“What must Odysseus do to right things with Poseidon?”

“Plant an oar in a land where no man knows what it’s for.”

Oglesby looked up again from the Rouse translation. “Very good, Mr. Malone. One last question, which no one in the history of this class has answered on the first try. You get it right, we talk about heroes, and the class takes the easy test. You get it wrong, and I will have Professor Spiridakos at SMU write the essay questions in ancient Greek. Are you ready?”

Holy shit, Dan thought.

“Do it for Johnny!” Jay Blaylock was a movie-line jukebox, and Oglesby’s whipping boy.

“Mr. Blaylock—you can write a five-hundred-word essay on outbursts for tomorrow.”

“Thank you, sir.” A snappy Boy Scout salute.

“Make it a thousand.”

Oglesby slammed his stick on Blaylock’s desk. It broke some of the tension Dan felt. His hands were trembling as he gripped the edge of his desk.

“Okay, Mr. Malone. What drunk companion of Odysseus’s fell off Circe’s roof?”

Dan threw his chin down in concentration. C’mon, you know this. “It’s not Eurylochus.”

“No.”

“It’s not Perimedes.”

Confident, Oglesby closed his book. “No.”

“Ahhh . . .”

“Well, Mr. Malone, I must say, that was the closest . . .”

Then it came to him, like a gift from the gods.

“Elpenor!” Dan shouted. “It’s Elpenor. Odysseus sees him again in the underworld!”

Mr. Oglesby bowed. The bell rang, and a great cheer went up among the sophomores.

That Saturday evening Rob McGhee was still crowing about Dan’s epic trivia battle. As the sun set and all the ways of the day went dark, Dan and Rob sat on the concrete retaining wall in front of the Malone house on Crown Shore Drive. The wall was the one signature element to the property—although you could only park half your ass on it, it was reminiscent of the wall in Charlie Brown and was a well-placed caesura in the familiar beat of Fox and Jacobs tract housing. In the fifties, the North Dallas developer had laid out the lots with a simple repeat of ranch houses and given all these side streets their generic marine and littoral appellations—Crown Shore, Boca Bay, Cold Harbor, and so on. The irony that the subdivision sat on a high prairie hundreds of miles from the sea seemed unintended. Nonetheless, the wall was a good spot for cigarettes, conversations, and watching the western skies.

“C’mon, Malone—what was that?” Rob teased his hand through his moussed hair; he had stolen the Perma Soft from his older sister Lexy. They were waiting for Steve O’Donnell to pick them up—Sticky was the first to get his license—and take them to the dance at Ursuline, the girls’ high school.

“Just read a lot of mythology, I guess,” Dan said.

“That was some Real Genius shit.”