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America has invested her religion as well as her morality in sound income-paying securities. She has adopted the unassailable position of a nation blessed because it deserves to be blessed; and her sons, whatever other theologies they may affect or disregard, subscribe unreservedly to this national creed.

-Agnes Repplier, Times and Tendencies.

 

Shadow drove west, across Wisconsin and Minnesota and into North Dakota, where the snow-covered hills looked like huge sleeping buffalo, and he and Wednesday saw nothing but nothing and plenty of it for mile after mile. They went south, then, into South Dakota, heading for reservation country.

Wednesday had traded the Lincoln Town Car, which Shadow had liked to drive, for a lumbering and ancient Winnebago, which smelled pervasively and unmistakably of male cat, which he didn't enjoy driving at all.

As they passed their first signpost for Mount Rushmore, still several hundred miles away, Wednesday grunted. "Now that," he said, "is a holy place."

Shadow had thought Wednesday was asleep. He said, "I know it used to be sacred to the Indians."

"It's a holy place," said Wednesday. "That's the American Way-they need to give people an excuse to come and worship. These days, people can't just go and see a mountain. Thus, Mister Gutzon Borglum's tremendous presidential faces. Once they were carved, permission was granted, and now the people drive out in their multitudes to see something in the flesh that they've already seen on a thousand postcards."

"I knew a guy once. He did weight training at the Muscle Farm, years back. He said that the Dakota Indians, the young men climb up the mountain, then form death-defying human chains off the heads, just so that the guy at the end of the chain can piss on the president's nose."

Wednesday guffawed. "Oh, fine! Very fine! Is any specific president the particular butt of their ire?"

Shadow shrugged. "He never said."

Miles vanished beneath the wheels of the Winnebago. Shadow began to imagine that he was staying still while the American landscape moved past them at a steady sixty-seven miles per hour. A wintry mist fogged the edges of things.

It was midday on the second day of the drive, and they were almost there. Shadow, who had been thinking, said, "A girl vanished from Lakeside last week, when we were in San Francisco."

"Mm?" Wednesday sounded barely interested.

"Kid named Alison McGovern. She's not the first kid to vanish there. There have been others. They go in the wintertime."

Wednesday furrowed his brow. "It is a tragedy, is it not? The little faces on the milk cartons-although I can't remember the last time I saw a kid on a milk carton-and on the walls of freeway rest areas. 'Have you seen me?' they ask. A deeply existential question at the best of times. 'Have you seen me?' Pull off at the next exit."

Shadow thought he heard a helicopter pass overhead, but the clouds were too low to see anything.

"Why did you pick Lakeside?" asked Shadow.

"I told you. It's a nice quiet place to hide you away. You're off the board there, under the radar."

"Why?"

"Because that's the way it is. Now hang a left," said Wednesday.

Shadow turned left.

"There's something wrong," said Wednesday. "Fuck. Jesus fucking Christ on a bicycle. Slow down, but don't stop."

"Care to elaborate?"

"Trouble. Do you know any alternative routes?"

"Not really. This is my first time in South Dakota," said Shadow. "And I don't know where we're going."

On the other side of the hill something flashed redly, smudged by the mist.

"Roadblock," said Wednesday. He pushed his hand deeply into first one pocket of his suit, then another, searching for something.

"I can stop and turn around."

"We can't turn. They're behind us as well," said Wednesday. "Take your speed down to ten, fifteen miles per hour."

Shadow glanced into the mirror. There were headlights behind them, under a mile back. "Are you sure about this?" he asked.

Wednesday snorted. "Sure as eggs is eggs," he said. "As the turkey farmer said when he hatched his first turtle. Ah, success!" and from the bottom of a pocket he produced a small piece of white chalk.

He started to scratch with the chalk on the dashboard of the camper, making marks as if he were solving an algebraic puzzle-or perhaps, Shadow thought, as if he were a hobo, scratching long messages to the other hobos in hobo code-bad dog here, dangerous town, nice woman, soft jail in which to overnight...

"Okay," said Wednesday. "Now increase your speed to thirty. And don't slow down from that."

One of the cars behind them turned on its lights and siren and accelerated toward them. "Do not slow down," repeated Wednesday. "They just want us to slow before we get to the roadblock." Scratch. Scratch. Scratch.

They crested the hill. The roadblock was less than a quarter of a mile away. Twelve cars arranged across the road, and on the side of the road, police cars, and several big black SUVs.

"There," said Wednesday, and he put his chalk away. The dashboard of the Winnebago was now covered with rune-like scratchings.

The car with the siren was just behind them. It had slowed to their speed, and an amplified voice was shouting, "Pull over!" Shadow looked at Wednesday.

"Turn right," said Wednesday. "Just pull off the road."

"I can't take this thing off-road. We'll tip."

"It'll be fine. Take a right. Now!"

Shadow pulled the wheel down with his right hand, and the Winnebago lurched and jolted. For a moment he thought he had been correct, that the camper was going to tip, and then the world through the windshield dissolved and shimmered, like the reflection in a clean pool when the wind brushes the surface.

The clouds and the mist and the snow and the day were gone.

Now there were stars overhead, hanging like frozen spears of light, stabbing the night sky.

"Park here," said Wednesday. "We can walk the rest of the way."

Shadow turned off the engine. He went into the back of the Winnebago, pulled on his coat, his boots and gloves. Then he climbed out of the vehicle and said "Okay. Let's go."

Wednesday looked at him with amusement and something else-irritation perhaps. Or pride. "Why don't you argue?" asked Wednesday. "Why don't you exclaim that it's all impossible? Why the hell do you just do what I say and take it all so fucking calmly?"

"Because you're not paying me to ask questions," said Shadow. And then he said, realizing the truth as the words came out of his mouth, "Anyway, nothing's really surprised me since Laura."

"Since she came back from the dead?"

"Since I learned she was screwing Robbie. That one hurt. Everything else just sits on the surface. Where are we going now?"

Wednesday pointed, and they began to walk. The ground beneath their feet was rock of some kind, slick and volcanic, occasionally glassy. The air was chilly, but not winter-cold. They sidestepped their way awkwardly down a hill. There was a rough path, and they followed it. Shadow looked down to the bottom of the hill.

"What the hell is that?" asked Shadow, but Wednesday touched his finger to his lips, shook his head sharply. Silence.

It looked like a mechanical spider, blue metal, glittering LED lights, and it was the size of a tractor. It squatted at the bottom of the hill. Beyond it were an assortment of bones, each with a flame beside it little bigger than a candle-flame, flickering.

Wednesday gestured for Shadow to keep his distance from these objects. Shadow took an extra step to the side, which was a mistake on that glassy path, as his ankle twisted and he tumbled down the slope, rolling and slipping and bouncing. He grabbed at a rock as he went past, and the obsidian snag ripped his leather glove as if it were paper.

He came to rest at the bottom of the hill, between the mechanical spider and the bones.

He put a hand down to push himself to his feet, and found himself touching what appeared to be a thighbone with the palm of his hand, and he was...

...standing in the daylight, smoking a cigarette, and looking at his watch. There were cars all around him, some empty, some not. He was wishing he had not had that last cup of coffee, for he dearly needed a piss, and it was starting to become uncomfortable.

One of the local law enforcement people came over to him, a big man with frost in his walrus mustache. He had already forgotten the man's name.

"I don't know how we could have lost them," says Local Law Enforcement, apologetic and puzzled.

"It was an optical illusion," he replies. "You get them in freak weather conditions. The mist. It was a mirage. They were driving down some other road. We thought they were on this one."

Local Law Enforcement looks disappointed. "Oh. I thought it was maybe like an X-Files kinda thing," he says.

"Nothing so exciting, I'm afraid." He suffers from occasional hemorrhoids and his ass has just started itching in the way that signals that a flare-up is on the way. He wants to be back inside the Beltway. He wishes there was a tree to go and stand behind: the urge to piss is getting worse. He drops the cigarette and steps on it.

