They took her to the cemet'ry
In a big ol' Cadillac
They took her to the cemet'ry
But they did not bring her back.
-old song
"I have taken the liberty," said Mr. Wednesday, washing his hands in the men's room of Jack's Crocodile Bar, "of ordering food for myself, to be delivered to your table. We have much to discuss, after all."
"I don't think so," said Shadow. He dried his own hands on a paper towel and crumpled it, and dropped it into the bin.
"You need a job," said Wednesday. "People don't hire ex-cons. You folk make them uncomfortable."
"I have a job waiting. A good job."
"Would that be the job at the Muscle Farm?"
"Maybe," said Shadow.
"Nope. You don't. Robbie Burton's dead. Without him the Muscle Farm's dead too."
"You're a liar."
"Of course. And a good one. The best you will ever meet. But, I'm afraid, I'm not lying to you about this." He reached into his pocket, produced a folded newspaper, and handed it to Shadow. "Page seven," he said. "Come on back to the bar. You can read it at the table."
Shadow pushed open the door, back into the bar. The air was blue with smoke, and the Dixie Cups were on the jukebox singing "Iko Iko." Shadow smiled, slightly, in recognition of the old children's song.
The barman pointed to a table in the corner. There was a bowl of chili and a burger at one side of the table, a rare steak and a bowl of fries laid in the place across from it.
Look at my king all dressed in red,
Iko Iko all day,
I bet you five dollars he'll kill you dead,
Jockamo-feena-nay
Shadow took his seat at the table. He put the newspaper down. "This is my first meal as a free man. I'll wait until after I've eaten to read your page seven."
Shadow ate his hamburger. It was better than prison hamburgers. The chili was good but, he decided, after a couple of mouthfuls, not the best in the state.
Laura made a GREat chili. She used lean meat, dark kidney beans, carrots cut small, a bottle or so of dark beer, and freshly sliced hot peppers. She would let the chili cook for a while, then add red wine, lemon juice and a pitch of fresh dill, and, finally, measure out and add her chili powders. On more than one occasion Shadow had tried to get her to show him how she made it: he would watch everything she did, from slicing the onions and dropping them into the olive oil at the bottom of the pot. He had even written down the recipe, ingredient by ingredient, and he had once made Laura's chili for himself on a weekend when she had been out of town. It had tasted okay-it was certainly edible, but it had not been Laura's chili.
The news item on page seven was the first account of his wife's death that Shadow had read. Laura Moon, whose age was given in the article as twenty-seven, and Robbie Burton, thirty-nine, were in Robbie's car on the interstate when they swerved into the path of a thirty-two-wheeler. The truck brushed Robbie's car and sent it spinning off the side of the road.
Rescue crews pulled Robbie and Laura from the wreckage. They were both dead by the time they arrived at the hospital.
Shadow folded the newspaper up once more and slid it back across the table, toward Wednesday, who was gorging himself on a steak so bloody and so blue it might never have been introduced to a kitchen flame.
"Here. Take it back," said Shadow.
Robbie had been driving. He must have been drunk, although the newspaper account said nothing about this. Shadow found himself imagining Laura's face when she realized that Robbie was too drunk to drive. The scenario unfolded in Shadow's mind, and there was nothing he could do to stop it: Laura shouting at Robbie-shouting at him to pull off the road, then the thud of car against truck, and the steering wheel wrenching over...
...the car on the side of the road, broken glass glittering like ice and diamonds in the headlights, blood pooling in rubies on the road beside them. Two bodies being carried from the wreck, or laid neatly by the side of the road.
"Well?" asked Mr. Wednesday. He had finished his steak, devoured it like a starving man. Now he was munching the french fries, spearing them with his fork.
"You're right," said Shadow. "I don't have a job." Shadow took a quarter from his pocket, tails up. He flicked it up in the air, knocking it against his finger as it left his hand, giving it a wobble as if it were turning, caught it, slapped it down on the back of his hand.
"Call," he said.
"Why?" asked Wednesday.
"I don't want to work for anyone with worse luck than me. Call."
"Heads," said Mr. Wednesday.
"Sorry," said Shadow, without even bothering to glance at the quarter. "It was tails. I rigged the toss."
"Rigged games are the easiest ones to beat," said Wednesday, wagging a square finger at Shadow. "Take another look at it."
Shadow glanced down at it. The head was face up.
