His hand throbbing, Dan stopped there. Don’t suffer. Wiping away the tears, he went to bed.

Back in class, Sticky stopped chewing on his pen and popped Dan in the shoulder. “Dude, turn in the journal.”

Dan pulled his hand from his bag. “I can’t. I didn’t finish.”

Oglesby collected the notebooks but did not count them, and Dan was unsure if he noticed that his journal was missing. The bell rang, and Oglesby raised his hand to hold the sophomores in their seats for one last admonition.

“Gentlemen, Norwegian rat season is upon us. The first election is going to be soon, and before you know it, we will also be preparing for the Game. Prove to me that you are not just enduring, you are excelling. To paraphrase Papa Hemingway, rule twenty-two: keep your head clear and suffer like a rat. If you understand this lesson, you will be prepared for this class, the strategies the Game requires, and whatever challenge comes next.”

Panicked and nearly in tears, Dan packed up quick and rushed from Oglesby’s classroom, convinced he was now definitely and finally salao.

When school finally let out, Dan went home with Rick, who lived in a far northern kingdom known as Plano. Spanish for “really fucking flat,” Plano was Dallas with even less of a strategy. In 1987, back before Plano was fully turnpiked and terraformed, half the land was still undeveloped, but the grid was filling in, and one hundred thousand people had arrived. To find Rick’s house, imagine a beige brick, brown-shingled housing development, in the middle of empty prairie, curbs cut within sight of the pastures of Southfork Ranch. Welcome to the Colonnade of the Bowling Green Meadow Estates, a.k.a. the Colon Bowl.

Rick and Dan hitched a ride with Chad Gilchrist, another Plano kid, and discovered Master of Puppets to be a very wearying album for driving to the end of civilization. Eventually Chad dropped them off on Castlemere Drive. Rick Sr. was standing in his empty three-car garage smoking a cigar.

“Son, welcome home. Who is this you brought with you? A new recruit to our cult? Perfect. Take him back to the tabernacle and prepare for the sacrifice.”

A trip to the cigar store punched the ticket for Richard Lee Dowlearn Sr. to be in a good mood. Rick Sr. was a true born Texan who grew up in all parts of the Dallas hinterlands, from Denton to Duncanville. He went to SMU until drinking got him kicked out. He then hunted and hoboed, jockeyed rigs in the Gulf, made a couple of runs to the border, and lived like an outlaw until it was time to make amends. He had been sober for a good long while, until of course he wasn’t, but that was not a concern of late—the cigar store was part of his AA routine.