|
along time coming.
Part 5:
From American Gods by Neil Gaiman
The two of them were in the VW bus, heading down to Florida on I-75. They'd been driving since dawn; or rather, Shadow had driven.
"Are you happy?" Asked Mr. Nancy, suddenly. He had been staring at Shadow for several hours. Whenever Shadow glanced over to his right, Mr. Nancy was looking at him with earth-brown eyes.
"Not really," said Shadow. "But I'm not dead yet."
"Huh?"
"'Call no man happy untill he is dead.' Herodotus."
Mr. Nancy raised an eyebrow, and he said, "I'm not dead yet, and, mostly because I'm not dead yet, I'm happy as a clamboy."
Shadow changed the subject.
"Tell me somethin', Shadow-boy."
"Okay."
"You learn anything from all this?"
Shadow shrugged. "I don't know. Most of what I learned on the tree I've already forgotten," he said. "I think I met some people. But I'm not certain of anything anymore. It's like one of those dreams that changes you. You keep some of the dream forever, and you know things down deep inside yourself, becuase it happened to you, but when you go looking for details they kind of just slip out of your head."
"Yeah," said Mr. Nancy. And then he said, grudgingly, "You're not so dumb."
"Maybe not," said Shadow. "But I wish I could have kept more of what passed through my hands, since I got out of prision. I was given so many things, and I lost them again."
"Maybe," said Mr. Nancy, "You kept more than you think."
"No," said Shadow.
"This is one i learned from a guy who's dead now." He reached into nowhere, and took a gold coin from the air. "And that's all there is," he said.
He tossed the coin into the air with a flick of his thumb.
It spun golden at the top of it's arc, in the sunlight, and it glittered and glinted and hung there in the midsummer sky as if it was never going to come down. Maybe it never would. Shadow didn't wait to see.
He walked away and kept on walking.
part 4
part 3
part 2
part 1the end.
|
