jake was struck by this ; his father had never been the sort of man to indulge in reminiscences which began , you know , when i was a kid ... jake tried to imagine his father as a boy with a bad case of exam fever and found he could n't quite do it - the best he could manage was the unpleasant image of a pugnacious dwarf in a piper sweatshirt , a dwarf in custom-tooled cowboy boots , a dwarf with short black hair bolting up from his forehead .