Too much pain.
“Worship them,” Mama Zouzou told the young Widow Paris in the bayou, one hour after midnight. They were both naked to the waist, sweating in the humid night, their skins given accents by the white moonlight.
The Widow Paris’s husband Jacques (whose own death, three years later, would have several remarkable features) had told Marie a little about the gods of St. Domingo, but she did not care. Power came from the rituals, not from the gods.
Together Mama Zouzou and the Widow Paris crooned and stamped and keened in the swamp. They were singing in the blacksnakes, the free woman of color and the slave woman with the withered arm.
“There is more to it than just, you prosper, your enemies fail,” said Mama Zouzou.
Many of the words of the ceremonies, words she knew once, words her brother had also known, these words had fled from her memory. She told pretty Marie Laveau that the words did not matter, only the tunes and the beats, and there, singing and tapping in the blacksnakes, in the swamp, she has an odd vision. She sees the beats of the songs, the Calinda beat, the Bamboula beat, all the rhythms of equatorial Africa spreading slowly across this midnight land until the whole country shivers and swings to the beats of the old gods whose realms she had left. And even that, she understands somehow, in the swamp, even that will not be enough.
She turns to pretty Marie and sees herself through Marie’s eyes, a black-skinned old woman, her face lined, her bony arm hanging limply by her side, her eyes the eyes of one who has seen her children fight in the trough for food from the dogs. She saw herself, and she knew then for the first time the revulsion and the fear the younger woman had for her.
Then she laughed, and crouched, and picked up in her good hand a blacksnake as tall as a sapling and as thick as a ship’s rope.
“Here,” she said. “Here will be our voudon.”
She dropped the unresisting snake into a basket that yellow Marie was carrying.
And then, in the moonlight, the second sight possessed her for a final time, and she saw her brother Agasu, not the twelve-year-old boy she had last seen in the Bridgetown market so long ago, but a huge man, bald and grinning with broken teeth, his back lined with deep scars. In one hand he held a machete-knife. His right arm was barely a stump.
She reached out her own good left hand.
“Stay, stay a while,” she whispered. “I will be there. I will be with you soon.”
And Marie Paris thought the old woman was speaking to her.
CHAPTER TWELVE
America has invested her religion as well as her morality in sound income-paying securities. She has adopted the unassailable position of a nation blessed because it deserves to be blessed; and her sons, whatever other theologies they may affect or disregard, subscribe unreservedly to this national creed.
—AGNES REPPLIER, TIMES AND TENDENCIES
Shadow drove west, across Wisconsin and Minnesota and into North Dakota, where the snow-covered hills looked like huge sleeping buffalo, and he and Wednesday saw nothing but nothing and plenty of it for mile after mile. They went south, then, into South Dakota, heading for reservation country.
Wednesday had traded in the Lincoln town car, which Shadow had liked driving, for a lumbering and ancient Winnebago, which smelled non-specifically but pervasively and unmistakably of male cat, and which he didn’t enjoy driving at all.
As they passed their first signpost for Mount Rushmore, still several hundred miles away, Wednesday grunted. “Now that,” he said, “is a holy place.”
Shadow had thought Wednesday was asleep. He said, “I know it used to be sacred to the Indians.”
“It’s a holy place,” said Wednesday. “That’s the American Way—they need to give people an excuse to come and worship. These days, people can’t just go and see a mountain. Thus, Mister Gutzon Borglum’s tremendous presidential faces. Once they were carved, permission was granted, and now the people drive out in their multitudes to see something in the flesh that they’ve already seen on a thousand postcards.”
“I knew a guy once. He did weight training at the Muscle Farm, years back. He said that the Dakota Indians, the young men climb up the mountain, then form death-defying human chains off the heads, just so that the guy at the end of the chain can piss on the president’s nose.”
Wednesday guffawed. “Oh, fine! Very fine! Is any specific president the particular butt of their ire?”
Shadow shrugged. “He never said.”
Miles vanished beneath the wheels of the Winnebago. Shadow began to imagine that he was staying still while the American landscape moved past them at a steady sixty-seven miles per hour. A wintry mist fogged the edges of things.
It was midday on the second day of the drive, and they were almost there. Shadow, who had been thinking, said, “A girl vanished from Lakeside last week. When we were in San Francisco.”
“Mm?” Wednesday sounded barely interested.
“Kid named Alison McGovern. She’s not the first kid to vanish there. There have been others. They go in the wintertime.”
Wednesday furrowed his brow. “It is a tragedy, is it not? The little faces on the milk-cartons—although I can’t remember the last time I saw a kid on a milk-carton—and on the walls of freeway rest areas. Have you seen me? they ask. A deeply existential question at the best of times. Have you seen me? Pull off at the next exit.”
Shadow thought he heard a helicopter pass overhead, but the clouds were too low to see anything.
“Why did you pick Lakeside?” asked Shadow.
“I told you. It’s a nice quiet place to hide you away. You’re off the board there, under the radar.”
“Why?”
“Because that’s the way it is. Now hang a left,” said Wednesday.
Shadow turned left.
“There’s something wrong,” said Wednesday. “Fuck. Jesus fucking Christ on a bicycle. Slow down, but don’t stop.”
“Care to elaborate?”
“Trouble. Do you know any alternative routes?”
“Not really. This is my first time in South Dakota,” said Shadow. “Also I don’t know where we’re going.”
On the other side of the hill something flashed redly, smudged by the mist.
“Roadblock,” said Wednesday. He pushed his hand deeply into first one pocket of his suit then another, searching for something.
“I can stop and turn around. If we had a jeep I’d go off-road, but the Winnebago’s just going to tip if I try and drive her across that ditch.”
“We can’t turn. They’re behind us as well,” said Wednesday. “Take your speed down to ten, fifteen miles per hour.”
Shadow glanced into the mirror. There were headlights behind them, under a mile back. “Are you sure about this?” he asked.
Wednesday snorted. “Sure as eggs is eggs,” he said. “As the turkey-farmer said when he hatched his first turtle. Ah, success!” and from the bottom of a pocket he produced a small piece of white chalk.
He started to scratch with the chalk on the dashboard of the camper, making marks as if he were solving an algebraic puzzle—or perhaps, Shadow thought, as if he were a hobo, scratching long messages to the other hobos in hobo code—bad dog here, dangerous town, nice woman, soft jail in which to overnight…