"I must have fumbled the toss," he said, puzzled.
"You do yourself a disservice," said Wednesday, and he grinned. "I'm just a lucky, lucky guy." Then he looked up. "Well I never. Mad Sweeney. Will you have a drink with us?"
"Southern Comfort and Coke, straight up," said a voice from behind Shadow.
"I'll go and talk to the barman," said Wednesday. He stood up, and began to make his way toward the bar.
"Aren't you going to ask what I'm drinking?" called Shadow.
"I already know what you're drinking," said Wednesday, and then he was standing by the bar. Patsy Cline started to sing "Walking After Midnight" on the jukebox again.
The Southern Comfort and Coke sat down beside Shadow. He had a short ginger beard. He wore a denim jacket covered with bright sew-on patches, and under the jacket a stained white T-shirt. On the T-shirt was printed:
IF YOU CAN'T EAT IT, DRINK IT, SMOKE IT, OR SNORT IT...THEN F*CK IT!
He wore a baseball cap, on which was printed:
THE ONLY WOMAN I HAVE EVER LOVED WAS ANOTHER MAN'S WIFE...MY MOTHER!
He opened a soft pack of Lucky Strikes with a dirty thumbnail, took a cigarette, offered one to Shadow. Shadow was about to take one, automatically-he did not smoke, but a cigarette makes good barter material-when he realized that he was no longer inside. He shook his head.
"You working for our man then?" asked the bearded man. He was not sober, although he was not yet drunk.
"It looks that way," said Shadow. "What do you do?"
The bearded man lit his cigarette. "I'm a leprechaun," he said, with a grin.
Shadow did not smile. "Really?" he said. "Shouldn't you be drinking Guinness?"
"Stereotypes. You have to learn to think outside the box," said the bearded man. "There's a lot more to Ireland than Guinness."
"You don't have an Irish accent."
"I've been over here too fucken long."
"So you are originally from Ireland?"
"I told you. I'm a leprechaun. We don't come from fucken Moscow."
"I guess not."
Wednesday returned to the table, three drinks held easily in his pawlike hands. "Southern Comfort and Coke for you, Mad Sweeney m'man, and a Jack Daniel's for me. And this is for you, Shadow."
"What is it?"
"Taste it."
The drink was a tawny golden color. Shadow took a sip, tasting an odd blend of sour and sweet on his tongue. He could taste the alcohol underneath, and a strange blend of flavors. It reminded him a little of prison hooch, brewed in a garbage bag from rotten fruit and bread and sugar and water, but it was sweeter, and far stranger.
"Okay," said Shadow. "I tasted it. What was it?"
"Mead," said Wednesday. "Honey wine. The drink of heroes. The drink of the gods."
Shadow took another tentative sip. Yes, he could taste the honey, he decided. That was one of the tastes. "Tastes kinda like pickle juice," he said. "Sweet pickle-juice wine."
"Tastes like a drunken diabetic's piss," aGREed Wednesday. "I hate the stuff."
"Then why did you bring it for me?" asked Shadow, reasonably.
Wednesday stared at Shadow with his mismatched eyes. One of them, Shadow decided, was a glass eye, but he could not decide which one. "I brought you mead to drink because it's traditional. And right now we need all the tradition we can get. It seals our bargain."
"We haven't made a bargain."
"Sure we have. You work for me now. You protect me. You transport me from place to place. You run errands. In an emergency, but only in an emergency, you hurt people who need to be hurt. In the unlikely event of my death, you will hold my vigil. And in return I shall make sure that your needs are adequately taken care of."
"He's hustling you," said Mad Sweeney, rubbing his bristly ginger beard. "He's a hustler."
"Damn straight I'm a hustler," said Wednesday. "That's why I need someone to look out for my best interests."
The song on the jukebox ended, and for a moment, the bar fell quiet, every conversation at a lull.
"Someone once told me that you only get those everybody-shuts-up-at-once moments at twenty past or twenty to the hour," said Shadow.
Sweeney pointed to the clock above the bar, held in the massive and indifferent jaws of a stuffed alligator head. The time was 11:20.
"There," said Shadow. "Damned if I know why that happens."
"I know why," said Wednesday. "Drink your mead."
Shadow knocked the rest of the mead back in one long gulp. "It might be better over ice," he said.
"Or it might not," said Wednesday. "It's terrible stuff."
