2003American Gods by Neil Gaiman

Author:Neil Gaiman [Gaiman, Neil]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-01-12T06:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.

—Ben Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanack.

Three cold days passed. The thermometer never made it up to the zero mark, not even at midday. Shadow wondered how people had survived this weather in the days before electricity, before thermal face masks and lightweight thermal underwear, before easy travel.

He was down at the video, tanning, bait and tackle store, being shown Hinzelmann’s hand-tied trout flies. They were more interesting than he had expected: colorful fakes of life, made of feather and thread, each with a hook hidden inside it.

He asked Hinzelmann.

“For real?” asked Hinzelmann.

“For real,” said Shadow.

“Well,” said the older man. “Sometimes they didn’t survive it, and they died. Leaky chimneys and badly ventilated stoves and ranges killed as many people as the cold. But those days were hard—they’d spend the summer and the fall laying up the food and the firewood for the winter. The worst thing of all was the madness. I heard on the radio, they were saying how it has to do with the sunlight, how there isn’t enough of it in the winter. My daddy, he said folk just went stir crazy—winter madness they called it. Lakeside always had it easy, but some of the other towns around here, they had it hard. There was a saying still had currency when I was a kid, that if the serving girl hadn’t tried to kill you by February she hadn’t any backbone.

“Storybooks were like gold dust—anything you could read was treasured, back before the town had a lending library. When my grampaw got sent a storybook from his brother in Bavaria, all the Germans in town met up in the town hall to hear him read it, and the Finns and the Irish and the rest of them, they’d make the Germans tell them the stories.

‘Twenty miles south of here, in Jibway, they found a woman walking mother-naked in the winter with a dead babe at her breast, and she’d not suffer them to take it from her.” He shook his head meditatively, closed the fly cabinet with a click. “Bad business. You want a video rental card? Eventually they’ll open a Blockbusters here, and then we’ll soon be out of business. But for now we got a pretty fair selection.”

Shadow reminded Hinzelmann that he had no television, and no VCR. He enjoyed Hinzelmann’s cotftpany—the reminiscences, the tall tales, the goblin grin ofthe old man. It could make things awkward between them were Shadow to admit that television had made him uncomfortable ever since it had started to talk to him.

Hinzelmann fished in a drawer, «id took out a tin box—by the look of it, it had once been a Christmas box, of the kind that contained chocolates or cookies: a mottled Santa Claus, holding a tray of Coca-Cola bottles, beamed up from its lid. Hinzelmann eased off the metal top of the box, revealing a notebook and books of blank tickets, and said, “How many you want me to put you down for?”

“How many of what?”

“Klunker tickets.

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