Underbridge

by Peter S. Beagle

The Seattle position came through just in time.

It was a near thing, even for Richardson. As an untenured professor of children’s literature he was bitterly used to cutting it close, but now, with nothing in the wings to follow his MSSU gig but Jake Riskin’s offer to sub remedial English in the Joplin high schools, life was officially the bleakest Richardson could remember. Easy enough to blink through grad school dreaming of life as a Matthew Arnold — esque scholar-gypsy; harder to slog through decades of futureless jobs in second-rank college towns, never being offered the cozy sinecure he had once assumed inevitable. What about professional respect and privileges? What about medical insurance, teaching assistants, preferred parking? What about sabbaticals?

Rescue found him shopping in the West 7th Street Save-A-Lot. His cell phone rang, and wondrously, instead of Jake pushing for a decision, the call was from a secretary at the University of Washington English department. Would he, she wondered, be free to take over classes for a professor who had just been awarded a sizable grant to spend eighteen months at Cambridge, producing a study of the life and works of Joan Aiken?

He said yes, of course, then took a brief time settling the details, which were neither many nor complicated. At no time did he show the slightest degree of unprofessional emotion. But after he snapped his phone shut he stood very still and whispered “Saved…” to himself, and when he left the store there were red baby potatoes ($2.40 a pound!) in his bag instead of 34-cent russets.

* * *

Most especially was he grateful at being able to take over the Queen Anne Hill apartment of the traveling professor. It was snug — the man lived alone, except for an old cat, whom Richardson, who disliked cats, had dourly agreed to care for — but also well appointed, including cable television, washer and dryer, microwave and dishwasher, a handsome fireplace, and a one-car garage, with a cord of split wood for the winter neatly stacked at the far end. The rent was manageable, as was the drive to the UW; and his classes were surprisingly enjoyable, containing as they did a fair number of students who actually wanted to be there. Richardson could have done decidedly worse, and most often had.

He had been welcomed to the school with impersonal warmth by the chairman of the English department, who was younger than Richardson and looked it. The chairman’s name was Philip Austin Watkins IV, but he preferred to be called “Aussie,” though he had never been to Australia. He assured Richardson earnestly on their first meeting, “I want you to know, I’m really happy to have you on board, and I’ll do everything I can to get you extended here if possible. That’s a promise.” Richardson, who knew much better at fifty-one than to believe this, believed.

His students generally seemed to like him — at least they paid attention, worked hard on their assignments, didn’t mock his serious manner, and often brought up intelligent questions about Milne and Greene, Erich Kästner, Hugh Lofting, Astrid Lindgren, or his own beloved E. Nesbit. But they never took him into their confidence, even during his office hours — never wept or broke down, confessing anxieties or sins or dreams (which would have terrified him), never came to him merely to visit. Nor did he make any significant connections with his fellows on the faculty. He knew well enough that he made friends with difficulty and wasn’t good at keeping them, being naturally formal in his style and uncomfortable in his body, so that he appeared to be forever leaning away from people even when he was making an earnest effort to be close to them. With women, his lifelong awkwardness became worse in the terminally friendly Seattle atmosphere. Once, younger, he had wished to be different; now he no longer believed it possible.

The legendary rain of the Pacific Northwest was not an issue; if anything, he discovered that he enjoyed it. Having studied the data on the Seattle climate carefully, once he knew he was going there, he understood that many areas of both coasts get notably more rain, in terms of inches, and endure distinctly colder winters. And the year-round greenness and lack of air pollution more than made up for the mildew, as far as Richardson was concerned. Damp or not, it beat Joplin. Or Hobbs, New Mexico. Or Enterprise, Alabama.

What the greenness did not make up for was the near-perpetual overcast. Seattle’s sky was dazzlingly, exaltingly, shockingly blue when it chose to be so; but there was a reason that the city consumed more than its share of vitamin D and was the first marketplace for various full-spectrum lightbulbs. Seattle introduced Richardson to an entirely new understanding of the word overcast, sometimes going two months and more without seeing either clear skies or an honest raindrop. He had not been prepared for this.