"That it is," aGREed Mad Sweeney. "You'll excuse me for a moment, gentlemen, but I find myself in deep and urgent need of a lengthy piss." He stood up and walked away, an impossibly tall man. He had to be almost seven feet tall, decided Shadow.
A waitress wiped a cloth across the table and took their empty plates. Wednesday told her to bring the same again for everyone, although this time Shadow's mead was to be on the rocks.
"Anyway," said Wednesday, "that's what I need of you."
"Would you like to know what I want?" asked Shadow.
"Nothing could make me happier."
The waitress brought the drink. Shadow sipped his mead on the rocks. The ice did not help-if anything it sharpened the sourness, and made the taste linger in the mouth after the mead was swallowed. However, Shadow consoled himself, it did not taste particularly alcoholic. He was not ready to be drunk. Not yet.
He took a deep breath.
"Okay," said Shadow. "My life, which for three years has been a long way from being the GREatest life there has ever been, just took a distinct and sudden turn for the worse. Now there are a few things I need to do. I want to go to Laura's funeral. I want to say goodbye. I should wind up her stuff. If you still need me, I want to start at five hundred dollars a week." The figure was a stab in the dark. Wednesday's eyes revealed nothing. "If we're happy working together, in six months' time you raise it to a thousand a week."
He paused. It was the longest speech he'd made in years. "You say you may need people to be hurt. Well, I'll hurt people if they're trying to hurt you. But I don't hurt people for fun or for profit. I won't go back to prison. Once was enough."
"You won't have to," said Wednesday.
"No," said Shadow. "I won't." He finished the last of the mead. He wondered, suddenly, somewhere in the back of his head, whether the mead was responsible for loosening his tongue. But the words were coming out of him like the water spraying from a broken fire hydrant in summer, and he could not have stopped them if he had tried. "I don't like you, Mister Wednesday, or whatever your real name may be. We are not friends. I don't know how you got off that plane without me seeing you, or how you trailed me here. But I'm at a loose end right now. When we're done, I'll be gone. And if you piss me off, I'll be gone too. Until then, I'll work for you."
"Very good," said Wednesday. "Then we have a compact. And we are aGREed."
"What the hell," said Shadow. Across the room, Mad Sweeney was feeding quarters into the jukebox. Wednesday spat in his hand and extended it. Shadow shrugged. He spat in his own palm. They clasped hands. Wednesday began to squeeze. Shadow squeezed back. After a few seconds his hand began to hurt. Wednesday held the grip a little longer, and then he let go.
"Good," he said. "Good. Very good. So, one last glass of evil, vile fucking mead to seal our deal, and then we are done."
"It'll be a Southern Comfort and Coke for me," said Sweeney, lurching back from the jukebox.
The jukebox began to play the Velvet Underground's "Who Loves the Sun?" Shadow thought it a strange song to find on a jukebox. It seemed very unlikely. But then, this whole evening had become increasingly unlikely.
Shadow took the quarter he had used for the coin toss from the table, enjoying the sensation of a freshly milled coin against his fingers, producing it in his right hand between forefinger and thumb. He appeared to take it into his left hand in one smooth movement, while casually finger-palming it. He closed his left hand on the imaginary quarter. Then he took a second quarter in his right hand, between finger and thumb, and, as he pretended to drop that coin into the left hand, he let the palmed quarter fall into his right hand, striking the quarter he held there on the way. The chink confirmed the illusion that both coins were in his left hand, while they were now both held safely in his right.
"Coin tricks is it?" asked Sweeney, his chin raising, his scruffy beard bristling. "Why, if it's coin tricks we're doing, watch this."
He took an empty glass from the table. Then he reached out and took a large coin, golden and shining, from the air. He dropped it into the glass. He took another gold coin from the air and tossed it into the glass, where it clinked against the first. He took a coin from the candle flame of a candle on the wall, another from his beard, a third from Shadow's empty left hand, and dropped them, one by one, into the glass. Then he curled his fingers over the glass, and blew hard, and several more golden coins dropped into the glass from his hand. He tipped the glass of sticky coins into his jacket pocket, and then tapped the pocket to show, unmistakably, that it was empty.
"There," he said. "That's a coin trick for you."
Shadow, who had been watching closely, put his head on one side. "I need to know how you did it."
