“You made peace,” said the buffalo man. “You took our words and made them your own. They never understood that they were here—and the people who worshiped them were here—because it suits us that they are here. But we can change our minds. And perhaps we will.”
“Are you a god?” asked Shadow.
The buffalo-headed man shook his head. Shadow thought, for a moment, that the creature was amused. “I am the land,” he said.
And if there was more to that dream then Shadow did not remember it.
He heard something sizzling. His head was aching, and there was a pounding behind his eyes.
Mr. Nancy was already cooking breakfast: a pile of pancakes, sizzling bacon, perfect eggs, and coffee. He looked in the peak of health.
“My head hurts,” said Shadow.
“You get a good breakfast inside you, you’ll feel like a new man.”
“I’d rather feel like the same man, just with a different head,” said Shadow.
“Eat,” said Mr. Nancy.
Shadow ate.
“How do you feel now?”
“Like I’ve got a headache, only now I’ve got some food in my stomach and I think I’m going to throw up.”
“Come with me.” Beside the sofa, on which Shadow had spent the night, covered with an African blanket, was a trunk, made of some dark wood, which looked like an undersized pirate chest. Mr. Nancy undid the padlock, and opened the lid. Inside the trunk there were a number of boxes. Nancy rummaged among the boxes. “It’s an ancient African herbal remedy,” he said. “It’s made of ground willow bark, things like that.”
“Like aspirin?”
“Yup,” said Mr. Nancy. “Just like that.” From the bottom of the trunk he produced a giant economy-sized bottle of generic aspirin. He unscrewed the top, and shook out a couple of white pills. “Here.”
“Nice trunk,” said Shadow. He took the bitter pills, swallowed them with a glass of water.
“My son sent it to me,” said Mr. Nancy. “He’s a good boy. I don’t see him as much as I’d like.”
“I miss Wednesday,” said Shadow. “Despite everything he did. I keep expecting to see him. But I look up and he’s not there.” He kept staring at the pirate trunk, trying figure out what it reminded him of.
You will lose many things. Do not lose this. Who said that?
“You miss him? After what he put you through? Put us all through?”
“Yes,” said Shadow. “I guess I do. Do you think he’ll be back?”
“I think,” said Mr. Nancy, “that wherever two men are gathered together to sell a third man a twenty-dollar violin for ten thousand dollars, he will be there in spirit.”
“Yes, but—”
“We should get back into the kitchen,” said Mr. Nancy, his expression becoming stony. “Those pans won’t wash themselves.”
Mr. Nancy washed the pans and the dishes. Shadow dried them, and put them away. Somewhere in there the headache began to ease. They went back into the sitting room.
Shadow stared at the old trunk some more, willing himself to remember. “If I don’t go to see Czernobog,” he said, “what would happen?”
“You’ll see him,” said Mr. Nancy flatly. “Maybe he’ll find you. Or maybe he’ll bring you to him. But one way or another, you’ll see him.”
Shadow nodded. Something started to fall into place. “Hey,” he said. “Is there a god with an elephant’s head?”
“Ganesh? He’s a Hindu god. He removes obstacles and makes journeys easier. Good cook, too.”
Shadow looked up. “…it’s in the trunk,” he said. “I knew it was important, but I didn’t know why. I thought maybe it meant the trunk of the tree. But he wasn’t talking about that at all, was he?”
Mr. Nancy frowned. “You lost me.”
“It’s in the trunk,” said Shadow. He knew it was true. He did not know why it should be true, not quite. But of that he was completely certain.
He got to his feet. “I got to go,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
Mr. Nancy raised an eyebrow. “Why the hurry?”
“Because,” said Shadow, “the ice is melting.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
it’s
spring
and
the
goat-footed
balloonMan whistles
far
and
wee
—E.E. CUMMINGS
Shadow was driving a rental, and he came out of the forest slowly, about 8:30 in the morning, drove down the hill doing under forty-five miles per hour, and entered the town of Lakeside three weeks after he was certain he had left it for good.
He drove through the city, surprised at how little it had changed in the last few weeks, which were a lifetime, and he parked halfway down the driveway that led to the lake. Then he got out of the car.
There were no more ice-fishing huts on the frozen lake any longer, no SUVs, nobody sitting at a fishing hole with a line and a twelve-pack. The lake was dark: no longer covered with a blind white layer of snow, now there were reflective patches of water on the surface of the ice, and the water beneath the ice was dark, and the ice itself was clear enough that the darkness beneath showed through. The sky was gray, but the icy lake was bleak and empty.
Almost empty.
There was one car remaining on the ice, parked out on the frozen lake almost beneath the bridge, so that anyone driving through the town, anyone crossing the town, could not help but see it. It was a dirty green in color; the sort of car that people abandon in parking lots, the kind that they just park and leave because it’s just not worth coming back for. It had no engine. It was a symbol of a wager, waiting for the ice to become rotten enough, and soft enough, and dangerous enough to allow the lake to take it forever.
There was a chain across the short driveway that led down to the lake, and a warning sign forbidding entrance to people or to vehicles. THIN ICE, it said. Beneath it was a hand-painted sequence of pictograms with lines through them: no cars, no pedestrians, no snowmobiles. Danger.
Shadow ignored the warnings and scrambled down the bank. It was slippery—the snow had already melted, turning the earth to mud under his feet, and the brown grass barely offered traction. He skidded and slid down to the lake and walked, carefully, out onto a short wooden jetty, and from there he stepped down onto the ice.
The layer of water on the ice, made up of melted ice and melted snow, was deeper than it had looked from above, and the ice beneath the water was slicker and more slippery than any skating rink, so that Shadow was forced to fight to keep his footing. He splashed through the water, as it covered his boots to the laces and seeped inside. Ice water. It numbed where it touched. He felt strangely distant as he trudged across the frozen lake, as if he were watching himself on a movie screen—a movie in which he was the hero, a detective, perhaps: there was a feeling of inevitability, now, as if everything that was going to happen would play itself out, and there was nothing he could have done to change a moment of it.
He walked toward the klunker, painfully aware that the ice was too rotten for this, and that the water beneath the ice was as cold as water could be without freezing. He felt very exposed, out on the ice alone. He kept walking, and he slipped and slid. Several times he fell.