“Bidder Bladdig. He wode be gubbig bag today.”
   “Can I make an appointment for tomorrow?”
   She wipes her nose. “You hab to teddephode. Appoid-beds odly by teddephode.”
   “I see,” says Salim. And then he smiles: a salesman, Fuad had told him many times before he left Muscat, is naked in America without his smile. “Tomorrow I will telephone,” he says. He takes his sample case, and he walks down the many stairs to the street, where the freezing rain is turning to sleet. Salim contemplates the long, cold walk back to the 46th Street hotel, and the weight of the sample case, then he steps to the edge of the sidewalk and waves at every yellow cab that approaches, whether the light on top is on or off, and every cab drives past him.
   One of them accelerates as it passes; a wheel dives into a water-filled pothole, spraying freezing muddy water over Salim’s pants and coat. For a moment, he contemplates throwing himself in front of one of the lumbering cars, and then he realizes that his brother-in-law would be more concerned with the fate of the sample case than of Salim himself, and that he would bring grief to no one but his beloved sister, Fuad’s wife (for he had always been a slight embarrassment to his father and mother, and his romantic encounters had always, of necessity, been both brief and relatively anonymous): also, he doubts that any of the cars are going fast enough actually to end his life.
   A battered yellow taxi draws up beside him and, grateful to be able to abandon his train of thought, Salim gets in.
   The backseat is patched with gray duct tape; the half-open Plexiglas barrier is covered with notices warning him not to smoke, telling him how much to pay to get to the various airports. The recorded voice of somebody famous he has never heard of tells him to remember to wear his seat belt.
   “The Paramount Hotel, please,” says Salim.
   The cabdriver grunts and pulls away from the curb, into the traffic. He is unshaven, and he wears a thick, dust-colored sweater and black plastic sunglasses. The weather is gray, and night is falling: Salim wonders if the man has a problem with his eyes. The wipers smear the street scene into grays and smudged lights.
   From nowhere, a truck pulls out in front of them, and the cabdriver swears, by the beard of the prophet.
   Salim stares at the name on the dashboard, but he cannot make it out from here. “How long have you been driving a cab, my friend?” he asks the man, in his own language.
   “Ten years,” says the driver, in the same tongue. “Where are you from?”
   “Muscat,” says Salim. “In Oman.”
   “From Oman. I have been in Oman. It was a long time ago. Have you heard of the city of Ubar?” asks the taxi driver.
   “Indeed I have,” says Salim. “The Lost City of Towers. They found it in the desert five, ten years ago, I do not remember exactly. Were you with the expedition that excavated it?”
   “Something like that. It was a good city,” says the taxi driver. “On most nights there would be three, maybe four thousand people camped there: every traveler would rest at Ubar, and the music would play, and the wine would flow like water and the water would flow as well, which was why the city existed.”
   “That is what I have heard,” says Salim. “And it perished, what, a thousand years ago? Two thousand?”
   The taxi driver says nothing. They are stopped at a red traffic light. The light turns green, but the driver does not move, despite the immediate discordant blare of horns behind them. Hesitantly, Salim reaches through the hole in the Plexiglas and he touches the driver on the shoulder. The man’s head jerks up, with a start, and he puts his foot down on the gas, lurching them across the intersection.
   “Fuckshitfuckfuck,” he says, in English.
   “You must be very tired, my friend,” says Salim.
   “I have been driving this Allah-forgotten taxi for thirty hours,” says the driver. “It is too much. Before that, I sleep for five hours, and I drove fourteen hours before that. We are shorthanded, before Christmas.”
   “I hope you have made a lot of money,” says Salim.
   The driver sighs. “Not much. This morning I drove a man from Fifty-first Street to Newark Airport. When we got there, he ran off into the airport, and I could not find him again. A fifty-dollar fare gone, and I had to pay the tolls on the way back myself.”
   Salim nods. “I had to spend today waiting to see a man who will not see me. My brother-in-law hates me. I have been in America for a week, and it has done nothing but eat my money. I sell nothing.”
   “What do you sell?”
   “Shit,” says Salim. “Worthless gewgaws and baubles and tourist trinkets. Horrible, cheap, foolish, ugly shit.”
   The taxi driver wrenches the wheel to the right, swings around something, drives on. Salim wonders how he can see to drive, between the rain, the night, and the thick sunglasses.
   “You try to sell shit?”
   “Yes,” says Salim, thrilled and horrified that he has spoken the truth about his brother-in-law’s samples.
   “And they will not buy it?”
   “No.”
   “Strange. You look at the stores here, that is all they sell.”
   Salim smiles nervously.
   A truck is blocking the street in front of them: a red-faced cop standing in front of it waves and shouts and points them down the nearest street.
   “We will go over to Eighth Avenue, come uptown that way,” says the taxi driver. They turn onto the street, where the traffic has stopped completely. There is a cacophony of horns, but the cars do not move.
   The driver sways in his seat. His chin begins to descend to his chest, one, two, three times. Then he begins, gently, to snore. Salim reaches out to wake the man, hoping that he is doing the right thing. As he shakes his shoulder, the driver moves, and Salim’s hand brushes the man’s face, knocking the sunglasses from his face into his lap.
   The taxi driver opens his eyes, reaches for and replaces the black plastic sunglasses, but it is too late. Salim has seen his eyes.
   The car crawls forward in the rain. The numbers on the meter increase.
   “Are you going to kill me?” asks Salim.
   The taxi driver’s lips are pressed together. Salim watches his face in the driver’s mirror.
   “No,” says the driver, very quietly.
   The car stops again. The rain patters on the roof.
   Salim begins to speak. “My grandmother swore that she had seen an ifrit, or perhaps a marid, late one evening, on the edge of the desert. We told her that it was just a sandstorm, a little wind, but she said no, she saw its face, and its eyes, like yours, were burning flames.”
   The driver smiles, but his eyes are hidden behind the black plastic glasses, and Salim cannot tell whether there is any humor in that smile or not. “The grandmothers came here too,” he says.
   “Are there many jinn in New York?” asks Salim.
   “No. Not many of us.”
   “There are the angels, and there are men, who Allah made from mud, and then there are the people of the fire, the jinn,” says Salim.
   “People know nothing about my people here,” says the driver. “They think we grant wishes. If I could grant wishes do you think I would be driving a cab?”
   “I do not understand.”
   The taxi driver seems gloomy. Salim stares at his face in the mirror as he speaks, watching the ifrit’s dark lips.
   “They believe that we grant wishes. Why do they believe that? I sleep in one stinking room in Brooklyn. I drive this taxi for any stinking freak who has the money to ride in it, and for some who don’t. I drive them where they need to go, and sometimes they tip me. Sometimes they pay me.” His lower lip began to tremble. The ifrit seemed on edge. “One of them shat on the backseat once. I had to clean it before I could take the cab back. How could he do that? I had to clean the wet shit from the seat. Is that right?”
   Salim puts out a hand, pats the ifrit’s shoulder. He can feel solid flesh through the wool of the sweater. The ifrit raises his hand from the wheel, rests it on Salim’s hand for a moment.
   Salim thinks of the desert then: red sands blow a dust storm through his thoughts, and the scarlet silks of the tents that surrounded the lost city of Ubar flap and billow through his mind.
   They drive up Eighth Avenue.
   “The old believe. They do not piss into holes, because the Prophet told them that jinn live in holes. They know that the angels throw flaming stars at us when we try to listen to their conversations. But even for the old, when they come to this country we are very, very far away. Back there, I did not have to drive a cab.”
   “I am sorry,” says Salim.
   “It is a bad time,” says the driver. “A storm is coming. It scares me. I would do anything to get away.”
   The two of them say nothing more on their way back to the hotel.
   When Salim gets out of the cab he gives the ifrit a twenty-dollar bill, tells him to keep the change. Then, with a sudden burst of courage, he tells him his room number. The taxi driver says nothing in reply. A young woman clambers into the back of the cab, and it pulls out into the cold and the rain.
   Six o’clock in the evening. Salim has not yet written the fax to his brother-in-law. He goes out into the rain, buys himself this night’s kabob and french fries. It has only been a week, but he feels that he is becoming heavier, rounder, softening in this country of New York.
   When he comes back to the hotel he is surprised to see the taxi driver standing in the lobby, hands deep in his pockets. He is staring at a display of black-and-white postcards. When he sees Salim he smiles, self-consciously. “I called your room,” he says, “but there was no answer. So I thought I would wait.”
   Salim smiles also, and touches the man’s arm. “I am here,” he says.
   Together they enter the dim, green-lit elevator, ascend to the fifth floor holding hands. The ifrit asks if he may use Salim’s bathroom. “I feel very dirty,” he says. Salim nods. He sits on the bed, which fills most of the small white room, and listens to the sound of the shower running. Salim takes off his shoes, his socks, and then the rest of his clothes.
   The taxi driver comes out of the shower, wet, with a towel wrapped about his midsection. He is not wearing his sunglasses, and in the dim room his eyes burn with scarlet flames.
   Salim blinks back tears. “I wish you could see what I see,” he says.
   “I do not grant wishes,” whispers the ifrit, dropping his towel and pushing Salim gently, but irresistibly, down onto the bed.
   It is an hour or more before the ifrit comes, thrusting and grinding into Salim’s mouth. Salim has already come twice in this time. The jinn’s semen tastes strange, fiery, and it burns Salim’s throat.
   Salim goes to the bathroom, washes out his mouth. When he returns to the bedroom the taxi driver is already asleep in the white bed, snoring peacefully. Salim climbs into the bed beside him, cuddles close to the ifrit, imagining the desert on his skin.
   As he starts to fall asleep he realizes that he still has not written his fax to Fuad, and he feels guilty. Deep inside he feels empty and alone: he reaches out, rests his hand on the ifrit’s tumescent cock and, comforted, he sleeps. They wake in the small hours, moving against each other, and they make love again. At one point Salim realizes that he is crying, and the ifrit is kissing away his tears with burning lips. “What is your name?” Salim asks the taxi driver.
   “There is a name on my driving permit, but it is not mine,” the ifrit says.
   Afterward, Salim could not remember where the sex had stopped and the dreams began.
   When Salim wakes, the cold sun creeping into the white room, he is alone.
   Also, he discovers, his sample case is gone, all the bottles and rings and souvenir copper flashlights, all gone, along with his suitcase, his wallet, his passport, and his air tickets back to Oman.
   He finds a pair of jeans, the T-shirt, and the dust-colored woolen sweater discarded on the floor. Beneath them he finds a driver’s license in the name of Ibrahim bin Irem, a taxi permit in the same name, and a ring of keys with an address written on a piece of paper attached to them in English. The photographs on the license and the permit do not look much like Salim, but then, they did not look much like the ifrit.
   The telephone rings: it is the front desk calling to point out that Salim has already checked out and his guest needs to leave soon so that they can service the room, to get it ready for another occupant.
   “I do not grant wishes,” says Salim, tasting the way the words shape themselves in his mouth.
   He feels strangely light-headed as he dresses.
   New York is very simple: the avenues run north to south, the streets run west to east. How hard can it be? he asks himself.
   He tosses the car keys into the air and catches them. Then he puts on the black plastic sunglasses he found in the pockets, and leaves the hotel room to go and look for his cab.

Chapter 8

   He said the dead had souls, but when I asked him
   How that could be—I thought the dead were souls,
   he broke my trance. Don’t that make you suspicious
   That there’s something the dead are keeping back?
   Yes, there’s something the dead are keeping back.