"I did it," said Sweeney, with the air of one confiding a huge secret, "with panache and style. That's how I did it." He laughed, silently, rocking on his heels, his gappy teeth bared.
"Yes," said Shadow. "That is how you did it. You've got to teach me. All the ways of doing the Miser's Dream that I've read, you'd be hiding the coins in the hand that holds the glass, and dropping them in while you produce and vanish the coin in your right hand."
"Sounds like a hell of a lot of work to me," said Mad Sweeney. "It's easier just to pick them out of the air."
Wednesday said, "Mead for you, Shadow. I'll stick with Mister Jack Daniel's, and for the freeloading Irishman...?"
"A bottled beer, something dark for preference," said Sweeney. "Freeloader, is it?" He picked up what was left of his drink, and raised it to Wednesday in a toast. "May the storm pass over us, and leave us hale and unharmed," he said, and knocked the drink back.
"A fine toast," said Wednesday. "But it won't."
Another mead was placed in front of Shadow.
"Do I have to drink this?"
"I'm afraid you do. It seals our deal. Third time's the charm, eh?"
"Shit," said Shadow. He swallowed the mead in two large gulps. The pickled-honey taste filled his mouth.
"There," said Mr. Wednesday. "You're my man, now."
"So," said Sweeney, "you want to know the trick of how it's done?"
"Yes," said Shadow. "Were you loading them in your sleeve?"
"They were never in my sleeve," said Sweeney. He chortled to himself, rocking and bouncing as if he were a lanky, bearded volcano preparing to erupt with delight at his own brilliance. "It's the simplest trick in the world. I'll fight you for it."
Shadow shook his head. "I'll pass."
"Now there's a fine thing," said Sweeney to the room. "Old Wednesday gets himself a bodyguard, and the feller's too scared to put up his fists, even."
"I won't fight you," aGREed Shadow.
Sweeney swayed and sweated. He fiddled with the peak of his baseball cap. Then he pulled one of his coins out of the air and placed it on the table. "Real gold, if you were wondering," said Sweeney. "Win or lose-and you'll lose-it's yours if you fight me. A big fellow like you-who'd'a thought you'd be a fucken coward?"
"He's already said he won't fight you," said Wednesday. "Go away, Mad Sweeney. Take your beer and leave us in peace."
Sweeney took a step closer to Wednesday. "Call me a freeloader, will you, you doomed old creature? You coldblooded, heartless old tree-hanger." His face was turning a deep, angry red.
Wednesday put out his hands, palms up, pacific. "Foolishness, Sweeney. Watch where you put your words."
Sweeney glared at him. Then he said, with the gravity of the very drunk, "You've hired a coward. What would he do if I hurt you, do you think?"
Wednesday turned to Shadow. "I've had enough of this," he said. "Deal with it."
Shadow got to his feet and looked up into Mad Sweeney's face: how tall was the man? he wondered. "You're bothering us," he said. "You're drunk. I think you ought to leave now."
A slow smile spread over Sweeney's face. "There, now," he said. He swung a huge fist at Shadow. Shadow jerked back: Sweeney's hand caught him beneath the right eye. He saw blotches of light, and felt pain.
And with that, the fight began.
Sweeney fought without style, without science, with nothing but enthusiasm for the fight itself: huge, barreling roundhouse blows that missed as often as they connected.
Shadow fought defensively, carefully, blocking Sweeney's blows or avoiding them. He became very aware of the audience around them. Tables were pulled out of the way with protesting groans, making a space for the men to spar. Shadow was aware at all times of Wednesday's eyes upon him, of Wednesday's humorless grin. It was a test, that was obvious, but what kind of a test?
In prison Shadow had learned there were two kinds of fights: don't fuck with me fights, where you made it as showy and impressive as you could, and private fights, real fights, which were fast and hard and nasty, and always over in seconds.
"Hey, Sweeney," said Shadow, breathless, "why are we fighting?"
"For the joy of it," said Sweeney, sober now, or at least, no longer visibly drunk. "For the sheer unholy fucken delight of it. Can't you feel the joy in your own veins, rising like the sap in the springtime?" His lip was bleeding. So was Shadow's knuckle.
"So how'd you do the coin production?" asked Shadow. He swayed back and twisted, took a blow on his shoulder intended for his face.
"I told you how I did it when first we spoke," grunted Sweeney. "But there's none so blind-ow! Good one!-as those who will not listen."
