American Gods: Chapters 1–4

In the food hall Sam Fetisher sidled over to Shadow and smiled, showing his old teeth.

"...We’d drop you in the hole and forget you.”
Oubliettes, thought Shadow, and he said nothing.

It was a survival thing: he didn’t answer back, didn’t say anything about job security for prison guards, debate the nature of repentance, rehabilitation, or rates of recidivism.

He had been imprisoned in a lightless garret room for far too long: his beard was wild and his hair was a tangle.

The upshot of it all was that Johnnie Larch never actually made it to Seattle, and he spent the next couple of days in town in bars, and when his $100 was gone he held up a gas station with a toy gun for money to keep drinking...

Wednesday grinned. His smiles were strange things, Shadow decided. They contained no shred of humor, no happiness, no mirth. Wednesday looked like he had learned to smile from a manual.

“I did it,” said Sweeney, with the air of one confiding a huge secret, “with panache and style. That’s how I did it.”

Wednesday put out his hands, palms up, pacific.

Wednesday was obviously on the verge of tears, an old man made helpless by the implacable plastic march of the modern world.

“Then after lunch they will take her from there to the graveyard for the interment.”

At the end of the room was a small dais, and, on it, a cream-colored casket with several displays of flowers arranged about it: scarlets and yellows and whites and deep, bloody purples.

It was his Laura and it was not: her repose, he realized, was what was unnatural.

Those who came over and talked to him did so as little as they could, mumbled awkward commiserations and fled.

It continued to snow, erratically, in ghost-like tumbling flakes.

He threw the gold coin into the grave with Laura, then he pushed more earth into the hole, to hide the coin from acquisitive gravediggers.

The lights inside the limo transmuted from orange, to red, and back to purple.

He has been consigned to the Dumpster of history while people like me ride our limos down the superhighway of tomorrow.

...there was a flightless bird which Shadow did not recognize, twice his height, with a beak made for rending, like a vulture’s, but with human arms: and on, and on.

“You could have. You big galoot.”

We got maudlin. It was sweet.

“Tell me about it. I knocked the gearshift with my shoulder, and then Robbie was trying to push me out of the way to put the car back in gear, and we were swerving, and there was a loud crunch and I remember the world started to roll and to spin, and I thought, I’m going to die. It was very dispassionate. I remember that. I wasn’t scared. And then I don’t remember anything more.”

His heart was pounding arrhythmically in his chest.

As he knocked he got the weirdest notion: that he was being buffeted by black wings, as if an enormous crow was flying through him, out into the hall and the world beyond.

They set to, with a will, to build a hall out of split trees and mud, inside a small stockade of sharpened logs, although as far as they knew they were the only men in the new land.

They laughed riotously at the man as he stumbled and sang, at the way his head rolled and lolled, and this on less than a drinking-horn of mead.

They laughed riotously at the man as he stumbled and sang, at the way his head rolled and lolled, and this on less than a drinking-horn of mead.

The longboat, upside-down and pulled high on the shingle, they also burned, hoping that the pale strangers had but one boat, and that by burning it they were ensuring that no other Northmen would come to their shores.

His flat, round pieces were the color of old, dirty wood, nominally white.

Zorya Vechernyaya took five wooden bowls and placed an unpeeled boiled potato in each, then ladled in a healthy serving of a ferociously crimson borscht.

The boiled potato was mealy.

“I thank you, ladies. And now, I am afraid that it is incumbent upon us to ask you to recommend to us a fine hotel in the neighborhood.”

A narrow shaft of sunlight streamed in through the window, making the dust motes dance.

In the days where you could be hanged in London from Tyburn’s triple-crowned tree for the theft of twelve pennies, the Americas became a symbol of clemency, of a second chance.

You were sold to a captain, and would ride in his ship, crowded tight as a slaver’s, to the colonies or to the West Indies; off the boat the captain would sell you on as an indentured servant to one who would take the cost of your skin out in your labor until the years of your indenture were done.

Essie’s mother was in service as a cook at the squire’s house, and, at the age of twelve, Essie began to work there, in the scullery.

Essie gave thanks for her escapes from her vicissitudes to all the creatures that she had been told of as a child, to the piskies (whose influence, she was certain, extended as far as London), and she would put a wooden bowl of milk on a window-ledge each night, although her friends laughed at her...

Found guilty, Essie shocked no one by pleading her belly, although the town matrons, who assessed such claims (which were usually spurious), were surprised when they were forced to agree that Essie was indeed with child; although who the father was, Essie declined to say.

Fluxes and fevers ran rampant; there was scarcely room to sit, let alone to lie down; a woman died in childbirth in the back of the hold, and, the people being pushed in too tightly to pass her body forward, she and the infant were forced out of a small porthole in the back, directly into the choppy gray sea.

She told them, in her mellifluous Cornish drawl, which trees they should be wary of, in the old rhyme:
Elm, he do brood
And Oak, he do hate,
But the willow-man goes walking,
If you stays out late.

Phyllida’s children would come to Essie for tales, and she would tell them of the Black Dog of the Moors, and of Raw-Head and Bloody-Bones, or the Apple Tree Man, but they were not interested; they only wanted tales of Jack—Jack up the Beanstalk, or Jack Giant-killer, or Jack and his Cat and the King.