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his eyes, which locked into a permanent stare. Not a blank stare, mind. It was a more intense look, the kind that suggests great concentration: the brow lowered ever-so-slightly, the eyes crinkled, as if the starer is trying to see right through what’s in front of them. In that stare, something of the fierceness I’d seen dormant in his face came to the surface, and it could be a tad unsettling to have him focus it on you. Although his manner remained civil—he was always at least polite, frequently pleasant—under that gaze I felt a bit like a prisoner in one of those escape from Alcatraz movies the moment the spotlight catches him.
    When I finally did ask Dan to fish with me, I acted on impulse, a spur-of-the-moment kind of thing. I was standing in the doorway of Frank Block’s office, telling him about my struggle the previous weekend to land a trout. The trout hadn’t been the biggest I’d ever caught, but he had been strong. My efforts had been complicated by the fact that, when the fish struck, I’d been away behind a clump of bushes, answering a call of nature brought on by a cup of extremely powerful coffee I’d drunk not an hour before. My line had been quiet prior to the moment I’d felt the uncontrollable urge to visit the bushes, so I thought it would be safe to leave the rod wedged in between my tacklebox and a log whilst I did what must be done. Naturally, this was the moment the fish chose to take the fly and run. When I heard the reel buzzing, I started looking around furiously for some leaves. Then, with a clatter and a crash, the fish pulled the rod over and began dragging it toward the river. There was no time for me to do anything but rush from my improvised toilet, pants still around my ankles, and dive for the rod, which I just managed to catch. I staggered to my feet, and spent the next ten minutes working that fish, giving him a little line, drawing him in, giving him a little line, drawing him in, naked from waist to ankles as the day the doctor took me from my ma. When at last I hauled the trout from the water and stood there holding him up to admire, I noticed movement on the other side of the river. Two young women were standing across from me, the one with a pair of binoculars, the other with a camera. Both were pointing in my direction and laughing. I don’t like to think at what.
    “What’d you do?” Frank asked, laughing himself.
    “What else could I do?” I said. “I bowed to them both, turned around, and shuffled back up the bank.”
    “You fish?” Dan asked. He’d come up behind me as I was talking. I must have been aware of him, since I didn’t jump ten feet in the air and shout, “Jesus!” I turned and said, “I do. I fish most days it isn’t raining, and some when it is.”
    “I used to fish,” Dan said. “My dad used to take me.”
    “Really?” I said. “What kind of fishing?”
    “Nothing that exciting,” he said. “Lakes and ponds, mostly.”
    “You ever catch anything?” Frank asked. He was one of those fellows who likes to talk fishing more than he does fish fishing.
    “Some,” Dan said. He shrugged. “Bass. A lot of sunnies. My dad caught a pike, once.”
    “No kidding,” I said. “Pike’s a tough fish to land.”
    “You can say that again,” Frank said.
    “It took us the whole afternoon,” Dan said. “When we got him into the boat, he was almost three feet long. It was a record for that lake. This was in Maine. My dad gave the fish to Captain Pete—he was the guy who ran the bait and tackle shop on the lake. We bought our bait from him, soda, too. He had this big cooler full of cans of soda. Anyway, he was so impressed, he had that fish mounted—you know, gave it to a taxidermist—and hung it up on one of his shop’s walls. He had my dad’s name and the date the fish was caught carved on the mount.”
    “Wow,” Frank said, whether at the story or at Dan’s having told us it I couldn’t say. As far as either of us knew,