shopping bags arranged around him. Richardson took them at first for the man’s worldly possessions; only later, back in the apartment, did he recall glimpsing a long Italian salami, a wine bottle, and a French baguette in one of them.
The old man coughed — a long, rattling, machine-gun burst — then growled, “I’d back off a little ways, was I you. He gets mean at night.”
Richardson played along with the joke. “Oh, I don’t know. He put up so nicely with all those tourists today.”
“Daytime,” the old man grunted. “Sun goes down, he gets around.…” He belched mightily, leaned back against the guardrail, and closed his eyes.
“Well,” Richardson said, chuckling to keep the conversation reasonable. “Well, but you’re here, taking a nap right within his grasp. You’re not afraid of him.”
The old man did not open his eyes. “I got on his good side a long time ago. Go away, man. You don’t want to be here.” The last words grumbled into a snore.
Richardson stood looking back and forth at the Troll and the old man in the black rain slicker, whose snoring mouth hung open, a red-black wound in the vast gray beard. Finally he said politely to the Troll, “You have curious friends,” and walked quickly away. The old man never stirred as Richardson passed him.
He had no trouble sleeping that night, but he did dream of the Troll. They were talking quite earnestly, under the bridge, but he remembered not even a fragment of their conversation; only that the Troll was wearing a Smokey Bear hat and kept biting pieces off the Volkswagen, chewing them like gum and spitting them out. In the dream, Richardson accepted this as perfectly normal: The flavor probably didn’t last very long.
He didn’t go back to see the Troll at night for a month. Once or twice in the daytime, yes, but he found such visits unsatisfying. During daylight hours the tourist buses were constantly stopping, and families were likely to push baby carriages close between the Troll’s hands for photographs. The familiarity, the chattering gaiety, was almost offensive to him, as though the people were savages out of bad movies, and the Troll their trapped and stoic prisoner.
He never saw the old man there. Presumably he was off doing whatever homeless people did during the day, even those who bought French baguettes with their beggings.
Richardson’s own routine was as drearily predictable as ever. Over the years he had become intensely aware of the arc of each passing contract, from eager launch through trembling zenith to the unavoidable day when he packed his battered Subaru and drove off to whatever job might come next. He was now at the halfway point of his stay at the UW: Each time he opened his office door was one twisting turn closer to the last, each paycheck a countdown, in reverse, to the end of his temporary security. Richardson’s students and colleagues saw no change in his tone or behavior — he was most careful about that — but in his own ears he heard a gently rising scream.
His silent night walks began to fill with imagined conversations. Some of these were with his parents, both long deceased but still reproving. Others were with distantly remembered college acquaintances or with characters out of his favorite books. But the ones that Richardson enjoyed most were his one-sided exchanges with the Troll, whose vast, unresponsive silence Richardson found endlessly encouraging. As he wandered through the darkness, hands uncharacteristically in his hip pockets, he found he could speak to the Troll as though they had been friends long enough that there was no point in hiding anything from one another. He had never known that sort of friendship.
“I am never going to be anything more than I am already,” he said to the Troll-haunted air. “Forget the fellowships and grants, never mind the articles in The New Yorker, Smithsonian, Harper’s, never mind the Modern Language Association, PEN.… None of it is ever going to happen, Troll. I know this. My life is exactly like yours — set in stone and meaningless.”
Without realizing it, or ever putting it into words, Richardson came to think of the concrete Troll as his only real friend in Seattle, just as he began resenting the old man in the rain slicker for his privileged position on the Troll’s “good side,” and himself for his own futility. In the middle of one class — a lecture on the period political references hidden within Lewis Carroll’s underappreciated Sylvie and Bruno — Richardson heard his own voice abruptly say, “To hell with that!” He had to stop and look around the hall for a moment, puzzling his students, before he realized that he hadn’t actually said the words out loud.
On the damp and moonless night that Richardson finally returned to the end of the Aurora Avenue Bridge, the old man wasn’t there. Neither was the Troll. Only the concrete-slathered Volkswagen was still in place, its curved roof and sides indented where the Troll’s great fingers had previously rested.
Sun goes down, he gets around.… Richardson remembered what he had assumed was a joke, and shook his head sharply. He felt the urge to run away, as if the absence of the Troll somehow constituted an almost cellular rebuke to his carefully manicured sense of the rational.
Richardson heard the sound then, distant yet, but numbingly clear: the long, dragging scrape of stone over asphalt. He turned and walked a little way to look east, toward Fremont Street — saw the hunched shadow rising into view — turned again, and bolted back across the bridge, the one leading him to Queen Anne Hill, a door he could close and lock, and a smelly gray cat wailing angrily over an empty food dish. He sat up the rest of the night, watching the QVC channel for company, seeing nothing. Near dawn he fell asleep on the living-room couch, with the television set still selling Select Comfort beds and amethyst jewelry.
In the morning, before he went to the university, he drove down into Fremont, double-parking at 36th and Winslow to make sure of what he already knew. The Troll was back in its place with no smallest deviation from its four creators’ positioning and no indication that it had ever moved at all. Even its grip on the old VW was displayed exactly as it had been, crushing finger for finger, bulging knuckle for knuckle, splayed right-hand fingers digging at the earth for purchase.
Richardson had a headache. He stepped graciously aside for children already swarming up to pose with the Troll for their parents, hurried back to his car, and drove away. His usual parking space was taken when he got to the UW, and finding another made him late to class.
For more than two weeks Richardson not only avoided the Aurora Bridge but stayed out of Fremont altogether. Even so, whether by day or night, strolling the campus, shopping in the University District, or walking a silent waterfront street under the Viaduct, he would often stand very still, listening for the slow, terribly slow, grinding of concrete feet somewhere near. The fact that he could not quite hear it did not make it go away.
Eventually, out of a kind of wintry lassitude, he began drifting down Fourth Avenue North again, at first no farther than the drawbridge, whose raisings and lowerings he found oddly soothing. He seemed to be at a curious remove from himself during that time, watching himself watching the boats waiting to pass the bridge, watching the rain on the water.
When he finally did cross the bridge, however, he did so without hesitation and on the hunt.
“Fuck off,” Cut’n-Shoot said. “Just fuck off and go away and leave me alone.”
“Not a chance.”
“I have to get ready. I have to be there.”
“Then tell me. All you have to do is tell me!”
Richardson had found the bearded old man asleep — noisily asleep, his throat a sporadic bullroarer — under a tree in the Gas Works Park, near the shore of Lake Union. He was still wearing the same clothes and black rain slicker, now with the hood down, and there was an empty bottle of orange schnapps clutched in his filthy hand. Bits of greasy foie gras speckled his whiskers like dirty snow. When glaring him awake didn’t work, Richardson had moved on to kicking the cracked leather soles of the man’s old boots, which did.
It also got him a deep bruise on his forearm, from blocking an angrily thrown schnapps bottle. Their subsequent conversation had been unproductive. So far, the only useful thing he had uncovered was that the old man called himself “Cut’n-Shoot,” after the small town in Texas where he’d been born. That was the end of anything significant, aside from the man’s obvious agitation and impatience as evening darkened toward night.
“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.”