Local Law Enforcement walks over to one of the police cars and says something to the driver. They both shake their heads.

He pulls out his telephone, touches the menu, pages down and finds the address entry marked ''Laundry," which had amused him so much when he typed it in-a reference to The Man from U.N.C.LE, and as he looks at it he realizes that it's not from that at all, that was a tailor's, he's thinking of Get Smart, and he still feels weird and slightly embarrassed after all those years about not realizing it was a comedy when he was a kid, and just wanting a shoephone...

A woman's voice on the phone. "Yes?"

"This is Mister Town, for Mister World."

There is silence. Town crosses his legs, tugs his belt higher on his belly-got to lose those last ten pounds-and away from his bladder. Then an urbane voice says, "Hello, Mister Town."

"We lost them," says Town. He feels a knot of frustration in his gut: these were the bastards, the lousy dirty sons of bitches who killed Woody and Stone, for Chrissakes. Good men. Good men. He badly wants to fuck Mrs. Wood, but knows it's still too soon after Woody's death to make a move. So he is taking her out for dinner every couple of weeks, an investment in the future, she's just grateful for the attention...

"How?"

"I don't know. We set up a roadblock, there was nowhere they could have gone and they went there anyway."

"Just another one of life's little mysteries. Don't worry. Have you calmed the locals?"

"Told 'em it was an optical illusion."

"They buy it?"

"Probably."

There was something very familiar about Mr. World's voice-which was a strange thing to think, he'd been working for him directly for two years now, spoken to him every day, of course there was something familiar about his voice.

"They'll be far away by now."

"Should we send people down to the rez to intercept them?"

"Not worth the aggravation. Too many jurisdictional issues, and there are only so many strings I can pull in a morning. We have plenty of time. Just get back here. I've got my hands full at this end trying to organize the policy meeting."

"Trouble?"

"It's a pissing contest. I've proposed that we have it out here. The techies want it in Austin, or maybe San Jose, the players want it in Hollywood, the intangibles want it on Wall Street. Everybody wants it in their own backyard. Nobody's going to give."

"You need me to do anything?"

"Not yet. I'll growl at some of them, stroke others. You know the routine."

"Yes, sir."

"Carry on, Town."

The connection is broken.

Town thinks he should have had a S.W.A.T. team to pick off that fucking Winnebago, or land mines on the road, or a tactical friggin' nukuler device, that would have showed those bastards they meant business. It was like Mr. World had once said to him, We are writing the future in Letters of Fire and Mr. Town thinks that Jesus Christ, if he doesn't piss now he'll lose a kidney, it'll just burst, and it was like his pop had said when they were on long journeys, when Town was a kid, out on the interstate, his pop would always say, "My back teeth are afloat," and Mr. Town could hear that voice even now, that sharp Yankee accent saying "I got to take a leak soon. My back teeth are afloat"...

...and it was then that Shadow felt a hand opening his own hand, prising it open one finger at a time, off the thighbone it was clutching. He no longer needed to urinate; that was someone else. He was standing under the stars on a glassy rock plain.

Wednesday made the signal for silence again. Then he began to walk, and Shadow followed.

There was a creak from the mechanical spider, and Wednesday froze. Shadow stopped and waited with him. Green lights flickered and ran up and along its side in clusters. Shadow tried not to breathe too loudly.

He thought about what had just happened. It had been like looking through a window into someone else's mind. And then he thought, Mr. World. It was me who thought his voice sounded familiar. That was my thought, not Town's. That was why that seemed so strange. He tried to identify the voice in his mind, to put it into the category in which it belonged, but it eluded him.

It'll come to me, thought Shadow. Sooner or later, it'll come to me.

The green lights went blue, then red, then faded to a dull red, and the spider settled down on its metallic haunches. Wednesday began to walk forward, a lonely figure beneath the stars, in a broad-brimmed hat, his frayed dark cloak gusting randomly in the nowhere wind, his staff tapping on the glassy rock floor.

When the metallic spider was only a distant glint in the starlight, far back on the plain, Wednesday said, "It should be safe to speak, now."

"Where are we?"

"Behind the scenes," said Wednesday.

"Sorry?"

"Think of it as being behind the scenes. Like in a theater or something. I just pulled us out of the audience and now we're walking about backstage. It's a shortcut."

"When I touched that bone, I was in the mind of a guy named Town. He's with that spook show. He hates us."

"Yes."

"He's got a boss named Mister World. He reminds me of someone, but I don't know who. I was looking into Town's head-or maybe I was in his head. I'm not certain."

"Do they know where we're headed?"

"I think they're calling off the hunt right now. They didn't want to follow us to the reservation. Are we going to a reservation?"

"Maybe." Wednesday leaned on his staff for a moment, then continued to walk.

"What was that spider thing?"

"A pattern manifestation. A search engine."

"Are they dangerous?"

"You only get to be my age by assuming the worst."

Shadow smiled. "And how old would that be?"

"Old as my tongue," said Wednesday. "And a few months older than my teeth."

"You play your cards so close to your chest," said Shadow, "that I'm not even sure that they're really cards at all."

Wednesday only grunted.

Each hill they came to was harder to climb.

Shadow began to feel headachy. There was a pounding quality to the starlight, something that resonated with the pulse in his temples and his chest. At the bottom of the next hill he stumbled, opened his mouth to say something and, without warning, he vomited.

Wednesday reached into an inside pocket, and produced a small hip flask. "Take a sip of this," he said. "Only a sip."

The liquid was pungent, and it evaporated in his mouth like a good brandy, although it did not taste like alcohol. Wednesday took the flask away, and pocketed it. "It's not good for the audience to find themselves walking about backstage. That's why you're feeling sick. We need to hurry to get you out of here."

They walked faster, Wednesday at a solid trudge, Shadow stumbling from time to time, but feeling better for the drink, which had left his mouth tasting of orange peel, of rosemary oil and peppermint and cloves.

Wednesday took his arm. "There," he said, pointing to two identical hillocks of frozen rock-glass to their left. "Walk between those two mounds. Walk beside me."

They walked, and the cold air and bright daylight smashed into Shadow's face at the same time.

They were standing halfway up a gentle hill. The mist had gone, the day was sunny and chill, the sky was a perfect blue. At the bottom of the hill was a gravel road, and a red station wagon bounced along it like a child's toy car. A gust of wood smoke came from a building nearby. It looked as if someone had picked up a mobile home and dropped it on the side of the hill thirty years ago. The home was much repaired, patched, and, in places, added onto.

As they reached the door it opened, and a middle-aged man with sharp eyes and a mouth like a knife slash looked down at them and said, "Eyah, I heard that there were two white men on their way to see me. Two whites in a Winnebago. And I heard that they got lost, like white men always get lost if they don't put up their signs everywhere. And now look at these two sorry beasts at the door. You know you're on Lakota land?" His hair was gray, and long.

"Since when were you Lakota, you old fraud?" said Wednesday. He was wearing a coat and a flap-eared cap, and already it seemed to Shadow unlikely that only a few moments ago under the stars he had been wearing a broad-brimmed hat and a tattered cloak. "So, Whiskey Jack. I'm starving, and my friend here just threw up his breakfast. Are you going to invite us in?"

Whiskey Jack scratched an armpit. He was wearing blue jeans, and an undershirt the gray of his hair. He wore moccasins, and he seemed not to notice the cold. Then he said, "I like it here. Come in, white men who lost their Winnebago."

There was more wood smoke in the air inside the trailer, and there was another man in there, sitting at a table. The man wore stained buckskins, and was barefoot. His skin was the color of bark.

Wednesday seemed delighted. "Well," he said, "it seems our delay was fortuitous. Whiskey Jack and Apple Johnny. Two birds with one stone."

The man at the table, Apple Johnny, stared at Wednesday, then he reached down a hand to his crotch, cupped it and said, "Wrong again. I jes' checked and I got both of my stones, jes' where they oughtta be." He looked up at Shadow, raised his hand, palm out. "I'm John Chapman. You don't mind anything your boss says about me. He's an asshole. Always was an asshole. Always goin' to be an asshole. Some people is jes' assholes, and that's an end of it."

