“Maybe you should get Hinzelmann to write your editorial for you. Let’s see. On the Rezoning of the Land by the Old Cemetery, it so happens that in the winter of ought three my grampaw shot a stag down by the old cemetery by the lake. He was out of bullets, so he used a cherry-stone from the lunch my grandmama had packed for him. Creased the skull of the stag and it shot off like a bat out of heck. Two years later he was down that way and he sees this mighty buck with a spreading cherry tree growing between its antlers. Well, he shot it, and grandmama made cherry pies enough that they were still eating them come the next Fourth of July…”
And they both laughed, then.
INTERLUDE 3
JACKSONVILLE, FLORIDA. 2:00 A.M.
“The sign says ‘help wanted.’”
“We’re always hiring.”
“I can only work the night shift. Is that going to be a problem?”
“Shouldn’t be. I can get you an application to fill out. You ever worked in a gas station before?”
“No. I figure, how hard can it be?”
“Well, it ain’t rocket science, that’s for sure.”
“I’m new here. I don’t have a telephone. Waiting for them to put it in.”
“I surely know that one. I surely do. They just make you wait because they can. You know, ma’am, you don’t mind my saying this, but you do not look well.”
“I know. It’s a medical condition. Looks worse than it is. Nothing life-threatening.”
“Okay. You leave that application with me. We are really shorthanded on the late shift right now. Round here we call it the zombie shift. You do it too long, that’s how you feel. Well now…is that Larna?”
“Laura.”
“Laura. Okay. Well, I hope you don’t mind dealing with weirdos. Because they come out at night.”
“I’m sure they do. I can cope.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Hey, old friend.
What do you say, old friend?
Make it okay, old friend,
Give an old friendship a break.
Why so grim? We’re going on forever.
You, me, him—too many lives are at stake…
—STEPHEN SONDHEIM, “OLD FRIENDS”
It was Saturday morning. Shadow answered the door.
Marguerite Olsen was there. She did not come in, just stood there in the sunlight, looking serious. “Mister Ainsel…?”
“Mike, please,” said Shadow.
“Mike, yes. Would you like to come over for dinner tonight? About six-ish? It won’t be anything exciting, just spaghetti and meatballs.”
“Not a problem. I like spaghetti and meatballs.”
“Obviously, if you have any other plans…”
“I have no other plans.”
“Six o’clock.”
“Should I bring flowers?”
“If you must. But this is a social gesture. Not a romantic one.” She closed the door behind her.
He showered. He went for a short walk, down to the bridge and back. The sun was up, a tarnished quarter in the sky, and he was sweating in his coat by the time he got home. It had to be above freezing. He drove the 4Runner down to Dave’s Finest Foods and bought a bottle of wine. It was a twenty-dollar bottle, which seemed to Shadow like some kind of guarantee of quality. He didn’t know wines, but he figured that for twenty bucks it ought to taste good. He bought a Californian Cabernet, because Shadow had once seen a bumper sticker, back when he was younger and people still had bumper stickers on their cars, which said LIFE IS A CABERNET and it had made him laugh.
He bought a plant in a pot as a gift. Green leaves, no flowers. Nothing remotely romantic about that.
He bought a carton of milk, which he would never drink, and a selection of fruit, which he would never eat.
Then he drove over to Mabel’s and bought a single lunchtime pasty. Mabel’s face lit up when she saw him. “Did Hinzelmann catch up with you?”
“I didn’t know he was looking for me.”
“Yup. Wants to take you ice-fishing. And Chad Mulligan wanted to know if I’d seen you around. His cousin’s here from out of state. She’s a widow. His second cousin, what we used to call kissing cousins. Such a sweetheart. You’ll love her.” And she dropped the pasty into a brown paper bag, twisted the top of the bag over to keep the pasty warm.
Shadow drove the long way home, eating one-handed, the steaming pasty’s pastry-crumbs tumbling onto his jeans and onto the floor of the 4Runner. He passed the library on the south shore of the lake. It was a black and white town in the ice and the snow. Spring seemed unimaginably far away: the klunker would always sit on the ice, with the ice-fishing shelters and the pickup trucks and the snowmobile tracks.
He reached his apartment, parked, walked up the drive, up the wooden steps to his apartment. The goldfinches and nuthatches on the bird feeder hardly gave him a glance. He went inside. He watered the plant, wondered whether or not to put the wine into the refrigerator.
There was a lot of time to kill until six.
Shadow wished he could comfortably watch television once more. He wanted to be entertained, not to have to think, just to sit and let the sounds and the light wash over him. Do you want to see Lucy’s tits? something with a Lucy voice whispered in his memory, and he shook his head, although there was no one there to see him.
He was nervous, he realized. This would be his first real social interaction with other people—normal people, not people in jail, not gods or culture heroes or dreams—since he was first arrested, over three years ago. He would have to make conversation, as Mike Ainsel.
He checked his watch. It was two-thirty. Marguerite Olsen had told him to be there at six. Did she mean six exactly? Should he be there a little early? A little late? He decided, eventually, to walk next door at five past six.
Shadow’s telephone rang.
“Yeah?” he said.
“That’s no way to answer the phone,” growled Wednesday.
“When I get my telephone connected I’ll answer it politely,” said Shadow. “Can I help you?”
“I don’t know,” said Wednesday. There was a pause. Then he said, “Organizing gods is like herding cats into straight lines. They don’t take naturally to it.” There was a deadness, and an exhaustion, in Wednesday’s voice that Shadow had never heard before.
“What’s wrong?”
“It’s hard. It’s too fucking hard. I don’t know if this is going to work. We might as well cut our throats. Just cut our own throats.”
“You mustn’t talk like that.”
“Yeah. Right.”
“Well, if you do cut your throat,” said Shadow, trying to jolly Wednesday out of his darkness, “maybe it wouldn’t even hurt.”
“It would hurt. Even for my kind, pain still hurts. If you move and act in the material world, then the material world acts on you. Pain hurts, just as greed intoxicates and lust burns. We may not die easy and we sure as hell don’t die well, but we can die. If we’re still loved and remembered, something else a whole lot like us comes along and takes our place and the whole damn thing starts all over again. And if we’re forgotten, we’re done.”