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 rather 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.
Richardson had no plans to go out, not even to round up a stray dog or cat (which had been growing more
