“Who was it?” asked Shadow.
“Didn’t say.”
“What did they want?”
“They were offerin’ us a truce, while they hand over the body.”
“They lie,” said Czernobog. “They want to lure us in, and then they will kill us. What they did to Wednesday. Is what I always used to do,” he added, with gloomy pride.
“It’s on neutral territory,” said Nancy. “Truly neutral.”
Czernobog chuckled. It sounded like a metal ball rattling in a dry skull. “I used to say that also. Come to a neutral place, I would say, and then in the night we would rise up and kill them all. Those were the good days.”
Mr. Nancy shrugged. He crunched down on his dark brown french fries, grinned his approval. “Mm-mm. These are fine fries,” he said.
“We can’t trust those people,” said Shadow.
“Listen, I’m older than you and I’m smarter than you and I’m better lookin’ than you,” said Mr. Nancy, thumping the bottom of the ketchup bottle, blobbing ketchup over his burnt fries. “I can get more pussy in an afternoon than you’ll get in a year. I can dance like an angel, fight like a cornered bear, plan better than a fox, sing like a nightingale . . .”
“And your point here is . . . ?”
Nancy’s brown eyes gazed into Shadow’s. “And they need to get rid of the body as much as we need to take it.”
Czernobog said, “There is no such neutral place.”
“There’s one,” said Mr. Nancy. “It’s the center.”
Determining the exact center of anything can be problematic at best. With living things—people, for example, or continents—the problem becomes one of intangibles: What is the center of a man? What is the center of a dream? And in the case of the continental United States, should one count Alaska when one attempts to find the center? Or Hawaii?
As the Twentieth Century began, they made a huge model of the USA, the lower forty-eight states, out of cardboard, and to find the center they balanced it on a pin, until they found the single place it balanced.
As near as anyone could figure it out, the exact center of the continental United States was several miles from Lebanon, Kansas, on Johnny Grib’s hog farm. By the 1930s the people of Lebanon were all ready to put a monument up in the middle of the hog farm, but Johnny Grib said that he didn’t want millions of tourists coming in and tramping all over and upsetting the hogs, so they put the monument to the geographical center of the United States two miles north of the town. They built a park, and a stone monument to go in the park, and a brass plaque on the monument. They blacktopped the road from the town, and, certain of the influx of tourists waiting to arrive, they even built a motel by the monument. Then they waited.
The tourists did not come. Nobody came.
It’s a sad little park, now, with a mobile chapel in it that wouldn’t fit a small funeral party, and a motel whose windows look like dead eyes.
“Which is why,” concluded Mr. Nancy, as they drove into Humansville, Missouri (pop. 1084), “the exact center of America is a tiny run-down park, an empty church, a pile of stones, and a derelict motel.”
“Hog farm,” said Czernobog. “You just said that the real center of America was a hog farm.”
“This isn’t about what is,” said Mr. Nancy. “It’s about what people think is. It’s all imaginary anyway. That’s why it’s important. People only fight over imaginary things.”
“My kind of people?” asked Shadow. “Or your kind of people?”
Nancy said nothing. Czernobog made a noise that might have been a chuckle, might have been a snort.
Shadow tried to get comfortable in the back of the bus. He had only slept a little. He had a bad feeling in the pit of his stomach. Worse than the feeling he had had in prison, worse than the feeling he had had back when Laura had come to him and told him about the robbery. This was bad. The back of his neck prickled, he felt sick and, several times, in waves, he felt scared.
Mr. Nancy pulled over in Humansville, parked outside a supermarket. Mr. Nancy went inside, and Shadow followed him in. Czernobog waited in the parking lot, smoking his cigarette.
There was a young fair-haired man, little more than a boy, restocking the breakfast cereal shelves.
“Hey,” said Mr. Nancy.
“Hey,” said the young man. “It’s true, isn’t it? They killed him?”
“Yes,” said Mr. Nancy. “They killed him.”