Robert Frost, “Two Witches”


   The week before Christmas is often a quiet one in a funeral parlor, Shadow learned, over supper. They were sitting in a small restaurant, two blocks from Ibis and Jacquel’s Funeral Parlor. Shadow’s meal consisted of an all-day full breakfast—it came with hush puppies—while Mr. Ibis picked and pecked at a slice of coffee cake. Mr. Ibis explained it to him. “The lingering ones are holding on for one final Christmas,” said Mr. Ibis, “or even for New Year’s, while the others, the ones for whom other people’s jollity and celebration will prove too painful, have not yet been tipped over the edge by that last showing of It’s a Wonderful Life, have not quite encountered the final straw, or should I say, the final sprig of holly that breaks not the camel’s but the reindeer’s back.” And he made a little noise as he said it, half smirk, half snort, which suggested that he had just uttered a well-honed phrase of which he was particularly fond.
   Ibis and Jacquel was a small, family-owned funeral home: one of the last truly independent funeral homes in the area, or so Mr. Ibis maintained. “Most fields of human merchandising value nationwide brand identities,” he said. Mr. Ibis spoke in explanations: a gentle, earnest lecturing that put Shadow in mind of a college professor who used to work out at the Muscle Farm and who could not talk, could only discourse, expound, explain. Shadow had figured out within the first few minutes of meeting Mr. Ibis that his expected part in any conversation with the funeral director was to say as little as possible. “This, I believe, is because people like to know what they are getting ahead of time. Thus, McDonald’s, Wal-Mart, F. W. Woolworth (of blessed memory): store brands maintained and visible across the entire country. Wherever you go, you will get something that is, with small regional variations, the same.
   “In the field of funeral homes, however, things are, perforce, different. You need to feel that you are getting smalltown personal service from someone who has a calling to the profession. You want personal attention to you and your loved one in a time of great loss. You wish to know that your grief is happening on a local level, not on a national one. But in all branches of industry—and death is an industry, my young friend, make no mistake about that—one makes one’s money from operating in bulk, from buying in quantity, from centralizing one’s operations. It’s not pretty, but it’s true. Trouble is, no one wants to know that their loved ones are traveling in a cooler-van to some big old converted warehouse where they may have twenty, fifty, a hundred cadavers on the go. No, sir. Folks want to think they’re going to a family concern, somewhere they’ll be treated with respect by someone who’ll tip his hat to them if he sees them in the street.”
   Mr. Ibis wore a hat. It was a sober brown hat that matched his sober brown blazer and his sober brown face. Small gold-rimmed glasses perched on his nose. In Shadow’s memory Mr. Ibis was a short man; whenever he would stand beside him, Shadow would rediscover that Mr. Ibis was well over six feet in height, with a cranelike stoop. Sitting opposite him now, across the shiny red table, Shadow found himself staring into the man’s face.
   “So when the big companies come in they buy the name of the company, they pay the funeral directors to stay on, they create the apparency of diversity. But that is merely the tip of the gravestone. In reality, they are as local as Burger King. Now, for our own reasons, we are truly an independent. We do all our own embalming, and it’s the finest embalming in the country, although nobody knows it but us. We don’t do cremations, though. We could make more money if we had our own crematorium, but it goes against what we’re good at. What my business partner says is, if the Lord gives you a talent or a skill, you have an obligation to use it as best you can. Don’t you agree?”
   “Sounds good to me,” said Shadow.
   “The Lord gave my business partner dominion over the dead, just as he gave me skill with words. Fine things, words. I write books of tales, you know. Nothing literary. Just for my own amusement. Accounts of lives.” He paused. By the time Shadow realized that he should have asked if he might be allowed to read one, the moment had passed. “Anyway, what we give them here is continuity: there’s been an Ibis and Jacquel in business here for almost two hundred years. We weren’t always funeral directors, though. We used to be morticians, and before that, undertakers”
   “And before that?”
   “Well,” said Mr. Ibis, smiling just a little smugly, “we go back a very long way. Of course, it wasn’t until after the War Between the States that we found our niche here. That was when we became the funeral parlor for the colored folks hereabouts. Before that no one thought of us as colored—foreign maybe, exotic and dark, but not colored.
   Once the war was done, pretty soon, no one could remember a time when we weren’t perceived as black. My business partner, he’s always had darker skin than mine. It was an easy transition. Mostly you are what they think you are. It’s just strange when they talk about African-Americans. Makes me think of the people from Punt, Ophir, Nubia. We never thought of ourselves as Africans—we were the people of the Nile.”
   “So you were Egyptians,” said Shadow.
   Mr. Ibis pushed his lower lip upward, then let his head bob from side to side, as if it were on a spring, weighing the pluses and minuses, seeing things from both points of view. “Well, yes and no. ‘Egyptians’ makes me think of the folk who live there now. The ones who built their cities over our graveyards and palaces. Do they look like me?”
   Shadow shrugged. He’d seen black guys who looked like Mr. Ibis. He’d seen white guys with tans who looked like Mr. Ibis.
   “How’s your coffee cake?” asked the waitress, refilling their coffees.
   “Best I ever had,” said Mr. Ibis. “You give my best to your ma.”
   “I’ll do that,” she said, and bustled away.
   “You don’t want to ask after the health of anyone, if you’re a funeral director. They think maybe you’re scouting for business,” said Mr. Ibis, in an undertone. “Shall we see if your room is ready?”
   Their breath steamed in the night air. Christmas lights twinkled in the windows of the stores they passed. “It’s good of you, putting me up,” said Shadow. “I appreciate it.”
   “We owe your employer a number of favors. And Lord knows, we have the room. It’s a big old house. There used to be more of us, you know. Now it’s just the three of us. You won’t be in the way.”
   “Any idea how long I’m meant to stay with you?”
   Mr. Ibis shook his head. “He didn’t say. But we are happy to have you here, and we can find you work. If you are not squeamish. If you treat the dead with respect.”
   “So,” asked Shadow, “what are you people doing here in Cairo? Was it just the name or something?”
   “No. Not at all. Actually this region takes its name from us, although people barely know it. It was a trading post back in the old days.”
   “Frontier times?”
   “You might call it that,” said Mr. Ibis. “Evening Miz Simmons! And a Merry Christmas to you too! The folk who brought me here came up the Mississippi a long time back.”
   Shadow stopped in the street, and stared. “Are you trying to tell me that ancient Egyptians came here to trade five thousand years ago?”
   Mr. Ibis said nothing, but he smirked loudly. Then he said, “Three thousand five hundred and thirty years ago. Give or take.”
   “Okay,” said Shadow. “I’ll buy it, I guess. What were they trading?”
   “Not much,” said Mr. Ibis. “Animal skins. Some food. Copper from the mines in what would now be Michigan’s upper peninsula. The whole thing was rather a disappointment. Not worth the effort. They stayed here long enough to believe in us, to sacrifice to us, and for a handful of the traders to die of fever and be buried here, leaving us behind them.” He stopped dead in the middle of the sidewalk, turned around slowly, arms extended. “This country has been Grand Central for ten thousand years or more. You say to me, what about Columbus?”
   “Sure,” said Shadow, obligingly. “What about him?”
   “Columbus did what people had been doing for thousands of years. There’s nothing special about coming to America. I’ve been writing stories about it, from time to time.” They began to walk again.
   “True stories?”
   “Up to a point, yes. I’ll let you read one or two, if you like. It’s all there for anyone who has eyes to see it. Personally—and this is speaking as a subscriber to Scientific American, here—I feel very sorry for the professionals whenever they find another confusing skull, something that belonged to the wrong sort of people, or whenever they find statues or artifacts that confuse them—for they’ll talk about the odd, but they won’t talk about the impossible, which is where I feel sorry for them, for as soon as something becomes impossible it slipslides out of belief entirely, whether it’s true or not. I mean, here’s a skull that shows the Ainu, the Japanese aboriginal race, were in America nine thousand years ago. Here’s another that shows there were Polynesians in California nearly two thousand years later. And all the scientists mutter and puzzle over who’s descended from whom, missing the point entirely. Heaven knows what’ll happen if they ever actually find the Hopi emergence tunnels. That’ll shake a few things up, you just wait.
   “Did the Irish come to America in the dark ages, you ask me? Of course they did, and the Welsh, and the Vikings, while the Africans from the West Coast—what in later days they called the Slave Coast or the Ivory Coast—they were trading with South America, and the Chinese visited Oregon a couple of times—they called it Fu Sang. The Basque established their secret sacred fishing grounds off the coast of Newfoundland twelve hundred years back. Now, I suppose you’re going to say, but Mister Ibis, these people were primitives, they didn’t have radio controls and vitamin pills and jet airplanes.”
   Shadow hadn’t said anything, and hadn’t planned to say anything, but he felt it was required of him, so he said, “Well, weren’t they?” The last dead leaves of fall crackled underfoot, winter-crisp.
   “The misconception is that men didn’t travel long distances in boats before the days of Columbus. Yet New Zealand and Tahiti and countless Pacific Islands were settled by people in boats whose navigation skills would have put Columbus to shame; and the wealth of Africa was from trading, although that was mostly to the east, to India and China. My people, the Nile folk, we discovered early on that a reed boat will take you around the world, if you have the patience and enough jars of sweet water. You see, the biggest problem with coming to America in the old days was that there wasn’t a lot here that anyone wanted to trade, and it was much too far away.”
   They had reached a large house, built in the style people called Queen Anne. Shadow wondered who Queen Anne was, and why she had been so fond of Addams Family-style houses. It was the only building on the block that wasn’t locked up with boarded-over windows. They went through the gate and walked around the back of the building.
   Through large double doors, which Mr. Ibis unlocked with a key from his key chain, and they were in a large, unheated room, occupied by two people. They were a very tall, dark-skinned man, holding a large metal scalpel, and a dead girl in her late teens, lying on a long, porcelain table that resembled both a slab and a sink.
   There were several photographs of the dead girl pinned up on a corkboard on the wall above the body. She was smiling in one, a high school head shot. In another she was standing in a line with three other girls; they were wearing what might have been prom dresses, and her black hair was tied above her head in an intricate knotwork.
   Cold on the porcelain, her hair was down, loose around her shoulders, and matted with dried blood.
   “This is my partner, Mister Jacquel,” said Ibis.
   “We met already,” said Jacquel. “Forgive me if I don’t shake hands.”
   Shadow looked down at the girl on the table. “What happened to her?” he asked.
   “Poor taste in boyfriends,” said Jacquel.
   “It’s not always fatal,” said Mr. Ibis, with a sigh. “This time it was. He was drunk, and he had a knife, and she told him that she thought she was pregnant. He didn’t believe it was his.”
   “She was stabbed…” said Mr. Jacquel, and he counted. There was a click as he stepped on a foot switch, turning on a small Dictaphone on a nearby table, “Five times. There are three knife wounds in the left anterior chest wall. The first is between the fourth and fifth intercostal spaces at the medial border of the left breast, two point two centimeters in length; the second and third are through the inferior portion of the left mid-breast penetrating at the sixth interspace, overlapping, and measuring three centimeters. There is one wound two centimeters long in the upper anterior left chest in the second interspace, and one wound five centimeters long and a maximum of one point six centimeters deep in the anteromedial left deltoid, a slashing injury. All the chest wounds are deep penetrating injuries. There are no other visible wounds externally.” He released pressure from the foot switch. Shadow noticed a small microphone-dangling above the embalming table by its cord.
   “So you’re the coroner as well?” asked Shadow.
   “Coroner’s a political appointment around here,” said Ibis. “His job is to kick the corpse. If it doesn’t kick him back, he signs the death certificate. Jacquel’s what they call a prosector. He works for the county medical examiner. He does autopsies and saves tissue samples for analysis. He’s already photographed her wounds.”
   Jacquel ignored them. He took a big scalpel and made a deep incision in a large V that began at both collarbones and met at the bottom of her breastbone, and then he turned the V into a Y, another deep incision that continued from her breastbone to her pubis. He picked up what looked like a small, heavy chrome drill with a medallion-sized round saw blade at the business end. He turned it on, and cut through the ribs at both sides of her breastbone.
   The girl opened like a purse.
   Shadow suddenly was aware of a mild but unpleasantly penetrating, pungent, meaty smell.
   “I thought it would smell worse,” said Shadow.
   “She’s pretty fresh,” said Jacquel. “And the intestines weren’t pierced, so it doesn’t smell of shit.”
   Shadow found himself looking away, not from revulsion, as he would have expected, but from a strange desire to give the girl some privacy. It would be hard to be nakeder than this open thing.
   Jacquel tied off the intestines, glistening and snakelike in her belly, below the stomach and deep in the pelvis. He ran them through his fingers, foot after foot of them, described them as “normal” to the microphone, put them in a bucket on the floor. He sucked all the blood out of her chest with a vacuum pump, and measured the volume. Then he inspected the inside of her chest. He said to the microphone, “There are three lacerations in the pericardium, which is filled with clotted and liquefying blood.”
   Jacquel grasped her heart, cut it at its top, turned it about in his hand, examining it. He stepped on his switch and said, “There are two lacerations of the myocardium; a one-point-five-centimeter laceration in the right ventricle and a one-point-eight-centimeter laceration penetrating the left ventricle.”
   Jacquel removed each lung. The left lung had been stabbed and was half collapsed. He weighed them, and the heart, and he photographed the wounds. From each lung he sliced a small piece of tissue, which he placed into ajar.
   “Formaldehyde,” whispered Mr. Ibis helpfully.
   Jacquel continued to talk to the microphone, describing what he was doing, what he saw, as he removed the girl’s liver, the stomach, spleen, pancreas, both kidneys, the uterus and the ovaries. He weighed each organ, reported them as normal and uninjured. From each organ he took a small slice and put it into a jar of formaldehyde.
   From the heart, the liver, and from one of the kidneys, he cut an additional slice. These pieces he chewed, slowly, making them last, while he worked.
   Somehow it seemed to Shadow a good thing for him to do: respectful, not obscene.
   “So you want to stay here with us for a spell?” said Jacquel, masticating the slice of the girl’s heart.
   “If you’ll have me,” said Shadow.