"Mike Ainsel," said Shadow.

Chapman rubbed his stubbly chin. "Ainsel," he said. "That's not a name. But it'll do at a pinch. What do they call you?"

"Shadow."

"I'll call you Shadow, then. Hey, Whiskey Jack"-but it wasn't really Whiskey Jack he was saying, Shadow realized. Too many syllables. "How's the food looking?"

Whiskey Jack took a wooden spoon and lifted the lid off a black iron pot, bubbling away on the range of the wood-burning stove. "It's ready for eating," he said.

He took four plastic bowls and spooned the contents of the pot into the bowls, put them down on the table. Then he opened the door, stepped out into the snow, and pulled a plastic gallon jug from the snowbank. He brought it inside, and poured four large glasses of a cloudy yellow-brown liquid, which he put beside each bowl. Last of all, he found four spoons. He sat down at the table with the other men.

Wednesday raised his glass suspiciously. "Looks like piss," he said.

"You still drinking that stuff?" asked Whiskey Jack. "You white men are crazy. This is better." Then, to Shadow, "The stew is mostly wild turkey. John here brought the applejack."

"It's a soft apple cider," said John Chapman. "I never believed in hard liquor. Makes men mad."

The stew was delicious, and it was very good apple cider. Shadow forced himself to slow down, to chew his food, not to gulp it, but he was more hungry than he would have believed. He helped himself to a second bowl of the stew and a second glass of the cider.

"Dame Rumor says that you've been out talking to all manner of folk, offering them all manner of things. Says you're takin' the old folks on the warpath," said John Chapman. Shadow and Whiskey Jack were washing up, putting the leftover stew into Tupperware bowls. Whiskey Jack put the bowls into the snowdrifts outside his front door, and put a milk crate on top of the place he'd pushed them, so he could find them again.

"I think that's a fair and judicious summary of events," said Wednesday.

"They'll win," said Whiskey Jack flatly. "They won already. You lost already. Like the white man and my people. Mostly they won. And when they lost, they made treaties. Then they broke the treaties. So they won again. I'm not fighting for another lost cause."

"And it's no use you lookin' at me," said John Chapman, "for even if I fought for you-which'n I won't-I'm no use to you. Mangy rat-tailed bastards jes' picked me off and clean forgot me." He stopped. Then he said, "Paul Bunyan." He shook his head slowly and he said it again. "Paul Bunyan." Shadow had never heard two such innocuous words made to sound so damning.

"Paul Bunyan?" Shadow said. "What did he ever do?"

"He took up head space," said Whiskey Jack. He bummed a cigarette from Wednesday and the two men sat and smoked.

"It's like the idiots who figure that hummingbirds worry about their weight or tooth decay or some such nonsense, maybe they just want to spare hummingbirds the evils of sugar," explained Wednesday. "So they fill the hummingbird feeders with fucking NutraSweet. The birds come to the feeders and they drink it. Then they die, because their food contains no calories even though their little tummies are full. That's Paul Bunyan for you. Nobody ever told Paul Bunyan stories. Nobody ever believed in Paul Bunyan. He came staggering out of a New York ad agency in 1910 and filled the nation's myth stomach with empty calories."

"I like Paul Bunyan," said Whiskey Jack. "I went on his ride at the Mall of America, few years back. You see big old Paul Bunyan at the top, then you come crashing down. Splash! He's okay by me. I don't mind that he never existed, means he never cut down any trees. Not as good as planting trees though. That's better."

"You said a mouthful," said Johnny Chapman.

Wednesday blew a smoke ring. It hung in the air, dissipating slowly in wisps and curls. "Damn it, Whiskey Jack, that's not the point and you know it."

"I'm not going to help you," said Whiskey Jack. "When you get your ass kicked, you can come back here and if I'm still here I'll feed you again. You get the best food in the fall."

Wednesday said, "All the alternatives are worse."

"You have no idea what the alternatives are," said Whiskey Jack. Then he looked at Shadow. "You are hunting," he said. His voice was roughened by wood smoke and cigarettes.

"I'm working," said Shadow.

Whiskey Jack shook his head. "You are also hunting something," he said. "There is a debt that you wish to pay."

Shadow thought of Laura's blue lips and the blood on her hands, and he nodded.

"Listen. Fox was here first, and his brother was the wolf. Fox said, people will live forever. If they die they will not die for long. Wolf said, no, people will die, people must die, all things that live must die, or they will spread and cover the world, and eat all the salmon and the caribou and the buffalo, eat all the squash and all the corn. Now one day Wolf died, and he said to the fox, quick, bring me back to life. And Fox said, No, the dead must stay dead. You convinced me. And he wept as he said this. But he said it, and it was final. Now Wolf rules the world of the dead and Fox lives always under the sun and the moon, and he still mourns his brother."

Wednesday said, "If you won't play, you won't play. We'll be moving on."

Whiskey Jack's face was impassive. "I'm talking to this young man," he said. "You are beyond help. He is not." He turned back to Shadow. "Tell me your dream," said Whiskey Jack.

Shadow said, "I was climbing a tower of skulls. There were huge birds flying around it. They had lightning in their wings. They were attacking me. The tower fell."

"Everybody dreams," said Wednesday. "Can we hit the road?"

"Not everybody dreams of the Wakinyau, the thunder-bird," said Whiskey Jack. "We felt the echoes of it here."

"I told you," said Wednesday. "Jesus."

"There's a clutch of thunderbirds in West Virginia," said Chapman, idly. "A couple of hens and an old cock-bird at least. There's also a breeding pair in the land, they used to call it the State of Franklin, but old Ben never got his state, up between Kentucky and Tennessee. 'Course, there was never a great number of them, even at the best of times."

Whiskey Jack reached out a hand the color of red clay and touched Shadow's face, gently. "Eyah," he said. "It's true. If you hunt the thunderbird you could bring your woman back. But she belongs to the wolf, in the dead places, not walking the land."

"How do you know?' asked Shadow.

Whiskey Jack's lips did not move. "What did the buffalo tell you?"

"To believe."

"Good advice. Are you going to follow it?"

"Kind of. I guess." They were talking without words, without mouths, without sound. Shadow wondered if, for the other two men in the room, they were standing, unmoving, for a heartbeat or for a fraction of a heartbeat.

"When you find your tribe, come back and see me," said Whiskey Jack. "I can help."

"I shall."

Whiskey Jack lowered his hand. Then he turned to Wednesday. "Are you going to fetch your Ho Chunk?"

"My what?"

"Ho Chunk. It's what the Winnebago call themselves."

Wednesday shook his head. "It's too risky. Retrieving it could be problematic. They'll be looking for it."

"Is it stolen?"

Wednesday looked affronted. "Not a bit of it. The papers are in the glove compartment."

"And the keys?"

"I've got them," said Shadow.

"My nephew, Harry Bluejay, has an '81 Buick. Why don't you give me the keys to your camper? You can take his car."

Wednesday bristled. "What kind of trade is that?"

Whiskey Jack shrugged. "You know how hard it will be to bring back your camper from where you abandoned it? I'm doing you a favor. Take it or leave it. I don't care." He closed his knife-wound mouth.

Wednesday looked angry, and then the anger became rue, and he said, "Shadow, give the man the keys to the Winnebago." Shadow passed the car keys to Whiskey Jack.

"Johnny," said Whiskey Jack, "will you take these men down to find Harry Bluejay? Tell him I said, for him to give them his car."

"Be my pleasure," said John Chapman.

He got up and walked to the door, picked up a small burlap sack sitting next to it, opened the door, and walked outside. Shadow and Wednesday followed him. Whiskey Jack waited in the doorway. "Hey," he said to Wednesday. "Don't come back here, you. You are not welcome."

Wednesday extended his finger heavenward. "Rotate on this," he said affably.

