The axe was no longer on his shoulder. Paul was leaning on its haft, and the blunt end of its head had crushed a trench in the concrete of the sidewalk. He was still grinning, but there was nothing cheery about it now. From between gigantic yellow teeth there drifted a smell like small animals rotting in hot underbrush.
'I'm going to eat you up,' the giant had said in a low rumbling voice. It was the sound of boulders rocking against each other during an earthquake. 'Unless you give me back my hen and my harp and my bags of gold, I'm going to eat you right the fuck up!'
The breath of these words made Richie's shirt flutter and flap like a sail in a hurricane. He shrank back against the bench, eyes bugging, hair standing out to all sides like quills, wrapped in a pocket of carrion-stink.
The giant began to laugh. It settled its hands on the haft of its axe the way Ted Williams might have laid hold of his favorite baseball bat (or ash-handle, if you prefer), and pulled it out of the hole it had made in the sidewalk. The axe began to rise into the air. It made a low lethal rushing sound. Richie suddenly understood that the giant meant to split him right down the middle.
But he felt that he could not move; a logy sort of apathy had stolen over him. What did it matter? He was dozing, having a dream. Any moment now some driver would blow his horn at a kid running across the street and he would wake up.
'That's right,' the giant had rumbled, 'you'll wake up in hell!' And at the last instant, as the axe slowed to its apogee and balanced there, Richie understood that this wasn't a dream at all . . . and if it was, it was a dream that could kill.
Trying to scream but making no sound at all, he rolle d off the bench and onto the raked gravel plot which surrounded what had been a statue and was now only a base with two huge steel bolts sticking out of it where the feet had been. The sound of the descending axe filled the world with its pressing insistent whisper; the giant's grin had become a murderer's grimace. Its lips had pulled back so far from its teeth that its plastic red gums, hideously red, gleamed.
The blade of the axe struck the bench where Richie had been only an instant before. The edge was so sharp that there was almost no sound at all, but the bench was sheared instantly in two. The halves sagged away from each other, the wood inside the green-painted skin a bright and somehow sickening white.
Richie was on his back. Still trying to scream, he pushed himself with his heels. Gravel went down the collar of his shirt, down the back of his pants. And there was Paul, towering above him, looking down at him with eyes the size of manhole covers; there was Paul, looking down at one small boy cowering on the gravel.
The giant took a step toward him. Richie felt the ground shudder when the black boot came down. Gravel spumed up in a cloud.
Richie rolled over onto his stomach and staggered to his feet. His legs were already trying to run before he was balanced, and as a result he fell flat on his belly again. He heard the wind whoof out of his lungs. His hair fell in his eyes. He could see the traffic going back and forth on Canal and Main Streets as it did every day, as if nothing was happening, as if no one in any of those cars could see or care that Paul Bunyan had come to life and stepped down from its pedestal in order to commit murder with an axe roughly the size of a deluxe motor home.
The sunshine was blotted out. Richie lay in a patch of shade that looked like a man.
He scrambled to his knees, almost fell over sideways, managed to get to his feet, and ran as fast as he could — he ran with his knees popping almost all the way up to his chest and his elbows pistoning. Behind him he could hear that awful persistent whisper building again, a sound that seemed to be not really sound at all but pressure on the skin and eardrums: Swiiipppppp! —
The earth shook. Richie's upper and lower teeth rattled against each other like china plates in an earthquake. He did not have to look to know that Paul's axe had buried itself haft-deep in the sidewalk inches behind his feet.
Madly, in his mind, he heard the Dovells: Oh the kids in Bristol are sharp as a pistol When they do the Bristol Stomp . . .
He passed out of the giant's shadow into sunlight again, and as he did he began to laugh — the same exhausted laughter that had come from him when he bolted downstairs in Freese's. Panting, that hot stitch in his side again, he had at last risked a glance back over his shoulder.
There was the statue of Paul Bunyan, standing on its pedestal where it always stood, axe on its shoulder, head cocked toward the sky, lips parted in the eternal optimistic grin of the myth-hero. The bench which had been sheared in two was whole and intact, thank you very much. The gravel where Tall Paul (He's –a my all, A n n e t t e F u n i c e l l o s a n g m a n i a c a l l y i n Richie's head) had planted his huge foot was raked and immaculate except for the scuffed spot where Richie had fallen off while he was
(getting away from the giant)
dreaming. There was no footprint, no axe-slash in the concrete. There was nothing here but a boy who had been chased by other boys, bigger boys, and so had had himself a very small (but ve ry potent) dream about a homicidal Colossus . . . the Giant Economy-Size Henry Bowers, if you pleased.
'Shit,' Richie said in a tiny wavering voice, and then uttered an uncertain laugh.
He stood there awhile longer, waiting to see if the statue would move again — perhaps wink, perhaps shift its axe from one shoulder to the other, perhaps come down and have at him again. But of course none of those things happened.
Of course.
What, me worry? Har-de-har-har –har.
A doze. A dream. No more than that.
But, as Abraham Lincoln or Socrates or someone like that had once observed, enough was enough. It was time to go home and cool out; to make like Kookie on 77 Sunset Strip and just lay chilly.
And although it would have been quicker to cut through the City Center grounds, he decided not to. He didn't want to get close to that statue again. So he had gone the long way around and by that evening he had nearly forgotten the incident.
Until now.
Here sits a man, he thought, here sits a man dressed in a mossy-green sportcoat purchased at one of the best shops on Rodeo Drive; here sits a man with Bass Weejuns on his feet and Calvin Klein underwear to cover his ass; here sits a man with soft contact lenses resting easily on his eyes; here sits a man remembering the dream of a boy who thought an Ivy League shin with a fruit-loop on the back and a pair of Snap Jack shoes was the height of fashion; here sits a grownup looking at the same old statue, and hey, Paul, Tall Paul, I'm here to say you'r e the same in every way, you ain't aged a motherfucking day.
The old explanation still rang true in his mind: a dream.
He supposed he could believe in monsters if he had to; monsters were no big deal. Hadn't he sat in radio studios at one time or another reading news copy about such fellows as Idi Amin Dada and Jim Jones and that guy who had blown away all those folks in a McDonald's just down the road apiece? Shitfire and save matches, monsters were cheap! Who needed a five –buck movie ticket when you could read about them in the paper for thirty-five cents or hear about them on the radio for free? And he supposed if he could believe in the Jim Jones variety, he could believe in Mike Hanlon's version, at least for awhile; It even had Its own sorry charm, because It came from Outside and no one had to claim responsibility for It. He could believe in a monster that had as many faces as there are rubber masks in a novelty shop (if you're gonna have one, you might as well have a pack of em, he thought, cheaper by the dozen, right, gang?), at least for the sake of argument . . . but a thirty-foot-high plastic statue that stepped off its pedestal and then tried to carve you up with its plastic axe? That was just a little too ripe. As Abraham Lincoln or Socrates or someone had also said, I'll eat fish and I'll eat meat, but there is some shit I will not eat. It just wasn't —