   “Certainly we’ll have you,” said Mr. Ibis. “No reasons why not and plenty of reasons why. You’ll be under our protection as long as you’re here.”
   “I hope you don’t mind sleeping under the same roof as the dead,” said Jacquel.
   Shadow thought of the touch of Laura’s lips, bitter and cold. “No,” he said. “Not as long as they stay dead, anyhow.”
   Jacquel turned and looked at him with dark brown eyes as quizzical and cold as a desert dog’s. “They stay dead here” was all he said.
   “Seems to me,” said Shadow, “seems to me that the dead come back pretty easy.”
   “Not at all,” said Ibis. “Even zombies, they make them out of the living, you know. A little powder, a little chanting, a little push, and you have a zombie. They live, but they believe they are dead. But to truly bring the dead back to life, in their bodies. That takes power.” He hesitated, then, “In the old land, in the old days, it was easier then.”
   “You could bind the ka of a man to his body for five thousand years,” said Jacquel. “Binding or loosing. But that was a long time ago.” He took all the organs that he had removed and replaced them, respectfully, in the body cavity. He replaced the intestines and the breastbone and pulled the skin edges near each other. Then he took a thick needle and thread and, with deft, quick strokes, he sewed it up, like a man stitching a baseball: the cadaver transformed from meat into girl once again.
   “I need a beer,” said Jacquel. He pulled off his rubber gloves and dropped them into the bin. He dropped his dark brown overalls into a hamper. Then he took the cardboard tray of jars filled with little red and brown and purple slices of the organs. “Coming?”
   They walked up the back stairs to the kitchen. It was brown and white, a sober and respectable room that looked to Shadow as if it had last been decorated in 1920. There was a huge Kelvinator rattling to itself by one wall. Jacquel opened the Kelvinator door, put the plastic jars with their slivers of spleen, of kidney, of liver, of heart, inside. He took out three brown bottles. Ibis opened a glass-fronted cupboard, removed three tall glasses. Then he gestured for Shadow to sit down at the kitchen table.
   Ibis poured the beer and passed a glass to Shadow, a glass to Jacquel. It was a fine beer, bitter and dark.
   “Good beer,” said Shadow.
   “We brew it ourselves,” said Ibis. “In the old days the women did the brewing. They were better brewers than we are. But now it is only the three of us here. Me, him, and her.” He gestured toward the small brown cat, fast asleep in a cat-basket in the corner of the room. “There were more of us, in the beginning. But Set left us to explore, what, two hundred years ago? Must be, by now. We got a postcard from him from San Francisco in 1905, 1906. Then nothing. While poor Horus…” he trailed off, in a sigh, and shook his head.
   “I still see him, on occasion,” said Jacquel. “On my way to a pickup.” He sipped his beer.
   “I’ll work for my keep,” said Shadow. “While I’m here. You tell me what you need doing, and I’ll do it.”
   “We’ll find work for you,” agreed Jacquel.
   The small brown cat opened her eyes and stretched to her feet. She padded across the kitchen floor and pushed at Shadow’s boot with her head. He put down his left hand and scratched her forehead and the back of her ears and the scruff of her neck. She arched, ecstatically, then sprang into his lap, pushed herself up against his chest, and touched her cold nose to his. Then she curled up in his lap and went back to sleep. He put his hand down to stroke her: her fur was soft, and she was warm and pleasant in his lap; she acted like she was in the safest place in the world, and Shadow felt comforted.
   The beer left a pleasant buzz in Shadow’s head.
   “Your room is at the top of the stairs, by the bathroom,” said Jacquel. “Your work clothes will be hanging in the closet—you’ll see. You’ll want to wash up and shave first, I guess.”
   Shadow did. He showered standing in the cast-iron tub and he shaved, very nervously, with a straight razor that Jacquel loaned him. It was obscenely sharp, and had a mother-of-pearl handle, and Shadow suspected it was usually used to give dead men their final shave. He had never used a straight razor before, but he did not cut himself. He washed off the shaving cream, looked at himself naked in the fly-specked bathroom mirror. He was bruised: fresh bruises on his chest and arms overlaying the fading bruises that Mad Sweeney had left him. His eyes looked back mistrustfully from the mirror at him.
   And then, as if someone else were holding his hand, he raised the straight razor, placed it, blade open, against his throat.
   It would be a way out, he thought. An easy way out. And if there’s anyone who’d simply take it in their stride, who’d just clean up the mess and get on with things, it’s the two guys sitting downstairs at the kitchen table drinking their beer. No more worries. No more Laura. No more mysteries and conspiracies. No more bad dreams. Just peace and quiet and rest forever. One clean slash, ear to ear. That’s all it’ll take.
   He stood there with the razor against his throat. A tiny smudge of blood came from the place where the blade touched the skin. He had not even noticed a cut. See, he told himself, and he could almost hear the words being whispered in his ear. It’s painless. Too sharp to hurt. I’ll be gone before I know it.
   Then the door to the bathroom swung open, just a few inches, enough for the little brown cat to put her head around the door frame and “Mrr?” up at him curiously.
   “Hey,” he said to the cat. “I thought I locked that door.”
   He closed the cutthroat razor, put it down on the side of the sink, dabbed at his tiny cut with a toilet paper swab. Then he wrapped a towel around his waist and went into the bedroom next door.
   His bedroom, like the kitchen, seemed to have been decorated some time in the 1920s: there was a washstand and a pitcher beside the chest of drawers and mirror. Someone had already laid out clothes for him on the bed: a black suit, white shirt, black tie, white undershirt and underpants, black socks. Black shoes sat on the worn Persian carpet beside the bed.
   He dressed himself. The clothes were of good quality, although none of them was new. He wondered who they had belonged to. Was he wearing a dead man’s socks? Would he be stepping into a dead man’s shoes? He adjusted the tie in the mirror and now it seemed to him that his reflection was smiling at him, sardonically.
   Now it seemed inconceivable to him that he had ever thought of cutting his throat. His reflection continued to smile as he adjusted his tie.
   “Hey,” he said to it. “You know something that I don’t?” and immediately felt foolish.
   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 Goodchild. 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 on 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, and 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 pretty damn evil to tip the scales on that baby. Stop here, that gas 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 a 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 who tried 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 beer. When the beer and the chicken were gone, he washed up 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 Digest s 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.


* * *

   Later he was never able to recollect the sequence and details of that dream: attempts to remember it produced nothing more than a tangle of dark images. There was a girl. He had met her somewhere, and now they were walking across a bridge. It spanned a small lake, in the middle of a town. The wind was ruffling the surface of the lake, making waves tipped with whitecaps, which seemed to Shadow to be tiny hands reaching for him.
   –Down there, said the woman. She was wearing a leopard-print skirt, which flapped and tossed in the wind, and the flesh between the top of her stockings and her skirt was creamy and soft and in his dream, on the bridge, before God and the world, Shadow went down to his knees in front of her, burying his head in her crotch, drinking in the intoxicating jungle female scent of her. He became aware, in his dream, of his erection in real life, a rigid, pounding, monstrous thing as painful in its hardness as the erections he’d had as a boy, when he was crashing into puberty.
   He pulled away and looked upward, and still he could not see her face. But his mouth was seeking hers and her lips were soft against his, and his hands were cupping her breasts, and then they were running across the satin smoothness of her skin, pushing into and parting the furs that hid her waist, sliding into the wonderful cleft of her, which warmed and wetted and parted for him, opening to his hand like a flower.
   The woman purred against him ecstatically, her hand moving down to the hardness of him and squeezing it. He pushed the bedsheets away and rolled on top of her, his hand parting her thighs, her hand guiding him between her legs, where one thrust, one magical push…
   Now he was back in his old prison cell with her, and he was kissing her deeply. She wrapped her arms tightly around him, clamped her legs about his legs to hold him tight, so he could not pull out, not even if he wanted to.
   Never had he kissed lips so soft. He had not known that there were lips so soft in the whole world. Her tongue, though, was sandpaper-rough as it slipped against his.
   –Who are you? he asked.
   She made no answer, just pushed him onto his back and, in one lithe movement, straddled him and began to ride him. No, not to ride him: to insinuate herself against him in a series of silken-smooth waves, each more powerful than the one before, strokes and beats and rhythms that crashed against his mind and his body just as the wind-waves on the lake splashed against the shore. Her nails were needle-sharp and they pierced his sides, raking them, but he felt no pain, only pleasure, everything was transmuted by some alchemy into moments of utter pleasure.
   He struggled to find himself, struggled to talk, his head now filled with sand dunes and desert winds.
   –Who are you? he asked again, gasping for the words.
   She stared at him with eyes the color of dark amber, then lowered her mouth to his and kissed him with a passion, kissed him so completely and so deeply that there, on the bridge over the lake, in his prison cell, in the bed in the Cairo funeral home, he almost came. He rode the sensation like a kite riding a hurricane, willing it not to crest, not to explode, wanting it never to end. He pulled it under control. He had to warn her.
   –My wife, Laura. She will kill you.
   –Not me, she said.
   A fragment of nonsense bubbled up from somewhere in his mind: In medieval days it was said that a woman on top during coitus would conceive a bishop. That was what they called it: trying for a bishop….

  He wanted to know her name, but he dared not ask her a third time, and she pushed her chest against his, and he could feel the hard nubs of her nipples against his chest, and she was squeezing him, somehow squeezing him down there deep inside her and this time he could not ride it or surf it, this time it picked him up and spun and tumbled him away, and he was arching up, pushing into her as deeply as he could imagine, as if they were, in some way, part of the same creature, tasting, drinking, holding, wanting …
   –Let it happen, she said, her voice a throaty feline growl. Give it to me. Let it happen.
   And he came, spasming and dissolving, the back of his mind itself liquefying, then sublimating slowly from one state to the next.
   Somewhere in there, at the end of it, he took a breath, a clear draught of air he felt all the way down to the depths of his lungs, and he knew that he had been holding his breath for a long time now. Three years, at least. Perhaps even longer.
   –Now rest, she said, and she kissed his eyelids with her soft lips. Let it go. Let it all go.
   The sleep he slept after that was deep and dreamless and comforting, and Shadow dived deep and embraced it.


