Then she laughed, and crouched, and picked up in her good hand a blacksnake as tall as a sapling and as thick as a ship’s rope.
“Here,” she said, “Here will be our voudon.”
She dropped the unresisting snake into a basket that yellow Marie was carrying.
And then, in the moonlight, the second sight possessed her for a final time, and she saw her brother Agasu. He was not the twelve-year-old boy she had last seen in the Bridgeport market, but a huge man, bald and grinning with broken teeth, his back lined with deep scars. In one hand he held a machete. His right arm was barely a stump.
She reached out her own good left hand.
“Stay, stay awhile,” she whispered. “I will be there. I will be with you soon.”
And Marie Paris thought the old woman was speaking to her.
CHAPTER TWELVE
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.”