Gately's higher power and Bob Death — "The M.P.’s tongue was in the…"
The M.P.’s tongue was in the corner of his mouth and his little-eyed face wore a look of great concentration, as if he were taking something delicate apart or putting it together.
Context
Into the vacuum the vanished ironworker leaves steps the anti-father: the former Navy M.P., the mother's live-in lover, who beat her on a schedule with a brig-guard's craftsmanship — landing the blows only "between groin and breast so that nothing showed," timing them between her flame-beating-out arm-waves with the sober problem-solving face of a man assembling something delicate. This is the male authority the child Gately actually grows up under, and its signature is method: the same man "logged each beer he drank carefully in a little spiral notebook he used to monitor his intake of alcohol." A patriarch whose entire transmitted lesson is controlled, accountable violence — the note-keeping abuser who teaches, by example, that a man's force is something to administer precisely. It's the model against which Gately's whole later gentleness reads as a repudiation.