“It’s a fine vehicle. And it’s the last thing that they’ll be expecting you to be driving. The last thing they’ll be looking for.”
Czernobog walked around the vehicle. Then he started to cough, a lung-rumbling, old-man, five-in-the-morning, smoker’s cough. He hawked, and spat, and put his hand to his chest, massaging away the pain. “Yes. The last car they will suspect. So what happens when the police pull us over, looking for the hippies, and the dope? Eh? We are not here to ride the magic bus. We are to blend in.”
The bearded man unlocked the door of the bus. “So they take a look at you, they see you aren’t hippies, they wave you goodbye. It’s the perfect disguise. And it’s all I could find at no notice.”
Czernobog seemed to be ready to argue it further, but Mr. Nancy intervened smoothly. “Elvis, you come through for us. We are very grateful. Now, that car needs to get back to Chicago.”
“We’ll leave it in Bloomington,” said the bearded man. “The wolves will take care of it. Don’t give it another thought.” He turned back to Shadow. “Again, you have my sympathy and I share your pain. Good luck. And if the vigil falls to you, my admiration, and my sympathy.” He squeezed Shadow’s hand in sympathy and in friendship with his own catcher’s-mitt fist. It hurt. “You tell his corpse when you see it. Tell him that Alviss son of Vindalf will keep the faith.”
The VW bus smelled of patchouli, of old incense and rolling tobacco. There was a faded pink carpet glued to the floor and to the walls.
“Who was that?” asked Shadow, as he drove them down the ramp, grinding the gears.
“Just like he said, Alviss son of Vindalf. He’s the king of the dwarfs. The biggest, mightiest, greatest of all the dwarf folk.”
“But he’s not a dwarf,” pointed out Shadow. “He’s what, five eight? Five nine?”
“Which makes him a giant among dwarfs,” said Czernobog from behind him. “Tallest dwarf in America.”
“What was that about the vigil?” asked Shadow.
The two old men said nothing. Shadow glanced to his right. Mr. Nancy was staring out of the window.
“Well? He was talking about a vigil. You heard him.”
Czernobog spoke up from the back seat. “You will not have to do it,” he said.
“Do what?”
“The vigil. He talks too much. All the dwarfs talk and talk and talk. And sing. All the time, sing, sing, sing. Is nothing to think of. Better you put it out of your mind.”
They drove south, keeping off the freeways (“We must assume,” said Mr. Nancy, “that they are in enemy hands. Or that they are perhaps enemy hands in their own right”). Driving south was like driving forward in time. The snows erased, slowly, and were completely gone by the following morning when the bus reached Kentucky. Winter was already over in Kentucky, and spring was on its way. Shadow began to wonder if there were some kind of equation to explain it—perhaps every fifty miles he drove south he was driving a day into the future.
He would have mentioned his idea to his passengers, but Mr. Nancy was asleep in the passenger seat in the front, while Czernobog snored unceasingly in the back.
Time seemed a flexible construct at that moment, an illusion he was imagining as he drove. He found himself becoming painfully aware of birds and animals: he saw the crows on the side of the road, or in the bus’s path, picking at roadkill; flights of birds wheeled across the skies in patterns that almost made sense; cats stared at them from front lawns and fence-posts.
Czernobog snorted and woke, sitting up slowly. “I dreamed a strange dream,” he said. “I dreamed that I am truly Bielebog. That forever the world imagines that there are two of us, the light god and the dark, but that now we are both old, I find it was only me all the time, giving them gifts, taking my gifts away.” He broke the filter from a Lucky Strike, put it between his lips and lit it with his lighter.
Shadow wound down his window.
“Aren’t you worried about lung cancer?” he said.
“I am cancer,” said Czernobog. “I do not frighten myself.” He chuckled, and then the chuckle became a wheeze and the wheeze turned into a cough.
Nancy spoke. “Folk like us don’t get cancer. We don’t get arteriosclerosis or Parkinson’s disease or syphilis. We’re kind of hard to kill.”
“They killed Wednesday,” said Shadow.
He pulled over for gas, and then parked next door at a restaurant, for an early breakfast. As they entered, the payphone in the entrance began to jangle. They walked past it without answering it, and it stopped ringing.
They gave their orders to an elderly woman with a worried smile, who had been sitting reading a paperback copy of What My Heart Meant by Jenny Kerton. The telephone began to ring once more. The woman sighed, then walked back and over to the phone, picked it up, said, “Yes.” Then she looked back at the room, said, “Yep. Looks like they are. You just hold the line now,” and walked over to Mr. Nancy.
“It’s for you,” she said.
“Okay,” said Mr. Nancy. “Now, ma’am, you make sure those fries are real crisp now. Think burnt.” He walked over to the payphone.
“This is he,” he said.
“And what makes you think I’m dumb enough to trust you?” he said.
“I can find it,” he said. “I know where it is.”
“Yes,” he said. “We want it. You know we want it. And I know you want to get rid of it. So don’t give me any shit.”
He put down the telephone, came back to the table.
“Who was it?” asked Shadow.
“Didn’t say.”
“What did they want?”
“They were offerin’ us a truce, while they hand over the body.”
“They lie,” said Czernobog. “They want to lure us in, and then they will kill us. What they did to Wednesday. Is what I always used to do,” he added, with gloomy pride. “Promise them anything, but do what you will.”
“It’s on neutral territory,” said Nancy. “Truly neutral.”
Czernobog chuckled. It sounded like a metal ball rattling in a dry skull. “I used to say that also. Come to a neutral place, I would say, and then in the night we would rise up and kill them all. Those were the good days.”
Mr. Nancy shrugged. He crunched down on his dark brown french fries, grinned his approval. “Mm-mm. These are fine fries,” he said.
“We can’t trust those people,” said Shadow.
“Listen, I’m older than you and I’m smarter than you and I’m better lookin’ than you,” said Mr. Nancy, thumping the bottom of the ketchup bottle, blobbing ketchup over his burnt fries. “I can get more pussy in an afternoon than you’ll get in a year. I can dance like an angel, fight like a cornered bear, plan better than a fox, sing like a nightingale…”
“And your point here is…?”
Nancy’s brown eyes gazed into Shadow’s. “And they need to get rid of the body as much as we need to take it.”
Czernobog said, “There is no such neutral place.”
“There’s one,” said Mr. Nancy. “It’s the center.”