* * *

   The light was strange. It was, he checked his watch, 6:45 A.M., and still dark outside, although the room was filled with a pale blue dimness. He climbed out of bed. He was certain that he had been wearing pajamas when he went to bed, but now he was naked, and the air was cold on his skin. He walked to the window and closed it.
   There had been a snowstorm in the night: six inches had fallen, perhaps more. The corner of the town that Shadow could see from his window, dirty and run-down, had been transformed into somewhere clean and different: these houses were not abandoned and forgotten, they were frosted into elegance. The streets had vanished completely, lost beneath a white field of snow.
   There was an idea that hovered at the edge of his perception. Something about transience. It flickered and was gone.
   He could see as well as if it were full daylight.
   In the mirror, Shadow noticed something strange. He stepped closer, and stared, puzzled. All his bruises had vanished. He touched his side, pressing firmly with his fingertips, feeling for one of the deep pains that told him he had encountered Mr. Stone and Mr. Wood, hunting for the greening blossoms of bruise that Mad Sweeney had gifted him with, and finding nothing. His face was clear and unmarked. His sides, however, and his back (he twisted to examine it) were scratched with what looked like claw marks.
   He hadn’t dreamed it, then. Not entirely.
   Shadow opened the drawers, and put on what he found: an ancient pair of blue-denim Levi’s, a shirt, a thick blue sweater, and a black undertaker’s coat he found hanging in the wardrobe at the back of the room.
   He wore his own old shoes.
   The house was still asleep. He crept through it, willing the floorboards not to creak, and then he was outside, and he walked through the snow, his feet leaving deep prints on the sidewalk. It was lighter out than it had seemed from inside the house, and the snow reflected the light from the sky.
   After fifteen minutes of walking, Shadow came to a bridge with a big sign on the side of it warning him he was now leaving historical Cairo. A man stood under the bridge, tall and gangling, sucking on a cigarette and shivering continually. Shadow thought he recognized the man.
   And then, under the bridge in the winter darkness, he was close enough to see the purple smudge of bruise around the man’s eye, and he said, “Good morning, Mad Sweeney.”
   The world was so quiet. Not even cars disturbed the snowbound silence.
   “Hey, man,” said Mad Sweeney. He did not look up. The cigarette had been rolled by hand.
   “You keep hanging out under bridges, Mad Sweeney,” said Shadow, “people gonna think you’re a troll.”
   This time Mad Sweeney looked up. Shadow could see the whites of his eyes all around his irises. The man looked scared. “I was lookin’ for you,” he said. “You gotta help me, man. I fucked up big time.” He sucked on his hand-rolled cigarette, pulled it away from his mouth. The cigarette paper stuck to his lower lip, and the cigarette fell apart, spilling its contents onto his ginger beard and down the front of his filthy T-shirt. Mad Sweeney brushed it off, convulsively, with blackened hands, as if it were a dangerous insect.
   “My resources are pretty much tapped out, Mad Sweeney,” said Shadow. “But why don’t you tell me what it is you need. You want me to get you a coffee?”
   Mad Sweeney shook his head. He took out a tobacco pouch and papers from the pocket of his’ denim jacket and began to roll himself another cigarette. His beard bristled and his mouth moved as he did this, although no words were said aloud. He licked the adhesive side of the cigarette paper and rolled it between his fingers. The result looked only distantly like a cigarette. Then he said,” ‘M not a troll. Shit. Those bastards’re fucken mean.”
   “I know you’re not a troll, Sweeney,” said Shadow, gently. “How can I help you?”
   Mad Sweeney flicked his brass Zippo, and the first inch of his cigarette flamed and then subsided to ash. “You remember I showed you how to get a coin? You remember?”
   “Yes,” said Shadow. He saw the gold coin in his mind’s eye, watched it tumble into Laura’s casket, saw it glitter around her neck. “I remember.”
   “You took the wrong coin, man.”
   A car approached the gloom under the bridge, blinding them with its lights. It slowed as it passed them, then stopped, and a window slid down. “Everything okay here, gentlemen?”
   “Everything’s just peachy, thank you, officer,” said Shadow. “We’re just out for a morning walk.”
   “Okay now,” said the cop. He did not look as if he believed that everything was okay. He waited. Shadow put a hand on Mad Sweeney’s shoulder, and walked him forward, out of town, away from the police car. He heard the window hum closed, but the car remained where it was.
   Shadow walked. Mad Sweeney walked, and sometimes he staggered.
   The police car cruised past them slowly, then turned and went back into the city, accelerating down the snowy road.
   “Now, why don’t you tell me what’s troubling you,” said Shadow.
   “I did it like he said. I did it all like he said, but I gave you the wrong coin. It wasn’t meant to be that coin. That’s for royalty. You see? I shouldn’t even have been able to take it. That’s the coin you’d give to the king of America himself. Not some pissant bastard like you or me. And now I’m in big trouble. Just give me the coin back, man. You’ll never see me again, if you do, I sweartofuckenBran, okay? I swear by the years I spent in the fucken trees.”
   “You did it like who said, Sweeney?”
   “Grimnir. The dude you call Wednesday, You know who he is? Who he really is?”
   “Yeah. I guess.”
   There was a panicked look in the Irishman’s crazy blue eyes. “It was nothing bad. Nothing you can—nothing bad. He just told me to be there at that bar and to pick a fight with you. He said he wanted to see what you were made of.”
   “He tell you to do anything else?”
   Sweeney shivered and twitched; Shadow thought it was the cold for a moment, then knew where he’d seen that shuddering shiver before. In prison: it was a junkie shiver. Sweeney was in withdrawal from something, and Shadow would have been willing to bet it was heroin. A junkie leprechaun? Mad Sweeney pinched off the burning head of his cigarette, dropped it on the ground, put the unfinished yellowing rest of it into his pocket. He rubbed his dirt-black fingers together, breathed on them to try and rub warmth into them. His voice was a whine now, “Listen, just give me the fucken coin, man. I’ll give you another, just as good. Hell, I’ll give you a shitload of the fuckers.”
   He took off his greasy baseball cap, then, with his right hand, he stroked the air, producing a large golden coin. He dropped it into his cap. And then he took another from a wisp of breath steam, and another, catching and grabbing them from the still morning air until the baseball cap was brimming with them and Sweeney was forced to hold it with both hands.
   He extended the baseball cap filled with gold to Shadow. “Here,” he said. “Take them, man. Just give me back the coin I gave to you.” Shadow looked down at the cap, wondered how much its contents would be worth.
   “Where am I going to spend those coins, Mad Sweeney?” Shadow asked. “Are there a lot of places you can turn your gold into cash?”
   He thought the Irishman was going to hit him for a moment, but the moment passed and Mad Sweeney just stood there, holding out his gold-filled cap with both hands like Oliver Twist. And then tears swelled in his blue eyes and began to spill down his cheeks. He took the cap and put it—now empty of everything except a greasy sweatband—back over his thinning scalp. “You gotta, man,” he was saying. “Didn’t I show you how to do it? I showed you how to take coins from the hoard. I showed you where the hoard was. Just give me that first coin back. It didn’t belong to me.”
   “I don’t have it anymore.”
   Mad Sweeney’s tears stopped, and spots of color appeared in his cheeks. “You, you fucken—” he said, and then the words failed him and his mouth opened and closed, wordlessly.
   “I’m telling you the truth,” said Shadow. “I’m sorry. If I had it I’d give it back to you. But I gave it away.”
   Sweeney’s grimy hands clamped on Shadow’s shoulders, and the pale blue eyes stared into his. The tears had made streaks in the dirt on Mad Sweeney’s face. “Shit,” he said. Shadow could smell tobacco and stale beer and whiskey-sweat. “You’re telling the truth, you fucker. Gave it away and freely and of your own will. Damn your dark eyes, you gave it a-fucken-way.”
   “I’m sorry.” Shadow remembered the whispering thump the coin had made as it landed on Laura’s casket.
   “Sorry or not, I’m damned and I’m doomed.” He wiped his nose and his eyes on his sleeves, muddying his face into strange patterns.
   Shadow squeezed Mad Sweeney’s upper arm in an awkward male gesture.
   “Twere better I had never been conceived,” said Mad Sweeney, at length. Then he looked up. “The fellow you gave it to. Would he give it back?”
   “It’s a woman. And I don’t know where she is. But no, I don’t believe she would.”
   Sweeney sighed, mournfully. “When I was but a young pup,” he said, “there was a woman I met, under the stars, who let me play with her bubbies, and she told me my fortune. She told me that I would be undone and abandoned west of the sunset, and that a dead woman’s bauble would seal my fate. And I laughed and poured more barley wine and played with her bubbies some more, and I kissed her full on her pretty lips. Those were the good days—the first of the gray monks had not yet come to our land, nor had they ridden the green sea to westward. And now.” He stopped, midsentence. His head turned and he focused on Shadow. “You shouldn’t trust him,” he said, reproachfully.
   “Who?”
   “Wednesday. You mustn’t trust him.”
   “I don’t have to trust him. I work for him.”
   “Do you remember how to do it?”
   “What?” Shadow felt he was having a conversation with half a dozen different people. The self-styled leprechaun sputtered and jumped from persona to persona, from theme to theme, as if the remaining clusters of brain cells were igniting, flaming, and then going out for good.
   “The coins, man. The coins. I showed you, remember?” He raised two fingers to his face, stared at them, then pulled a gold coin from his mouth. He tossed the coin to Shadow, who stretched out a hand to catch it, but no coin reached him.
   “I was drunk,” said Shadow. “I don’t remember.”

  Sweeney stumbled across the road. It was light now and the world was white and gray. Shadow followed him. Sweeney walked in a long, loping stride, as if he were always falling, but his legs were there to stop him, to propel him into another stumble. When they reached the bridge, he held onto the bricks with one hand, and turned and said, “You got a few bucks? I don’t need much. Just enough for a ticket out of this place. Twenty bucks will do me fine. Just a lousy twenty?”
   “Where can you go on a twenty dollar bus ticket?” asked Shadow.
   “I can get out of here,” said Sweeney. “I can get away before the storm hits. Away from a world in which opiates have become the religion of the masses. Away from.” He stopped, wiped his nose on the side of his hand, then wiped his hand on his sleeve.
   Shadow reached into his jeans, pulled out a twenty and passed it to Sweeney. “Here.”
   Sweeney crumpled it up and pushed it deep into the breast pocket of his oil-stained denim jacket, under the sew-on patch showing two vultures on a dead branch and, beneath them, the words Patience my ass! I’m going to kill something! He nodded. “That’ll get me where I need to go,” he said.
   He leaned against the bricks, fumbled in his pockets until he found the unfinished stub of cigarette he had abandoned earlier. He lit it carefully, trying not to burn his fingers or his beard. “I’ll tell you something,” he said, as if he had said nothing that day. “You’re walking on gallows ground, and there’s a rope around your neck and a raven-bird on each shoulder waiting for your eyes, and the gallows tree has deep roots, for it stretches from heaven to hell, and our world is only the branch from which the rope is swinging.” He stopped. “I’ll rest here a spell,” he said, touching down, his back resting against the black brickwork.
   “Good luck,” said Shadow.
   “Hell, I’m fucked,” said Mad Sweeney. “Whatever. Thanks.”
   Shadow walked back toward the town. It was 8:00 A.M. and Cairo was waking. He glanced back to the bridge and saw Sweeney’s pale face, striped with tears and dirt, watching him go.
   It was the last time Shadow saw Mad Sweeney alive.


