Chapter Three
Every hour wounds. The last one kills.
-old saying
There was a thin young woman behind the counter at the Motel America. She told Shadow he had already been checked in by his friend, and gave him his rectangular plastic room key. She had pale blonde hair and a rodentlike quality to her face that was most apparent when she looked suspicious, and eased when she smiled. She refused to tell him Wednesday's room number, and insisted on telephoning Wednesday on the house phone to let him know his guest was here.
Wednesday came out of a room down the hall, and beckoned to Shadow.
"How was the funeral?" he asked.
"It's over," said Shadow.
"You want to talk about it?"
"No," said Shadow.
"Good." Wednesday grinned. "Too much talking these days. Talk talk talk. This country would get along much better if people learned how to suffer in silence."
Wednesday led the way back to his room, which was across the hall from Shadow's. There were maps all over the room, unfolded, spread out on the bed, taped to the walls. Wednesday had drawn all over the maps in bright marking pens, fluorescent greens and painful pinks and vivid oranges.
"I got hijacked by a fat kid," said Shadow. "He says to tell you that you have been consigned to the dungheap of history while people like him ride in their limos down the superhighways of life. Something like that."
"Little snot," said Wednesday.
"You know him?"
Wednesday shrugged. "I know who he is." He sat down, heavily, on the room's only chair. "They don't have a clue," he said. "They don't have a f**king clue. How much longer do you need to stay in town?"
"I don't know. Maybe another week. I guess I need to wrap up Laura's affairs. Take care of the apartment, get rid of her clothes, all that. It'll drive her mother nuts, but the woman deserves it."
Wednesday nodded his huge head. "Well, the sooner you're done, the sooner we can move out of Eagle Point. Goodnight."
Shadow walked across the hall. His room was a duplicate of Wednesday's room, down to the print of a bloody sunset on the wall above the bed. He ordered a cheese and meatball pizza, then he ran a bath, pouring all the motel's little plastic bottles of shampoo into the water, making it foam.
He was too big to lie down in the bathtub, but he sat in it and luxuriated as best he could. Shadow had promised himself a bath when he got out of prison, and Shadow kept his promises.
The pizza arrived shortly after he got out of the bath, and Shadow ate it, washing it down with a can of root beer.
Shadow lay in bed, thinking, This is my first bed as a free man, and the thought gave him less pleasure than he had imagined that it would. He left the drapes open, watched the lights of the cars and of the fast food joints through the window glass, comforted to know there was another world out there, one he could walk to anytime he wanted.
Shadow could have been in his bed at home, he thought, in the apartment that he had shared with Laura-in the bed that he had shared with Laura. But the thought of being there without her, surrounded by her things, her scent, her life, was simply too painful…
Don't go there, thought Shadow. He decided to think about something else. He thought about coin tricks. Shadow knew that he did not have the personality to be a magician: he could not weave the stories that were so necessary for belief, nor did he wish to do card tricks, nor produce paper flowers. But he just wanted to manipulate coins; he liked the craft of it. He started to list the coin vanishes he had mastered, which reminded him of the coin he had tossed into Laura's grave, and then, in his head, Audrey was telling him that Laura had died with Robbie's c**k in her mouth, and once again he felt a small hurt in his heart.
Every hour wounds. The last one kills. Where had he heard that?
He thought of Wednesday's comment and smiled, despite himself: Shadow had heard too many people telling each other not to repress their feelings, to let their emotions out, let the pain go. Shadow thought there was a lot to be said for bottling up emotions. If you did it long enough and deep enough, he suspected, pretty soon you wouldn't feel anything at all.
Sleep took him then, without Shadow noticing.
He was walking…
He was walking through a room bigger than a city, and everywhere he looked there were statues and carvings and rough-hewn images. He was standing beside a statue of a womanlike thing: her na**d br**sts hung flat and pendulous on her chest, around her waist was a chain of severed hands, both of her own hands held sharp knives, and, instead of a head, rising from her neck there were twin serpents, their bodies arched, facing each other, ready to attack. There was something profoundly disturbing about the statue, a deep and violent wrongness. Shadow backed away from it.
He began to walk through the hall. The carved eyes of those statues that had eyes seemed to follow his every step.
In his dream, he realized that each statue had a name burning on the floor in front of it. The man with the white hair, with a necklace of teeth about his neck, holding a drum, was Leucotios; the broad-hipped woman with monsters dropping from the vast gash between her legs was Hubur; the ram-headed man holding the golden ball was Hershef.
A precise voice, fussy and exact, was speaking to him, in his dream, but he could see no one.
"These are gods who have been forgotten, and now might as well be dead. They can be found only in dry histories. They are gone, all gone, but their names and their images remain with us."