outside Rusk's office
Rusk was urging Stice to name his anger and Stice was proposing to name his anger Horace after his old man’s late pointer that had got into some coyote bait when The Darkness was nine and was much missed by the whole Stice brood, back in Kansas.
Context
Overheard through the sports-psychologist's door: Stice, told to "name his anger," reaches home for the name — Horace, his old man's dead bird-dog, lost to coyote bait when Ortho was nine. Even the boy's rage gets routed through a memento of his father's household. It lands inside a scene already thick with paternal jargon: the same overheard session has Rusk's office glossing GI Joe as "an image of the potent but antagonistic father," so the raw brackets Stice's homely, grief-tinged Kansas memory with the clinic's textbook Oedipal father — the felt father and the theorized one, a door apart.