They walked downhill through the snow, pushing their way through the drifts. Chapman walked in front, his bare feet red against the crust-topped snow. "Aren't you cold?" asked Shadow.

"My wife was Choctaw," said Chapman.

"And she taught you mystical ways to keep out the cold?"

"Nope. She thought I was crazy," said Chapman. "She used t'say, 'Johnny, why don't you jes' put on boots?' " The slope of the hill became steeper, and they were forced to stop talking. The three men stumbled and slipped on the snow, using the trunks of birch trees on the hillside to steady themselves, and to stop themselves from falling. When the ground became slightly more level, Chapman said, "She's dead now, a'course. When she died I guess maybe I went a mite crazy. It could happen to anyone. It could happen to you." He clapped Shadow on the arm. "By Jesus and Jehosophat, you're a big man."

"So they tell me," said Shadow.

They trudged down that hill for about half an hour, until they reached the gravel road that wound around the base of it, and the three men began to walk along it, toward the cluster of buildings they had seen from high on the hill.

A car slowed and stopped. The woman driving it reached over, wound down the passenger window, and said, "You bozos need a ride?"

"You are very gracious, madam," said Wednesday. "We're looking for a Mister Harry Bluejay."

"He'll be down at the rec hall," said the woman. She was in her forties, Shadow guessed. "Get in."

They got in. Wednesday took the passenger seat, John Chapman and Shadow climbed into the back. Shadow's legs were too long to sit in the back comfortably, but he did the best he could. The car jolted forward, down the gravel road.

"So where did you three come from?" asked the driver.

"Just visiting with a friend," said Wednesday.

"Lives on the hill back there," said Shadow.

"What hill?" she asked.

Shadow looked back through the dusty rear window, looking back at the hill. But there was no high hill back there; nothing but clouds on the plains.

"Whiskey Jack," he said.

"Ah," she said. "We call him Inktomi here. I think it's the same guy. My grandfather used to tell some pretty good stories about him. Of course, all the best of them were kind of dirty." They hit a bump in the road, and the woman swore. "You okay back there?"

"Yes ma'am," said Johnny Chapman. He was holding onto the backseat with both hands.

"Rez roads," she said. "You get used to them."

"Are they all like this?" asked Shadow.

"Pretty much," said the woman. "All the ones around here. And don't you go asking about all the money from casinos, because who in their right mind wants to come all the way out here to go to a casino? We don't see none of that money out here."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be." She changed gear with a crash and a groan. "You know the white population all around here is falling? You go out there, you find ghost towns. How you going to keep them down on the farm, after they seen the world on their television screens? And it's not worth anyone's while to farm the Badlands anyhow. They took our lands, they settled here, now they're leaving. They go south. They go west. Maybe if we wait for enough of them to move to New York and Miami and L.A. we can take the whole of the middle back without a fight."

"Good luck," said Shadow.

They found Harry Bluejay in the rec hall, at the pool table, doing trick shots to impress a group of several girls. He had a blue jay tattooed on the back of his right hand, and multiple piercings in his right ear.

"Ho hoka, Harry Bluejay," said John Chapman.

"Fuck off, you crazy barefoot white ghost," said Harry Bluejay, conversationally. "You give me the creeps."

There were older men at the far end of the room, some of them playing cards, some of them talking. There were other men, younger men of about Harry Bluejay's age, waiting for their turn at the pool table. It was a full-sized pool table, and a rip in the green baize on one side had been repaired with silver-gray duct tape.

"I got a message from your uncle," said Chapman, un-fazed. "He says you're to give these two your car."

There must have been thirty, maybe even forty people in that hall, and now they were every one of them looking intently at their playing cards, or their feet, or their fingernails, and pretending as hard as they could not to be listening.

"He's not my uncle."

A cigarette-smoke fug hung over the hall. Chapman smiled widely, displaying the worst set of teeth that Shadow had seen in a human mouth. "You want to tell your uncle that? He says you're the only reason he stays among the Lakota."

"Whiskey Jack says a lot of things," said Harry Bluejay, petulantly. But he did not say Whiskey Jack either. It sounded almost the same, to Shadow's ear, but not quite: Wisakedjak, he thought. That's what they're saying. Not Whiskey Jack at all.

Shadow said, "Yeah. And one of the things he said was that we're trading our Winnebago for your Buick."

"I don't see a Winnebago."

"He'll bring you the Winnebago," said John Chapman. "You know he will."

Harry Bluejay attempted a trick shot and missed. His hand was not steady enough. "I'm not the old fox's nephew," said Harry Bluejay. "I wish he wouldn't say that to people."

"Better a live fox than a dead wolf," said Wednesday, in a voice so deep it was almost a growl. "Now, will you sell us your car?"

Harry Bluejay shivered, visibly and violently. "Sure," he said. "Sure. I was only kidding. I kid a lot, me." He put down the pool cue on the pool table, and took a thick jacket, pulling it out from a cluster of similar jackets hanging from pegs by the door. "Let me get my shit out of the car first," he said.

He kept darting glances at Wednesday, as if he were concerned that the older man were about to explode.

Harry Bluejay's car was parked a hundred yards away. As they walked toward it, they passed a small whitewashed Catholic church, and a man in a priest's collar who stared at them from the doorway as they went past. He was sucking on a cigarette as if he did not enjoy smoking it.

"Good day to you, father!" called Johnny Chapman, but the man in the collar made no reply; he crushed his cigarette under his heel, picked up the butt and dropped it into the bin beside the door, and went inside.

Harry Bluejay's car was missing its wing mirrors, and its tires were the baldest Shadow had ever seen: perfectly smooth black rubber. Harry Bluejay told them the car drank oil, but as long as you kept pouring oil in, it would just keep running forever, unless it stopped.

Harry Bluejay filled a black garbage bag with shit from the car (said shit including several screw-top bottles of cheap beer, unfinished, a small packet of cannabis resin wrapped in silver foil and badly hidden in the car's ashtray, a skunk tail, two dozen country-and-western cassettes and a battered, yellowing copy of Stranger in a Strange Land). "Sorry I was jerking your chain before," said Harry Bluejay to Wednesday, passing him the car keys. "You know when I'll get the Winnebago?"

"Ask your uncle. He's the fucking used-car dealer," growled Wednesday.

"Wisakedjak is not my uncle," said Harry Bluejay. He took his black garbage bag and went into the nearest house, and closed the door behind him.

They dropped Johnny Chapman in Sioux Falls, outside a whole-food store. Wednesday said nothing on the drive. He was in a black sulk, as he had been since they left Whiskey Jack's place.

In a family restaurant just outside St. Paul, Shadow picked up a newspaper someone else had put down. He looked at it once, then again, then he showed it to Wednesday,

"Look at that," said Shadow.

Wednesday sighed, and looked down at the paper. "I am," he said, "delighted that the air-traffic controllers' dispute has been resolved without recourse to industrial action."

"Not that," said Shadow. "Look. It says it's the fourteenth of February."

"Happy Valentine's Day."

"So we set out January the what, twentieth, twenty-first. I wasn't keeping track of the dates, but it was the third week of January. We were three days on the road, all told. So how is it the fourteenth of February?"

"Because we walked for almost a month," said Wednesday. "In the Badlands. Backstage."

"Hell of a shortcut," said Shadow.

Wednesday pushed the paper away. "Fucking Johnny Appleseed, always going on about Paul Bunyan. In real life Chapman owned fourteen apple orchards. He farmed thousands of acres. Yes, he kept pace with the western frontier, but there's not a story out there about him with a word of truth in it, save that he went a little crazy once. But it doesn't matter. Like the newspapers used to say, if the truth isn't big enough, you print the legend. This country needs its legends. And even the legends don't believe it anymore."

"But you see it."

"I'm a has-been. Who the fuck cares about me?"

Shadow said softly, "You're a god."

Wednesday looked at him sharply. He seemed to be about to say something, and then he slumped back in his seat, and looked down at the menu, and said, "So?"

