Struck plagiarizes the A.F.R. train-cult
les directeurs de jeu——older, post-adolescent boys, veterans of previous les jeux, many of them legless and in wheelchairs or——for the sons of asbestos miners, many orphaned and desperately poor——on crude rolling boards.
Context
Under the purple Academese, the train-jumping cult Struck is ripping off is an economy of sons: "miners' sons, ages ten to roughly sixteen" lining up to leap in front of night trains, the rounds refereed by older boys already legless from earlier games — and the poorest, "the sons of asbestos miners," orphaned and rolling on boards. The fathers here are only a trade and an absence, but the game itself is pure inheritance: the sons of a lethal industry playing a lethal game, the maiming handed down the way the mine is. It's thin as a dyad — the dads are economic backdrop, not presences — but the asbestos detail rhymes with the one real mining father elsewhere in the book, Wayne's, holding on in the shaft for his boy's pro money. [dyad-adjacent; assembly may cut; cf. 065]