That chilling grin of John’s. Once seen, not forgotten. Bruce had been through scores of scrapes and trials with the man — national tournaments and final exams, disciplinary boards, hard-ass negotiations, business crises, high-stake poker nights that turned nasty, dangerous storms, barroom rumbles, and worse (the day Bruce’s old Piper Cherokee stalled out on them while buzzing the penthouse sundecks up in the city one blinding afternoon, for example) — and so had had ample opportunity over the years to witness it, but the most memorable occasion for Bruce was one morning during a fishing trip together up at a remote roadless place a day’s flight and boat trip north of their cabin, when John, while taking a crap, got set upon by an angry grizzly. Bruce had gone down to the river to wash out their skillet after breakfasting on their dawn catch, and on the way back to camp, detouring round to their chosen dumping ground for his own soil-blessing rituals of the virgin day, he had come upon John and the bear doing a little double shuffle, slowly circling one another like sparring partners, John with his pants around his ankles and tracking through his own shit, the two of them just a few feet apart and the bear closing in. John had made a fundamental living-in-the-wild mistake, having left his weapons back up at the tent, but Bruce had not. He knelt, lay the skillet quietly in the undergrowth, raised the rifle to his shoulder — but then, even though the bear was now close enough to take a swipe at John, Bruce hesitated, captivated suddenly by John’s intense concentration and incongruous smile as, in a half-crouch, hands out but elbows in and bent and gaze locked on his adversary’s navel, he continued his shackled, bare-assed chassé around the grizzly as though not he but the animal was this death-dance’s intended prey. As Bruce in utter fascination watched them through his rifle sights, he realized, somewhat to his horror, that however much he cherished his friendship with John, there was something else, something perverse, that he cherished more, and it had more to do with John’s smile than with John himself. The first time he told this story to a bunch of the boys from John’s hometown up at the cabin, he found John staring at him with that same smile iced on his face, and he knew that the story divided them and that it was also a kind of bond. The fat motelkeeper wanted to know if he shot the bear. Bruce wouldn’t say.