"It'll make a great front-page story for the Lakeside News," said Shadow.
Chad looked at him without expression. "That a drifter got picked up for parole violations? Not much of a story."
"So that's the way it is?"
"That's what they tell me," said Chad Mulligan. Shadow put his hands in front of him this time, and Chad cuffed him. Chad locked on the ankle hobbles, and a rod from the cuffs to the hobbles.
Shadow thought, They'll take me outside. Maybe I can make a break for it-in hobbles and cuffs and lightweight orange clothes, out into the snow, and even as he thought it he knew how stupid and hopeless it was.
Chad walked him out into the office. Liz had turned the TV off now. The black deputy looked him over. "He's a big guy," he said to Chad. Liz passed the new deputy the paper bag with Shadow's possessions in it, and he signed for it.
Chad looked at Shadow, then at the deputy. He said to the deputy, quietly, but loudly enough for Shadow to hear, "Look. I just want to say, I'm not comfortable with the way this is happening."
The deputy nodded. "You'll have to take it up with the appropriate authorities, sir. Our job is simply to bring him in."
Chad made a sour face. He turned to Shadow. "Okay," said Chad. "Through that door and into the sally port."
"What?"
"Out there. Where the car is."
Liz unlocked the doors. "You make sure that orange uniform comes right back here," she said to the deputy. "The last felon we sent down to Lafayette, we never saw the uniform again. They cost the county money." They walked Shadow out to the sally port, where a car sat idling. It wasn't a sheriff's department car. It was a black town car. Another deputy, a grizzled white guy with a mustache, stood by the car, smoking a cigarette. He crushed it out underfoot as they came close, and opened the back door for Shadow.
Shadow sat down, awkwardly, his movements hampered by the cuffs and the hobble. There was no grille between the back and the front of the car.
The two deputies climbed into the front of the car. The black deputy started the motor. They waited for the sally port door to open.
"Come on, come on," said the black deputy, his fingers drumming against the steering wheel.
Chad Mulligan tapped on the side window. The white deputy glanced at the driver, then he lowered-the window. "This is wrong," said Chad. "I just wanted to say that."
"Your comments have been noted, and will be conveyed to the appropriate authorities," said the driver.
The doors to the outside world opened. The snow was still falling, dizzying into the car's headlights. The driver put his foot on the gas, and they were heading back down the street and on to Main Street.
"You heard about Wednesday?" said the driver. His voice sounded different, now, older, and familiar. "He's dead."
"Yeah. I know," said Shadow. "I saw it on TV."
"Those f**kers," said the white officer. It was the first thing he had said, and his voice was rough and accented and, like the driver's, it was a voice that Shadow knew. "I tell you, they are f**kers, those f**kers."
"Thanks for coming to get me," said Shadow.
"Don't mention it," said the driver. In the light of an oncoming car his face already seemed to look older. He looked smaller, too. The last time Shadow had seen him he had been wearing lemon-yellow gloves and a check jacket. "We were in Milwaukee. Had to drive like demons when Ibis called."
"You think we let them lock you up and send you to the chair, when I'm still waiting to break your head with my hammer?" asked the white deputy gloomily, fumbling in his pocket for a pack of cigarettes. His accent was Eastern European.
"The real shit will hit the fan in an hour or less," said Mr. Nancy, looking more like himself with each moment, "when they really turn up to collect you. We'll pull over before we get to Highway 53 and get you out of those shackles and back into your own clothes." Czernobog held up a handcuff key and smiled.
"I like the mustache," said Shadow. "Suits you."
Czernobog stroked it with a yellowed finger. "Thank you."
"Wednesday," said Shadow. "Is he really dead? This isn't some kind of trick, is it?"
He realized that he had been holding on to some kind of hope, foolish though it was. But the expression on Nancy's face told him all he needed to know, and the hope was gone.
COMING TO AMERICA
14,000 B.C.
Cold it was, and dark, when the vision came to her, for in the far north daylight was a gray dim time in the middle of the day that came, and went, and came again: an interlude between darknesses.
They were not a large tribe as these things were counted then: nomads of the Northern Plains. They had a god, who was the skull of a mammoth, and the hide of a mammoth fashioned into a rough cloak. Nunyunnini, they called him. When they were not traveling, he rested on a wooden frame, at man height.
She was the holy woman of the tribe, the keeper of its secrets, and her name was Atsula, the fox. Atsula walked before the two tribesmen who carried their god on long poles, draped with bearskins, that it should not be seen by profane eyes, nor at times when it was not holy.
They roamed the tundra, with their tents. The finest of the tents was made of caribou hide, and it was the holy tent, and there were four of them inside it: Atsula, the priestess, Gugwei, the tribal elder, Yanu, the war leader, and Kalanu, the scout. She called them there, the day after she had her vision.
Atsula scraped some lichen into the fire, then she threw in dried leaves with her withered left hand: they smoked, with an eye-stinging gray smoke, and gave off an odor that was sharp and strange. Then she took a wooden cup from the wooden platform, and she passed it to Gugwei. The cup was half filled with a dark yellow liquid.
