As the Hindu gods are “immortal” only in a very particular sense—for they are born and they die—they experience most of the great human dilemmas and often seem to differ from mortals in a few trivial details…and from demons even less. Yet they are regarded by the Hindus as a class of beings by definition totally different from any other; they are symbols in a way that no human being, however “archetypal” his life story, can ever be. They are actors playing parts that are real only for us; they are the masks behind which we see our own faces.—WENDY DONIGER O’FLAHERTY, INTRODUCTION,
HINDU MYTHS (PENGUIN BOOKS, 1975)
Shadow had been walking south, or what he hoped was more or less south, for several hours, heading along a narrow and unmarked road through the woods somewhere in, he imagined, southern Wisconsin. Several jeeps came down the road toward him at one point, headlights blazing, and he ducked well back into the trees until they had passed. The early morning mist hung at waist level. The cars were black.
When, thirty minutes later, he heard the noise of distant helicopters coming from the west, he struck out away from the timber trail and into the woods. There were two helicopters, and he lay, crouched in a hollow beneath a fallen tree, and listened to them pass over. As they moved away, he looked out and looked up, for one hasty glance at the gray winter sky. He was satisfied to observe that the helicopters were painted a matte black. He waited beneath the tree until the noise of the helicopters was completely gone.
Under the trees the snow was little more than a dusting, which crunched underfoot. He was deeply grateful for the chemical hand- and feetwarmers, which kept his extremities from freezing. Beyond that, he was numb: heart-numb, mind-numb, soul-numb. And the numbness, he realized, went a long way down, and a long way back.
So what do I want? he asked himself. He couldn’t answer, so he just kept on walking, a step at a time, on and on through the woods. Trees looked familiar, moments of landscape were perfectly déjà-vued. Could he be walking in circles? Maybe he would just walk and walk and walk until the warmers and the candy bars ran out and then sit down and never get up again.
He reached a large stream, of the kind the locals called a creek and pronounced crick, and decided to follow it. Streams led to rivers, rivers all led to the Mississippi, and if he kept
walking, or stole a boat or built a raft, eventually he’d get to New Orleans, where it was warm, an idea which seemed both comforting and unlikely.
There were no more helicopters. He had the feeling that the ones that had passed overhead had been cleaning up the mess at the freight train siding, not hunting for him, otherwise they would have returned; there would have been tracker dogs and sirens and the whole
paraphernalia of pursuit. Instead, there was nothing.
What did he want? Not to get caught. Not to get blamed for the deaths of the men on the train. “It wasn’t me,” he heard himself saying, “it was my dead wife.” He could imagine the expressions on the faces of the law officers. Then people could argue about whether he was crazy or not while he went to the chair…
He wondered whether Wisconsin had the death penalty. He wondered whether that would
matter. He wanted to understand what was going on—and to find out how it was all going to end. And finally, producing a half-rueful grin, he realized that most of all he wanted everything to be normal. He wanted never to have gone to prison, for Laura to still be alive, for none of this ever to have happened.
“I’m afraid that’s not exactly an option, m’boy,” he thought to himself, in Wednesday’s gruff voice, and he nodded agreement. Not an option. You burned your bridges. So keep walking. Do your own time…
A distant woodpecker drummed against a rotten log.
Shadow became aware of eyes on him: a handful of red cardinals stared at him from a skeletal elder bush, then returned to pecking at the clusters of black elderberries. They looked like the illustrations in the Songbirds of North America calendar. He heard the birds’ video-arcade trills and zaps and whoops follow him along the side of the creek. Eventually, they faded away.
The dead fawn lay in a glade in the shadow of a hill, and a black bird the size of a small dog was picking at its side with a large, wicked beak, rending and tearing gobbets of red meat from the corpse. Its eyes were gone, but its head was untouched, and white fawn-spots were visible on its rump. Shadow wondered how it had died.
The black bird cocked its head onto one side, and then said, in a voice like stones being struck,
“You shadow man.”
“I’m Shadow,” said Shadow. The bird hopped up onto the fawn’s rump, raised its head, ruffled its crown and neck feathers. It was enormous and its eyes were black beads. There was
something intimidating about a bird that size, this close.
“Says he will see you in Kay-ro,” tokked the raven. Shadow wondered which of Odin’s ravens this was: Huginn or Muninn: Memory or Thought.
“Kay-ro?” he asked.
“In Egypt.”
“How am I going to go to Egypt?”
“Follow Mississippi. Go south. Find Jackal.”
“Look,” said Shadow, “I don’t want to seem like I’m…Jesus, look…” He paused. Regrouped. He was cold, standing in a wood, talking to a big black bird who was currently brunching on Bambi.
