“Goddamn you, somebody gets hurt, it’s going to be all your fault! Let me go!” Cut’n-Shoot’s bellow was broken by a coughing spasm that almost brought him to his knees. He leaned forward, spitting and dribbling, hands braced on his thighs.
“I’m not stopping you,” Richardson said. “I just want answers. I know you weren’t making that up, about the Troll moving at night. I’ve seen it.”
“Yah?” Cut’n-Shoot hawked up one last monster wad. “So what? Price of fish cakes. Ain’t your job.”
“I’m a professor of children’s literature, a full professor”—for some reason he felt compelled to lie to the old man—“at the University of Washington. I could quote you troll stories from here to next September. And one thing I knew for certain — until I met you — was that they don’t exist.”
Cut’n-Shoot glared at him out of one rheumy eye, the other one closed and twitching. “You think you know trolls?” He snorted. “Goddamn useless punk … you don’t know shit.”
“Show me.”
The old man stared hard for a moment more, then smiled, revealing a sprinkling of brown teeth. It was not a friendly expression. “Might be I will, then. Maybe teach you a lesson. But we’re gonna pick up some things first, and you’re buyin’. Come on.”
Cut’n-Shoot led him a little over three-quarters of a mile from the park, along Northlake Way, under the high overpass of the Aurora Avenue Bridge and the low one at Fourth Avenue, then right on Evanston. Richardson tried asking more questions but got nothing but growls and snorts for his trouble. Best to save his breath, anyway — he was surprised at how fast the old man could move in a syncopated crab-scuttle that favored his right leg and made the rain slicker snap like a geisha’s fan. At the corner of 34th Street Cut’n-Shoot ignored the parallel white stripes of the crosswalk and angled straight across the street to the doors of the Fremont PCC. He strode through them like Alexander entering a conquered city.
The bag clerk nearest the entry waved as they came in. “Hey, Cut! Little late tonight.”
Cut’n-Shoot didn’t pause, cocking one thumb back over his shoulder at Richardson as he swept up a plastic shopping basket and continued deeper into the store. “Not my fault. Professor here’s got the rag on.”
When they finally left — having rung up $213.62 of luxury items on Richardson’s MasterCard, including multiple cuts of Eel River organic beef and a $55 bottle of 2006 Cadence Camerata Cabernet Sauvignon — it was a docile, baffled Richardson, grocery bags in hand, who trudged after the old man down the mostly empty neighborhood streets. Cut’n-Shoot had made his selections with the demanding eye of a lifelong connoisseur, assessing things on some qualitative scale of measurement Richardson couldn’t begin to comprehend. That he and his wallet were being taken advantage of was self-evident; but the inborn curiosity that had first led him to books as a child, that insatiable need to get to the end of each new unfolding story, was now completely engaged. Rambling concrete trolls weren’t the only mystery in Fremont.
Cut’n-Shoot led him east along 34th Street to where Troll Avenue started, a narrow road rising between the grand columns that supported the Aurora Avenue Bridge. High on the bridge itself cars hissed by like ghosts, while down on the ground it was quiet as the sea bottom, and the sparse lights from lakeside boats and local apartment buildings only served to make the path up to the Troll darker than Richardson liked.
“Stupid ratfucks throw a big party up there every October,” Cut’n-Shoot said. “Call it ‘Trolloween.’ People. Batshit stupid.”
“Well, Fremont’s that kind of place,” Richardson responded. “I mean, the Solstice Parade, Oktoberfest, the crazy rocket with ‘Freedom to Be Peculiar’ written on it in Latin—”
“Don’t care about all that crap. Just wish they wouldn’t rile him so much. Job’s hard enough as it is.”
“And what job would that be, exactly, anyway?”
“You’ll see.”