* * *

   The brief winter days leading up to Christmas were like moments of light between the winter darknesses, and they fled fast in the house of the dead.
   It was the twenty-third of December, and Jacquel and Ibis’s played host to a wake for Lila Goodchild. Bustling women filled the kitchen with tubs and with saucepans, and with skillets and with Tupperware, and the deceased was laid out in her casket in the funeral home’s front room with hothouse flowers around her. There was a table on the other side of the room laden high with coleslaw and beans and cornmeal hush puppies and chicken and ribs and black-eyed peas, and by midafternoon the house was filled with people weeping and laughing and shaking hands with the minister, everything being quietly organized and overseen by the sober-suited Messrs. Jacquel and Ibis. The burial would be on the following morning.
   When the telephone in the hall rang (it was Bakelite and black and had an honest-to-goodness rotary dial on the front), Mr. Ibis answered. Then he took Shadow aside. “That was the police,” he said. “Can you make a pickup?”
   “Sure.”
   “Be discreet. Here.” He wrote down an address on a slip of paper, then passed it to Shadow, who read the address, written in perfect copperplate handwriting, and then folded it up and put it in his pocket. “There’ll be a police car,” Ibis added.
   Shadow went out back and got the hearse. Both Mr. Jacquel and Mr. Ibis had made a point, individually, of explaining that, really, the hearse should only be used for funerals, and they had a van that they used to collect bodies, but the van was being repaired, had been for three weeks now, and could he be very careful with the hearse? Shadow drove carefully down the street. The snowplows had cleaned the roads by now, but he was comfortable driving slowly. It seemed right to go slow in a hearse, although he could barely remember the last time he had seen a hearse on the streets. Death had vanished from the streets of America, thought Shadow; now it happened in hospital rooms and in ambulances. We must not startle the living, thought Shadow. Mr. Ibis had told him that they move the dead about in some hospitals on the lower level of apparently empty covered gurneys, the deceased traveling their own paths in their own covered ways.
   A dark blue police cruiser was parked on a side street, and Shadow pulled up the hearse behind it. There were two cops inside the cruiser, drinking their coffee from thermos tops. They had the engine running to keep warm. Shadow tapped on the side window.
   “Yeah?”
   “I’m from the funeral home,” said Shadow.
   “We’re waiting for the medical examiner,” said the cop. Shadow wondered if it was the same man who had spoken to him under the bridge. The cop, who was black, got out of the car, leaving his colleague in the driver’s seat, and walked Shadow back to a Dumpster. Mad Sweeney was sitting in the snow beside the Dumpster. There was an empty green bottle in his lap, a dusting of snow and ice on his face and baseball cap and shoulders. He didn’t blink.
   “Dead wino,” said the cop.
   “Looks like it,” said Shadow.
   “Don’t touch anything yet,” said the cop. “Medical examiner should be here any time now. You ask me, the guy drank himself into a stupor and froze his ass.”
   “Yes,” agreed Shadow. “That’s certainly what it looks like.”
   He squatted down and looked at the bottle in Mad Sweeney’s lap. Jameson Irish whiskey: a twenty-dollar ticket out of this place. A small green Nissan pulled up, and a harassed middle-aged man with sandy hair and a sandy mustache got out, walked over. He touched the corpse’s neck. He kicks the corpse, thought Shadow, and if it doesn’t kick him back…
   “He’s dead,” said the medical examiner. “Any ID?”
   “He’s a John Doe,” said the cop.
   The medical examiner looked at Shadow. “You working for Jacquel and Ibis?” he asked.
   “Yes,” said Shadow.
   “Tell Jacquel to get dentals and prints for ID and identity photos. We don’t need a post. He should just draw blood for toxicology. Got that? Do you want me to write it down for you?”
   “No,” said Shadow. “It’s fine. I can remember.”
   The man scowled fleetingly, then pulled a business card from his wallet, scribbled on it, and gave it to Shadow, saying, “Give this to Jacquel.” Then the medical examiner said “Merry Christmas” to everyone, and was on his way. The cops kept the empty bottle.
   Shadow signed for the John Doe and put it on the gurney. The body was pretty stiff, and Shadow couldn’t get it out of a sitting position. He fiddled with the gurney, and found out that he could prop up one end. He strapped John Doe, sitting, to the gurney and put him in the back of the hearse, facing forward. Might as well give him a good ride. He closed the rear curtains. Then he drove back to the funeral home.
   The hearse was stopped at a traffic light when Shadow heard a voice croak, “And it’s a fine wake I’ll be wanting, with the best of everything, and beautiful women shedding tears and their clothes in their distress, and brave men lamenting and telling fine tales of me in my great days.”
   “You’re dead, Mad Sweeney,” said Shadow. “You take what you’re given when you’re dead.”
   “Aye, that I shall,” sighed the dead man sitting in the back of the hearse. The junkie whine had vanished from his voice now, replaced with a resigned flatness, as if the words were being broadcast from a long, long way away, dead words being sent out on a dead frequency. The light turned green and Shadow put his foot gently down on the gas.
   “But give me a wake, nonetheless,” said Mad Sweeney. “Set me a place at table and give me a stinking drunk wake tonight. You killed me, Shadow. You owe me that much.”
   “I never killed you, Mad Sweeney,” said Shadow. It’s twenty dollars, he thought, for a ticket out of here. “It was the drink and the cold killed you, not me.”
   There was no reply, and there was silence in the car for the rest of the journey. After he parked at the back, Shadow wheeled the gurney out of the hearse and into the mortuary. He manhandled Mad Sweeney onto the embalming table as if he were hauling a side of beef.
   He covered the John Doe with a sheet and left him there, with the paperwork beside him. As he went up the back stairs he thought he heard a voice, quiet and muted, like a radio playing in a distant room, which said, “And what would drink or cold be doing killing me, a leprechaun of the blood? No, it was you losing the little golden sun killed me, Shadow, killed me dead, as sure as water’s wet and days are long and a friend will always disappoint you in the end.”
   Shadow wanted to point out to Mad Sweeney that that was a kind of bitter philosophy, but he suspected it was the being dead that made you bitter.
   He went upstairs to the main house, where a number of middle-aged women were putting Saran Wrap on casserole dishes, popping the Tupperware tops onto plastic pots of cooling fried potatoes and macaroni and cheese.

   Mr. Goodchild, the husband of the deceased, had Mr. Ibis against a wall, and was telling him how he knew none of his children would come out to pay their respects to their mother. The apple don’t fall far from the tree, he told anyone who would listen to him. The apple don’t fall far from the tree.


* * *

   That evening Shadow laid an extra place at the table. He put a glass at each place, and a bottle of Jameson Gold in the middle of the table. It was the most expensive Irish whiskey they sold at the liquor store. After they ate (a large platter of leftovers left for them by the women) Shadow poured a generous tot into each glass—his, Ibis’s, Jacque’s, and, Mad Sweeney’s.
   “So what if he’s sitting on a gurney in the cellar,” said Shadow, as he poured, “on his way to a pauper’s grave. Tonight we’ll toast him, and give him the wake he wanted.”
   Shadow raised his glass to the empty place at the table. “I only met Mad Sweeney twice, alive,” he said. “The first time I thought he was a world-class jerk with the devil in him. The second time I thought he was a major fuckup and I gave him the money to kill himself. He showed me a coin trick I don’t remember how to do, gave me some bruises, and claimed he was a leprechaun. Rest in peace, Mad Sweeney.” He sipped the whiskey, letting the smoky taste evaporate in his mouth. The other two drank, toasting the empty chair along with him.
   Mr. Ibis reached into an inside pocket and pulled out a notebook, which he flipped through until he found the appropriate page, and he read out a summarized version of Mad Sweeney’s life.
   According to Mr. Ibis, Mad Sweeney had started his life as the guardian of a sacred rock in a small Irish glade, over three thousand years ago. Mr. Ibis told them of Mad Sweeney’s love affairs, his enmities, the madness that gave him his power (“a later version of the tale is still told, although the sacred nature, and the antiquity, of much of the verse has long been forgotten”), the worship and adoration in his own land that slowly transmuted into a guarded respect and then, finally into amusement; he told them the story of the girl from Bantry who came to the New World, and who brought her belief in Mad Sweeney the leprechaun with her, for hadn’t she seen him of a night, down by the pool, and hadn’t he smiled at her and called her by her own true name? She had become a refugee, in the hold of a ship of people who had watched their potatoes turn to black sludge in the ground, who had watched friends and lovers die of hunger, who dreamed of a land of full stomachs. The girl from Bantry Bay dreamed, specifically, of a city where a girl would be able to earn enough to bring her family over to the New World. Many of the Irish coming into America thought of themselves as Catholics, even if they knew nothing of the catechism, even if all they knew of religion was the Bean Sidhe, the banshee, who came to wail at the walls of a house where death soon would be, and Saint Bride, who was once Bridget of the two sisters (each of the three was a Brigid, each was the same woman), and tales of Finn, of Ofsin, of Conan the Bald—even of the leprechauns, the little people (and was that not the biggest joke of the Irish, for the leprechauns in their day were the tallest of the mound folk)…
   All this and more Mr. Ibis told them in the kitchen that night. His shadow on the wall was stretched and birdlike, and as the whiskey flowed Shadow imagined it head of a huge waterfowl, beak long and curved, and it was somewhere in the middle of the second glass that Mad Sweeney himself began to throw both details and irrelevancies into Ibis’s narrative (“…such a girl she was, with breasts cream-colored and spackled with freckles, with the tips of them the rich reddish pink of the sunrise on a day when it’ll be bucketing down before noon but glorious again by supper…”) and then Sweeney was trying, with both hands, to explain the history of the gods in Ireland, wave after wave of them as they came in from Gaul and from Spain and from every damn place, each wave of them transforming the last gods into trolls and fairies and every damn creature until Holy Mother Church herself arrived and every god in Ireland was transformed into a fairy or a saint or a dead King without so much as a by-your-leave…
   Mr. Ibis polished his gold-rimmed spectacles and explained—enunciating even more clearly and precisely than usual, so Shadow knew he was drunk (his words, and the sweat that beaded on his forehead in that chilly house, were the only indications of this)—with forefinger wagging, that he was an artist and that his tales should not be seen as literal constructs but as imaginative re-creations, truer than the truth, and Mad Sweeney said, “I’ll show you an imaginative re-creation, my fist imaginatively re-creating your fucken face for starters,” and Mr. Jacquel bared his teeth and growled at Sweeney, the growl of a huge dog who’s not looking for a fight but can always finish one by ripping out your throat, and Sweeney took the message and sat down and poured himself another glass of whiskey.
   “Have you remembered how I do my little coin trick?” he asked Shadow with a grin.
   “I have not.”
   “If you can guess how I did it,” said Mad Sweeney, his lips purple, his blue eyes beclouded, “I’ll tell you if you get warm.”
   “It’s not a palm is it?” asked Shadow.
   “It is not.”
   “Is it a gadget of some kind? Something up your sleeve or elsewhere that shoots the coins up for you to catch?”
   “It is not that neither. More whiskey, anybody?”
   “I read in a book about a way of doing the miser’s dream with latex covering the palm of your hand, making a skin-colored pouch for the coins to hide behind.”
   “This is a sad wake for Great Sweeney who flew like a bird across all of Ireland and ate watercress in his madness: to be dead and unmourned save for a bird, a dog, and an idiot. No, it is not a pouch.”
   “Well, that’s pretty much it for ideas,” said Shadow. “I expect you just take them out of nowhere.” It was meant to be sarcasm, but then he saw the expression on Sweeney’s face. “You do,” he said. “You do take them from nowhere.”
   “Well, not exactly nowhere,” said Mad Sweeney. “But now you’re getting the idea. You take them from the hoard.”
   “The hoard,” said Shadow, starting to remember. “Yes.”
   “You just have to hold it in your mind, and it’s yours to take from. The sun’s treasure. It’s there in those moments when the world makes a rainbow. It’s there in the moment of eclipse and the moment of the storm.”
   And he showed Shadow how to do the thing.
   This time Shadow got it.