Many things that shrink from sunlight gain power in fog and murk. Richardson began to find himself reluctant enough to leave the atmosphere of the UW campus that he often stayed on after work, attending lectures that bored him, going to showings of films he didn’t understand — even once dropping in on a faculty meeting, though this was not required of him. The main subject under discussion was the urgent need to replace a particular TA, who for six years had been covering most of the undergraduate classes of professors far too occupied with important matters to deal with actual students. Another year would have required granting him a tenure-track assistant professorship, which was, of course, out of the question. Sitting uncomfortably in the back, saying nothing, Richardson felt he was somehow attending his own autopsy.

And when Richardson finally went home in darkness to the warm, comfortable apartment that was not his own, and the company of the sour-smelling old gray cat, he frequently went out again to walk aimlessly on steep, silent Queen Anne Hill and beyond, watching the lights go out in window after window. If rain did not fall, he might well wander until three or four in the morning, as he had never before done in his life.

But it was in daylight that Richardson first saw the Troll.

He had walked across the blue-and-orange drawbridge at the foot of Queen Anne Hill into Fremont, which had become a favorite weekend ramble of his, though the quirky, rakish little pocket always made him nervous and wistful at the same time. He wished he were the sort of person who could fit comfortably into a neighborhood that could proclaim itself “The Center of the Universe,” hold a nude bicycle parade as part of a solstice celebration, and put up signs advising visitors to throw their watches away. He would have liked to be able to imagine living in Fremont.

Richardson had read about the Fremont Bridge Troll online while preparing to leave Joplin. He knew that it was not actually located under the Fremont Bridge, but under the north end of the nearby Aurora Avenue Bridge; and that the Troll was made of concrete, had been created by a team of four artists, weighed four thousand pounds, was more than eighteen feet high, had one staring eye made of an automobile hubcap, and was crushing a cement-spattered Volkswagen Beetle in its left hand. As beloved a tourist photo op as the Space Needle, it had the inestimable further advantages of being free, unique, and something no lover of children’s books could ignore.

It took Richardson a while to come face-to-face with the Troll, because the day was blue and brisk, and the families were out in force, shoving up to the statue to take pictures, posing small children and puzzled-looking babies within the Troll’s embrace, or actually placing them on its shoulder. Richardson made no effort to approach until the crowd had thinned to a few teenagers with cell-phone cameras; then he went close enough to see his distorted reflection in the battered aluminum eye. He said nothing but stayed there until a couple of the teenagers pushed past him to be photographed kissing and snuggling in the shadow of the Troll. Then he went on home.

Two weeks later, driven by increasing insomnia, he crossed the Fremont Bridge again and eventually found himself facing the glowering concrete monster where it crouched in its streetside cave. Alone in darkness, with no fond throng to warm and humanize it, the hubcap eye now seemed to be sizing him up as a tender improvement on a VW Beetle. Grendel, Richardson thought, this is what Grendel looked like. Aloud, he said, “Hello. Off for the night?”

The Troll made no answer. Richardson went a few steps closer, fascinated by the expression and personality it was possible to impose on two tons of concrete. He asked it, “Do you ever get tired of tourists gaping at you every day? I would.” For some reason, he wanted the Troll to know that he was a sympathetic, understanding person. He said, “My name’s Richardson.”

A roupy old voice behind him said, “Don’t you get too close. He’s mean.”

Richardson turned to see a black rain slicker, which appeared to be almost entirely inhabited by a huge gray beard. The hood of the slicker was pulled close around the old man’s face, so that only the beard and a pair of bright, bloodshot gray eyes were visible as he squatted on the sidewalk that approached the underpass, with four 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.”