At the top of the road the bridge merged with the hillside, forming the space that held the Troll, with stairs running up the hill on either side. Tonight the Troll looked exactly as it had the first time he saw it. It was impossible to imagine this crudely hewn mound of ferroconcrete in motion, even knowing what he knew. Cut’n-Shoot made him put the grocery bags on the ground at the base of the eastern stair, then gestured brusquely for him to stand aside. When he did, the old man got down heavily on one knee — not the right one, Richardson noticed — and started searching through them.
“That’s the thing, see. People never know what they’re doing. Best place to sleep in town and they had to go fuck everything up.”
“It’s concrete and wire and rebar,” Richardson responded. “I read about it. They had a contest back in 1990; this design won. There used to be a time capsule with Elvis memorabilia in the car, for Christ’s sake. It’s not real.”
“Sure, sure. Like a troll cares what it’s made of, starting out. Hah. That ain’t the point. Point is, they did too good a job.”
Cut’n-Shoot struggled to his feet, unbalanced by the pair of brown packages he was holding — two large roasts in their taped-up butcher wrapping. “Here,” he said, holding out one of them to Richardson. “Get this shit off. He won’t be able to smell ’em through the paper.”
“You feed him?”
“Told you I was on his good side, didn’t I?”
Grinning fiercely through his beard now, the old man marched straight to the hulking stone brute and slapped the bloody roast down on the ground in front of it. “There!” he said. “First snack of the night. Better than your usual, too, and don’t you know it! Ummm-mmm, that’s gonna be good.” He looked back at Richardson just as a car passed, its headlights making the Troll’s hubcap eye seem to flicker and spin. “Well, come on — you wanted this, didn’t you? Just do like me, make it friendly.”
Richardson was holding the larger unwrapped roast in front of him like a doily, pinching the thick slab of meat between the thumb and forefinger of each hand. It was slippery, and the blood dripping from it made him queasy. As he stepped forward with the offering, an old Norse poem suddenly came to him, the earliest relevant reference his magpie mind could dredge up. “They call me Troll,” he recited. “Gnawer of the Moon, Giant of the Gale-blasts, Curse of the rain-hall…”
Cut’n-Shoot looked at him approvingly, nodding him on.
“Companion of the Sibyl, Nightroaming hag, Swallower of the loaf of heaven.
What is a Troll but that?”
Richardson laid his roast down gently beside Cut’n-Shoot’s, took a deep breath, and backed away without looking up, not knowing as he did so whether this obeisance was for the Troll’s benefit, Cut’n-Shoot’s, or his own.
The old man’s grating chuckle came to him. “That’s the good side, all right. That’s the way, that’s the way.” Richardson looked up. Cut’n-Shoot had pushed back the hood of his rain slicker, and was scratching his head through hair like furnace ashes. “But he likes lively a sight better. You get the chance, you remember.”
“Nothing’s happening,” Richardson started to say — and then something was.
One by one the fingers of the Troll’s right hand were coming free of the ground. Richardson realized that the whole forearm was lifting up, twisting from the elbow, dust and dirt sifting off as it rose. The giant hand turned with the motion, dead-gray fingers coming together with a sound of cracking bricks. Then — like a child grabbing for jacks before the ball comes down, and just as fast — the Troll’s hand swept up the two roasts in one great swinging motion and carried them to its suddenly open mouth. The ponderous jaw moved up and down three times before it settled back into place, and Richardson tried to imagine what could possibly be going on inside. A moment later the Troll’s hand and arm returned to their original position, fingers wriggling their way back into the soil and once more becoming motionless.
There was no moon, and no more cars went by, but the hubcap continued to twinkle with a brightly chilling malice,
and even — so it seemed to Richardson — to wink. He was still staring at the Troll when Cut’n-Shoot finally clapped his palms together with satisfaction.
“Well! Old sumbitch settled right down. Think he liked that fancy talk. Know any more?”
“Sure.”
“My lucky day,” the old man said. “Now lemme show you what the wine’s for.”
* * *
Richardson woke the next morning hung over, stiff backed, and with a runny nose. He was late to class again; and that evening, when he returned to Fremont, he brought lamb chops.
