“Kay-ro,” he said. “Wherever that is.”
“I know where that is,” she said. “Hand me an Illinois map from that rack over there.” Shadow passed her a plastic-coated map. She unfolded it, then pointed in triumph to the bottom-most corner of the state. “There it is.”
“Cairo?”
“That’s how they pronounce the one in Egypt. But the one in Little Egypt, they call that one Kayro. They got a Thebes down there, all sorts. My sister-in-law comes from Thebes. I asked her about the one in Egypt, she looked at me as if I had a screw loose.” The woman chuckled like a drain.
“Any pyramids?” The city was five hundred miles away, almost directly south.
“Not that they ever told me. They call it Little Egypt because back, oh, mebbe a hundred, hundred and fifty years back, there was a famine all over. Crops failed. But they didn’t fail down there. So everyone went there to buy food. Like in the Bible. Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat. Off we go to Egypt, bad-a-boom.”
“So if you were me, and you needed to get there, how would you go?” asked Shadow.
“Drive.”
“Car died a few miles down the road. It was a pieceashit if you’ll pardon my language,” said Shadow.
“Pee-Oh-Esses,” she said. “Yup. That’s what my brother-in-law calls ’em. He buys and sells cars in a small way. He’ll call me up, say Mattie, I just sold another Pee-Oh-Ess. Say, maybe he’d be interested in your old car. For scrap or something.”
“It belongs to my boss,” said Shadow, surprising himself with the fluency and ease of his lies. “I need to call him, so he can come pick it up.” A thought struck him. “Your brother-in-law, is he around here?”
“He’s in Muscoda. Ten minutes south of here. Just over the river. Why?”
“Well, does he have a Pee-Oh-Ess he’d like to sell me for, mm, five, six hundred bucks?”
She smiled sweetly. “Mister, he doesn’t have a car on that back lot you couldn’t buy with a full tank of gas for five hundred dollars. But don’t you tell him I said so.”
“Would you call him?” asked Shadow.
“I’m way ahead of you,” she told him, and she picked up the phone. “Hon? It’s Mattie. You get over here this minute. I got a man here wants to buy a car.”
The piece of shit he chose was a 1983 Chevy Nova, which he bought, with a full tank of gas, for four hundred and fifty dollars. It had almost a quarter of a million miles on the clock, and smelled faintly of bourbon, tobacco, and more strongly of something that might well have been bananas. He couldn’t tell what color it was, under the dirt and the snow. Still, of all the vehicles in Mattie’s brother-in-law’s back lot, it was the only one that looked like it might take him five hundred miles.
The deal was done in cash, and Mattie’s brother-in-law never asked for Shadow’s name or social security number or for anything except the money.
Shadow drove west, then south, with five hundred and fifty dollars in his pocket, keeping off the interstate. The piece of shit had a radio, but nothing happened when he turned it on. A sign said he’d left Wisconsin and was now in Illinois. He passed a strip-mining works, huge blue arc lights burning in the dim midwinter daylight.
He stopped and ate at a place called Mom’s, catching them just before they closed for the afternoon.
Each town he passed through had an extra sign up beside the sign telling him that he was now entering Our Town (pop. 720). The extra sign announced that the town’s under-14s team was the third runner-up in the interstate basketball team, or that the town was the home of the Illinois girls’ under-16s wrestling semifinalist.
He drove on, head nodding, feeling more drained with every minute that passed. He ran a stoplight, and was nearly side-swiped by a woman in a Dodge. As soon as he got out into open country he pulled off onto an empty tractor path on the side of the road, and he parked by a snow-spotted stubbly field in which a slow procession of fat black wild turkeys walked like a line of mourners; he turned off the engine, stretched out in the backseat, and fell asleep.
Darkness; a sensation of falling—as if he were tumbling down a great hole, like Alice. He fell for a hundred years into darkness. Faces passed him, swimming out of the black, then each face was ripped up and away before he could touch it . . .
Abruptly, and without transition, he was not falling. Now he was in a cave, and he was no longer alone. Shadow stared into familiar eyes: huge, liquid black eyes. They blinked.
Under the earth: yes. He remembered this place. The stink of wet cow. Firelight flickered on the wet cave walls, illuminating the buffalo head, the man’s body, skin the color of brick clay.
“Can’t you people leave me be?” asked Shadow. “I just want to sleep.”
The buffalo man nodded, slowly. His lips did not move, but a voice in Shadow’s head said, “Where are you going, Shadow?”
“Cairo.”
“Why?”
“Where else have I got to go? It’s where Wednesday wants me to go. I drank his mead.” In Shadow’s dream, with the power of dream logic behind it, the obligation seemed unarguable: he drank Wednesday’s mead three times, and sealed the pact—what other choice of action did he have?