“Then,” said Shadow, “it kills me.”
Mr. Nancy flicked his cigarillo into the meadow, angrily. “I said you had shit for brains, and you still have shit for brains. Can’t see when somebody’s tryin’ to give you an out?”
“I’m sorry,” said Shadow. He didn’t say anything else. Nancy walked back to the bus.
Czernobog walked over to Shadow. He did not look pleased. “You must come through this alive,” he said. “Come through this safely for me.” And then he tapped his knuckle gently against Shadow’s forehead and said, “Bam!” He squeezed Shadow’s shoulder, patted his arm, and went to join Mr. Nancy.
The biggest woman, whose name seemed to be Urtha or Urder—Shadow could not repeat it back to. her to her satisfaction—told him, in pantomime, to take ofE&s clothes.
“All of them?”
The big woman shrugged. Shadow stripped to his briefs and T-shirt. The women propped the laddegs against the tree. One of the ladders—it was painted by hind, with little flowers and leaves twining up the struts—they pointed out to him.
He climbed the nine steps. Then, at their urging, he stepped onto a low branch.
The middle woman tipped out the contents of the sack onto the meadow-grass. It was filled with a tangle of thin ropes, brown with age and dirt, and the woman began to sort them out into lengths, and to lay them carefully on the ground beside Wednesday’s body.
They climbed their own ladders now, and they began to knot the ropes, intricate and elegant knots, and they wrapped the ropes first about the tree, and then about Shadow. Unembarrassed, like midwives or nurses or those who lay out corpses, they removed his T-shirt and briefs, then they bound him, never tightly, but firmly and finally. He was amazed at how comfortably the ropes and the knots bore his weight. The ropes went under his arms, between his legs, around his waist, his ankles, his chest, binding him to the tree.
The final rope was tied, loosely, about his neck. It was, initially, uncomfortable, but his weight was well distributed, and none of the ropes cut his flesh.
His feet were five feet above the ground. The tree was leafless and huge, its branches black against the gray sky, its bark a smooth silvery gray.
They took the ladders away. There was a moment of panic as all his weight was taken by the ropes, and he dropped a few inches. Still, he made no sound.
The women placed the body, wrapped in its motel-sheet shroud, at the foot of the tree, and they left him there.
They left him there alone.
Chapter Fifteen
Hang me, O hang me, and I’ll be dead and gone,
Hang me, O hang me, and I’ll be dead and gone,
I wouldn ‘t mind the hangin’, it’s bein ‘gone so long,
It’s lyin’in the grave so long.
—Old song
The first day that Shadow hung from the tree he experienced only discomfort that edged slowly into pain, and fear, and, occasionally, an emotion that was somewhere between boredom and apathy: a gray acceptance, a waiting. He hung. The wind was still. After several hours fleeting bursts of color started to explode across his vision in blossoms of crimson and gold, throbbing and pulsing with a life of their own.
The pain in his arms and legs became, by degrees, intolerable. If he relaxed them, let his body go slack and dangle, if he flopped forward, then the rope around his neck would take up the slack and the world would shimmer and swim. So he pushed himself back against the trunk of the tree. He could feel his heart laboring in his chest, a pounding arrhythmic tattoo as it pumped the blood through his body ... Emeralds and sapphires and rubies crystallized and burst in front of his eyes. His breath came in shallow gulps. The bark of the tree was rough against his back. The chill of the afternoon on his naked skin made him shiver, made his flesh prickle and goose.
It’s easy, said someone in the back of his head. There’s a trick to it. You do it or you die.
He was pleased with the thought, and repeated it over and over in the back of his head, part mantra, part nursery rhyme, rattling along to the drumbeat of his heart.
It’s easy, there’s a trick to it, you do it or you die. It’s easy, there’s a trick to it, you do it or you die. It’s easy, there’s a trick to it, you do it or you die. It’s easy, there’s a trick to it, you do it or you die.
Time passed. The chanting continued. He could hear it. Someone was repeating the words, only stopping when Shadow’s mouth began to dry out, when his tongue turned dry and skinlike in his mouth. He pushed himself up and away from the tree with his feet, trying to support his weight in a way that would still allow him to fill his lungs.