Shadow jabbed at Sweeney, forcing him back into a table; empty glasses and ashtrays crashed to the floor. Shadow could have finished him off then.
Shadow glanced at Wednesday, who nodded. Shadow looked down at Mad Sweeney. "Are we done?" he asked. Mad Sweeney hesitated, then nodded. Shadow let go of him, and took several steps backward. Sweeney, panting, pushed himself back up to a standing position.
"Not on yer ass!" he shouted. "It ain't over till I say it is!" Then he grinned, and threw himself forward, swinging at Shadow. He stepped onto a fallen ice cube, and his grin turned to openmouthed dismay as his feet went out from under him, and he fell backward. The back of his head hit the barroom floor with a definite thud.
Shadow put his knee into Mad Sweeney's chest. "For the second time, are we done fighting?" he asked.
"We may as well be, at that," said Sweeney, raising his head from the floor, "for the joy's gone out of me now, like the pee from a small boy in a swimming pool on a hot day." And he spat the blood from his mouth and closed his eyes and began to snore, in deep and magnificent snores.
Somebody clapped Shadow on the back. Wednesday put a bottle of beer into his hand. It tasted better than mead.
***
Shadow woke up stretched out in the back of a sedan. The morning sun was dazzling, and his head hurt. He sat up awkwardly, rubbing his eyes.
Wednesday was driving. He was humming tunelessly as he drove. He had a paper cup of coffee in the cup holder. They were heading along an interstate highway. The passenger seat was empty.
"How are you feeling, this fine morning?" asked Wednesday, without turning around.
"What happened to my car?" asked Shadow. "It was a rental."
"Mad Sweeney took it back for you. It was part of the deal the two of you cut last night. After the fight."
Conversations from the night before began to jostle uncomfortably in Shadow's head. "You got anymore of that coffee?"
The big man reached beneath the passenger seat and passed back an unopened bottle of water. "Here. You'll be dehydrated. This will help more than coffee, for the moment. We'll stop at the next gas station and get you some breakfast. You'll need to clean yourself up, too. You look like something the goat dragged in."
"Cat dragged in," said Shadow.
"Goat," said Wednesday. "Huge rank stinking goat with big teeth."
Shadow unscrewed the top of the water and drank. Something clinked heavily in his jacket pocket. He put his hand into the pocket and pulled out a coin the size of a half-dollar. It was heavy, and a deep yellow in color.
***
In the gas station Shadow bought a Clean-U-Up Kit, which contained a razor, a packet of shaving cream, a comb, and a disposable toothbrush packed with a tiny tube of toothpaste. Then he walked into the men's rest room and looked at himself in the mirror. He had a bruise under one eye-when he prodded it, experimentally, with one finger, he found it hurt deeply-and a swollen lower lip.
Shadow washed his face with the rest room's liquid soap, then he lathered his face and shaved. He cleaned his teeth. He wet his hair and combed it back. He still looked rough.
He wondered what Laura would say when she saw him, and then he remembered that Laura wouldn't say anything ever again and he saw his face, in the mirror, tremble, but only for a moment.
He went out.
"I look like shit," said Shadow.
"Of course you do," aGREed Wednesday.
Wednesday took an assortment of snack food up to the cash register and paid for that and their gas, changing his mind twice about whether he was doing it with plastic or with cash, to the irritation of the gum-chewing young lady behind the till. Shadow watched as Wednesday became increasingly flustered and apologetic. He seemed very old, suddenly. The girl gave him his cash back, and put the purchase on the card, and then gave him the card receipt and took his cash, then returned the cash and took a different card. Wednesday was obviously on the verge of tears, an old man made helpless by the implacable plastic march of the modern world.
They walked out of the warm gas station, and their breath steamed in the air.
On the road once more: browning grass meadows slipped past on each side of them. The trees were leafless and dead. Two black birds stared at them from a telegraph wire.
"Hey, Wednesday."
"What?"
"The way I saw it in there, you never paid for the gas."
"Oh?"
"The way I saw it, she wound up paying you for the privilege of having you in her gas station. You think she's figured it out yet?"
"She never will."
"So what are you? A two-bit con artist?"
Wednesday nodded. "Yes," he said. "I suppose I am. Among other things."
He swung out into the left lane to pass a truck. The sky was a bleak and uniform gray.
