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Meanwhile, Digby vaulted the kissing bumpers and delivered a savage kung-fu blow to the greasy character’s collarbone. Digby had just finished a course in martial arts for phys-ed credit and had spent the better part of the past two nights telling us apocryphal tales of Bruce Lee types and of the raw power invested in lightning blows shot from coiled wrists, ankles, and elbows. The greasy character was unimpressed. He merely backed off a step, his face like a Toltec mask, and laid Digby out with a single whistling roundhouse blow . . . but by now Jeff had got into the act, and I was beginning to extricate myself from the dirt, a tinny compound of shock, rage, and impotence wadded in my throat.
These lines come after Bobbie has ripped out of his car to kick the narrator, chip his tooth, and leave him in the grass. Not only do these lines contrast Bobbie, an effective fighter and a truly “dangerous character,” with the narrator and his friends, but they offer an example of Boyle’s ability to combine humor with grim detail. The “savage” blow of “raw power” that Digby, who imagines himself like martial arts master Bruce Lee after a single college PE course, delivers leaves Bobbie unimpressed.
By contrast, the threat of Bobbie’s strikes is real, and he delivers them impassively, even sternly. In this, Bobbie is a foil to the narrator, to whom the attack has come as a shock. Like Bobbie, he is enraged, but unlike Bobbie, he is not in control of the situation, at least not while the friends use only their fists and feet against Bobbie. Having been so suddenly and unexpectedly bested by this “man of action,” the narrator feels an impotence so strong that it seems to choke him.
I heard a door slam, a curse, and then the sound of headlights shattering—almost a good-natured sound, celebratory, like corks popping from the necks of bottles. This was succeeded by the dull booming of the fenders, metal on metal, and then the icy crash of the windshield. . . . The tire iron flailing, the greasy bad character was laying into the side of my mother’s Bel Air like an avenging demon, his shadow riding up the trunks of the trees. . . . The greasy character paused a moment, took one good swipe at the left taillight, and then heaved the tire iron halfway across the lake.
These events happen while the narrator, hidden in the reeds, watches as Bobbie, with some help from the blond guys, smashes the exterior of the narrator’s mother’s car. Bobbie is a “man of action,” and since he can’t locate the narrator and his friends, he acts against the car. The narrator has just reported relief at knowing that he hadn’t committed murder, but the relief gives way as he realizes Bobbie will destroy the narrator upon finding him.
That Bobbie uses the tire iron, which the narrator used to knock him out, to beat up the car adds to the retribution. Without the tire iron, which Bobbie dismissively throws into the lake when he’s done with it, the combined force of the narrator and his friends probably would not have taken Bobbie down. The narrator’s care to hide himself in the cold, uncomfortable mud makes it clear that he now understands that no matter how bad a character he thinks he is, he is no match for the worse, stronger, more violent characters whose paths he might cross.
