Gately's Trauma Wing: the wraith and the M.P. (pp. 842–843)
a well-maimed fly produced tiny little fly-screams of pain and fear. Human beings couldn’t hear a maimed fly’s screams, but you could bet your fat little rug-rat ass other flies could, and the screams of their maimed colleagues helped keep them away.
Context
Gately's counter-lineage: not a father who failed to reach him but the anti-father who filled the house, his mother's live-in ex-M.P., who taught the toddler free-weights "with special emphasis on control and form" and, over five Heinekens, this — that maiming is more useful than killing because the screams keep the others in line. It is a paternal curriculum in cruelty-as-control, delivered by a man who beat Gately's mother daily but "never laid a hand on Gately personally," so the boy absorbed the fear without the blows and grew up unable to remember whether he ever put the maimed flies out of their misery or only "hunkered blankly down" to listen for the screams. Against the wraith's father who wanted to be heard and couldn't, the M.P. is the father- figure who wanted obedience and got it — the theme's two failures of paternity, transmission of a wound versus transmission of a menace, meeting in the same feverish head.