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