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.”
“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.”