Page 49 of Are You Happy Now?

Frowning, Will studied the document for a few seconds, then handed the clipboard to John. “Your dad’s the lawyer,” Will said.

John glanced over the legal mumbo-jumbo. In the dim light, the small type was hard to read. “What the fuck,” he said and signed his name on a line at the bottom. Will signed right below him.

The barker wanted to make one thing clear: “Listen. It’s thirty dollars total, not thirty dollars each. You pin him, you split the money. Clear?”

The boys nodded.

“And no funny business,” he added. “No punching or kicking. Keep your fingers away from his mouth and eyes. If either of you gets out of the ring for any reason, the match is over. If you want to quit, just yell. One round, five minutes. Understand?” From under his cowboy hat, the barker scanned the tent. The bleachers had mostly filled up. “Now, let’s go.” He opened a gate in the wire mesh and led the boys inside.

John and Will moved to their corner of the ring. Surrounded by the wire fence, John felt as if he were in a cage. His heart drummed against his chest. This had happened so quickly. It comforted him that Will was beside him, but John was only there because of Will, who had inherited a touch of his father’s flamboyance.

“How you feeling?” Will asked just then.

“Good.”

“Here’s the thing. We can take this guy. High-low. You hit him high, I’ll hit him low.”

“OK.”

The barker stood in the center of the room and bellowed an introduction for the team called the College Boys. The crowd responded with a mixture of whoops and boos. Will hammed it up, clasping his hands over his head, turning slowly, nodding and grinning. John gave a clenched-fist salute and let it go at that.

“And in this corner,” the barker continued, “we have the champion—trained in the forests of Siberia, undefeated in his last twenty-two matches, a star of stage and television—he’s tough, he’s smart, give a hand, folks, to Boris the Wrestling Bear!”

A honking chorus of cheers filled the tent. The bear just sat, its head lolling slightly back forth. The handler unhooked the chain from the muzzle and gave the creature a soft slap on the back of the head. The bear lumbered on all fours into the center of the ring. The handler said something in a guttural language, and the animal rose on its hind legs. The handler assumed a boxing stance, and for a minute or so, they danced around each other. Every few steps, the handler slapped the animal sharply on the snout, setting off an angry shake of the furry head. But the bear stayed upright and moved with a light step, lifting and placing its feet carefully, as if crossing a stream on rocks.

John was less certain now that he was watching a man, but he couldn’t fit what he was seeing—the lean, square torso, the agility upright, the nimble forelegs—into his idea of a bear.

After circling the canvas with the boxing exhibition, the animal and its handler retreated to their corner, and the barker returned to the center of the ring. “One round, five minutes, thirty dollars if the College Boys can pin him. Are we ready?”

The crowd hollered its answer.

“Let’s have a clean fight! Here we go!”

Someone sounded a gong, and the match was on.

The boys moved warily into the ring. The bear sat on its haunches in the corner until the handler barked something and the animal roused itself and plodded on four legs toward the center. As the boys closed in, the bear planted itself in a defensive posture. Will slipped around behind. John dropped into a wrestling crouch, knees bent, hands in front, and dodged around, feinting, as if looking for an opening. In fact, he was frozen—he couldn’t for the life of him imagine attacking this muzzled creature, whatever it was. He wondered if he could eat up five minutes just pretending to prepare to make a move. But the crowd quickly grew restless for action. After several men stood and shouted insults, Will suddenly launched himself at the bear’s hindquarters, knocking the beast on its side. “Go!” he cried to John. As the bear flailed to right itself, something in John—some hunting instinct, some passion for his friend, for his species—pushed him to throw himself at the animal’s chest. He landed with a thud, bouncing on the surprisingly springy torso, scrambling to wrap his arms around a thick furry shoulder.

The bear rolled quickly on its back, kicking aside Will, then swung its hips behind John, who clung to a foreleg. The dense coat of fur had a greasy quality, and the animal, now righted, easily slipped out of John’s grasp and loped to the side. The boys climbed to their feet while jeers and cheers echoed around the tent.

The two of them glanced at each other but didn’t say anything. John could see from his friend’s face that this first encounter had hardened Will’s determination. Again they circled their adversary, Will edging to the bear’s back. Touching the beast had eased John’s wariness, and as he moved in, he stared hard into the creature’s black, unblinking eyes. He’d grown up with dogs, and he’d played the stare game with them countless times, and always the animals grew bored and turned away. But the bear didn’t waver, and John thought he saw a glint, a depth behind the glassy blackness. A man, John told himself.

The handler called out something, and the bear rose on its hind legs. Lurching toward John, the animal caught him by surprise and planted its forelegs heavily on John’s shoulders. John tried to pull away, lost his balance, and wrapped his arms around the animal’s neck. The two staggered, head against helmet, like clumsy dancers in an intimate embrace. John’s chin pressed against the animal’s shoulder just below its ear. The fur gave off a musty, dead odor that caught in John’s throat. With the snout just inches from his own ear, John could hear deep, heaving grunts. Where was Will? This was the setup for the high-low move. The grunts got louder and mingled with screams from the crowd, the commotion muffled by the painfully tight football helmet. At last, Will saw his chance and rolled into the back of the bear’s hind legs. John and the animal tumbled together violently onto the mat, bouncing, heaving. In the frenzied crash, the grunts in John’s ear clarified for an instant: “Big shot,” the creature growled—or seemed to. “Big shot.”

The force of the

impact loosened John’s grip, and again the animal twisted free and scrambled off to the corner beside its handler. Will and John pulled themselves up off the canvas. The crowd thrilled at their humiliation, screaming and stomping on the wood planks of the bleachers, inflating the tent with scorn at the cocky upstarts. Back in their corner, Will put his mouth close to John’s ear. “That thing smells like shit,” he said. He’d lost his steely face. “That’s a real fucking bear.”

“It’s not,” John shouted back over the noise.

“How do you know?”

“It was talking to me.”

Will’s eyes got big. “Are you sure?”

“Positive.”

Of course, John wasn’t. But he thought he’d heard those words, and something familiar in the body he’d been hugging had bolstered his suspicion that human flesh and bones were hiding beneath the fur.

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