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.”
Shadow did not know what to say. He said, “So where are you calling from?”
“None of your goddamn business.”
“Are you drunk?”
“Not yet. I just keep thinking about Thor. You never knew him. Big guy, like you. Good hearted. Not bright, but he’d give you the goddamned shirt off his back if you asked him. And he killed himself. He put a gun in his mouth and blew his head off in Philadelphia in 1932. What kind of a way is that for a god to die?”
“I’m sorry.”
“You don’t give two fucking cents, son. He was a whole lot like you. Big and dumb.” Wednesday stopped talking. He coughed.
“What’s wrong?” said Shadow, for the second time.
“They got in touch.”
“Who did?”
“The opposition.”
“And?”
“They want to discuss a truce. Peace talks. Live and let fucking live.”