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Ram-bam-bam, across the parking lot, past the chopper and into the feculent undergrowth at the lake’s edge, insects flying up in my face, weeds whipping, frogs and snakes and red-eyed turtles splashing off into the night: I was already ankle-deep in muck and tepid water and still going strong. Behind me, the girl’s screams rose in intensity, disconsolate, incriminating, the screams of the Sabine women, the Christian martyrs, Anne Frank dragged from the garret. I kept going, pursued by those cries, imagining cops and bloodhounds.
These lines occur after the narrator and his friends are interrupted in their intent to rape Bobbie’s girlfriend by the beaming headlights of the arriving car. The narrator has experienced “lust and greed and the purest primal badness,” and now, as he flees, two things happen. First, the screams of their intended victim become conflated in his mind with the screams of other victims of “primal badness,” some of them rape victims (the Sabine women) but others victims of other ancient hatreds. Now he realizes that he is among the attackers.
All the victims’ screams “pursue” him, and he knows that, had the car not pulled up when it did, he would be a criminal leaving traces for bloodhounds. From playing at being “dangerous characters” by loitering and drinking alcohol, he and his friends have, in mere moments, attacked and perhaps killed a man and then attempted to rape an outnumbered, barely clothed woman. The ease of the transition shocks the narrator, who hides in the water, breathing “in sobs, in gasps.”
I don’t know how long I lay there, the bad breath of decay all around me, my jacket heavy as a bear, the primordial ooze subtly reconstituting itself to accommodate my upper thighs and testicles. My jaws ached, my knee throbbed, my coccyx was on fire. I contemplated suicide, wondered if I’d need bridgework, scraped the recesses of my brain for some sort of excuse to give my parents. . . . Then I thought of the dead man. He was probably the only person on the planet worse off than I was. I thought about him, fog on the lake, insects chirring eerily, and felt the tug of fear, felt the darkness opening up inside me like a set of jaws. Who was he, I wondered, this victim of time and circumstance bobbing sorrowfully in the lake at my back.
These lines, which occur after Bobbie drives away and leaves the smashed car behind, trace the narrator’s thoughts in the moment. Already injured and exhausted, the narrator becomes aware of the inevitable universal truth of human mortality. The drowned man didn’t drive to Greasy Lake expecting to die, but some combination of “time and circumstance” kills him. The darkness the narrator feels is not the natural darkness of night; it comes from within him and threatens to consume him.
The narrator arrived at Greasy Lake full of life and hoping for a little dangerous fun, but the fight and its aftermath leaves him in fear’s wake. Early in the story, the narrator comments that Jeff may quit college and take up art; each young man has plans. Now the “breath of decay” surrounds the narrator, and the torn leather jacket that marks him as a cool young rebel pins him in the mud. His traumatic epiphany about his own mortality makes him want to vomit, sob, and hide in his bed.