* * *

   Shadow’s head ached and pounded, and his tongue tasted and felt like flypaper. He squinted at the glare of the daylight. He had fallen asleep with his head on the kitchen table. He was fully dressed, although he had at some point taken off his black tie.
   He walked downstairs, to the mortuary, and was relieved but unsurprised to see that John Doe was still on the embalming table. Shadow pried the empty bottle of Jameson Gold from the corpse’s rigor-mortised fingers and threw it away. He could hear someone moving about in the house above.
   Mr. Wednesday was sitting at the kitchen stable when Shadow went upstairs. He was eating leftover potato salad from a Tupperware container with a plastic spoon. He wore a dark gray suit, a white shirt, and a deep gray tie: the morning sun glittered on the silver tie pin in the shape of a tree. He smiled at Shadow when he saw him.
   “Ah, Shadow m’boy, good to see you’re up. I thought you were going to sleep forever.”
   “Mad Sweeney’s dead,” said Shadow.
   “So I heard,” said Wednesday. “A great pity. Of course it will come to all of us, in the end.” He tugged on an imaginary rope, somewhere on the level of his ear, and then jerked his neck to one side, tongue protruding, eyes bulging. As quick pantomimes went, it was disturbing. And then he let go of the rope and smiled his familiar grin. “Would you like some potato salad?”
   “I would not.” Shadow darted a look around the kitchen and out into the hall. “Do you know where Ibis and Jacquel are?”
   “Indeed I do. They are burying Mrs. Lila Goodchild—something that they would probably have liked your help in doing, but I asked them not to wake you. You have a long drive ahead of you.”
   “We’re leaving?”
   “Within the hour.”
   “I should say goodbye.”
   “Goodbyes are overrated. You’ll see them again, I have no doubt, before this affair is done.”
   For the first time since that first night, Shadow observed, the small brown cat was curled up in her basket. She opened her incurious amber eyes and watched him go.
   So Shadow left the house of the dead. Ice sheathed the winter-black bushes and trees as if they’d been insulated, made into dreams. The path was slippery.
   Wednesday led the way to Shadow’s white Chevy Nova, parked out on the road. It had been recently cleaned, and the Wisconsin plates had been removed, replaced with Minnesota plates. Wednesday’s luggage was already stacked in the backseat. Wednesday unlocked the car with keys that were duplicates of the ones Shadow had in his own pocket.
   “I’ll drive,” said Wednesday. “It’ll be at least an hour before you’re good for anything.”
   They drove north, the Mississippi on their left, a wide silver stream beneath a gray sky. Shadow saw, perched on a leafless gray tree beside the road, a huge brown-and-white hawk, which stared down at them with mad eyes as they drove toward it, then took to the wing and rose in slow and powerful circles.
   Shadow realized it had only been a temporary reprieve, his time in the house of the dead; and already it was beginning to feel like something that happened to somebody else, a long time ago.

Part Two:
My Ainsel

Chapter 9

   Not to mention mythic creatures in the rubble…

Wendy Cope, “A Policeman’s Lot”


   As they drove out of Illinois late that evening, Shadow asked Wednesday his first question. He saw the WELCOME TO WISCONSIN sign, and said, “So who were the guys that grabbed me in the parking lot? Mister Wood and Mister Stone? Who were they?”
   The lights of the car illuminated the winter landscape. Wednesday had announced that they were not to take freeways because he didn’t know whose side the freeways were on, so Shadow was sticking to back roads. He didn’t mind. He wasn’t even sure that Wednesday was crazy.
   Wednesday grunted. “Just spooks. Members of the opposition. Black hats.”
   “I think,” said Shadow, “that they think they’re the white hats.”
   “Of course they do. There’s never been a true war that wasn’t fought between two sets of people who were certain they were in the right. The really dangerous people believe that they are doing whatever they are doing solely and only because it is without question the right thing to do. And that is what makes them dangerous.”
   “And you?” asked Shadow. “Why are you doing what you’re doing?”
   “Because I want to,” said Wednesday. And then he grinned. “So that’s all right.”
   Shadow said, “How did you all get away? Or did you all get away?”
   “We did,” said Wednesday. “Although it was a close thing. If they’d not stopped to grab you, they might have taken the lot of us. It convinced several of the people who had been sitting on the fence that I might not be completely crazy.”
   “So how did you get out?”
   Wednesday shook his head. “I don’t pay you to ask questions,” he said. “I’ve told you before.”
   Shadow shrugged.
   They spent the night in a Super 8 motel south of La Crosse.
   Christmas Day was spent on the road, driving north and east. The farmland became pine forest. The towns seemed to come farther and farther apart.
   They ate their Christmas lunch late in the afternoon in a hall-like family restaurant in northern central Wisconsin. Shadow picked cheerlessly at the dry turkey, jam-sweet red lumps of cranberry sauce, tough-as-wood roasted potatoes, and violently green canned peas. From the way he attacked it, and the way he smacked his lips, Wednesday seemed to be enjoying the food. As the meal progressed he became positively expansive—talking, joking, and, whenever she came close enough, flirting with the waitress, a thin blonde girl who looked scarcely old enough to have dropped out of high school.
   “Excuse me, m’dear, but might I trouble you for another cup of your delightful hot chocolate? And I trust you won’t think me too forward if I say what a mightily fetching and becoming dress that is. Festive, yet classy.”
   The waitress, who wore a bright red-and-green skirt edged with glittering silver tinsel, giggled and colored and smiled happily, and went off to get Wednesday another mug of hot chocolate.
   “Fetching,” said Wednesday, thoughtfully, watching her go. “Becoming,” he said. Shadow did not think he was talking about the dress. Wednesday shoveled the final slice of turkey into his mouth, flicked at his beard with his napkin, and pushed his plate forward. “Aaah. Good.” He looked around him, at the family restaurant. In the background a tape of Christmas songs was playing: the little drummer boy had no gifts to bring, parupapom-pom, rapappom pom, rapappom pom.
   “Some things may change,” said Wednesday, abruptly. “People, however…people stay the same. Some gifts last forever, others are swallowed soon enough by time and by the world. My favorite gift of all is no longer practical. Still, a surprising number of gifts are timeless—the Spanish Prisoner, the Pigeon Drop, the Fawney Rig (that’s the Pigeon Drop but with a gold ring instead of a wallet), the Fiddle Game…”
   “I’ve never heard of the Fiddle Game,” said Shadow. “I think I’ve heard of the others. My old cellmate said he’d actually done the Spanish Prisoner. He was a grifter.”
   “Ah,” said Wednesday, and his left eye sparkled. “The Fiddle Game was a fine and wonderful coir. In its purest form it is a two-man grift. It trades on cupidity and greed, as all great grifts do. You can always cheat an honest man, but it takes more work. So. We are in a hotel or an inn or a fine restaurant, and, dining there, we find a man—shabby, but shabby genteel, not down-at-heel but certainly down on his luck. We shall call him Abraham. And when the time comes to settle his bill—not a huge bill, you understand, fifty, seventy-five dollars—an embarrassment! Where is his wallet? Good Lord, he must have left it at a friend’s, not far away. He shall go and obtain his wallet forthwith! But here, mine host, says—Abraham, take this old fiddle of mine for security. It’s old, as you can see, but it’s how I make my living.”
   Wednesday’s smile when he saw the waitress approaching was huge and predatory. “Ah, the hot chocolate! Brought to me by my Christmas Angel! Tell me my dear, could I have some more of your delicious bread when you get a moment?”
   The waitress—what was she, Shadow wondered: sixteen, seventeen?—looked at the floor and her cheeks flushed crimson. She put down the chocolate with shaking, hands and retreated to the edge of the room, by the slowly rotating display of pies, where she stopped and stared at Wednesday. Then she slipped into the kitchen to fetch Wednesday his bread.
   “So. The violin—old, unquestionably, perhaps even a little battered—is placed away in its case, and our temporarily impecunious Abraham sets off in search of his wallet. But a well-dressed gentleman, only just done with his own dinner, has been observing this exchange, and now he approaches our host: could he, perchance, inspect the violin that honest Abraham left behind?
   “Certainly he can. Our host hands it over, and the well-dressed man—let us call him Barrington—opens his mouth wide, then remembers himself and closes it, examines the violin reverentially, like a man who has been permitted into a holy sanctum to examine the bones of a prophet. ‘Why!’ he says, ‘this is—it must be—no, it cannot be—but yes, there it is—my lord! But this is unbelievable!” and he points to the maker’s mark, on a strip of browning paper inside the violin—but still, he says, even without it he would have known it by the color of the varnish, by the scroll, by the shape.
   “Now Barrington reaches inside his pocket and produces an engraved business card, proclaiming him to be a preeminent dealer in rare and antique musical instruments. ‘So this violin is rare?’ asks mine host. ‘Indeed it is,’ says Barrington, still admiring it with awe, ‘and worth in excess of a hundred thousand dollars, unless I miss my guess. Even as a dealer in such things I would pay fifty—no, seventy-five thousand dollars, good cash money, for such an exquisite piece. I have a man on the West Coast who would buy it tomorrow, sight unseen, with one telegram, and pay whatever I asked for it.’ And then he consults his watch, and his face falls. ‘My train—’ he says. ‘I have scarcely enough time to catch my train! Good sir, when the owner of this inestimable instrument should return, please give him my card, for, alas, I must be away.’ And with that, Barrington leaves, a man who knows that time and the train wait for no man.
   “Mine host examines the violin, curiosity mingling with cupidity in his veins, and a plan begins to bubble up through his mind. But the minutes go by, and Abraham does not return. And now it is late, and through the door, shabby but proud, comes our Abraham, our fiddle player, and he holds in his hands a wallet, a wallet that has seen better days, a wallet that has never contained more than a hundred dollars on its best day, and from it he takes the money to pay for his meal or his stay, and he asks for the return of his violin.
   “Mine host puts the fiddle in its case on the counter, and Abraham takes it like a mother cradling her child. ‘Tell me,’ says the host (with the engraved card of a man who’ll pay fifty thousand dollars, good cash money, burning his inside breast pocket), ‘how much is a violin like this worth? For my niece has a yearning on her to play the fiddle, and it’s her birthday coming up in a week or so.’
   “ ‘Sell this fiddle?’ says Abraham. ‘I could never sell her. I’ve had her for twenty years, I have, fiddled in every state of the union with her. And to tell the truth, she cost me all of five hundred dollars back when I bought her.’
   “Mine host keeps the smile from his face. ‘Five hundred dollars? What if I were to offer you a thousand dollars for it, here and now?’
   “The fiddle player looks delighted, then crestfallen, and he says, ‘But lordy, I’m a fiddle player, sir, it’s all I know how to do. This fiddle knows me and she loves me, and my fingers know her so well I could play an air upon her in the dark. Where will I find another that sounds so fine? A thousand dollars is good money, but this is my livelihood. Not a thousand dollars, not for five thousand.”
   “Mine host sees his profits shrinking, but this is business, and you must spend money to make money. ‘Eight thousand dollars,’ he says. ‘It’s not worth that, but I’ve taken a fancy to it, and I do love and indulge my niece.’
   “Abraham is almost in tears at the thought of losing his beloved fiddle, but how can he say no to eight thousand dollars?—especially when mine host goes to the wall safe and removes not eight but nine thousand dollars, all neatly banded and ready to be slipped into the fiddle player’s threadbare pocket. ‘You’re a good man,’ he tells his host. ‘You’re a saint! But you must swear to take care of my girl!’ and, reluctantly, he hands over his violin.”
   “But what if mine host simply hands over Barrington’s card and tells Abraham that he’s come into some good fortune?” asked Shadow.
   “Then we’re out the cost of two dinners,” said Wednesday. He wiped the remaining gravy and leftovers from his plate with a slice of bread, which he ate with lip-smacking relish.
   “Let me see if I’ve got it straight,” said Shadow. “So Abraham leaves, nine thousand dollars the richer, and in the parking lot by the train station he and Barrington meet up. They split the money, get into Barrington’s Model A Ford, and head for the next town. I guess in the trunk of that car they must have a box filled with hundred-dollar violins.”
   “I personally made it a point of honor never to pay more than five dollars for any of them,” said Wednesday. Then he turned to the hovering waitress. “Now, my dear, regale us with your description of the sumptuous desserts available to us on this, our Lord’s natal day.” He stared at her—it was almost a leer—as if nothing that she could offer him would be as toothsome a morsel as herself. Shadow felt deeply uncomfortable: it was like watching an old wolf stalking a fawn too young to know that if it did not run, and run now, it would wind up in a distant glade with its bones picked clean by the ravens.
   The girl blushed once more and told them that dessert was apple pie а la mode—“That’s with a scoop of vanilla ice cream”—Christmas cake а la mode, or a red-and-green whipped pudding. Wednesday stared into her eyes and told her that he would try the Christmas cake а la mode. Shadow passed.
   “Now, as grifts go,” said Wednesday, “the fiddle game goes back three hundred years or more. And if you pick your chicken correctly you could still play it anywhere in America tomorrow.”
   “I thought you said that your favorite grift was no longer practical,” said Shadow.
   “I did indeed. However, that is not my favorite. No, my favorite was one they called the Bishop Game. It had everything: excitement, subterfuge, portability, surprise. Perhaps, I think from time to time, perhaps with a little modification, it might…” he thought for a moment, then shook his head. “No. Its time has passed. It is, let us say, 1920, in a city of medium to large size—Chicago, perhaps,—or New York, or Philadelphia. We are in a jeweler’s emporium. A man dressed as a clergyman—and not just any clergyman, but a bishop, in his purple—enters and picks out a necklace—a gorgeous and glorious confection of diamonds and pearls, and pays for it with a dozen of the crispest hundred-dollar bills.
   “There’s a smudge of green ink on the topmost bill and the store owner, apologetically but firmly, sends the stack of bills to the bank on the corner to be checked. Soon enough, the store clerk returns with the bills. The bank says they are none of them counterfeit. The owner apologizes again, and the bishop is most gracious, he well understands the problem, there are such lawless and ungodly types in the world today, such immorality and lewdness abroad in the world and shameless women, and now that the underworld has crawled out of the gutter and come to live on the screens of the picture palaces, what more could anyone expect? And the necklace is placed in its case, and the store owner does his best not to ponder why a bishop of the church would be purchasing a twelve-hundred-dollar diamond necklace, nor why he would be paying good cash money for it.
   “The bishop bids him a hearty farewell, and walks out on the street, only for a heavy hand to descend on his shoulder. ‘Why Soapy, yez spalpeen, up to your old tricks, are you?’ and a broad beat cop with an honest Irish face walks the bishop back into the jewelry store.
   “ ‘Beggin’ your pardon, but has this man just bought anything from you?’ asks the cop. ‘Certainly not,’ says the bishop. ‘Tell him I have not.’ ‘Indeed he has,’ says the jeweler. ‘He bought a pearl and diamond necklace from me—paid for it in cash as well.’ ‘Would you have the bills available, sir?’ asks the cop.
   “So the jeweler takes the twelve hundred-dollar bills from the cash register and hands them to the cop, who holds them up to the light and shakes his head in wonder. ‘Oh, Soapy, Soapy,’ he says, ‘these are the finest that you’ve made yet! You’re a craftsman, that you are!’
   “A self-satisfied smile spreads across the bishop’s face. ‘You can’t prove nothing,’ says the bishop. ‘And the bank said that they were on the level. It’s the real green stuff.’ ‘I’m sure they did,’ agrees the cop on the beat, ‘but I doubt that the bank had been warned that Soapy Sylvester was in town, nor of the quality of the hundred-dollar bills he’d been passing in Denver and in St. Louis.’ And with that he reaches into the bishop’s pocket and pulls out the necklace. “Twelve hundred dollars’ worth of diamonds and pearls in exchange for fifty cents’ worth of paper and ink,’ says the policeman, who is obviously a philosopher at heart. ‘And passing yourself off as a man of the church. You should be ashamed,’ he says, as he claps the handcuffs on the bishop, who is obviously no bishop, and he marches him away, but not before he gives the jeweler a receipt for both the necklace and the twelve hundred counterfeit dollars. It’s evidence, after all.”
   “Was it really counterfeit?” asked Shadow.

