—FROM THE NOTEBOOKS OF MR. IBIS
The two of them were driving the VW bus down to Florida on I-75. They’d been driving since dawn, or rather, Shadow had driven, and Mr. Nancy had sat up front in the passenger seat and, from time to time, and with a pained expression on his face, offered to drive. Shadow always said no.
“Are you happy?” asked Mr. Nancy, suddenly. He had been staring at Shadow for several hours. Whenever Shadow glanced over to his right, Mr. Nancy was looking at him with his earth-brown eyes.
“Not really,” said Shadow. “But I’m not dead yet.”
“Huh?”
“Call no man happy until he is dead. Herodotus.”
Mr. Nancy raised a white eyebrow, and he said, “I’m not dead yet, and, mostly because I’m not dead yet, I’m happy as a clamboy.”
“The Herodotus thing. It doesn’t mean that the dead are happy,” said Shadow. “It means that you can’t judge the shape of someone’s life until it’s over and done.”
“I don’t even judge then,” said Mr. Nancy. “And as for happiness, there’s a lot of different kinds of happiness, just as there’s a hell of a lot of different kinds of dead. Me, I’ll just take what I can get when I can get it.”
Shadow changed the subject. “Those helicopters,” he said. “The ones that took away the bodies, and the injured.”
“What about them?”
“Who sent them? Where did they come from?”
“You shouldn’t worry yourself about that. They’re like valkyries or buzzards. They come because they have to come.”
“If you say so.”
“The dead and the wounded will be taken care of. You ask me, old Jacquel’s going to be very busy for the next month or so. Tell me somethin’, Shadow-boy.”
“Okay.”
“You learn anythin’ from all this?”
Shadow shrugged. “I don’t know. Most of what I learned on the tree I’ve already forgotten,” he said. “I think I met some people. But I’m not certain of anything any more. It’s like one of those dreams that changes you. You keep some of the dream forever, and you know things down deep inside yourself, because it happened to you, but when you go looking for details they kind of just slip out of your head.”
“Yeah,” said Mr. Nancy. And then he said, grudgingly, “You’re not so dumb.”
“Maybe not,” said Shadow. “But I wish I could have kept more of what passed through my hands, since I got out of prison. I was given so many things, and I lost them again.”
“Maybe,” said Mr. Nancy, “you kept more than you think.”
“No,” said Shadow.
They crossed the border into Florida, and Shadow saw his first palm tree. He wondered if they’d planted it there on purpose, at the border, just so that you knew you were in Florida now.
Mr. Nancy began to snore, and Shadow glanced over at him. The old man still looked very gray, and his breath was rasping. Shadow wondered, not for the first time, if he had sustained some kind of chest or lung injury in the fight. Nancy had refused any medical attention.
Florida went on for longer than Shadow had imagined, and it was late by the time he pulled up outside a small, one-story wooden house, its windows tightly shuttered, on the outskirts of Fort Pierce. Nancy, who had directed him through the last five miles, invited him to stay the night.
“I can get a room in a motel,” said Shadow. “It’s not a problem.”
“You could do that, and I’d be hurt. Obviously I wouldn’t say anythin’. But I’d be real hurt, real bad,” said Mr. Nancy. “So you better stay here, and I’ll make you a bed up on the couch.”
Mr. Nancy unlocked the hurricane shutters, and pulled open the windows. The house smelled musty and damp, and a little sweet, as if it were haunted by the ghosts of long-dead cookies.
Shadow agreed, reluctantly, to stay the night there, just as he agreed, even more reluctantly, to walk with Mr. Nancy to the bar at the end of the road, for just one late-night drink while the house aired out.
“Did you see Czernobog?” asked Nancy, as they strolled through the muggy Floridian night. The air was alive with whirring palmetto bugs and the ground crawled with creatures that scuttled and clicked. Mr. Nancy lit a cigarillo, and coughed and choked on it. Still, he kept right on smoking.
“He was gone when I came out of the cave.”
“He will have headed home. He’ll be waitin’ for you there, you know.”
“Yes.”
They walked in silence to the end of the road. It wasn’t much of a bar, but it was open.
“I’ll buy the first beers,” said Mr. Nancy.
“We’re only having one beer, remember,” said Shadow.
“What are you?” asked Mr. Nancy. “Some kind of cheapskate?”
Mr. Nancy bought them their first beers, and Shadow bought the second round. He stared in horror as Mr. Nancy talked the barman into turning on the karaoke machine, and then watched in fascinated embarrassment as the old man belted his way through “What’s New Pussycat?” before crooning out a moving, tuneful version of “The Way You Look Tonight.” He had a fine voice, and by the end the handful of people still in the bar were cheering and applauding him.
When he came back to Shadow at the bar he was looking brighter. The whites of his eyes were clear, and the gray pallor that had touched his skin was gone. “Your turn,” he said.
“Absolutely not,” said Shadow.
But Mr. Nancy had ordered more beers and was handing Shadow a stained printout of songs from which to choose. “Just pick a song you know the words to.”
“This is not funny,” said Shadow. The world was beginning to swim, a little, but he couldn’t muster the energy to argue, and then Mr. Nancy was putting on the backing tape to “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood,” and pushing—literally pushing—Shadow up onto the tiny makeshift stage at the end of the bar.
Shadow held the mike as if it was probably live, and then the backing music started and he croaked out the initial “Baby…” Nobody in the bar threw anything in his direction. And it felt good. “Can you understand me now?” His voice was rough but melodic, and rough suited the song just fine. “Sometimes I feel a little mad. Don’t you know that no one alive can always be an angel…”
And he was still singing it as they walked home through the busy Florida night, the old man and the young, stumbling and happy.
“I’m just a soul whose intentions are good,” he sang to the crabs and the spiders and the palmetto beetles and the lizards and the night. “Oh lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood.”
Mr. Nancy showed him to the couch. It was much smaller than Shadow, who decided to sleep on the floor, but by the time he had finished deciding to sleep on the floor he was already fast asleep, half-sitting, half-lying, on the tiny sofa.
At first, he did not dream. There was just the comforting darkness. And then he saw a fire burning in the darkness and he walked toward it.
“You did well,” whispered the buffalo man without moving his lips.
“I don’t know what I did,” said Shadow.