Locker room and the Loach saga (p. 971)
and Mario, being alone and only fourteen and largely clueless about anti-stem defensive strategies outside T-stations, had had no one worldly or adult along with him there to explain to him why the request of men with outstretched hands for a simple handshake or High Five shouldn’t automatically be honored and granted, and Mario had extended his clawlike hand and touched and heartily shaken Loach’s own fuliginous hand, which led through a convoluted but kind of heartwarming and faith-reaffirming series of circumstances to B. Loach, even w/o an official B.A., being given an Asst. Trainer’s job at E.T.A.
Context
The Loach saga's payoff: nine months of Barry Loach begging Park Street commuters just to be touched, and the hand that finally takes the request literally is the "clawlike" one — the talon the book has spent hundreds of pages cataloguing among Mario's deformities is here the instrument of grace, the only hand in metro Boston unguarded enough to extend. The deformity and the fearless literalism are the same trait; the body U.H.I.D. would veil is the one that saves a soul. (Carlisle flags a chronology snag — the filming context puts Mario at ten or eleven, "not age fourteen as stated" — recorded; we as printed.)