   “Of course not! Fresh banknotes, straight from the bank, only with a thumbprint and a smudge of green ink on a couple of them to make them a little more interesting.”
   Shadow sipped his coffee. It was worse than prison coffee. “So the cop was obviously no cop. And the necklace?”
   “Evidence,” said Wednesday. He unscrewed the top from the salt shaker, poured a little heap of salt on the table. “But the jeweler gets a receipt, and assurance that he’ll get the necklace straight back as soon as Soapy comes to trial. He is congratulated on being a good citizen, and he watches proudly, already thinking of the tale he’ll have to tell at the next meeting of the Oddfellows tomorrow night, as the policeman marches the man pretending to be a bishop out of the store, twelve-hundred-dollars in one pocket, a twelve hundred dollar diamond necklace in the other, on their way to a police station that’ll never see hide nor hair of either of them.”
   The waitress had returned to clear the table. “Tell me my dear,” said Wednesday. “Are you married?”
   She shook her head.
   “Astonishing that a young lady of such loveliness has not yet been snapped up.” He was doodling with his fingernail in the spilled salt, making squat, blocky, runelike shapes. The waitress stood passively beside him, reminding Shadow less of a fawn and more of a young rabbit caught in an eighteen-wheeler’s headlights, frozen in fear and indecision.
   Wednesday lowered his voice, so much so that Shadow, only across the table, could barely hear him. “What time do you get off work?”
   “Nine,” she said, and swallowed. “Nine-thirty latest.”
   “And what is the finest motel in this area?”
   “There’s a Motel 6,” she said. “It’s not much.”
   Wednesday touched the back of her hand, fleetingly, with the tips of his fingers, leaving crumbs of salt on her skin. She made no attempt to wipe them off. “To us,” he said, his voice an almost inaudible rumble, “it shall be a pleasure palace.”
   The waitress looked at him. She bit her thin lips, hesitated, then nodded and fled for the kitchen.
   “C’mon,” said Shadow. “She looks barely legal.”
   “I’ve never been overly concerned about legality,” Wednesday told him. “And I need her, not as an end in herself, but to wake me up a little. Even King David knew that there is one easy prescription to get warm blood flowing through an old frame: take one virgin, call me in the morning.”
   Shadow caught himself wondering if the girl on night duty in the hotel back in Eagle Point had been a virgin. “Don’t you ever worry about disease?” he asked. “What if you knock her up? What if she’s got a brother?”
   “No,” said Wednesday. “I don’t worry about diseases. I don’t catch them. Unfortunately—for the most part—people like me fire blanks, so there’s not a great deal of interbreeding. It used to happen in the old days. Nowadays, it’s possible, but so unlikely as to be almost unimaginable. So no worries there. And many girls have brothers, and fathers. It’s not my problem. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, I’ve left town already.”
   “So we’re staying here for the night?”
   Wednesday rubbed his chin. “I shall stay in the Motel 6,” he said. Then he put his hand into his coat pocket. He pulled out a front door key, bronze-colored, with a card tag attached on which was typed an address: 502 Northridge Rd, Apt #3. “You, on the other hand, have an apartment waiting for you, in a city far from here.” Wednesday closed his eyes for a moment. Then he opened them, gray and gleaming and fractionally mismatched, and he said, “The Greyhound bus will be coming through town in twenty minutes. It stops at the gas station. Here’s your ticket.” He pulled out a folded bus ticket, passed it across the table. Shadow picked it up and looked at it.
   “Who’s Mike Ainsel?” he asked. That was the name on the ticket.
   “You are. Merry Christmas.”
   “And where’s Lakeside?”
   “Your happy home in the months to come. And now, because good things come in threes…” He took a small, gift-wrapped package from his pocket, pushed it across the table. It sat beside the ketchup bottle with the black smears of dried ketchup on the top. Shadow made no move to take it.
   “Well?”
   Reluctantly, Shadow tore open the red wrapping paper to reveal a fawn-colored calfskin wallet, shiny from use. It was obviously somebody’s wallet. Inside the wallet was a driver’s license with Shadow’s photograph on it, in the name of Michael Ainsel, with a Milwaukee address, a MasterCard for M. Ainsel, and twenty crisp fifty-dollar bills. Shadow closed the wallet, put it into an inside pocket.
   “Thanks,” he said.
   “Think of it as a Christmas bonus. Now, let me walk you down to the Greyhound. I shall wave to you as you ride the gray dog north.”
   They walked outside the restaurant. Shadow found it hard to believe how much colder it had gotten in the last few hours. It felt too cold to snow, now. Aggressively cold. This was a bad winter.
   “Hey. Wednesday. Both of the scams you were telling me about—the violin scam and the bishop one, the bishop and the cop—” He hesitated, trying to form his thought, to bring it into focus.
   “What of them?”
   Then he had it. “They’re both two—man scams. One guy on each side. Did you used to have a partner?” Shadow’s breath came in clouds. He promised himself that when he got to Lakeside he would spend some of his Christmas bonus on the warmest, thickest winter coat that money could buy.
   “Yes,” said Wednesday. “Yes. I had a partner. A junior partner. But, alas, those days are gone. There’s the gas station, and there, unless my eye deceives me, is the bus.” It was already signaling its turn into the parking lot. “Your address is on the key,” said Wednesday. “If anyone asks, I am your uncle, and I shall be rejoicing in the unlikely name of Emerson Borson. Settle in, in Lakeside, nephew Ainsel. I’ll come for you within the week. We shall be traveling together. Visiting the people I have to visit. In the meantime, keep your head down and stay out of trouble.”
   “My car…?” said Shadow.
   “I’ll take good care of it. Have a good time in Lakeside,” said Wednesday. He thrust out his hand, and Shadow shook it. Wednesday’s hand was colder than a corpse’s.
   “Jesus,” said Shadow. “You’re cold.”
   “Then the sooner I am making the two-backed beast with the little hotsy-totsy lass from the restaurant in a back room of the Motel 6, the better.” And he reached out his other hand and squeezed Shadow’s shoulder.
   Shadow experienced a dizzying moment of double vision: he saw the grizzled man facing him, squeezing his shoulder, but he saw something else: so many winters, hundreds and hundreds of winters, and a gray man in a broad-brimmed hat walking from settlement to settlement, leaning on his staff, staring in through windows at the firelight and a joy and a burning life he would never be able to touch, never even be able to feel…
   “Go,” said Wednesday, his voice a reassuring growl. “All is well, and all is well, and all shall be well.”
   Shadow showed his ticket to the driver. “Hell of a day to be traveling,” she said. And then she added, with a certain grim satisfaction, “Merry Christmas.”
   The bus was almost empty. “When will we get into Lakeside?” asked Shadow.
   “Two hours. Maybe a bit more,” said the driver. “They say there’s a cold snap coming.” She thumbed a switch and the doors closed with a hiss and a thump.
   Shadow walked halfway down the bus, put the seat back as far as it would go, and he started to think. The motion of the bus and the warmth combined to lull him, and before he was aware that he was becoming sleepy, he was asleep.


* * *

   In the earth, and under the earth. The marks on the wall were the red of wet clay: handprints, fingermarks, and, here and there, crude representations of animals and people and birds.
   The fire still burned and the buffalo man still sat on the other side of the fire, staring at Shadow with huge eyes, eyes like pools of dark mud. The buffalo lips, fringed with matted brown hair, did not move as the buffalo voice said, “Well, Shadow? Do you believe yet?”
   “I don’t know,” said Shadow. His mouth had not moved either, he observed. Whatever words were passing between the two of them were not being spoken, not in any way that Shadow understood speech. “Are you real?”
   “Believe,” said the buffalo man.
   “Are you…” Shadow hesitated, and then he asked, “Are you a god too?”
   The buffalo man reached one hand into the flames of the fire and he pulled out a burning brand. He held the brand in the middle. Blue and yellow flames licked his red hand, but they did not burn.

