Wednesday lowered his voice, so much so that Shadow, only across the table, could barely hear him. “What time do you get off work?”
“Nine,” she said, and swallowed. “Nine thirty latest.”
“And what is the finest motel in this area?”
“There’s a Motel 6,” she said. “It’s not much.”
Wednesday touched the back of her hand, fleetingly, with the tips of his fingers, leaving crumbs of salt on her skin. She made no attempt to wipe them off. “To us,” he said, his voice an almost inaudible rumble, “it shall be a pleasure-palace.”
The waitress looked at him. She bit her thin lips, hesitated, then nodded and fled for the kitchen.
“C’mon,” said Shadow. “She looks barely legal.”
“I’ve never been overly concerned about legality,” Wednesday told him. “Not as long as I get what I want. Sometimes the nights are long and cold. And I need her, not as an end in herself, but to wake me up a little. Even King David knew that there is one easy prescription to get warm blood flowing through an old frame: take one virgin, call me in the morning.”
Shadow caught himself wondering if the girl on night duty in the hotel back in Eagle Point had been a virgin. “Don’t you ever worry about disease?” he asked. “What if you knock her up? What if she’s got a brother?”
“No,” said Wednesday. “I don’t worry about diseases. I don’t catch them. People like me avoid them. Unfortunately, for the most part people like me fire blanks, so there’s not a great deal of interbreeding. It used to happen in the old days. Nowadays, it’s possible, but so unlikely as to be almost unimaginable. So no worries there. And many girls have brothers, and fathers. Some even have husbands. It’s not my problem. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, I’ve left town already.”
“So we’re staying here for the night?”
Wednesday rubbed his chin. “I shall stay in the Motel 6,” he said. Then he put his hand into his coat pocket. He pulled out a front-door key, bronze-colored, with a card tag attached on which was typed an address: 502 NORTHRIDGE RD, APT #3. “You, on the other hand, have an apartment waiting for you, in a city far from here.” Wednesday closed his eyes for a moment. Then he opened them, gray and gleaming and fractionally mismatched, and he said, “The Greyhound bus will be coming through town in twenty minutes. It stops at the gas station. Here’s your ticket.” He pulled out a folded bus ticket, passed it across the table. Shadow picked it up and looked at it.
“Who’s Mike Ainsel?” he asked. That was the name on the ticket.
“You are. Happy Christmas.”
“And where’s Lakeside?”
“Your happy home in the months to come. And now, because good things come in threes…” He took a small, gift-wrapped package from his pocket, pushed it across the table. It sat beside the ketchup bottle with the black smears of dried ketchup on the top. Shadow made no move to take it.
“Well?”
Reluctantly, Shadow tore open the red wrapping paper, to reveal a fawn-colored calfskin wallet, shiny from use. It was obviously somebody’s wallet. Inside the wallet was a driver’s license with Shadow’s photograph on it, in the name of Michael Ainsel, with a Milwaukee address, a MasterCard for M. Ainsel, and twenty crisp fifty-dollar bills. Shadow closed the wallet, put it into an inside pocket.
“Thanks,” he said.
“Think of it as a Christmas bonus. Now, let me walk you down to the Greyhound. I shall wave to you as you ride the gray dog north.”
They walked outside the restaurant. Shadow found it hard to believe how much colder it had gotten in the last few hours. It felt too cold to snow, now. Aggressively cold. This was a bad winter.
“Hey. Wednesday. Both of the scams you were telling me about—the violin scam and the bishop one, the bishop and the cop—” He hesitated, trying to form his thought, to bring it into focus.
“What of them?”
Then he had it. “They’re both two-man scams. One guy on each side. Did you used to have a partner?” Shadow’s breath came in clouds. He promised himself that when he got to Lakeside he would spend some of his Christmas bonus on the warmest, thickest winter coat that money could buy.
“Yes,” said Wednesday. “Yes. I had a partner. A junior partner. But, alas, those days are gone. There’s the gas station, and there, unless my eye deceives me, is the bus.” It was already signaling its turn into the parking lot. “Your address is on the key,” said Wednesday. “If anyone asks, I am your uncle, and I shall be rejoicing in the unlikely name of Emerson Borson. Settle in, in Lakeside, nephew Ainsel. I’ll come for you within the week. We shall be traveling together. Visiting the people I have to visit. In the meantime, keep your head down and stay out of trouble.”
“My car—?” said Shadow.
“I’ll take good care of it. Have a good time in Lakeside,” said Wednesday. He thrust out his hand, and Shadow shook it. Wednesday’s hand was colder than a corpse’s.
“Jesus,” said Shadow. “You’re cold.”
“Then the sooner I am making the two-backed beast with the little hotsy-totsy lass from the restaurant in a back room of the Motel 6, the better.” And he reached out his other hand and squeezed Shadow’s shoulder.
Shadow experienced a dizzying moment of double vision: he saw the grizzled man facing him, squeezing his shoulder, but he saw something else: so many winters, hundreds and hundreds of winters, and a gray man in a broad-brimmed hat walking from settlement to settlement, leaning on his staff, staring in through windows at the firelight, at a joy and a burning life he would never be able to touch, never even be able to feel…
“Go,” said Wednesday, his voice a reassuring growl. “All is well, and all is well, and all shall be well.”
Shadow showed his ticket to the driver. “Hell of a day to be traveling,” she said. And then she added, with a certain grim satisfaction, “Merry Christmas.”
The bus was almost empty. “When will we get in to Lakeside?” asked Shadow.
“Two hours. Maybe a bit more,” said the driver. “They say there’s a cold snap coming.” She thumbed a switch and the doors closed with a hiss and a thump.
Shadow walked halfway down the bus, put the seat back as far as it would go, and he started to think. The motion of the bus and the warmth combined to lull him, and before he was aware that he was becoming sleepy, he was asleep.
In the earth, and under the earth. The marks on the wall were the red of wet clay: hand prints, finger-marks and, here and there, crude representations of animals and people and birds.
The fire still burned and the buffalo man still sat on the other side of the fire, staring at Shadow with huge eyes, eyes like pools of dark mud. The buffalo lips, fringed with matted brown hair, did not move as the buffalo voice said, “Well, Shadow? Do you believe yet?”
“I don’t know,” said Shadow. His mouth had not moved either, he observed. Whatever words were passing between the two of them were not being spoken, not in any way that Shadow understood speech. “Are you real?”
“Believe,” said the buffalo man.