Chapter 9 (p.3)
“Who's Mike Ainsel?” he asked. That was the name on the ticket.
“You are. Happy Christmas.”
“And where's Lakeside?”
“Your happy home in the months to come. And now, because good things come in threes…” He took a small, gift-wrapped package from his pocket, pushed it across the table. It sat beside the ketchup bottle with the black smears of dried ketchup on the top. Shadow made no move to take it.
“Well?”
Reluctantly, Shadow tore open the red wrapping paper, to reveal a fawn-colored calfskin wallet, shiny from use. It was obviously somebody's wallet. Inside the wallet was a driver's license with Shadow's photograph on it, in the name of Michael Ainsel, with a Milwaukee address, a MasterCard for M. Ainsel, and twenty crisp fifty-dollar bills. Shadow closed the wallet, put it into an inside pocket.
“Thanks,” he said.
“Think of it as a Christmas bonus. Now, let me walk you down to the Greyhound. I shall wave to you as you ride the gray dog north.”
They walked outside the restaurant. Shadow found it hard to believe how much colder it had gotten in the last few hours. It felt too cold to snow, now. Aggressively cold. This was a bad winter.
“Hey. Wednesday. Both of the scams you were telling me about—the violin scam and the bishop one, the bishop and the cop—” He hesitated, trying to form his thought, to bring it into focus.
“What of them?”
Then he had it. “They're both two-man scams. One guy on each side. Did you used to have a partner?” Shadow's breath came in clouds. He promised himself that when he got to Lakeside he would spend some of his Christmas bonus on the warmest, thickest winter coat that money could buy.
“Yes,” said Wednesday. “Yes. I had a partner. A junior partner. But, alas, those days are gone. There's the gas station, and there, unless my eye deceives me, is the bus.” It was already signaling its turn into the parking lot. “Your address is on the key,” said Wednesday. “If anyone asks, I am your uncle, and I shall be rejoicing in the unlikely name of Emerson Borson. Settle in, in Lakeside, nephew Ainsel. I'll come for you within the week. We shall be traveling together. Visiting the people I have to visit. In the meantime, keep your head down and stay out of trouble.”
“My car—?” said Shadow.
“I'll take good care of it. Have a good time in Lakeside,” said Wednesday. He thrust out his hand, and Shadow shook it. Wednesday's hand was colder than a corpse's.
“Jesus,” said Shadow. “You're cold.”
“Then the sooner I am making the two-backed beast with the little hotsy-totsy lass from the restaurant in a back room of the Motel 6, the better.” And he reached out his other hand and squeezed Shadow's shoulder.
Shadow experienced a dizzying moment of double vision: he saw the grizzled man facing him, squeezing his shoulder, but he saw something else: so many winters, hundreds and hundreds of winters, and a gray man in a broad-brimmed hat walking from settlement to settlement, leaning on his staff, staring in through windows at the firelight, at a joy and a burning life he would never be able to touch, never even be able to feel…
“Go,” said Wednesday, his voice a reassuring growl. “All is well, and all is well, and all shall be well.”
Shadow showed his ticket to the driver. “Hell of a day to be traveling,” she said. And then she added, with a certain grim satisfaction, “Merry Christmas.”
The bus was almost empty. “When will we get in to Lakeside?” asked Shadow.
“Two hours. Maybe a bit more,” said the driver. “They say there's a cold snap coming.” She thumbed a switch and the doors closed with a hiss and a thump.
Shadow walked halfway down the bus, put the seat back as far as it would go, and he started to think. The motion of the bus and the warmth combined to lull him, and before he was aware that he was becoming sleepy, he was asleep.
In the earth, and under the earth. The marks on the wall were the red of wet clay: hand prints, finger-marks and, here and there, crude representations of animals and people and birds.
The fire still burned and the buffalo man still sat on the other side of the fire, staring at Shadow with huge eyes, eyes like pools of dark mud. The buffalo lips, fringed with matted brown hair, did not move as the buffalo voice said, “Well, Shadow? Do you believe yet?”
“I don't know,” said Shadow. His mouth had not moved either, he observed. Whatever words were passing between the two of them were not being spoken, not in any way that Shadow understood speech. “Are you real?”
“Believe,” said the buffalo man.
“Are you…” Shadow hesitated, and then he asked, “Are you a god too?”
The buffalo man reached one hand into the flames of the fire and he pulled out a burning brand. He held the brand in the middle. Blue and yellow flames licked his red hand, but they did not burn.
“This is not a land for gods,” said the buffalo man. But it was not the buffalo man talking any more, Shadow knew, in his dream: it was the fire speaking, the crackling and the burning of the flame itself that spoke to Shadow in the dark place under the earth.
“This land was brought up from the depths of the ocean by a diver,” said the fire. “It was spun from its own substance by a spider. It was shat by a raven. It is the body of a fallen father, whose bones are mountains, whose eyes are lakes.
“This is a land of dreams and fire,” said the flame.
The buffalo man put the brand back on the fire.
“Why are you telling me this stuff?” said Shadow. “I'm not important. I'm not anything. I was an okay physical trainer, a really lousy smalltime crook and maybe not so good a husband as I thought I was…” He trailed off.
“How do I help Laura?” Shadow asked the buffalo man. “She wants to be alive again. I said I'd help her. I owe her that.”
The buffalo man said nothing. He pointed up with his soot-blackened palm facing Shadow, his index finger pointing toward the roof of the cave. Shadow's eyes followed. There was a thin, wintry light, coming from a tiny opening far above.
“Up there?” asked Shadow, wishing that one of his questions would be answered. “I'm supposed to go up there?”
The dream took him then, the idea becoming the thing itself, and Shadow was crushed into the rock and earth. He was like a mole, trying to push through the earth, like a badger, climbing through the earth, like a groundhog, pushing the earth out of his way, like a bear, but the earth was too hard, too dense, and his breath was coming in gasps, and soon he could go no further, dig and climb no more, and he knew then that he would die, somewhere in the deep place beneath the world.
His own strength was not enough. His efforts became weaker. He knew that though his body was riding in a hot bus through cold woods if he stopped breathing here, beneath the world, he would stop breathing there as well, that even now his breath was coming in shallow panting gasps.