"It's a good thing to be a god," said Shadow.

"Is it?" asked Wednesday, and this time it was Shadow who looked away.

In a gas station twenty-five miles outside Lakeside, on the wall by the rest rooms, Shadow saw a homemade photocopied notice: a black-and-white photo of Alison McGovern and the handwritten question Have You Seen Me? above it. Same yearbook photograph: smiling confidently, a girl with rubber-band braces on her top teeth who wants to work with animals when she grows up.

Have you seen me?

Shadow bought a Snickers bar, a bottle of water, and a copy of the Lakeside News. The above-the-fold story, written by Marguerite Olsen, our Lakeside Reporter, showed a photograph of a boy and an older man, out on the frozen lake, standing by an outhouselike ice-fishing shack, and between them they were holding a big fish. They were smiling. Father and Son Catch Local Record Northern Pike. Full story inside.

Wednesday was driving. He said, "Read me anything interesting you find in the paper."

Shadow looked carefully, and he turned the pages slowly, but he couldn't find anything.

Wednesday dropped him off in the driveway outside his apartment. A smoke-colored cat stared at him from the driveway, then fled when he bent to stroke it.

Shadow stopped on the wooden deck outside his apartment and looked out at the lake, dotted here and there with green and brown ice-fishing huts. Many of them had cars parked beside them. On the ice nearer the bridge sat the old green klunker, just as it had sat in the newspaper. "March twenty-third," said Shadow, encouragingly. "Round nine-fifteen in the morning. You can do it."

"Not a chance," said a woman's voice. "April third. Six P.M. That way the day warms up the ice." Shadow smiled.

Marguerite Olsen was wearing a ski suit. She was at the far end of the deck, refilling the bird feeder.

"I read your article in the Lakeside News on the Town Record Northern Pike."

"Exciting, huh?"

"Well, educational, maybe."

"I thought you weren't coming back to us," she said. "You were gone for a while, huh?"

"My uncle needed me," said Shadow. "The time kind of got away from us."

She placed the last suet brick in its cage, and began to fill a net sock with thistle seeds from a plastic milk jug. Several goldfinches, olive in their winter coats, twitted impatiently from a nearby fir tree.

"I didn't see anything in the paper about Alison McGovern."

"There wasn't anything to report. She's still missing. There was a rumor that someone had seen her in Detroit, but it turned out to be a false alarm."

"Poor kid."

Marguerite Olsen screwed the top back onto the gallon jug. "I hope she's dead," she said, matter-of-factly.

Shadow was shocked. "Why?"

"Because the alternatives are worse."

The goldfinches hopped frantically from branch to branch of the fir tree, impatient for the people to be gone.

You aren't thinking about Alison, thought Shadow. You're thinking of your son. You're thinking of Sandy.

He remembered someone saying I miss Sandy. Who was that?

"Good talking to you," he said.

"Yeah," she said. "You too."

***

February passed in a succession of short, gray days. Some days the snow fell, most days it didn't. The weather warmed up, and on the good days it got above freezing. Shadow stayed in his apartment until it began to feel like a prison cell, and then, on the days that Wednesday did not need him to travel, he began to walk.

He would walk for much of the day, long trudges out of the town. He walked, alone, until he reached the national forest to the north and the west, or the cornfields and cow pastures to the south. He walked the Lumber County Wilderness Trail, and he walked along the old railroad tracks, and he walked the back roads. A couple of times he even walked along the frozen lake, from north to south. Sometimes he'd see locals or winter tourists or joggers, and he'd wave and say hi. Mostly he saw nobody at all, just crows and finches, and a few times he spotted a hawk feasting on a roadkill possum or raccoon. On one memorable occasion he watched an eagle snatch a silver fish from the middle of the White Pine River, the water frozen at the edges, but still rushing and flowing at the center. The fish wriggled and jerked in the eagle's talons, glittering in the midday sun; Shadow imagined the fish freeing itself and swimming off across the sky, and he smiled, grimly.

If he walked, he discovered, he did not have to think, and that was just the way he liked it; when he thought, his mind went to places he could not control, places that made him feel uncomfortable. Exhaustion was the best thing. When he was exhausted, his thoughts did not wander to Laura, or to the strange dreams, or to things that were not and could not be. He would return home from walking, and sleep without difficulty and without dreaming.

He ran into Police Chief Chad Mulligan in George's Barber Shop in the town square. Shadow always had high hopes for haircuts, but they never lived up to his expectations. After every haircut he looked more or less the same, only with shorter hair. Chad, seated in the barber's chair beside Shadow's, seemed surprisingly concerned about his own appearance. When his haircut was finished he gazed grimly at his reflection, as if he were preparing to give it a speeding ticket.

"It looks good," Shadow told him.

"Would it look good to you if you were a woman?"

"I guess."

They went across the square to Mabel's together, ordered mugs of hot chocolate. Chad said, "Hey. Mike. Have you ever thought about a career in law enforcement?"

Shadow shrugged. "I can't say I have," he said. "Seems like there's a whole lot of things you got to know."

Chad shook his head. "You know the main part of police work, somewhere like this? It's just keeping your head. Something happens, somebody's screaming at you, screaming blue murder, you simply have to be able to say that you're sure that it's all a mistake, and you'll just sort it all out if they just step outside quietly. And you have to be able to mean it."

"And then you sort it out?"

"Mostly, that's when you put handcuffs on them. But yeah, you do what you can to sort it out. Let me know if you want a job. We're hiring. And you're the kind of guy we want."

"I'll keep that in mind, if the thing with my uncle falls through."

They sipped their hot chocolate. Mulligan said, "Say, Mike, what would you do if you had a cousin. Like a widow. And she started calling you?"

"Calling you how?"

"On the phone. Long distance. She lives out of state." His cheeks crimsoned. "I saw her last year at a family wedding. She was married, back then, though, I mean, her husband was still alive, and she's family. Not a first cousin. Pretty distant."

"You got a thing for her?"

Blush. "I don't know about that."

"Well then, put it another way. Does she have a thing for you?"

"Well, she's said a few things, when she called. She's a very fine-looking woman."

"So...what are you going to do about it?"

"I could ask her out here. I could do that, couldn't I? She's kind of said she'd like to come up here."

"You're both adults; I'd say go for it."

Chad nodded, and blushed, and nodded again.

The telephone in Shadow's apartment was silent and dead. He thought about getting it connected, but could think of no one he wanted to call. Late one night he picked it up and listened, and was convinced that he could hear a wind blowing and a distant conversation between a group of people talking in voices too low to properly make out. He said, "Hello?" and "Who's there?" but there was no reply, only a sudden silence and then the faraway sound of laughter, so faint he was not certain he was not imagining it.

***

Shadow made more journeys with Wednesday in the weeks that followed.

He waited in the kitchen of a Rhode Island cottage, and listened while Wednesday sat in a darkened bedroom and argued with a woman who would not get out of bed, nor would she let Wednesday or Shadow look at her face. In the refrigerator was a plastic bag filled with crickets, and another filled with the corpses of baby mice.

In a rock club in Seattle, Shadow watched Wednesday shout his greeting, over the noise of the band, to a young woman with short red hair and blue-spiral tattoos. That talk must have gone well, for Wednesday came away from it grinning delightedly.

Five days later Shadow was waiting in the rental when Wednesday walked, scowling, from the lobby of an office building in Dallas. Wednesday slammed the car door when he got in, and sat there in silence, his face red with rage. He said, "Drive." Then he said, "Fucking Albanians. Like anybody cares."

Three days after that they flew to Boulder, where they had a pleasant lunch with five young Japanese women. It was a meal of pleasantries and politeness, and Shadow walked away from it unsure of whether anything had been agreed to or decided. Wednesday, though, seemed happy enough.

Shadow had begun to look forward to returning to Lakeside. There was a peace there, and a welcome, that he appreciated.