* * *
From then on he never came to the bridge without bringing some tribute for the Troll. Most often it came in the form of slabs of raw meat; though now and again, this being Seattle, he would present the statue with a whole salmon, usually purchased down at the ferry dock from a fisherman’s wife. Once — only once — he tried offering a bag of fresh crab cakes, but Cut’n-Shoot informed him tersely, “Don’t give him none of that touristy shit,” and made him go back to the Fremont PCC for an entire Diestel Family turkey.
Richardson also read to the Troll most evenings, working his way up from obvious fare to selections from the Bland Tomtar och Troll series, voiced dramatically in his best stab at phonetic Swedish. He had no idea whether the Troll understood, but the expressions on his own face as he dealt with the unfamiliar orthography made Cut’n-Shoot howl.
It didn’t always go easily. By day the Troll was changeless, an eternally crude concrete figure with one dull aluminum eye, a vacantly malevolent expression, and bad hair. At night its temperament was as unpredictably irritable as a wasp’s. Richardson began to measure his visits on a scale marked in feet, yards, and furlongs, assessing the difference between this Tuesday and that Saturday by precisely how far the Troll stirred from its den. In that way he came to understand — as Cut’n-Shoot never bothered to explain — that the old man’s task wasn’t to feed the Troll at all, but rather to distract it, to confuse it, to short-circuit its unfocused instinct to go off unimpeded about its trollish business, whatever that might be. Food was a means to that end; as now was Richardson’s cheerfully garbled Swedish. Even so there were nights when it would not yield, and lumbered half a mile or more before they could tempt and coax it — like two Pekingese herding a mastiff — back under the bridge. On those nights, nothing would do but “the lively,” usually in the form of a writhing rat or pigeon. Cut’n-Shoot never told Richardson how — or with what — he caught them.
The months passed, and the weather turned relatively mild and notably dry. On campus this was generally spoken of as a function of global warming and greeted with definite anxiety. Richardson paid little attention to climate crises, having his own worries. His temporary tenure at the university was coming to an end with the summer quarter, and thoughts of the department chair’s vague early promises moved in his heart like schooling fish: Instead of calling up job listings and sending out inquiries, he found himself manufacturing excuses to go by Aussie’s office or sit near him in the faculty dining hall, hoping that mere proximity might make the man offer him work he couldn’t possibly ask for.
He also began to drink, at first in pretended sociability with Cut’n-Shoot, but later with the devotion of a convert. It was not an area in which he had any sort of previous expertise. He could neither tell good champagne from bad nor upper-shelf vodka from potato-peel swill; only that in each case the latter was distinctly cheaper. It all invariably left him with a hammering headache the next morning, which seemed to be how you could tell you were doing it right.
Having no one to drink with in comfort and understanding, he came to spend the early part of many evenings drinking with the gray cat, for whom he had conceived an increasing dislike. Not only did it smell bad, it had taken to urinating on the floor outside its box and knocking down the clothes hamper to tear and scratch at Richardson’s dirty clothes. Richardson, who had never hated an animal in his life, no more than he had ever loved one, brooded increasingly and extensively about the gray cat.
Nothing would probably have come of this growing fixation had he not already been drunk on the evening he discovered that the cat had peed in his only pair of carpet slippers. Having noticed a pet-transport cage in one of the closets, he pounced on the unwary animal and forced it into the cage, threw on his coat, and stalked down the hill toward Fremont, muttering in counterpoint to the cat’s furious wails, as the cage banged against the side of his left knee. “Lively. Right, lively it is. Lively it bloody is.”
Cut’n-Shoot said nothing when Richardson set the cage down facing the Troll, shouted “Lively!” and walked quickly away, paying no heed to the cat’s redoubled howling. He did look back once, but cage and bridge were both out of sight by then.
In the morning, between the expected headache and the forgotten pre-finals lecture summarizing works intended for children from A.D. 1000 to 1850, he remembered the cat only as he was locking the apartment door. There was no time to check on the cage just then; but all day long he could concentrate on almost nothing else. Along with trying to invent something to tell the cat’s owner, he became obsessed with the notion that the Humane Society would be waiting for him at the bridge with a charge of felony animal abuse — and quite possibly littering.