Atsula had found the pungh mushrooms, each with seven spots, only a true holy woman could find a seven-spotted mushroom-and had picked them at the dark of the moon, and dried them on a string of deer cartilage.
Yesterday, before she slept, she had eaten the three dried mushroom caps. Her dreams had been confused and fearful things, of bright lights moving fast, of rock mountains filled with lights spearing upward like icicles. In the night she had woken, sweating, and needing to make water. She squatted over the wooden cup and filled it with her urine. Then she placed the cup outside the tent, in the snow, and returned to sleep.
When she woke, she picked the lumps of ice out from the wooden cup, leaving a darker, more concentrated liquid behind.
It was this liquid she passed around, first to Gugwei, then to Yanu and to Kalanu. Each of them took a large gulp of the liquid, then Atsula took the final draft. She swallowed it, and poured what was left on the ground in front of their god, a libation to Nunyunnini.
They sat in the smoky tent, waiting for their god to speak. Outside, in the darkness, the wind wailed and breathed.
Kalanu, the scout, was a woman who dressed and walked as a man: she had even taken Dalani, a fourteen-year-old maiden, to be her wife. Kalanu blinked her eyes tightly, then she got up and walked over to the mammoth skull. She pulled the mammoth-hide cloak over herself, and stood so her head was inside the mammoth skull.
"There is evil in the land," said Nunyunnini in Kalanu's voice. "Evil, such that if you stay here, in the land of your mothers and your mother's mothers, you shall all perish."
The three listeners grunted.
"Is it the slavers? Or the great wolves?" asked Gugwei, whose hair was long and white, and whose face was as wrinkled as the gray skin of a thorn tree.
"It is not the slavers," said Nunyunnini, old stone-hide. "It is not the great wolves."
"Is it a famine? Is a famine coming?" asked Gugwei.
Nunyunnini was silent. Kalanu came out of the skull and waited with the rest of them.
Gugwei put on the mammoth-hide cloak and put his head inside the skull.
"It is not a famine as you know it," said Nunyunnini, through Gugwei's mouth, "although a famine will follow."
"Then what is it?" asked Yanu. "I am not afraid. I will stand against it. We have spears, and we have throwing rocks. Let a hundred mighty warriors come against us, still we shall prevail. We shall lead them into the marshes, and split their skulls with our flints."
"It is not a man thing," said Nunyunnini, in Gugwei's old voice. "It will come from the skies, and none of your spears or your rocks will protect you."
"How can we protect ourselves?" asked Atsula. "I have seen flames in the skies. I have heard a noise louder than ten thunderbolts. I have seen forests flattened and rivers boil."
"Ai…," said Nunyunnini, but he said no more. Gugwei came out of the skull, bending stiffly, for he was an old man, and his knuckles were swollen and knotted.
There was silence. Atsula threw more leaves on the fire, and the smoke made their eyes tear.
Then Yanu strode to the mammoth head, put the cloak about his broad shoulders, put his head inside the skull. His voice boomed. "You must journey," said Nunyunnini. "You must travel to sunward. Where the sun rises, there you will find a new land, where you will be safe. It will be a long journey: the moon will swell and empty, die and live, twice, and there will be slavers and beasts, but I shall guide you and keep you safe, if you travel toward the sunrise."
Atsula spat on the mud of the floor, and said, "No." She could feel the god staring at her. "No," she said. "You are a bad god to tell us this. We will die. We will all die, and then who will be left to carry you from high place to high place, to raise your tent, to oil your great tusks with fat?"
The god said nothing. Atsula and Yanu exchanged places. Atsula's face stared out through the yellowed mammoth bone.
"Atsula has no faith," said Nunyunnini in Atsula's voice. "Atsula shall die before the rest of you enter the new land, but the rest of you shall live. Trust me: there is a land to the east that is manless. This land shall be your land and the land of your children and your children's children, for seven generations, and seven sevens. But for Atsula's faithlessness, you would have kept it forever. In the morning, pack your tents and your possessions, and walk toward the sunrise."
And Gugwei and Yanu and Kalanu bowed their heads and exclaimed at the power and wisdom of Nunyunnini.
The moon swelled and waned and swelled and waned once more. The people of the tribe walked east, toward the sunrise, struggling through the icy winds, which numbed their exposed skin. Nunyunnini had promised them truly: they lost no one from the tribe on the journey, save for a woman in childbirth, and women in childbirth belong to the moon, not to Nunyunnini.
They crossed the land bridge.
Kalanu had left them at first light to scout the way. Now the sky was dark, and Kalanu had not returned, but the night sky was alive with lights, knotting and flickering and winding, flux and pulse, white and green and violet and red. Atsula and her people had seen the northern lights before, but they were still frightened by them, and this was a display like they had never seen before.
Kalanu returned to them, as the lights in the sky formed and flowed.
"Sometimes," she said to Atsula, "I feel that I could simply spread my arms and fall into the sky."