“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 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 difficult in recent weeks, as Queen Anne residents had been keeping closer track of their pets, blaming coyotes for the recent disappearances). Considering what to say to Aussie in the morning was paramount. But eventually he could not bear to sit still and found his legs carrying him to Fremont after all. Something special was clearly called for, a little libation to luck, so at the PCC he bought more of the Eel River beef for the Troll, and for himself and Cut’n-Shoot a half gallon of a unique coconut-and-molasses ice cream he had found nowhere else.

He left the grocery grinning, turned left — and saw, a block up 34th Street, walking away, Dr. Philip Austin Watkins IV.

The Scotch proved stronger than good judgment. “Aussie!” he shouted. Then louder: “Aussie!” Bag swinging wildly, he began to run.

* * *

The department head had dined out late with friends, imbibing one too many himself as the evening wore on. “You’ve never been screwed until you’ve been screwed by the British,” he’d said, and meant it. Thank heavens he’d had foresight enough to lay contingency plans.

It took him a moment to realize that his name was being called, and a troubling moment more when he turned around to recognize who it was. His apprehension should perhaps have lasted longer: Instead of a simple greeting, followed by meaningless chat, Richardson slammed full tilt into the issue of the job opening. “Aussie, I heard about Brubaker. And you promised. You did promise.”

“I promised to do everything I could to help you,” Aussie countered. “And I did, but obviously it wasn’t enough. I’m sorry.”

“You can’t leave the slot open, and it’s too late—”

“Mr. Richardson. You knew you were a fill-in, just as I knew from the beginning that the Aiken grant was a recruiting hook in disguise. If the fish had bitten later I might have had to keep you on. As it happens, he did it while my own preferred replacement was still sitting by the phone at Kansas State, waiting for my call, exactly where he’s been since I first talked to him last April. The slot, as you call it, is already filled.”

“Oh.” Without thought, Richardson removed the frozen half gallon of coconut-molasses ice cream from his grocery bag and smashed Aussie in the head with it just as hard as he could. The man was insensible when he hit the ground, but not dead. Richardson was particularly glad of that.

“That was satisfactory,” Richardson said aloud, as though he were judging a presentation in class. He heard his voice echoing in his head, which interested him. Looking around quickly and seeing no one close enough to notice what he was doing, or to interfere with it, Richardson got Aussie — who was not a small person — on his feet, hooked an arm around his waist, and draped one of the chairman’s arms around his own neck, saying loudly and frequently, “Told you, Aussie; you can’t say I didn’t tell you. Sip the Calvados, I said, don’t guzzle it. Ah, come on, Aussie, help me a little bit here.”

Ordinarily, the walk to the Aurora Bridge would have taken Richardson a few minutes at most; dragging the unconscious Aussie, it took months, and by the time he came near the Troll’s overpass he was panting and sweating heavily. “The last lively!” he called out in a louder, different voice. “Here you go! Compliments of the chef.”

A hoarse, frantic voice behind him demanded, “What you doing? What the hell you doing?” Richardson let go of Aussie and turned to see Cut’n-Shoot gaping at him, his bleared eyes as wild as those of a horse in a burning barn. “What the hell you think you doing?”

“Tidying up,” Richardson said. His voice sounded as far away as the old man’s, and the echoes in his head were growing louder.

“You dumb shit,” Cut’n-Shoot whispered. He was plainly sober, if he hadn’t been a moment before, and wishing he weren’t. “You crazy dumb shit, you fucking killed him.”

Richardson looked briefly down, shaking his head. “Oh, let’s hope not. He’s twitched a couple of times.”

Cut’n-Shoot was neither listening to him nor looking directly at him. “I’m out of here; I ain’t in this mess. I’m calling the cops.”

Richardson did not take the statement seriously. “Oh, please. Can you stand there and tell me our friend’s always lived on warm puppies? Nothing like this has ever, ever happened before?”

“Not like this, not never like this.” Cut’n-Shoot was beginning to back away, looking small and cold, hugging himself. “I got to call the cops. See if he got a cell phone or something.”