Each morning when he was not traveling he would drive across the bridge to the town square. He would buy two pasties at Mabel's; he would eat one pasty then and there, and drink a coffee. If someone had left a newspaper out he would read it, although he was never interested enough in the news to purchase a newspaper himself.

He would pocket the second pasty, wrapped in its paper bag, and eat it for his lunch.

He was reading USA Today one morning when Mabel said, "Hey, Mike. Where you going today?"

The sky was pale blue. The morning mist had left the trees covered with hoarfrost. "I don't know," said Shadow. "Maybe I'll walk the wilderness trail again."

She refilled his coffee. "You ever gone east on County Q? It's kind of pretty out that away. That's the little road that starts acrost from the carpet store on Twentieth Avenue."

"No. Never have."

"Well," she said, "it's kind of pretty."

It was extremely pretty. Shadow parked his car at the edge of town, and walked along the side of the road, a winding, country road that curled around the hills to the east of the town. Each of the hills was covered with leafless maple trees, bone-white birches, dark firs and pines.

At one point a small dark cat kept pace with him beside the road. It was the color of dirt, with white forepaws. He walked over to it. It did not run away.

"Hey cat," said Shadow, unselfconsciously.

The cat put its head on one side, looked up at him with emerald eyes. Then it hissed-not at him, but at something over on the side of the road, something he could not see.

"Easy," said Shadow. The cat stalked away across the road, and vanished into a field of old unharvested corn.

Around the next bend in the road Shadow came upon a tiny graveyard. The headstones were weathered, although several of them had sprays of fresh flowers resting against them. There was no wall about the graveyard, and no fence, only low mulberry trees, planted at the margins, bent over with ice and age. Shadow stepped over the piled-up ice and slush at the side of the road. There were two stone gateposts marking the entry to the graveyard, although there was no gate between them. He walked into the graveyard between the two posts.

He wandered around the graveyard, looking at the headstones. There were no inscriptions later than 1969. He brushed the snow from a solid-looking granite angel, and he leaned against it.

He took the paper bag from his pocket, and removed the pasty from it. He broke off the top: it breathed a faint wisp of steam into the wintry air. It smelled really good, too. He bit into it.

Something rustled behind him. He thought for a moment it was the cat, but then he smelled perfume, and under the perfume, the scent of something rotten.

"Please don't look at me," she said, from behind him.

"Hello, Laura," said Shadow.

Her voice was hesitant, perhaps, he thought, even a little scared. She said, "Hello, puppy."

He broke off some pasty. "Would you like some?" he asked.

She was standing immediately behind him, now. "No," she said. "You eat it. I don't eat food anymore."

He ate his pasty. It was good. "I want to look at you," he said.

"You won't like it," she told him.

"Please?"

She stepped around the stone angel. Shadow looked at her, in the daylight. Some things were different and some things were the same. Her eyes had not changed, nor had the crooked hopefulness of her smile. And she was, very obviously, very dead. Shadow finished his pasty. He stood up and tipped the crumbs out of the paper bag, then folded it up and put it back into his pocket.

The time he had spent in the funeral home in Cairo made it easier somehow for him to be in her presence. He did not know what to say to her.

Her cold hand sought his, and he squeezed it gently. He could feel his heart beating in his chest. He was scared, and what scared him was the normality of the moment. He felt so comfortable with her at his side that he would have been willing to stand there forever.

"I miss you," he admitted.

"I'm here," she said.

"That's when I miss you most. When you're here. When you aren't here, when you're just a ghost from the past or a dream from another life, it's easier then."

She squeezed his fingers.

"So," he asked. "How's death?"

"Hard," she said. "It just keeps going."

She rested her head on his shoulder, and it almost undid him. He said, "You want to walk for a bit?"

"Sure." She smiled up at him, a nervous, crooked smile in a dead face.

They walked out of the little graveyard, and made their way back down the road, toward the town, hand in hand. "Where have you been?" she asked.

"Here," he said. "Mostly."

"Since Christmas," she said, "I kind of lost you. Sometimes I would know where you were, for a few hours, for a few days. You'd be all over. Then you'd fade away again."

"I was in this town," he said. "Lakeside. It's a good little town."

"Oh," she said.

She no longer wore the blue suit in which she had been buried. Now she wore several sweaters, a long, dark skirt, and high, burgundy boots. Shadow commented on them.

Laura ducked her head. She smiled. "Aren't they great boots? I found them in this great shoe store in Chicago."

"So what made you decide to come up from Chicago?"

"Oh, I've not been in Chicago for a while, puppy. I was heading south. The cold was bothering me. You'd think I'd welcome it. But it's something to do with being dead, I guess. You don't feel it as cold. You feel it as a sort of nothing, and when you're dead I guess the only thing that you're scared of is nothing. I was going to go to Texas. I planned to spend the winter in Galveston. I think I used to winter in Galveston, when I was a kid."

"I don't think you did," said Shadow. "You've never mentioned it before."

"No? Maybe it was someone else, then. I don't know. I remember seagulls-throwing bread in the air for seagulls, hundreds of them, the whole sky becoming nothing but seagulls as they flapped their wings and snatched the bread from the air." She paused. "If I didn't see it, I guess someone else did."

A car came around the corner. The driver waved them hello. Shadow waved back. It felt wonderfully normal to walk with his wife.

"This feels good," said Laura, as if she was reading his mind.

"Yes," said Shadow.

"When the call came I had to hurry back. I was barely into Texas."

"Call?"

She looked up at him. Around her neck the gold coin glinted. "It felt like a call," she said. "I started to think about you. About how much I needed to see you. It was like a hunger."

"You knew I was here, then?"

"Yes." She stopped. She frowned, and her upper teeth pressed into her blue lower lip, biting it gently. She put her head on one side and said, "I did. Suddenly, I did. I thought you were calling me, but it wasn't you, was it?"

"No."

"You didn't want to see me."

"It wasn't that." He hesitated. "No. I didn't want to see you. It hurts too much."

The snow crunched beneath their feet and it glittered diamonds as the sunlight caught it.

"It must be hard," said Laura, "not being alive."

"You mean it's hard for you to be dead? Look, I'm still going to figure out how to bring you back, properly. I think I'm on the right track-"

"No," she said. "I mean, I'm grateful. And I hope you really can do it. I did a lot of bad stuff..." She shook her head. "But I was talking about you."

"I'm alive," said Shadow. "I'm not dead. Remember?"

"You're not dead," she said. "But I'm not sure that you're alive, either. Not really."

This isn't the way this conversation goes, thought Shadow. This isn't the way anything goes.

"I love you," she said, dispassionately. "You're my puppy. But when you're really dead you get to see things clearer. It's like there isn't anyone there. You know? You're like this big, solid, man-shaped hole in the world." She frowned. "Even when we were together. I loved being with you. You adored me, and you would do anything for me. But sometimes I'd go into a room and I wouldn't think there was anybody in there. And I'd turn the light on, or I'd turn the light off, and I'd realize that you were in there, sitting on your own, not reading, not watching TV, not doing anything."

She hugged him then, as if to take the sting from her words, and she said, "The best thing about Robbie was that he was somebody. He was a jerk sometimes, and he could be a joke, and he loved to have mirrors around when we made love so he could watch himself fucking me, but he was alive, puppy. He wanted things. He filled the space." She stopped, looked up at him, tipped her head a little to one side. "I'm sorry. Did I hurt your feelings?"

He did not trust his voice not to betray him, so he simply shook his head.

"Good," she said. "That's good."

They were approaching the rest area where he had parked his car. Shadow felt that he needed to say something: I love you, or please don't go, or I'm sorry. The kind of words you use to patch a conversation that had lurched, without warning, into the dark places. Instead he said, "I'm not dead."

"Maybe not," she said. "But are you sure you're alive?"

"Look at me," he said.

"That's not an answer," said his dead wife. "You'll know it, when you are."

"What now?" he said.

"Well," she said, "I've seen you now. I'm going south again."

"Back to Texas?"

"Somewhere warm. I don't care."

"I have to wait here," said Shadow. "Until my boss needs me."

