American Gods: Chapters 14–18

“Which is why,” concluded Mr. Nancy, as they drove into Humansville, Missouri (pop. 1,084), “the exact center of America is a tiny run-down park, an empty church, a pile of stones, and a derelict motel.”

Shadow had become adept at hunting for radio stations, negotiating between Mr. Nancy, who liked talk radio and dance music, and Czernobog, who favored classical music, the gloomier the better, leavened with the more extreme evangelical religious stations.

First every year, then, later, when the rot set in, and they became lax, every nine years, they would sacrifice here. A sacrifice of nines.

The dog was still alive: every few seconds it would kick spasmodically...

Steaming entrails tumbled onto the snow.

“In the god business,” said the figure—and now Shadow was certain it was Wednesday, nobody else had that rasp, that deep cynical joy in words, “it’s not the death that matters. It’s the opportunity for resurrection. And when the blood flows...’’

The wind gusted at them, fitfully, first from one direction, then from another.

You couldn’t be hypertext if you tried. I’m...I’m synaptic, while, while you’re synoptic...

Norse pantheon. We’re both from the Norse pantheon.

It was the most beautiful tree Shadow had ever seen: spectral and yet utterly real and almost perfectly symmetrical.

Gray, roiling clouds stretched from horizon to horizon; a slow drizzle began to fall.

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

Its roots went deep into the loam of the earth, deep down into time, into the hidden springs.

His mother’s eyes were closed in a morphine peace: what she had thought was just another sickle-cell crisis, another bout of pain to be endured, had turned out, they had discovered, too late, to be lymphoma.

There is a lupine grace to his movements.

She made a moue. “There’s dead,” she said, “and there’s dead, and there’s dead. It’s a relative thing.” Then she smiled again.

“I thought this was the world of the dead,” said Shadow.
“No. Not per se. It’s more of a preliminary.”

“What you have to remember,” said Mr. Ibis, testily, “is that life and death are different sides of the same coin. Like the heads and tails of a quarter.”

Shadow had a frisson, then, as they crossed the dark water. He imagined he could see the faces of children staring up at him reproachfully from beneath the water’s glassy surface: their faces were waterlogged and softened, their blind eyes clouded.

“So that’s that,” said Bast, wistfully. “Just another skull for the pile. It’s a pity. I had hoped that you would do some good, in the current troubles. It’s like watching a slow-motion car crash and being powerless to prevent it.”

When they leave, they leave bemused, uncertain of why they came, of what they have seen, of whether they had a good time or not.

Many of them hitchhiked, cadging rides from nervous motorists or from truck drivers.

Several local men and women came walking over the meadows, their bodies moving in unfamiliar ways: their voices, when they spoke, were the voices of the loa who rode them: a tall, black man spoke in the voice of Papa Legba who opens the gates; while Baron Samedi, the voudon lord of death, had taken over the body of a teenage Goth girl from Chattanooga, possibly because she possessed her own black silk top hat, which sat on her dark hair at a jaunty angle.

She had chided him once, on that day when they had walked and held hands, for not being alive.

She squeezed past the piano, pushed open a door and found herself in a dilapidated drawing room, filled with ramshackle furniture.

“It will be a mighty battle,” it told him, in a glutinous voice.

He could smell her perfume. It was heady and heavy, a cloying scent, like magnolias or lilacs, but he did not mind.

He could smell her perfume. It was heady and heavy, a cloying scent, like magnolias or lilacs, but he did not mind.

A man in an elegant suit, who had until now said nothing, put his hands together, stepped into the firelight, and made his point succinctly and clearly.

He saw it all, stark in its simplicity.

A gray-skinned man, his one cyclopean eye a huge cabochon emerald, walked stiffly up the hill, ahead of several squat and swarthy men, their impassive faces as regular as Aztec carvings: they knew the secrets that the jungles had swallowed.

He would examine it minutely, as if concentrating entirely on the twigness of the twig, the leafness of the leaf, as if he were seeing it for the first time.

He was not the first whose return she had initiated, and she knew that, soon enough, the million-year stare would fade, and the memories and the dreams that he had brought back from the tree would be elided by the world of things you could touch.

He had become harder to see, as if he was fading back into the ether.

This mountaintop was the quintessence of place, the heart of things as they were.

There were car gods there: a powerful, serious-faced contingent, with blood on their black gloves and on their chrome teeth: recipients of human sacrifice on a scale undreamed-of since the Aztecs.

Either you’ve been forgotten, or you’re scared you’re going to be rendered obsolete, or maybe you’re just getting tired of existing on the whim of people.

He was a god who took his power from sacrifice, and from death, and especially from war. He would have deaths of those who fell in war dedicated to him—whole battlefields which, in the old country, gave him power and sustenance.

He made his living as a grifter, working with another god from his pantheon, a god of chaos and deceit. Together they rooked the gullible. Together they took people for all they’d got.

An enormous man, his skin the deep brown of mahogany, his chest naked, wearing a top hat, cigar sticking rakishly from his mouth, spoke in a voice as deep as the grave.