“Ah, no cops,” Richardson said. He was fascinated by his own detachment; by his strange lightheartedness in the midst of what he knew ought to be a nightmare. He took hold of Cut’n-Shoot’s black slicker, which felt like slimy tissue paper in his hand. “You have got to get yourself a new raincoat,” he told the old man sternly. “Promise me you’ll get a new coat this winter.” Cut’n-Shoot stared blankly at him, and Richardson shook him hard. “Promise, damn it!”

Richardson heard the long scraping rumble before he could turn, still keeping his grip on the struggling, babbling Cut’n-Shoot. The Troll was moving, emerging from its lair under the bridge, the disproportionate length of its body giving the effect of a great worm, even a dragon. In the open, it braced itself on its knuckles for some moments, like a gorilla, before rising to its full height. The hubcap eye was alight as Richardson had never seen it — a whipping-forest-fire red-orange that had nothing to do with the thin, wan crescent on the horizon. He thought, madly and absurdly, not of Grendel, but of the Cyclops Polyphemus.

The Troll crouched hugely over Aussie, prodding him experimentally with the same hand that perpetually crushed the Volkswagen. The man moaned softly, and Richardson said as the Troll looked up, “See? Lively.”

For the first time in Richardson’s memory the Troll made a sound. It was neither a growl nor a snarl, nor were there any more words in it than there were words in Richardson to describe it. Long ago he had spent three-quarters of a year teaching at a branch of the University of Alaska, and what he most remembered about that strange land was the sense of the pack ice breaking up in the spring, much too distant for him to have heard it or even felt the vibration in his bones; but like everyone else, he, foreigner or not, knew absolutely that it was happening. So it was with the sound that reached him now — not from the Troll’s mouth or throat or monstrous body, but from its entire preposterous existence.

“Saying grace?” Richardson asked. The Troll made the sound again, and his head descended, jaws opening wider than Richardson had ever seen. Cut’n-Shoot screamed, and kept on screaming. Richardson kept a tight grip on him, but the old man’s utter panic set the echoes roaring in Richardson’s head. He said, “Quit it — come on, relax, enjoy a little dinner theater,” but one of Cut’n-Shoot’s flailing arms caught him hard enough on a cheekbone that his eyes watered and went out of focus for a moment. “Ow,” he said; and then, “Okay, then. Okay.”

Very little of Aussie was still visible. Richardson took a firmer hold of Cut’n-Shoot, lifted him partly off the ground, and half-hurled, half-shoved him at the Troll. The old man actually tripped over a concrete forearm; he fell directly against the Troll’s chest, snuggling grotesquely. He opened his mouth to scream again, but nothing came out.

“How about a taste of the guardian?” Richardson demanded. He hardly recognized his own voice: It was loud and frayed and hurt him coming out. “How about a piece of the one who’s always there to make sure you behave? Wouldn’t that be nice, after all this time?”

When the Troll’s mouth opened over Cut’n-Shoot, Richardson began to laugh in delighted hysteria. Not only did the great gray jaws seem to hinge at the back, exactly like a waffle iron, but they matched perfectly, hammer and anvil, when the mouth slammed shut.

After the jaws finally stopped moving, the Troll stretched toward the sky again, and Richardson realized that it was somehow different now — taller and straighter, its rough edges softening, sinking into themselves, becoming more fluid. Becoming more real. It stared down at Richardson and made a different sound this time.

Like a troll cares what it’s made of, starting out, he thought, and somehow the echoes in his head and Cut’n-Shoot’s crazy laughter were one and the same.

“Well, shit,” he said. “That meal sure agreed with you.”

He was just turning to run when the thing’s hand, no longer concrete but just as hard, just as vast and heavy, fell on his shoulder, breaking it. Richardson was shrieking as the Troll lifted him into the air, tucked him clumsily under one arm, and began squeezing back into the lair under the Aurora Bridge. Crumpled against the monster’s side — clothing shredded, skin lacerated, his ribs going — Richardson heard the tolling of an impossible heart.

Content

Underbridge
by Peter S. Beagle