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I was terrified. Blood was beating in my ears, my hands were shaking, my heart turning over like a dirtbike in the wrong gear. My antagonist was shirtless, and a single cord of muscle flashed across his chest as he bent forward to peel Jeff from his back like a wet overcoat. . . . I came at him like a kamikaze, mindless, raging, stung with humiliation—the whole thing, from the initial boot in the chin to this murderous primal instant involving no more than sixty hyperventilating, gland-flooding seconds—I came at him and brought the tire iron down across his ear.
The fight begins because of Bobbie’s primal urges of rage and the need to defend against what he perceives as an attack on him and his girlfriend. The fight escalates when the narrator’s primal urges of wounded pride and retaliatory rage drive him to respond. The narrator at least understands that emotions and physical responses have overwhelmed his ability to think clearly. He can still plan reactively, though, and grabs the tire iron he’s only used to change tires but has wanted to associate with “bad characters” who are prepared for anything. He is “mindless” to the point of not caring for his own safety, “like a kamikaze,” in the moment, and not until Bobbie lies dead, the narrator assumes, does a realization of the consequences of murder come to him. Seeing the incriminating hair stuck to the tire iron, the narrator drops the weapon as another primal emotion, fear, sweeps over him.
There was a silver chain round her ankle, and her toenails flashed in the glare of the headlights. I think it was the toenails that did it. Sure, the gin and the cannabis and even the Kentucky Fried may have had a hand in it, but it was the sight of those flaming toes that set us off—the toad emerging from the loaf in Virgin Spring, lipstick smeared on a child; she was already tainted. We were on her like Bergman’s deranged brothers—see no evil, hear none, speak none—panting, wheezing, tearing at her clothes, grabbing for flesh. We were bad characters, and we were scared and hot and three steps over the line—anything could have happened.
After Bobbie falls and the fight appears to be finished, the urges of rage, vengeance, and fear lead to another primal urge when the narrator and his friends, still “scared and hot” and certainly not thinking calmly, see the half-naked woman get out of Bobbie’s car, herself in the grip of rage. When she screams that they are “animals,” she’s not far off the mark. In their hyperemotional state, enhanced by substances, they see this woman, whom the narrator calls “the fox,” as prey and attack as a pack.
The narrator tries to explain this urge and its consequences, or perhaps it is more accurate to say that he rationalizes their actions. Undressed, with painted toenails, angry enough to run at three men she doesn’t know, the woman is, he says, “already tainted” as Bobbie’s willing sexual partner and thus, to their frenzied minds, appropriate prey. The next paragraph’s details reinforce the predator-prey imagery. The “accusing” beams of the arriving car catch the three teens with “shreds” of clothing in their hand, “lips licked,” ready for the attack.