"It's going to snow," said Shadow.
"Yes."
"Sweeney. Did he actually show me how he did that trick with the gold coins?"
"Oh, yes."
"I can't remember."
"It'll come back. It was a long night."
Several small snowflakes brushed the windshield, melting in seconds.
"Your wife's body is on display at Wendell's Funeral Parlor at present," said Wednesday. "Then after lunch they will take her from there to the graveyard for the interment."
"How do you know?"
"I called ahead while you were in the john. You know where Wendell's Funeral Parlor is?"
Shadow nodded. The snowflakes whirled and dizzied in front of them.
"This is our exit," said Shadow. The car stole off the interstate and past the cluster of motels to the north of Eagle Point.
Three years had passed. Yes. There were more stoplights, unfamiliar storefronts. Shadow asked Wednesday to slow as they drove past the Muscle Farm. CLOSED INDEFINITELY, said the hand-lettered sign on the door, DUE TO BEREAVEMENT.
Left on Main Street. Past a new tattoo parlor and the Armed Forces Recruitment Center, then the Burger King, and, familiar and unchanged, Olsen's Drug Store, finally the yellow-brick facade of Wendell's Funeral Parlor. A neon sign in the front window said HOUSE OF REST. Blank tombstones stood unchristened and uncarved in the window beneath the sign.
Wednesday pulled up in the parking lot. "Do you want me to come in?" he asked.
"Not particularly."
"Good." The grin FLASHed, without humor. "There's business I can be getting on with while you say your goodbyes. I'll get rooms for us at the Motel America. Meet me there when you're done."
Shadow got out of the car and watched it pull away. Then he walked in. The dimly lit corridor smelled of flowers and of furniture polish, with just the slightest tang of formaldehyde. At the far end was the Chapel of Rest.
Shadow realized that he was palming the gold coin, moving it compulsively from a back palm to a front palm to a Downs palm, over and over. The weight was reassuring in his hand.
His wife's name was on a sheet of paper beside the door at the far end of the corridor. He walked into the Chapel of Rest. Shadow knew most of the people in the room: Laura's workmates, several of her friends.
They all recognized him. He could see it in their faces. There were no smiles, though, no hellos.
At the end of the room was a small dais, and, on it, a cream-colored casket with several displays of flowers arranged about it: scarlets and yellows and whites and deep, bloody purples. He took a step forward. He could see Laura's body from where he was standing. He did not want to walk forward; he did not dare to walk away.
A man in a dark suit-Shadow guessed he worked at the funeral home-said, "Sir? Would you like to sign the condolence and remembrance book?" and pointed him to a leather-bound book, open on a small lectern.
He wrote SHADOW and the date in his precise handwriting, then, slowly, he wrote (PUPPY) beside it, putting off walking toward the end of the room where the people were, and the casket, and the thing in the cream casket that was no longer Laura.
A small woman walked in through the door, and hesitated. Her hair was a coppery red, and her clothes were expensive and very black. Widow's weeds, thought Shadow, who knew her well. Audrey Burton, Robbie's wife.
Audrey was holding a sprig of violets, wrapped at the base with silver foil. It was the kind of thing a child would make in June, thought Shadow. But violets were out of season.
She walked across the room, to Laura's casket. Shadow followed her.
Laura lay with her eyes closed, and her arms folded across her chest. She wore a conservative blue suit he did not recognize. Her long brown hair was out of her eyes. It was his Laura and it was not: her repose, he realized, was what was unnatural. Laura was always such a restless sleeper.
Audrey placed her sprig of summer violets on Laura's chest. Then she worked her mouth for a moment and spat, hard, onto Laura's dead face.
The spit caught Laura on the cheek, and began to drip down toward her ear.
Audrey was already walking toward the door. Shadow hurried after her.
"Audrey?" he said.
"Shadow? Did you escape? Or did they let you out?"
He wondered if she were taking tranquilizers. Her voice was distant and detached.
"Let me out yesterday. I'm a free man," said Shadow. "What the hell was that all about?"
She stopped in the dark corridor. "The violets? They were always her favorite flower. When we were girls we used to pick them together."
"Not the violets."
"Oh, that," she said. She wiped a speck of something invisible from the corner of her mouth. "Well, I would have thought that was obvious."
"Not to me, Audrey."
"They didn't tell you?" Her voice was calm, emotionless. "Your wife died with my husband's cock in her mouth, Shadow."