"That's not living," said Laura. She sighed; and then she smiled, the same smile that had been able to tug at his heart no matter how many times he saw it. Every time she smiled at him had been the first time all over again.

He went to put his arm around her, but she shook her head and pulled out of his reach. She sat down on the edge of a snow-covered picnic table, and she watched him drive away.

INTERLUDE

The war had begun and nobody saw it. The storm was lowering and nobody knew it.

A falling girder in Manhattan closed a street for two days. It killed two pedestrians, an Arab taxi driver and the taxi driver's passenger.

A trucker in Denver was found dead in his home. The murder instrument, a rubber-gripped claw-headed hammer, had been left on the floor beside his corpse. His face was untouched, but the back of his head was completely destroyed, and several words in a foreign alphabet were written on the bathroom mirror in brown lipstick.

In a postal sorting station in Phoenix, Arizona, a man went crazy, went postal as they said on the evening news, and shot Terry "The Troll" Evensen, a morbidly obese, awkward man who lived alone in a trailer. Several other people in the sorting station were fired on, but only Evensen was killed. The man who fired the shots-first thought to be a disgruntled postal worker-was not caught, and was never identified.

"Frankly," said Terry "The Troll" Evensen's supervisor, on the News at Five, "if anyone around here was gonna go postal, we would have figured it was gonna be the Troll. Okay worker, but a weird guy. I mean, you never can tell, huh?"

That interview was cut when the segment was repeated, later that evening.

A community of nine anchorites in Montana was found dead. Reporters speculated that it was a mass suicide, but soon the cause of death was reported as carbon monoxide poisoning from an elderly furnace.

A crypt was defiled in the Key West graveyard.

An Amtrak passenger train hit a UPS truck in Idaho, killing the driver of the truck. None of the passengers was seriously injured.

It was still a cold war at this stage, a phony war, nothing that could be truly won or lost.

The wind stirred the branches of the tree. Sparks flew from the fire. The storm was coming.

The Queen of Sheba, half-demon, they said, on her father's side, witch woman, wise woman, and queen, who ruled Sheba when Sheba was the richest land there ever was, when its spices and its gems and scented woods were taken by boat and camel-back to the corners of the earth, who was worshiped even when she was alive, worshiped as a living goddess by the wisest of kings, stands on the sidewalk of Sunset Boulevard at 2:00 A.M. staring blankly out at the traffic like a slutty plastic bride on a black-and-neon wedding cake. She stands as if she owns the sidewalk and the night that surrounds her.

When someone looks straight at her, her lips move, as if she is talking to herself. When men in cars drive past her she makes eye contact and she smiles.

It's been a long night.

It's been a long week, and a long four thousand years.

She is proud that she owes nothing to anyone. The other girls on the street, they have pimps, they have habits, they have children, they have people who take what they make. Not her.

There is nothing holy left in her profession. Not anymore.

A week ago the rains began in Los Angeles, slicking the streets into road accidents, crumbling the mud from the hillsides and toppling houses into canyons, washing the world into the gutters and storm drains, drowning the bums and the homeless camped down in the concrete channel of the river. When the rains come in Los Angeles they always take people by surprise.

Bilquis has spent the last week inside. Unable to stand on the sidewalk, she has curled up in her bed in the room the color of raw liver, listening to the rain pattering on the metal box of the window air conditioner and placing personals on the Internet. She has left her invitations on adult-friendfinder.com, LA-escorts.com, Classyhollywoodbabes.com, has given herself an anonymous e-mail address. She was proud of herself for negotiating the new territories, but remains nervous-she has spent a long time avoiding anything that might resemble a paper trail. She has never even taken a small ad in the back pages of the LA. Weekly, preferring to pick out her own customers, to find by eye and smell and touch the ones who will worship her as she needs to be worshiped, the ones who will let her take them all the way...

And it occurs to her now, standing and shivering on the street comer (for the late February rains have left off, but the chill they brought with them remains) that she has a habit as bad as that of the smack whores and the crack whores, and this distresses her, and her lips begin to move again. If you were close enough to her ruby-red lips you would hear her say,

"I will rise now and go about the city in the streets, and in the broad ways I will seek the one I love." She is whispering that, and she whispers, "By night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loveth. Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth. My beloved is mine and I am his."

Bilquis hopes that the break in the rains will bring the Johns back. Most of the year she walks the same two or three blocks on Sunset, enjoying the cool L.A. nights. Once a month she pays off an officer in the LAPD, who replaced the last guy she used to pay off, who had vanished. His name had been Jerry LeBec, and his disappearance had been a mystery to the LAPD. He had become obsessed with Bilquis, had taken to following her on foot. One afternoon she woke, startled by a noise, and opened the door to her apartment, and found Jerry LeBec in civilian clothes kneeling and swaying on the worn carpet, his head bowed, waiting for her to come out. The noise she had heard was the noise of his head, thumping against her door as he rocked back and forth on his knees.

She stroked his hair and told him to come inside, and later she put his clothes into a black plastic garbage bag and tossed them into a Dumpster behind a hotel several blocks away. His gun and his wallet she put into a grocery store bag. She poured used coffee grounds and food waste on top of them, folded the top of the bag, and dropped it into a trash can at a bus stop.

She kept no souvenirs.

The orange night sky glimmers to the west with distant lightning, somewhere out to sea, and Bilquis knows that the rain will be starting soon. She sighs. She does not want to be caught in the rain. She will return to her apartment, she decides, and take a bath, and shave her legs-it seems to her she is always shaving her legs-and sleep.

She begins to walk up a side street, walking up the hillside to where her car is parked.

Headlights come up behind her, slowing as they approach her, and she turns her face to the street and smiles. The smile freezes when she sees the car is a white stretch limo. Men in stretch limos want to fuck in stretch limos, not in the privacy of Bilquis's shrine. Still, it might be an investment. Something for the future.

A tinted window hums down and Bilquis walks over to the limo, smiling. "Hey, honey," she says. "You looking for something?"

"Sweet loving," says a voice from the back of the stretch. She peers inside, as much as she can through the open window: she knows a girl who got into a stretch with five drunk football players and got hurt real bad, but there's only one John in there that she can see, and he looks kind of on the young side. He doesn't feel like a worshiper, but money, good money that's passed from his hand to hers, that's an energy in its own right-baraka, they called it, once on a time-which she can use and frankly these days, every little helps.

"How much?" he asks.

"Depends on what you want and how long you want it for," she says. "And whether you can afford it." She can smell something smoky drifting out of the limo window. It smells like burning wires and overheating circuit boards. The door is pushed open from inside.

"I can pay for anything I want," says the John. She leans into the car and looks around. There's nobody else in there, just the John, a puffy-faced kid who doesn't even look old enough to drink. Nobody else, so she gets in.

"Rich kid, huh?" she says.

"Richer than rich," he tells her, edging along the leather seat toward her. He moves awkwardly. She smiles at him.

"Mm. Makes me hot, honey," she tells him. "You must be one of them dot coms I read about?"

He preens then, puffs like a bullfrog. "Yeah. Among other things. I'm a technical boy." The car moves off.

"So," he says. "Tell me, Bilquis, how much just to suck my cock?"

"What you call me?"

"Bilquis," he says, again. And then he sings, in a voice not made for singing, "You are an immaterial girl living in a material world." There is something rehearsed about his words, as if he's practiced this exchange in front of a mirror.

She stops smiling, and her face changes, becomes wiser, sharper, harder. "What do you want?"

"I told you. Sweet loving."

"I'll give you whatever you want," she says. She needs to get out of the limo. It's moving too fast for her to throw herself from the car, she figures, but she'll do it if she can't talk her way out of this. Whatever's happening here, she doesn't like it.

"What I want. Yes." He pauses. His tongue runs over his lips. "I want a clean world. I want to own tomorrow. I want evolution, devolution, and revolution. I want to move our kind from the fringes of the slipstream to the higher ground of the mainstream. You people are underground. That's wrong. We need to take the spotlight and shine. Front and center. You people have been so far underground for so long you've lost the use of your eyes."

