American Gods: Chapters 5–8

Like so many of the gods that Americans hold dear, a foreigner. In this case, a Frenchwoman, although, in deference to American sensibilities, the French covered up her magnificent bosom on that statue they presented to New York.

“I thought we had agreed that I wouldn’t be doing anything illegal.”
“You aren’t. Possibly aiding and abetting, a little conspiracy to commit, followed of course by receiving stolen money, but trust me, you’ll come out of this smelling like a rose.”

“But the ambience is unmissable.”
The ambience that Wednesday loved, it turned out, once lunch had been eaten—Shadow had the fried chicken, and enjoyed it—was the business that took up the rear of the shed: it was, the hanging flag across the center of the room announced, a Bankrupt and Liquidated Stock Clearance Depot.

“What can I possibly say to that, young man,” said Wednesday, picking up a box of floating plastic aquarium fish (“They'll never fade—and you'll never have to feed them!!"), “other than to congratulate you on your perspicacity...”

"...How about Arthur Haddock? Arthur’s a good name.”
“Too mundane.”

“Afternoon, young man,” he said, with an avuncular chuckle, as he passed Shadow.

The signs for the House on the Rock were all around that part of the world: oblique, ambiguous signs all across Illinois and Minnesota and Wisconsin, probably as far away as Iowa, Shadow suspected, signs alerting you to the existence of the House on the Rock.

The small boy ran over to his mother, who was inspecting one of the ubiquitous Santa Clauses—OVER 6000 ON DISPLAY! the signs said—and he tugged urgently at the hem of her coat.

Prim-lipped Victorian china dolls stared in profusion through dusty store windows, like so many props from respectable horror films.

“Now,” boomed Wednesday, over the mechanical music, “at the start of any quest or enterprise it behooves us to consult the Norns. So let us designate this Sybil our Urd, eh?”

Shadow observed, with a wry amusement, that the bows of the stringed instruments, played by mechanical arms, never actually touched the strings, which were often loose or missing.

The priest looked down at the drunk disdainfully, and backed through the open door, which closed behind him, leaving the drunk on his own.

Shadow bought the coffees and took them over to Czernobog, who was sitting with the old black man, and was smoking a cigarette surreptitiously, as if he were scared of being caught.

There was a faint twang in his voice, a hint of a patois that might have been West Indian.

Real creatures, imaginary creatures, and transformations of the two: each creature was different—he saw mermaid and merman, centaur and unicorn, elephants (one huge, one tiny), bulldog, frog and phoenix, zebra, tiger, manticore and basilisk, swans pulling a carriage, a white ox, a fox, twin walruses, even a sea serpent, all of them brightly colored and more than real: each rode the platform as the waltz came to an end and a new waltz began.

Wednesday was smiling, and Nancy was laughing delightedly, an old man’s cackle, and even the dour Czernobog seemed to be enjoying himself.

He wore a cloak, with a deep, monk-like cowl, and his face stared out at them from the shadows.

He moved among them like a politician, cajoling, encouraging, smiling, gently disagreeing, pacifying.

This time there were words interspersed in the humming.

Yet they are regarded by the Hindus as a class of beings by definition totally different from any other; they are symbols in a way that no human being, however “archetypal'’ his life story, can ever be.

He was deeply grateful for the chemical hand- and feetwarmers, which kept his extremities from freezing.

He had the feeling that the ones that had passed overhead had been cleaning up the mess at the freight train siding, not hunting for him, otherwise they would have returned; there would have been tracker dogs and sirens and the whole paraphernalia of pursuit.

The last of the gloaming had become night.

So, on land, they draw lots to figure out who gets sacrificed—and it’s the king himself. Well, he’s not happy about this, but they figure out that they can hang him in effigy and not hurt him.

Then, when Rob’s wife went to remonstrate with him, he hit her, hard, in the face.

Morning found Shadow back on the road, driving through a gently undulating brown landscape of winter grass and leafless trees.

In the late afternoon the sun began to lower, gilding the world in elf-light, a thick warm custardy light that made the world feel unearthly and more than real, and it was in this light that Shadow passed the sign telling him he was Now Entering Historical Cairo.

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 that of Salim himself, and that he would bring grief to no one but his beloved sister...

Worthless gewgaws and baubles and tourist trinkets.

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.

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.

There are three knife wounds in the left anterior chest wall.

“So you want to stay here with us for a spell?” said Jacquel, masticating the slice of the girl’s heart.

He adjusted the tie in the mirror and now it seemed to him that his reflection was smiling at him, sardonically.

Ibis opened the hearse, and the mortuary doors, and Shadow unbuckled the gurney and pulled it out.

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.

There was an idea that hovered at the edge of his perception. Something about transience. It flickered and was gone.

She told me that I would be undone and abandoned west of the sunrise, and that a dead woman’s bauble would seal my fate.

“You shouldn’t trust him,” he said, reproachfully.

Many of the Irish coming in to 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...