He went back in to the funeral home. Someone had already wiped away the spit.
***
After lunch-Shadow ate at the Burger King-was the burial. Laura's cream-colored coffin was interred in the small nondenominational cemetery on the edge of town: un-fenced, a hilly woodland meadow filled with black granite and white marble headstones.
He rode to the cemetery in the Wendell's hearse, with Laura's mother. Mrs. McCabe seemed to feel that Laura's death was Shadow's fault. "If you'd been here," she said, "this would never have happened. I don't know why she married you. I told her. Time and again, I told her. But they don't listen to their mothers, do they?" She stopped, looked more closely at Shadow's face. "Have you been fighting?"
"Yes," he said.
"Barbarian," she said, then she set her mouth, raised her head so her chins quivered, and stared straight ahead of her.
To Shadow's surprise Audrey Burton was also at the funeral, standing toward the back. The short service ended, the casket was lowered into the cold ground. The people went away.
Shadow did not leave. He stood there with his hands in his pockets, shivering, staring at the hole in the ground.
Above him the sky was iron gray, featureless and flat as a mirror. It continued to snow, erratically, in ghostlike tumbling flakes.
There was something he wanted to say to Laura, and he was prepared to wait until he knew what it was. The world slowly began to lose light and color. Shadow's feet were going numb, while his hands and face hurt from the cold. He burrowed his hands into his pockets for warmth, and his fingers closed about the gold coin.
He walked over to the grave.
"This is for you," he said.
Several shovels of earth had been emptied onto the casket, but the hole was far from full. He threw the gold coin into the grave with Laura, then he pushed more earth into the hole, to hide the coin from acquisitive grave diggers. He brushed the earth from his hands and said, "Good night, Laura." Then he said, "I'm sorry." He turned his face toward the lights of the town, and began to walk back into Eagle Point.
His motel was a good two miles away, but after spending three years in prison he was relishing the idea that he could simply walk and walk, forever if need be. He could keep walking north, and wind up in Alaska, or head south, to Mexico and beyond. He could walk to Patagonia, or to Tierra del Fuego.
A car drew up beside him. The window hummed down.
"You want a lift, Shadow?" asked Audrey Burton.
"No," he said. "And not from you."
He continued to walk. Audrey drove beside him at three miles an hour. Snowflakes danced in the beams of her headlights.
"I thought she was my best friend," said Audrey. "We'd talk every day. When Robbie and I had a fight, she'd be the first one to know-we'd go down to Chi-Chi's for margaritas and to talk about what scumpots men can be. And all the time she was fucking him behind my back."
"Please go away, Audrey."
"I just want you to know I had good reason for what I did."
He said nothing.
"Hey!" she shouted. "Hey! I'm talking to you!"
Shadow turned. "Do you want me to tell you that you were right when you spit in Laura's face? Do you want me to say it didn't hurt? Or that what you told me made me hate her more than I miss her? It's not going to happen, Audrey."
She drove beside him for another minute, not saying anything. Then she said, "So, how was prison, Shadow?"
"It was fine," said Shadow. "You would have felt right at home."
She put her foot down on the gas then, making the engine roar, and drove on and away.
With the headlights gone, the world was dark. Twilight faded into night. Shadow kept expecting the act of walking to warm him, to spread warmth through his icy hands and feet. It didn't happen.
Back in prison, Low Key Lyesmith had once referred to the little prison cemetery out behind the infirmary as the Bone Orchard, and the image had taken root in Shadow's mind. That night he had dreamed of an orchard under the moonlight, of skeletal white-trees, their branches ending in bony hands, their roots going deep down into the graves. There was fruit that GREw upon the trees in the bone orchard, in his dream, and there was something very disturbing about the fruit in the dream, but on waking he could no longer remember what strange fruit grew oh the trees, nor why he found it so repellent.
Cars passed him. Shadow wished that there was a sidewalk. He tripped on something that he could not see in the dark and sprawled into the ditch on the side of the road, his right hand sinking into several inches of cold mud. He climbed to his feet and wiped his hands on the leg of his pants. He stood there, awkwardly. He had only enough time to observe that there was someone beside him before something wet was forced over his nose and mouth, and he tasted harsh, chemical fumes.
This time the ditch seemed warm and comforting.
