beyond the pain of migraine,
beyond all pain. Everything dissolved info tiny butterflies which circled him
like a multicolored dust storm and then evaporated into the night.