The end of the Clipperton legend (p. 433)
his ex-soybean-farmer Pa, blinded in the infamous hailstorms of B.S. ’94, now spent all day every day playing with one of those little wooden paddles with a red rubber ball attached by elastic string, paddle-ball, with an understandable lack of success; and the tranquilized and sightless Clippertons had had no clue about where Eric had even disappeared off to most weekends
Context
Clipperton's actual father, revealed only at the graveside: a blinded ex-farmer batting hopelessly at a paddle-ball all day beside a Valium-fogged wife, so oblivious to their son that they swallowed his story about the trophies coming from a freelance design job. The absent-father pole in its saddest key — not cruelty but a sightless, sedated incapacity to see the boy at all, which is exactly why Eric had to borrow another kid's father for counsel. And he brings his parents to the suicide anyway: among the things he pulls from his wet coat before the Glock is "a sepia'd snapshot of some whey-faced Midwestern couple's wedding," the blind father and drugged mother carried to the end he stages in front of the father he wished he'd had.