***
Shadow's temples felt as if they had been reattached to the rest of his skull with roofing nails. His hands were bound behind his back with what felt like some kind of straps. He was in a car, sitting on leather upholstery. For a moment he wondered if there was something wrong with his depth perception and then he understood that, no, the other seat really was that far away.
There were people sitting beside him, but he could not turn to look at them.
The fat young man at the other end of the stretch limo took a can of diet Coke from the cocktail bar and popped it open. He wore a long black coat, made of some silky material, and he appeared barely out of his teens: a spattering of acne glistened on one cheek. He smiled when he saw that Shadow was awake.
"Hello, Shadow," he said. "Don't fuck with me."
"Okay," said Shadow. "I won't. Can you drop me off at the Motel America, up by the interstate?"
"Hit him," said the young man to the person on Shadow's left. A punch was delivered to Shadow's solar plexus, knocking the breath from him, doubling him over. He straightened up, slowly.
"I said don't fuck with me. That was fucking with me. Keep your answers short and to the point or I'll fucking kill you. Or maybe I won't kill you. Maybe I'll have the children break every bone in your fucking body. There are two hundred and six of them. So don't fuck with me."
"Got it," said Shadow.
The ceiling lights in the limo changed color from violet to blue, then to GREen and to yellow.
"You're working for Wednesday," said the young man.
"Yes," said Shadow.
"What the fuck is he after? I mean, what's he doing here? He must have a plan. What's the game plan?"
"I started working for Mister Wednesday this morning," said Shadow. "I'm an errand boy."
"You're saying you don't know?"
"I'm saying I don't know,"
The boy opened his jacket and took out a silver cigarette case from an inside pocket. He opened it, and offered a cigarette to Shadow. "Smoke?"
Shadow thought about asking for his hands to be untied, out decided against it. "No, thank you," he said.
The cigarette appeared to have been hand-rolled, and when the boy lit it, with a matte black Zippo lighter, it smelled a little like burning electrical parts.
The boy inhaled deeply, then held his breath. He let the smoke trickle out from his mouth, pulled it back into his nostrils. Shadow suspected that he had practiced that in front of a mirror for a while before doing it in public. "If you've lied to me," said the boy, as if from a long way away, "I'll fucking kill you. You know that."
"So you said."
The boy took another long drag on his cigarette. "You say you're staying at the Motel America?" He tapped on the driver's window, behind him. The glass window lowered. "Hey. Motel America, up by the interstate. We need to drop off our guest."
The driver nodded, and the glass rose up again.
The glinting fiber-optic lights inside the limo continued to change, cycling through their set of dim colors. It seemed to Shadow that the boy's eyes were glinting too, the GREen of an antique computer monitor.
"You tell Wednesday this, man. You tell him he's history. He's forgotten. He's old. Tell him that we are the future and we don't give a fuck about him or anyone like him. He has been consigned to the Dumpster of history while people like me ride our limos down the superhighway of tomorrow."
"I'll tell him," said Shadow. He was beginning to feel lightheaded. He hoped that he was not going to be sick.
"Tell him that we have fucking reprogrammed reality. Tell him that language is a virus and that religion is an operating system and that prayers are just so much fucking spam. Tell him that or I'll fucking kill you," said the young man mildly, from the smoke.
"Got it," said Shadow. "You can let me out here. I can walk the rest of the way."
The young man nodded. "Good talking to you," he said. The smoke had mellowed him. "You should know that if we do fucking kill you, then we'll just delete you. You got that? One click and you're overwritten with random ones and zeros. Undelete is not an option." He tapped on the window behind him. "He's getting off here," he said. Then he turned back to Shadow, pointed to his cigarette. "Synthetic toad skins," he said. "You know they can synthesize bufotenin now?"
The car stopped, and the door was opened. Shadow climbed out awkwardly. His bonds were cut. Shadow turned around. The inside of the car had become one writhing cloud of smoke in which two lights glinted, now copper-colored, like the beautiful eyes of a toad. "It's all about the dominant fucking paradigm, Shadow. Nothing else is important. And hey, sorry to hear about your old lady."
The door closed, and the stretch limo drove off, quietly. Shadow was a couple of hundred yards away from his motel, and he walked there, breathing the cold air, past red and yellow and blue lights advertising every kind of fast food a man could imagine, as long as it was a hamburger; and he reached the Motel America without incident.
