“Drive.”
“Car died a few miles down the road. It was a pieceashit if you’ll pardon my language,” said Shadow.
“Pee-Oh-Esses,” she said. “Yup. That’s what my brother-in-law calls ’em. He buys and sells cars in a small way. He’ll call me up, say, ‘Mattie, I just sold another Pee-Oh-Ess.’ Say, maybe he’d be interested in your old car. For scrap or something.”
“It belongs to my boss,” said Shadow, surprising himself with the fluency and ease of his lies. “I need to call him, so he can come pick it up.” A thought struck him. “Your brother-in-law, is he around here?”
“He’s in Muscoda. Ten minutes south of here. Just over the river. Why?”
“Well, does he have a Pee-Oh-Ess he’d like to sell me for, mm, five, six hundred bucks?”
She smiled sweetly. “Mister, he doesn’t have a car on that back lot you couldn’t buy with a full tank of gas for five hundred dollars. But don’t you tell him I said so.”
“Would you call him?” asked Shadow.
“I’m way ahead of you,” she told him, and she picked up the phone. “Hon? It’s Mattie. You get over here this minute. I got a man here wants to buy a car.”
The piece of shit he chose was a 1983 Chevy Nova, which he bought, with a full tank of gas, for four hundred and fifty dollars. It had almost a quarter of a million miles on the clock, and smelled faintly of bourbon, tobacco, and more strongly of something that reminded Shadow of bananas. He couldn’t tell what color it was, under the dirt and the snow. Still, of all the vehicles in Mattie’s brother-in-law’s back lot, it was the only one that looked like it might take him five hundred miles.
The deal was done in cash, and Mattie’s brother-in-law never asked for Shadow’s name or social security number or for anything except the money.
Shadow drove west, then south, with five hundred and fifty dollars in his pocket, keeping off the interstate. The piece of shit had a radio, but nothing happened when he turned it on. A sign said he’d left Wisconsin and was now in Illinois. He passed a strip-mining works, huge blue arc lights burning in the dim midwinter daylight.
He stopped and ate lunch at a place called Mom’s, catching them just before they closed for the afternoon. The food was okay.
Each town he passed through had an extra sign up beside the sign telling him that he was now entering Our Town (pop. 720). The extra sign announced that the town’s Under-14s team was the third runner-up in the interstate Hundred-Yard Sprint, or that the town was the home of the Illinois Girls’ Under-16s Wrestling semifinalist.
He drove on, head nodding, feeling more drained and exhausted with every minute that passed. He ran a stoplight, and was nearly sideswiped by a woman in a Dodge. As soon as he got out into open country he pulled off onto an empty tractor path on the side of the road, and he parked by a snow-spotted stubbly field in which a slow procession of fat black wild turkeys walked like a line of mourners; he turned off the engine, stretched out in the back seat, and fell asleep.
Darkness; a sensation of falling—as if he were tumbling down a great hole, like Alice. He fell for a hundred years into darkness. Faces passed him, swimming out of the black, then each face was ripped up and away before he could touch it…
Abruptly, and without transition, he was not falling. Now he was in a cave, and he was no longer alone. Shadow stared into familiar eyes: huge, liquid black eyes. They blinked.
Under the earth: yes. He remembered this place. The stink of wet cow. Firelight flickered on the wet cave walls, illuminating the buffalo head, the man’s body, skin the color of brick clay.
“Can’t you people leave me be?” asked Shadow. “I just want to sleep.”
The buffalo man nodded, slowly. His lips did not move, but a voice in Shadow’s head said, “Where are you going, Shadow?”
“Cairo.”
“Why?”
“Where else have I got to go? It’s where Wednesday wants me to go. I drank his mead.” In Shadow’s dream, with the power of dream-logic behind it, the obligation seemed unarguable: he drank Wednesday’s mead three times, and sealed the pact—what other choice of action did he have?
The buffalo-headed man reached a hand into the fire, stirring the embers and the broken branches into a blaze. “The storm is coming,” he said. Now there was ash on his hands, and he wiped it onto his hairless chest, leaving soot-black streaks.
“So you people keep telling me. Can I ask you a question?”
There was a pause. A fly settled on the furry forehead. The buffalo man flicked it away. “Ask.”
“Is this true? Are these people really gods? It’s all so…” He paused. Then he said, “Unlikely,” which was not exactly the word he had been going for but seemed to be the best he could do.
“What are gods?” asked the buffalo man.
“I don’t know,” said Shadow.
There was a tapping, relentless and dull. Shadow waited for the buffalo man to say something more, to explain what gods were, to explain the whole tangled nightmare that his life seemed to have become. He was cold. The fire no longer burned.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
Shadow opened his eyes, and, groggily, sat up. He was freezing, and the sky outside the car was the deep luminescent purple that divides the dusk from the night.
Tap. Tap. Someone said, “Hey, mister,” and Shadow turned his head. The someone was standing beside the car, no more than a darker shape against the darkling sky. Shadow reached out a hand and cranked down the window a few inches. He made several waking-up noises, and then he said, “Hi.”
“You all right? You sick? You been drinking?” The voice was high—a woman’s or a boy’s.
“I’m fine,” said Shadow. “Hold on.” He opened the door, and got out, stretching his aching limbs and neck as he did so. Then he rubbed his hands together, to get the blood circulating and to warm them up.
“Whoa. You’re pretty big.”
“That’s what they tell me,” said Shadow. “Who are you?”
“I’m Sam,” said the voice.
“Boy Sam or girl Sam?”
“Girl-Sam. I used to be Sammi with an i, and I’d do a smiley face over the i, but then I got completely sick of it because like absolutely everybody was doing it, so I stopped.”
“Okay, girl-Sam. You go over there, and look out at the road.”
“Why? Are you a crazed killer or something?”
“No,” said Shadow, “I need to take a leak and I’d like just the smallest amount of privacy.”
“Oh. Right. Okay. Got it. No problem. I am so with you. I can’t even pee if there’s someone in the next stall. Major shy bladder syndrome.”
“Now, please.”
She walked to the far side of the car, and Shadow took a few steps closer to the field, unzipped his jeans, and pissed against a fencepost for a very long time. He walked back to the car. The last of the gloaming had become night.
“You still there?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said. “You must have a bladder like Lake Erie. I think empires rose and fell in the time it took you to pee. I could hear it the whole time.”