Czernobog had been looking around the parking lot. Now he said, “You will pardon me asking, but our new vehicle is which?”
The barrel-chested man pointed. “There she is,” he said.
Czernobog snorted. “That?”
It was a 1970 VW bus. There was a rainbow decal in the rear window.
“It’s a fine vehicle. And it’s the last thing that they’ll be expecting you to be driving.”
Czernobog walked around the vehicle. Then he started to cough, a lung-rumbling, old-man, five-in-the-morning smoker’s cough. He hawked, and spat, and put his hand to his chest, massaging away the pain. “Yes. The last car they will suspect. So what happens when the police pull us over, looking for the hippies and the dope? Eh? We are not here to ride the magic bus. We are to blend in.”
The bearded man unlocked the door of the bus. “So they take a look at you, they see you aren’t hippies, they wave you goodbye. It’s the perfect disguise. And it’s all I could find at no notice.”
Czernobog seemed to be ready to argue it further, but Mr. Nancy intervened smoothly. “Elvis, you came through for us. We are very grateful. Now, that car needs to get back to Chicago.”
“We’ll leave it in Bloomington,” said the bearded man. “The wolves will take care of it. Don’t give it another thought.” He turned back to Shadow. “Again, you have my sympathy and I share your pain. Good luck. And if the vigil falls to you, my admiration, and my sympathy.” He squeezed Shadow’s hand with his own catcher’s-mitt fist. It hurt. “You tell his corpse when you see it. Tell him that Alviss son of Vindalf will keep the faith.”
The VW bus smelled of patchouli, of old incense and rolling tobacco. There was a faded pink carpet glued to the floor and to the walls.
“Who was that?” asked Shadow, as he drove them down the ramp, grinding the gears.
“Just like he said, Alviss son of Vindalf. Htfs the king of the dwarfs. The biggest, mightiest, greatest of all the dwarf folk.”
“But he’s not a dwarf,” pointed out Shadow. “He’s what, five-eight? Five-nine?”
“Which makes him a giant among dwarfs,” said Czernobog from behind him. ‘Tallest dwarf in America.”
“What was that about the vigil?” asked Shadow.
The two old men said nothing. Shadow glanced at Mr. Nancy, who was staring out of the window.
“Well? He was talking about a vigil. You heard him.”
Czernobog spoke up from the backseat. “You will not have to do it,” he said.
“Do what?”
“The vigil. He talks too much. All the dwarfs talk and talk. Is nothing to think of. Better you put it out of your mind.”
Driving south was like driving forward in time. The snows erased, slowly, and were completely gone by the following morning when the bus reached Kentucky. Winter was already over in Kentucky, and spring was on its way. Shadow began to wonder if there were some kind of equation to explain it—perhaps every fifty miles he drove south he was driving a day into the future.
He would have mentioned his idea to somebody, but Mr. Nancy was asleep in the passenger seat in the front, while Czernobog snored unceasingly in the back.
Time seemed a flexible construct at that moment, an illusion he was imagining as he drove. He found himself becoming painfully aware of birds and animals: he saw the crows on the side of the road, or in the bus’s path, picking at roadkill; flights of birds wheeled across the skies in patterns that almost made sense; cats stared at them from front lawns and fence posts.
Czernobog snorted and woke, sitting up slowly. “I dreamed a strange dream,” he said. “I dreamed that I am truly Bielebog. That forever the world imagines that there are two of us, the light god and the dark, but that now we are both old, I find it was only me all the time, giving them gifts, taking my gifts away.” He broke the filter from a Lucky Strike, put the cigarette between his lips and lit it.
Shadow wound down his window.
“Aren’t you worried about lung cancer?” he said.
“I am cancer,” said Czernobog. “I do not frighten myself.”
Nancy spoke. “Folk like us don’t get cancer. We don’t get arteriosclerosis or Parkinson’s disease or syphilis. We’re kind of hard to kill.”
“They killed Wednesday,” said Shadow.
He pulled over for gas, and then parked next door at a restaurant for an early breakfast. As they entered, the pay phone in the entrance began to jangle.
They gave their orders to an elderly woman with a worried smile, who had been sitting reading a paperback copy of What My Heart Meant by Jenny Kerton. The woman sighed, then walked back and over to the phone, picked it up, said “Yes.” Then she looked back at the room, said, “Yep. Looks like they are. You just hold the line now,” and walked over to Mr. Nancy.
“It’s for you,” she said.
“Okay,” said Mr. Nancy. “Now, ma’am, you make sure those fries are real crisp now. Think burnt.” He walked over to the pay phone. “This is he.”
“And what makes you think I’m dumb enough to trust you?” he said.