them.”
“Are they all like this?” asked Shadow.
“Pretty much,” said the woman. “All the ones round here. And don’t you go asking about all the money from casinos, because who in their right mind wants to come all the way out here to go to a casino? We don’t see none of that money out here.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be.” She changed gears with a crash and a groan. “You know the white population all round here is falling? You go out there, you find ghost towns. How you going to keep them down on the farm, after they seen the world on their television screens? And it’s not worth anyone’s while to farm the Badlands anyhow. They took our lands, they settled here, now they’re leaving. They go south. They go west. Maybe if we wait for enough of them to move to New York and Miami and L.A. we can take the whole of the middle back without a fight.”
“Good luck,” said Shadow.
They found Harry Bluejay in the rec hall, at the pool table, doing trick shots to impress a group of several girls. He had a blue jay tattooed on the back of his right hand, and multiple piercings in his right ear.
“Ho hoka, Harry Bluejay,” said John Chapman.
“Fuck off, you crazy barefoot white ghost,” said Harry Bluejay, conversationally. “You give me the creeps.”
There were older men at the far end of the room, some of them playing cards, some of them talking. There were other men, younger men of about Harry Bluejay’s age, waiting for their turn at the pool table. It was a full-sized pool table, and a rip in the green baize on one side had been repaired with silver-gray duct tape.
“I got a message from your uncle,” said Chapman, unfazed. “He says you’re to give these two your car.”
There must have been thirty, maybe even forty people in that hall, and now they were every one of them looking intently at their playing cards, or their feet, or their fingernails, and pretending as hard as they could not to be listening.
“He’s not my uncle.”
A cigarette-smoke fug hung over the hall like a cirrus cloud. Chapman smiled widely, displaying the worst set of teeth that Shadow had seen in a human mouth. “You want to tell your uncle that? He says you’re the only reason he stays among the Lakota.”
“Whiskey Jack says a lot of things,” said Harry Bluejay, petulantly. But he did not say Whiskey Jack either. It sounded almost the same, to Shadow’s ear, but not quite: Wisakedjak, he thought. That’s what they’re saying. Not Whiskey Jack at all.
Shadow said, “Yeah. And one of the things he said was that we’re trading our Winnebago for your Buick.”
“I don’t see a Winnebago.”
“He’ll bring you the Winnebago,” said John Chapman. “You know he will.”
Harry Bluejay attempted a trick shot and missed. His hand was not steady enough. “I’m not the old fox’s nephew,” said Harry Bluejay. “I wish he wouldn’t say that to people.”
“Better a live fox than a dead wolf,” said Wednesday, in a voice so deep it was almost a growl. “Now, will you sell us your car?”
Harry Bluejay shivered, visibly and violently. “Sure,” he said. “Sure. I was only kidding. I kid a lot, me.” He put down the pool cue on the pool table, and took a thick jacket, pulling it out from a cluster of similar jackets hanging from pegs by the door. “Let me get my shit out of the car first,” he said.
He kept darting glances at Wednesday, as if he were concerned that the older man was about to explode.
Harry Bluejay’s car was parked a hundred yards away. As they walked toward it, they passed a small whitewashed Catholic church, and a fair-haired man in a priest’s collar who stared at them from the doorway as they went past. He was sucking on a cigarette as if he did not enjoy smoking it.
“Good day to you, father!” called Johnny Chapman, but the man in the dog-collar made no reply; he crushed his cigarette under his heel, picked up the butt, and dropped it into the bin beside the door, and went inside.
“I told you not to give him those pamphlets last time you were here,” said Harry Bluejay.
“It is he that is in error, not me,” said Chapman. “If he’d jes read the Swedenborg I gave him he’d know that. It’d bring light into his life.”
Harry Bluejay’s car was missing its side mirrors, and its tires were the baldest