“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
