Whenever Jeltz played the epithet game, he always came back to his father’s pet name for him. Jeltz the Utter Bastard. That said it all, really. Jeltz remembered one of his own early poems. “Utter bastard,” he said in a voice of distant rumbling thunder. “Play thee, No more, By the crabby hole. Lay down thine mallet And flap flippy floppy arms, At a world of sun and tight skin. Learn hate well, My little, Utter Bastard.”