“Okay. What I’m trying to say is, I don’t want mysteries.”
“Mysteries,” agreed the bird, helpfully.
“What I want is explanations. Jackal in Kay-ro. This does not help me. It’s a line from a bad spy thriller.”
“Jackal. Friend. Tok. Kay-ro.”
“So you said. I’d like a little more information than that.”
The bird half-turned, and pulled another bloody strip of raw venison from the fawn’s ribs. Then it flew off into the trees, the red strip dangling from its beak like a long, bloody worm.
“Hey! Can you at least get me back to a real road?” called Shadow.
The raven flew up and away. Shadow looked at the corpse of the baby deer. He decided that if he were a real woodsman, he would slice off a steak and grill it over a wood fire. Instead, he sat on a fallen tree and ate a Snickers bar and knew that he really wasn’t a real woodsman.
The raven cawed from the edge of the clearing.
“You want me to follow you?” asked Shadow. “Or has Timmy fallen down another well?” The bird cawed again, impatiently. Shadow started walking toward it. It waited until he was close, then flapped heavily into another tree, heading somewhat to the left of the way Shadow had originally been going.
“Hey,” said Shadow. “Huginn or Muninn, or whoever you are.”
The bird turned, head tipped, suspiciously, on one side, and it stared at him with bright eyes.
“Say ‘Nevermore,’” said Shadow.
“Fuck you,” said the raven. It said nothing else as they went through the woodland together, the raven in the lead and flying from tree to tree, the man stomping heavily through the undergrowth trying to catch up.
The sky was a uniform gray. It was almost midday.
In half an hour they reached a blacktop road on the edge of a town, and the raven flew back into the wood. Shadow observed a Culver’s Frozen Custard ButterBurgers sign, and, next to it, a gas station. He went into the Culver’s, which was empty of customers. There was a keen young man with a shaven head behind the cash register. Shadow ordered two ButterBurgers and french fries. Then he went into the restroom to clean up. He looked a real mess. He did an inventory of the contents of his pockets: he had a few coins, including the silver Liberty dollar, a disposable toothbrush and toothpaste, three Snickers bars, five chemical heater pads, a wallet (with nothing more in it than his driver’s license and a credit card—he wondered how much longer the credit card had to live), and in the coat’s inside pocket, a thousand dollars in fifties and twenties, his take from yesterday’s bank job. He washed his face and hands in hot water, slicked down his dark hair, then went back into the restaurant and ate his burgers and fries, and drank his coffee.
He went back to the counter. “You want frozen custard?” asked the keen young man.
“No. No thanks. Is there anywhere around here I could rent a car? My car died, back down the road a way.”
The young man scratched his head-stubble. “Not around here, mister. If your car died you could call Triple-A. Or talk to the gas station next door about a tow.”
“A fine idea,” said Shadow. “Thanks.”
He walked across the melting snow, from the Culver’s parking lot to the gas station. He bought candy bars and beef jerky sticks and more chemical hand-and feetwarmers.
“Anywhere hereabouts I could rent a car?” he asked the woman behind the cash register. She was immensely plump, and bespectacled, and was delighted to have someone to talk to.
“Let me think,” she said. “We’re kind of out of the way here. They do that kind of thing over in Madison. Where you going?”
“Kay-ro,” he said. “Wherever that is.”
“I know where that is,” she said. “Hand me that map from that rack over there.” Shadow passed her a plastic-coated map of Illinois. She unfolded it, then pointed in triumph to the bottommost corner of the state. “There it is.”
“Cairo?”
“That’s how they pronounce the one in Egypt. The one in Little Egypt, they call that one Kayro.
They got a Thebes down there, all sorts. My sister-in-law comes from Thebes. I asked her about the one in Egypt, she looked at me as if I had a screw loose.” The woman chuckled like a drain.
“Any pyramids?” The city was five hundred miles away, almost directly south.
“Not that they ever told me. They call it Little Egypt because back, oh, mebbe a hundred,
hundred and fifty years back, there was a famine all over. Crops failed. But they didn’t fail down there. So everyone went there to buy food. Like in the Bible. Joseph and the Technicolor
Dreamcoat. Off we go to Egypt, bad-a-boom.”
“So if you were me, and you needed to get there, how would you go?” asked Shadow.
“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.”
“Thank you. Do you want something?”
“Well, I wanted to see if you were okay. I mean, if you were dead or something I would have called the cops. But the windows were kind of fogged up so I thought, well, he’s probably still alive.”
“You live around here?”
“Nope. Hitchhiking down from Madison.”
“That’s not safe.”
“I’ve done it five times a year for three years now. I’m still alive. Where are you headed?”
“I’ve done it five times a year for three years now. I’m still alive. Where are you headed?”