An old woman had died. Her name had been Lila Goodchild. At Mr. Jacquel’s direction, Shadow carried the folded aluminum gurney up the narrow stairs to her bedroom and unfolded it next to her bed. He took out a translucent blue plastic body bag, laid it next to the dead woman oa the bed, and unzipped it open. She wore a pink nightgown and a quilted robe. Shadow lifted her and wrapped her, fragile and almost weightless, in a blanket, and placed it onto the bag. He zipped the bag shut and put it on the gurney. While Shadow did this, Jacquel talked to a very old man who had, when she was alive, been married to Lila Goodchild. Or rather, Jacquel listened while the old man talked. As Shadow had zipped Mrs. Goodchild away, the old man had been explaining how ungrateful his children had been, and grandchildren too, though that wasn’t their fault, that was their parents’, the apple didn’t fall far from the tree, and he thought he’d raised them better than that.
Shadow and Jacquel wheeled the loaded gurney to the narrow flight of stairs. The old man followed them, still talking, mostly about money, and greed, and ingratitude. He wore bedroom slippers. Shadow carried the heavier bottom end of the gurney down the stairs and out onto the street, then he wheeled it along the icy sidewalk to the hearse. Jacquel opened the hearse’s rear door. Shadow hesitated, and Jacquel said, “Just push it on in there. The supports’ll fold up out of the way.” Shadow pushed the gurney, anjl the supports snapped up, the wheels rotated, and the gurney rolled right onto the floor of the hearse. Jacquel showed him how to strap it in securely, and Shadow closed up the hearse while Jacquel listened to the old man who had been married to Lila Goodchild, unmindful of the cold, an old man in his slippers and his bathrobe out on the wintry sidewalk telling Jacquel how his children were vultures, no better than hovering vultures, waiting to take what little he and Lila had scraped together, and how the two of them had fled to St. Louis, to Memphis, to Miami, and how they wound up in Cairo, and how relieved he was that Lila had not died in a nursing home, how scared he was that he would.
They walked the old man back into the house, up the stairs to his room. A small TV set droned from one corner of the couple’s bedroom. As Shadow passed it he noticed that the newsreader was grinning and winking at him. When he was sure that no one was looking in his direction he gave the set the finger.
“They’ve got no money,” said Jacquel when they were back in the hearse. “He’ll come in to see Ibis tomorrow. He’ll choose the cheapest funeral. Her friends will persuade him to do her right, give her a proper send-off in the front room, I expect. But he’ll grumble. Got no money. Nobody around here’s got money these days. Anyway, he’ll be dead in six months. A year at the outside.”
Snowflakes tumbled and drifted in front of the headlights. The snow was coming south. Shadow said, “Is he sick?”
“It ain’t that. Women survive their men. Men—men like him—don’t live long when their women are gone. You’ll see—he’ll just start wandering, all the familiar things are going to be gone with her. He gets tired and he fades and then he gives up and then he’s gone. Maybe pneumonia will take him or maybe it’ll be cancer, or maybe his heart will stop. Old age, and all the fight gone out of you. Then you die.”
Shadow thought. “Hey, Jacquel?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you believe in the soul?” It wasn’t quite the question he had been going to ask, and it took him by surprise to hear it coming from his mouth. He had intended to say something less direct, but there was nothing less direct that he could say.
“Depends. Back in my day, we had it all set up. You lined up when you died, and you’d answer for your evil deeds and for your good deeds, and if your evil deeds outweighed a feather, we’d feed your soul and your heart to Ammet, the Eater of Souls.”
“He must have eaten a lot of people.”
“Not as many as you’d think. It was ;a really heavy feather. We had it made special. You had to be p,retty damn evil to tip the scales on that baby. Stop here, thargas station. We’ll put in a few gallons.”
The streets were quiet, in the way that’streets only are when the first snow falls. “It’s going to be % white Christmas,” said Shadow as he pumped the gas.
“Yup. Shit. That boy was one lucky son of a virgin.”
“Jesus?”
“Lucky, lucky guy. He could fall in a cesspit and come up smelling like roses. Hell, it’s not even his birthday, you know that? He took it from Mithras. You run into Mithras yet? Red cap. Nice kid.”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Well ... I’ve never seen Mithras around here. He was an army brat. Maybe he’s back in the Middle East, taking it easy, but I expect he’s probably gone by now. It happens. One day every soldier in the empire has to shower in the blood of your sacrificial bull. The next they don’t even remember your birthday.”
Swish went the windshield wipers, pushing the snow to the side, bunching the flakes up into knots and swirls of clear ice.
A traffic light turned momentarily yellow and then red, and Shadow put his foot on the brake. The hearse fishtailed and swung around on the empty road before it stopped.
The light turned green. Shadow took the hearse up to ten miles per hour, which seemed enough on the slippery roads. It was perfectly happy cruising in second gear: he guessed it must have spent a lot of its time at that speed, holding up traffic.
“That’s good,” said Jacquel. “So, yeah, Jesus does pretty good over here. But I met a guy who said he saw him hitchhiking by the side of the road in Afghanistan and nobody was stopping to give him a ride. You know? It all depends on where you are.”