"My name's Ayesha," she says. "I don't know what you're talking about. There's another girl on that corner, her name's Bilquis. We could go back to Sunset, you could have both of us..."

"Oh, Bilquis," he says, and he sighs, theatrically. "There's only so much belief to go around. They're reaching the end of what they can give us. The credibility gap." And then he sings, once again, in his tuneless nasal voice, "You are an analog girl, living in a digital world." The limo takes a corner too fast, and he tumbles across the seat into her. The driver of the car is hidden behind tinted glass. An irrational conviction strikes her, that nobody is driving the car, that the white limo is driving through Beverly Hills like Herbie the Love Bug, under its own power.

Then the John reaches out his hand and taps on the tinted glass.

The car slows, and before it has stopped moving Bilquis has pushed open the door and she half jumps, half falls out onto the blacktop. She's on a hillside road. To the left of her is a steep hill, to the right is a sheer drop. She starts to run down the road.

The limo sits there, unmoving.

It starts to rain, and her high heels slip and twist beneath her. She kicks them off, and runs, soaked to the skin, looking for somewhere she can get off the road. She's scared. She has power, true, but it's hunger-magic, cunt-magic. It has kept her alive in this land for so long, but for everything else she uses her sharp eyes and her mind, her height and her presence.

There's a metal guardrail at knee height on her right, to stop cars from tumbling over the side of the hill, and now the rain is running down the hill road turning it into a river, and the soles of her feet have started to bleed.

The lights of L.A. are spread out in front of her, a twinkling electrical map of an imaginary kingdom, the heavens laid out right here on earth, and she knows that all she needs to be safe is to get off the road.

I am black but comely, she mouths to the night and the rain. I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys. Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples: for I am sick of love.

A fork of lightning burns greenly across the night sky. She loses her footing, slides several feet, skinning her leg and elbow, and she is getting to her feet when she sees the lights of the car descending the hill toward her. It's coming down too fast for safety and she wonders whether to throw herself to the right, where it could crush her against the hillside, or the left, where she might tumble down the gully. She runs across the road, intending to push herself up the wet earth, to climb, when the white stretch limo comes fish-tailing down the slick hillside road, hell, it must be doing eighty, maybe even aquaplaning on the surface of the road, and she's pushing her hands into a handful of weeds and earth, and she's going to get up and away, she knows, when the wet earth crumbles and she tumbles back down onto the road.

The car hits her with an impact that crumples the grille and tosses her into the air like a glove puppet. She lands on the road behind the limo, and the impact shatters her pelvis, fractures her skull. Cold rainwater runs over her face.

She begins to curse her killer: curse him silently, as she cannot move her lips. She curses him in waking and in sleeping, in living and in death. She curses him as only someone who is half-demon on her father's side can curse.

A car door slams. Someone approaches her. "You were an analog girl," he sings again, tunelessly, "living in a digital world." And then he says, "You fucking madonnas. All you fucking madonnas." He walks away.

The car door slams.

The limo reverses, and runs back over her, slowly, for the first time. Her bones crunch beneath the wheels. Then the limo comes back down the hill toward her.

When, finally, it drives away down the hill, all it leaves behind on the road is the smeared red meat of roadkill, barely recognizable as human, and soon even that will be washed away by the rain.

INTERLUDE 2

"Hi, Samantha."

"Mags? Is that you?"

"Who else? Leon said that Auntie Sammy called when I was in the shower."

"We had a good talk. He's such a sweet kid."

"Yeah. I think I'll keep him."

A moment of discomfort for both of them, barely a crackle of a whisper over the telephone lines. Then, "Sammy, how's school?"

"They're giving us a week off. Problem with the furnaces. How are things in your neck of the North Woods?"

"Well, I've got a new next-door neighbor. He does coin tricks. The Lakeside News letter column currently features a blistering debate on the potential rezoning of the town land down by the old cemetery on the southeast shore of the lake and yours truly has to write a strident editorial summarizing the paper's position on this without offending anybody or in fact giving anyone any idea what our position is."

"Sounds like fun."

"It's not. Alison McGovern vanished last week-Jilly and Stan McGovern's oldest. Nice kid. She baby-sat for Leon a few times."

A mouth opens to say something, and it closes again, leaving whatever it was to say unsaid, and instead it says, "That's awful."

"Yes."

"So..." and there's nothing to follow that with that isn't going to hurt, so she says, "Is he cute?"

"Who?"

"The neighbor."

"His name's Ainsel. Mike Ainsel. He's okay. Too young for me. Big guy, looks...what's the word. Begins with an M."

"Mean? Moody? Magnificent? Married?"

A short laugh, then, "Yes, I guess he does look married. I mean, if there's a look that married men have, he kind of has it. But the word I was thinking of was Melancholy. He looks Melancholy."

"And Mysterious?"

"Not particularly. When he moved in he seemed kinda helpless-he didn't even know to heat-seal the windows. These days he still looks like he doesn't know what he's doing here. When he's here-he's here, then he's gone again. I've seen him out walking from time to time."

"Maybe he's a bank robber."

"Uh-huh. Just what I was thinking."

"You were not. That was my idea. Listen, Mags, how are you? Are you okay?"

"Yeah."

"Really?"

"No."

A long pause then. "I'm coming up to see you."

"Sammy, no."

"It'll be after the weekend, before the furnaces are working and school starts again. It'll be fun. You can make up a bed on the couch for me. And invite the mysterious neighbor over for dinner one night."

"Sam, you're matchmaking."

"Who's matchmaking? After Claudine-the-bitch-from-hell, maybe I'm ready to go back to boys for a while. I met a nice strange boy when I hitchhiked down to El Paso for Christmas."

"Oh. Look, Sam, you've got to stop hitchhiking."

"How do you think I'm going to get to Lakeside?"

"Alison McGovern was hitchhiking. Even in a town like this, it's not safe. I'll wire you the money. You can take the bus."

"I'll be fine."

"Sammy."

"Okay, Mags. Wire me the money if it'll let you sleep easier."

"You know it will."

"Okay, bossy big sister. Give Leon a bug and tell him Auntie Sammy's coming up and he's not to hide his toys in her bed this time."

"I'll tell him. I don't promise it'll do any good."

"So when should I expect you?"

"Tomorrow night. You don't have to meet me at the bus station-I'll ask Hinzelmann to run me over in Tessie."

"Too late. Tessie's in mothballs for the winter. But Hinzelmann will give you a ride anyway. He likes you. You listen to his stories."

"Maybe you should get Hinzelmann to write your editorial for you. Let's see. 'On the Rezoning of the Land by the Old Cemetery. It so happens that in the winter of ought-three my grampaw shot a stag down by the old cemetery by the lake. He was out of bullets, so he used a cherry-stone from the lunch my grandmama had packed for him. Creased the skull of the stag and it shot off like a bat out of heck. Two years later he was down that way and he sees this mighty buck with a spreading cherry tree growing between its antlers. Well, he shot it, and grandmama made cherry pies enough that they were still eating them come the next fourth of July...'" And they both laughed, then.

INTERLUDE 3
Jacksonville, Florida. 2:00 A.M.

"The sign says help wanted."

"We're always hiring."

"I can only work the night shift. Is that going to be a problem?"

"Shouldn't be. I can get you an application to fill out. You ever worked in a gas station before?"

"No. I figure, how hard can it be?"

"Well, it ain't rocket science, that's for sure. You know, ma'am, you don't mind my saying this, but you do not look well."

"I know. It's a medical condition. Looks worse than it is. Nothing life-threatening."

"Okay. You leave that application with me. We are really shorthanded on the late shift right now. Round here we call it the zombie shift. You do it too long, that's how you feel. Well now...is that Larna?

"Laura."

"Laura. Okay. Well, I hope you don't mind dealing with weirdos. Because they come out at night."

"I'm sure they do. I can cope.