   “This is not a land for gods,” said the buffalo man. But it was not the buffalo man talking anymore, Shadow knew, in his dream: it was the fire speaking, the crackling and the burning of the flame itself that spoke to Shadow in the dark place under the earth.
   “This land was brought up from the depths of the ocean by a diver,” said the fire. “It was spun from its own substance by a spider. It was shat by a raven. It is the body of a fallen father, whose bones are mountains, whose eyes are lakes.
   “This is a land of dreams and fire,” said the flame.
   The buffalo man put the brand back on the fire.
   “Why are you telling me this stuff?” said Shadow. “I’m not important. I’m not anything. I was an okay physical trainer, a really lousy small-time crook, and maybe not so good a husband as I thought I was…” He trailed off.
   “How do I help Laura?” Shadow asked the buffalo man. “She wants to be alive again. I said I’d help her. I owe her that.”
   The buffalo man said nothing. He pointed up toward the roof of the cave. Shadow’s eyes followed. There was a thin, wintery light coming from a tiny opening far above.
   “Up there?” asked Shadow, wishing that one of his questions would be answered. “I’m supposed to go up there?”
   The dream took him then, the idea becoming the thing itself, and Shadow was crushed into the rock and earth. He was like a mole, trying to push through the earth, like a badger, climbing through the earth, like a groundhog, pushing the earth out of his way, like a bear, but the earth was too hard, too dense, and his breath was coming in gasps, and soon he could go no farther, dig and climb no more, and he knew then that he would die somewhere in the deep place beneath the world.
   His own strength was not enough. His efforts became weaker. He knew that though his body was riding in a hot bus through cold woods if he stopped breathing here, beneath the world, he would stop breathing there as well, that even now his breath was coming in shallow panting gasps.
   He struggled and he pushed, ever more weakly, each movement using precious air. He was trapped: could go no farther, and could not return the way that he had come.
   “Now bargain,” said a voice in his mind.
   “What do I have to bargain with?” Shadow asked. “I have nothing.” He could taste the clay now, thick and mud-gritty in his mouth.
   And then Shadow said, “Except myself. I have myself, don’t I?”
   It seemed as if everything was holding its breath.
   “I offer myself,” he said.
   The response was immediate. The rocks and the earth that had surrounded him began to push down on Shadow, squeezed him so hard that the last ounce of air in his lungs was crushed out of him. The pressure became pain, pushing him on every side. He reached the zenith of pain and hung there, cresting, knowing that he could take no more, at that moment the spasm eased and Shadow could breathe again. The light above him had grown larger.
   He was being pushed toward the surface.
   As the next earth-spasm hit, Shadow tried to ride with it. This time he felt himself being pushed upward.
   The pain, on that last awful contraction, was impossible to believe, as he felt himself being squeezed, crushed, and pushed through an unyielding rock gap, his bones shattering, his flesh becoming something shapeless. As his mouth and ruined head cleared the hole he began to scream, in fear and pain.
   He wondered, as he screamed, whether, back in the waking world, he was also screaming—if he was screaming in his sleep back on the darkened bus.
   And as that final spasm ended Shadow was on the ground, his fingers clutching the red earth.
   He pulled himself into a sitting position, wiped the earth from his face with his hand and looked up at the sky. It was twilight, a long, purple twilight, and the stars were coming out, one by one, stars so much brighter and more vivid than any stars he had ever seen or imagined.
   “Soon,” said the crackling voice of the flame, coming from behind him, “they will fall. Soon they will fall and the star people will meet the earth people. There will be heroes among them, and men who will slay monsters and bring knowledge, but none of them will be gods. This is a poor place for gods.”
   A blast of air, shocking in its coldness, touched his face. It was like being doused in ice water. He could hear the driver’s voice saying that they were in Pinewood, “anyone who needs a cigarette or wants to stretch their legs, we’ll be stopping here for ten minutes, then we’ll be back on the road.”
   Shadow stumbled off the bus. They were parked outside another rural gas station, almost identical to the one they had left. The driver was helping a couple of teenage girls onto the bus, putting their suitcases away in the luggage compartment.
   “Hey,” the driver said, when she saw Shadow. “You’re getting off at Lakeside, right?”
   Shadow agreed, sleepily, that he was.
   “Heck, that’s a good town,” said the bus driver. “I think sometimes that if I were just going to pack it all in, I’d move to Lakeside. Prettiest town I’ve ever seen. You’ve lived there long?”
   “My first visit.”
   “You have a pasty at Mabel’s for me, you hear?”
   Shadow decided not to ask for clarification. “Tell me,” said Shadow, “was I talking in my sleep?”
   “If you were, I didn’t hear you.” She looked at her watch. “Back on the bus. I’ll call you when we get to Lakeside.”
   The two girls—he doubted that either of them was much more than fourteen years old—who had got on in Pinewood were now in the seat in front of him. They were friends, Shadow decided, eavesdropping without meaning to, not sisters. One of them knew almost nothing about sex, but knew a lot about animals, helped out or spent a lot of time at some kind of animal shelter, while the other was not interested in animals, but, armed with a hundred tidbits gleaned from the Internet and from daytime television, thought she knew a great deal about human sexuality. Shadow listened with a horrified and amused fascination to the one who thought she was wise in the ways of the world detail the precise mechanics of using Alka-Seltzer tablets to enhance oral sex.
   Shadow started to tune them out, blanked everything except the noise of the road, and now only fragments of conversation would come back every now and again.


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

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

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

   I miss Sandy.

   Yeah, I miss Sandy too.

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


   And then the brakes of the bus were hissing and the driver was shouting “Lakeside!” and the doors clunked open. Shadow followed the girls out into the floodlit parking lot of a video store and tanning salon that functioned, Shadow guessed, as Lakeside’s Greyhound station. The air was dreadfully cold, but it was a fresh cold. It woke him up. He stared at the lights of the town to the south and the west, and pale expanse of a frozen lake to the east.
   The girls were standing in the lot, stamping and blowing on their hands dramatically. One of them, the younger one, snuck a look at Shadow, smiled awkwardly when she realized that he had seen her do so.
   “Merry Christmas,” said Shadow.
   “Yeah,” said the other girl, perhaps a year or so older than the first, “Merry Christmas to you too.” She had carroty red hair and a snub nose covered with a hundred thousand freckles.
   “Nice town you got here,” said Shadow.
   “We like it,” said the younger one. She was the one who liked animals. She gave Shadow a shy grin, revealing blue rubber-band braces stretching across her front teeth. “You look like somebody,” she told him, gravely. “Are you somebody’s brother or somebody’s son or something?”
   “You are such a spaz, Alison,” said her friend. “Everybody’s somebody’s son or brother or something.”
   “That wasn’t what I meant,” said Alison. Headlights framed them all for one brilliant white moment. Behind the headlights was a station wagon with a mother in it, and in moments it took the girls and their bags away, leaving Shadow standing alone in the parking lot.
   “Young man? Anything I can do for you?” The old man was locking up the video store. He pocketed his keys. “Store ain’t open Christmas,” he told Shadow cheerfully. “But I come down to meet the bus. Make sure everything was okay. Couldn’t live with myself if some poor soul’d found ‘emselves stranded on Christmas Day.” He was close enough that Shadow could see his face: old but contented, the face of a man who had sipped life’s vinegar and found it, by and large, to be mostly whiskey, and good whiskey at that.
   “Well, you could give me the number of the local taxi company,” said Shadow.
   “I could,” said the old man, doubtfully, “but Tom’ll be in his bed this time of night, and even if you could rouse him you’ll get no satisfaction—I saw him down at the Buck Stops Here earlier this evening, and he was very merry. Very merry indeed. Where is it you’re aiming to go?”
   Shadow showed him the address tag on the door key.
   “Well,” he said, “that’s a ten—, mebbe a twenty-minute walk over the bridge and around. But it’s no fun when it’s this cold, and when you don’t know where you’re going it always seems longer—you ever notice that? First time takes forever, and then ever after it’s over in a flash?”
   “Yes,” said Shadow. “I’ve never thought of it like that. But I guess it’s true.”
   The old man nodded. His face cracked into a grin. “What the heck, it’s Christmas. I’ll run you over there in Tessie.”
   Shadow followed the old man to the road, where a huge old roadster was parked. It looked like something that gangsters might have been proud to drive in the Roaring Twenties, running boards and all. It was a deep dark color under the sodium lights that might have been red and might have been green. “This is Tessie,” the old man said. “Ain’t she a beaut?” He patted her proprietorially, where the hood curved up and arched over the front nearside wheel.
   “What make is she?” asked Shadow.
   “She’s a Wendt Phoenix. Wendt went under in ‘31, name was bought by Chrysler, but they never made any more Wendts. Harvey Wendt, who founded the company, was a local boy. Went out to California, killed himself in, oh, 1941, ‘42. Great tragedy.”
   The car smelled of leather and old cigarette smoke—not a fresh smell, but as if enough people had smoked enough cigarettes and cigars in the car over the years that the smell of burning tobacco had become part of the fabric of the car. The old man turned the key in the ignition and Tessie started first time.
   “Tomorrow,” he told Shadow, “she goes into the garage. I’ll cover her with a dust sheet, and that’s where she’ll stay until spring. Truth of the matter is I shouldn’t be driving her right now, with the snow on the ground.”
   “Doesn’t she ride well in snow?”
   “Rides just fine. It’s the salt they put on the roads. Rusts these old beauties faster than you could believe. You want to go door to door, or would you like the moonlight grand tour of the town?”
   “I don’t want to trouble you—”
   “It’s no trouble. You get to be my age, you’re grateful for the least wink of sleep. I’m lucky if I get five hours a night nowadays—wake up and my mind is just turning and turning. Where are my manners? My name’s Hinzelmann. I’d say, call me Richie, but around here folks who know me just call me plain Hinzelmann. I’d shake your hand, but I need two hands to drive Tessie. She knows when I’m not paying attention.”
   “Mike Ainsel,” said Shadow. “Pleased to meet you, Hinzelmann.”
   “So we’ll go around the lake. Grand tour,” said Hinzelmann.
   Main Street, which they were on, was a pretty street, even at night, and it looked old-fashioned in the best sense of the word—as if, for a hundred years, people had been caring for that street and they had not been in a hurry to lose anything they liked.
   Hinzelmann pointed out the town’s two restaurants as they passed them (a German restaurant and what he described as “part Greek, part Norwegian, and a popover at every plate”); he pointed out the bakery and the bookstore (“What I say is, a town isn’t a town without a bookstore. It may call itself a town, but unless it’s got a bookstore, it knows it’s not fooling a soul”). He slowed Tessie as they passed the library so Shadow could get a good look at it. Antique gaslights flickered over the doorway—Hinzelmann proudly called Shadow’s attention to them. “Built in the 1870s by John Henning, local lumber baron. He wanted it called the Henning Memorial Library, but when he died they started calling it the Lakeside Library, and I guess it’ll be the Lakeside Library now until the end of time. Isn’t it a dream?” He couldn’t have been prouder of it if he had built it himself. The building reminded Shadow of a castle, and he said so. “That’s right,” agreed Hinzelmann. “Turrets and all. Henning wanted it to look like that on the outside. Inside they still have all the original pine shelving. Miriam Shultz wants to tear the insides out and modernize, but it’s on some register of historic places, and there’s not a damn thing she can do.”
   They drove around the south side of the lake. The town circled the lake, which was a thirty-foot drop below the level of the road. Shadow could see the patches of white ice dulling the surface of the lake with, here and there, a shiny patch of water reflecting the lights of the town.
   “Looks like it’s freezing over,” he said.
   “It’s been frozen over for a month now,” said Hinzelmann. “The dull spots are snowdrifts and the shiny spots are ice. It froze just after Thanksgiving in one cold night, froze smooth as glass. You do much ice-fishing, Mr. Ainsel?”
   “Never.”
   “Best thing a man can do. It’s not the fish you catch, it’s the peace of mind that you take home at the end of the day.”
   “I’ll remember that.” Shadow peered down at the lake through Tessie’s window. “Can you actually walk on it already?”
   “You can walk on it. Drive on it too, but I wouldn’t want to risk it yet. It’s been cold up here for six weeks,” said Hinzelmann. “But you also got to allow that things freeze harder and faster up here in northern Wisconsin than they do most anyplace else there is. I was out hunting once-hunting for deer, and this was oh, thirty, forty years back, and I shot at a buck, missed him, and sent him running off through the woods—this was over acrost the north end of the lake, up near where you’ll be living, Mike. Now he was the finest buck I ever did see, twenty point, big as a small horse, no lie. Now, I’m younger and feistier back then than I am now, and though it had started snowing before Halloween that year, now it was Thanksgiving and there was clean snow on the ground, fresh as anything, and I could see the buck’s footprints. It looked to me like the big fellow was heading for the lake in a panic