Shadow drove the long way home, eating one-handed, the steaming pasty’s pastry-crumbs tumbling onto his jeans and onto the floor of the 4Runner. He passed the library on the south shore of the lake. It was a black and white town in the ice and the snow. Spring seemed unimaginably far away: the klunker would always sit on the ice, with the ice-fishing shelters and the pickup trucks and the snowmobile tracks.
He reached his apartment, parked, walked up the drive, up the wooden steps to his apartment. The goldfinches and nuthatches on the bird feeder hardly gave him a glance. He went inside. He watered the plant, wondered whether or not to put the wine into the refrigerator.
There was a lot of time to kill until six.
Shadow wished he could comfortably watch television once more. He wanted to be entertained, not to have to think, just to sit and let the sounds and the light wash over him. Do you want to see Lucy’s tits? something with a Lucy voice whispered in his memory, and he shook his head, although there was no one there to see him.
He was nervous, he realized. This would be his first real social interaction with other people—normal people, not people in jail, not gods or culture heroes or dreams—since he was first arrested, over three years ago. He would have to make conversation, as Mike Ainsel.
He checked his watch. It was two thirty. Marguerite Olsen had told him to be there at six. Did she mean six exactly? Should he be there a little early? A little late? He decided, eventually, to walk next door at five past six.
Shadow’s telephone rang.
“Yeah?” he said.
“That’s no way to answer the phone,” growled Wednesday.
“When I get my telephone connected I’ll answer it politely,” said Shadow. “Can I help you?”
“I don’t know,” said Wednesday. There was a pause. Then he said, “Organizing gods is like herding cats into straight lines. They don’t take naturally to it.” There was a deadness, and an exhaustion, in Wednesday’s voice that Shadow had never heard before.
“What’s wrong?”
“It’s hard. It’s too fucking hard. I don’t know if this is going to work. We might as well cut our throats. Just cut our own throats.”
“You mustn’t talk like that.”
“Yeah. Right.”
“Well, if you do cut your throat,” said Shadow, trying to jolly Wednesday out of his darkness, “maybe it wouldn’t even hurt.”
“It would hurt. Even for my kind, pain still hurts. If you move and act in the material world, then the material world acts on you. Pain hurts, just as greed intoxicates and lust burns. We may not die easy and we sure as hell don’t die well, but we can die. If we’re still loved and remembered, something else a whole lot like us comes along and takes our place and the whole damn thing starts all over again. And if we’re forgotten, we’re done.”
Shadow did not know what to say. He said, “So where are you calling from?”
“None of your goddamn business.”
“Are you drunk?”
“Not yet. I just keep thinking about Thor. You never knew him. Big guy, like you. Good hearted. Not bright, but he’d give you the goddamned shirt off his back if you asked him. And he killed himself. He put a gun in his mouth and blew his head off in Philadelphia in 1932. What kind of a way is that for a god to die?”
“I’m sorry.”
“You don’t give two fucking cents, son. He was a whole lot like you. Big and dumb.” Wednesday stopped talking. He coughed.
“What’s wrong?” said Shadow, for the second time.
“They got in touch.”
“Who did?”
“The opposition.”
“And?”
“They want to discuss a truce. Peace talks. Live and let fucking live.”
“So what happens now?”
“Now I go and drink bad coffee with the modern assholes in a Kansas City Masonic hall.”
“Okay. You going to pick me up, or shall I meet you somewhere?”
“You stay there and you keep your head down. Don’t get into any trouble. You hear me?”
“But—”
There was a click, and the line went dead and stayed dead. There was no dial tone, but then, there never was.
Nothing but time to kill. The conversation with Wednesday had left Shadow with a sense of disquiet. He got up, intending to go for a walk, but already the light was fading, and he sat back down again.
Shadow picked up the Minutes of the Lakeside City Council 1872–1884 and turned the pages, his eyes scanning the tiny print, not actually reading it, occasionally scanning something that caught his eye.
In July of 1874, Shadow learned, the city council was concerned about the number of itinerant foreign loggers arriving in the town. An opera house was to be built on the corner of Third Street and Broadway. It was to be expected that the nuisances attendant to the damming of Mill Creek would abate once the millpond had become a lake. The council authorized the payment of seventy dollars to Mr. Samuel Samuels, and of eighty-five dollars to Mr. Heikki Salminen, in compensation for their land and for the expenses incurred in moving their domiciles out of the area to be flooded.
It had never occurred to Shadow before that the lake was man-made. Why call a town Lakeside, when the lake had begun as a dammed millpond? He read on, to discover that a Mr. Hinzelmann, originally of Hüdemuhlen in Brunswick, was in charge of the lake-building project, and that the city council had granted him the sum of $370 toward the project, any shortfall to be made up by public subscription. Shadow tore off a strip of a paper towel and placed it into the book as a bookmark. He could imagine Hinzelmann’s pleasure in seeing the reference to his grandfather. He wondered if the old man knew that his family had been instrumental in building the lake. Shadow flipped forward through the book, scanning for more references to the lake-building project.
They had dedicated the lake in a ceremony in the spring of