That evening he found the remains of the empty cage between two of the Troll’s huge fingers. The door had been ripped clean away, as had most of the front of the cage, and the rest of it had been pounded almost shapeless, as though by a hammer or a great fist. There was fur.
Richardson just made it to the bushes before he was very sick. It took him a long time to empty his stomach, and he was shaking and coughing when he was done, barely able to stand erect. His throat and mouth tasted of chewed tinfoil.
When he finally forced himself to turn back toward the statue, he saw Cut’n-Shoot grinning derisively at him from the shadow of the bridge. “One thing when I do it, another when you do, hah?”
“You could have stopped it. You had other food there. I saw it. You could have let the cat out of that thing, let it go.” His stomach contracted, and he thought he was going to be sick again, but there was nothing left to vomit.
“Waste not, want not,” Cut’n-Shoot chuckled. “’Sides, now you really do know trolls.”
* * *
With a mean cunning that he would not have suspected himself of possessing, Richardson designed an advertisement for a lost gray cat — even including the name he had never once called it — had a hundred copies xeroxed, and mounted them in sheltered places up and down Queen Anne Hill. Thus, when the owner returned from that enviable, enviable sabbatical in England, he would see that Richardson had done everything possible to track down his unfortunately vanished cat. Would have died soon anyway, old and incontinent as it was. He surely wouldn’t have wanted the poor thing peeing all over his nice condo.
The next morning he went to a pet shop in the Wallingford district, and bought two carrier cages, the first identical to the one he had found in the apartment. The second was a bit larger, since one never knew. With the latter in his hand, he continued his nightly routine, the only differences being that his rounds were now somewhat more purposeful, and that with purpose came a reduction in his drinking. He often whistled as he walked, which was unusual for him.
It astonished him to realize how many animals — strays and otherwise — were running loose on the streets of Seattle. Cats and the smaller dogs were the easiest to capture, though he felt a certain amount of guilt over the ones that came trustingly to his leather-gloved hands. But he learned that people make pets out of the most unlikely animals: He caught escaped ferrets on two or three occasions, lab rats and mice with surprising frequency, and once even a tame crow with clipped wings. He was going to set the crow free — it had a vocabulary of several words, and a way of cocking its head to consider him — but then he thought that its inability to fly would make it easy prey for any cat, and changed his mind.
He did go through cages rat
her often; there was no way to avoid that, given the Troll’s impetuous manner of opening them.
Feeding the Troll distracted him only somewhat from his terror of impending joblessness. It was now much too late to expect reprieve: All the best positions at even the worst colleges and universities had long since been snapped up without him ever applying, the community colleges were full, and thanks to Seattle’s highly educated population there were thirty people ahead of him in line for any on-call substituting, even assuming someone would have the human decency to come down ill. Meanwhile the ever-smiling Aussie had turned evasive Trappist. Richardson stopped sliding by his door.
He had no idea that he was going mad with fear, frustration, and weariness. Most people don’t; and most — frightened academic gypsies included — go on functioning fairly well. He remained faithful to his classes and his office hours; and if he was more terse with his students, and often more sharp tongued, still he fulfilled the function for which he was yet being paid as conscientiously as he knew how, because he still loved it. And love will keep you reasonably sane for a long time.
Then came the bright and breezy day when word began circulating through the department — a whisper only, at first, the merest of hints — that the Tenured Prodigal was not coming home.
* * *
At 9:30 P.M. a resurrected Richardson was thinking furiously as he knocked back half a bottle of Scotch and picked at his Indian takeout. This late in the game it would surely be impossible for Aussie to fill the Prodigal’s slot; he would have to extend Richardson now. And if God could create concrete Trolls that moved and miracles as plain as this one, why, He might yet manage a way to make this change permanent.
Underbridge Page 2
