American Gods: Chapters 9–13

It trades on cupidity and greed, as all great grifts do.

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.

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.

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.

Chief of Police Mulligan excused himself near the middle of this litany.

Entering the casino one is beset at every side by invitation—invitations such that it would take a man of stone, heartless, mindless, and curiously devoid of avarice, to decline them.

The money flows through the casino in an uninterrupted stream of green and silver, streaming from hand to hand, from gambler to croupier, to cashier, to the management, to security, finally ending up in the Holy of Holies, the innermost sanctum, the Counting Room.

“It means that I can’t stop you from hunting eagle stones or thunderbirds. But I would infinitely prefer that you spend your days quietly sequestered in Lakeside, out of sight, and, I hope, out of mind. When things get hairy we’ll need all hands to the wheel.”

“Don’t get into any trouble,” said Wednesday. “Keep your head below the parapet. Make no waves.”

Gary had died in prison, when what the infirmary had told him was just a malingering, feeling-lousy kind of day turned out to be a ruptured appendix.

“Hello, Mister Ainsel. Leon says you were doing magic for him.”
“Just a little prestidigitation, ma’am.”

Shadow walked down the marble and oak steps to the library basement, through a door into a large room filled with tables, each table covered with books of all kinds, indiscriminately assorted and promiscuously arranged: paperbacks and hardcovers, fiction and non-fiction, periodicals and encyclopedias all side by side upon the tables, spines up or spines out.

He was unsurprised to see that the portly secretary of the 1882 city council was a Patrick Mulligan: shave him, make him lose twenty pounds and he’d be a dead ringer for Chad Mulligan, his—what, great-great-grandson?

And the odds are certainly in your favor here—this is San Francisco, after all. There are heathens and pagans and Wiccans aplenty on these precipitous streets.

“You stiffed that girl for ten bucks, I slipped her ten bucks,” said Shadow, doggedly.

And if it does, are we not doing a disservice to his sister, who lies in the searing dust beside him, a distorted, distended caricature of a human child?

Lineage and property was something that moved in the matrilineal line, but power remained in the hands of the men: a man had complete ownership of his sister’s children.

There was nothing untoward or unusual about their uncle selling the twins, although twins were considered magical beings, and their uncle was scared of them, scared enough that he did not tell them that they were to be sold in case they harmed his shadow and killed him.

They made harbor on a pleasant, balmy day in Bridgetown, Barbados, and the captives were carried from the ship to the shore in low boats sent out from the dock, and taken to the market square, where they were, by dint of a certain amount of shouting, and blows from cudgels, arranged into lines.

First they took him to a seasoning farm, where they whipped him daily for the things he did and didn’t do, they taught him a smattering of English and they gave him the name of Inky Jack, for the darkness of his skin.

They cut his arm off at the shoulder with a saw, and they cauterized it with the burning blade.

She was a hairdresser who went from home to home, arranging the coiffures of the elegant ladies of New Orleans before their demanding social engagements.

Then an urbane voice says, “Hello, Mister Town.”

“A pattern manifestation. A search engine.”

It was much repaired, patched, and, in places, added onto: Shadow was certain that the galvanized tin chimney, from which the wood smoke was coming, was not part of the original structure.

“Well,” he said, “it seems our delay was fortuitous. Whiskey Jack and Apple Johnny. Two birds with one stone.”

“Paul Bunyan.” Shadow had never heard two such innocuous words made to sound so damning.

“Whiskey Jack says a lot of things,” said Harry Bluejay, petulantly.

“I am,” he said, “delighted that the air-traffic controllers’ dispute has been resolved without recourse to industrial action.”

I am black but comely, she mouths to the night and the rain. I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys.

The Lakeside News letter column currently features a blistering debate on the potential rezoning of the town land down by the old cemetery on the southeast shore of the lake and yours truly has to write a strident editorial summarizing the paper’s position on this without offending anybody or in fact giving anyone any idea what our position is.

In July of 1874, Shadow learned, the city council was concerned about the number of itinerant foreign loggers arriving in the town.

It was to be expected that the nuisances attendant to the damming of Mill Creek would abate once the mill-pond had become a lake.

Well, you know that it was my idea to paint this thing purple, thus forcing Paul Gunther to become such an object of scorn and derision for several counties around that he was forced to leave town entirely.

“What I figure, is, the thing to do,” pontificated bar-bore Cliff, “is to escape in hunting season, when everybody’s wearing orange anyway.”

He looked into the camera and said, “Terrorism is too easy a word to bandy about..."

“I think your promises were made to be broken and your oaths to be forsworn. But I will keep my word.”

Atsula walked before the two tribesmen who carried their god on long poles, draped with bearskins, that it should not be seen by profane eyes, nor at times when it was not holy.

She swallowed it, and poured what was left on the ground in front of their god, a libation to Nunyunnini.

And there is no telling how long she might have continued in this blasphemy, had it not been interrupted in a manner that brooked no argument.