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An unnamed narrator recalls the events of a night when he was nineteen. He and two friends, home for summer break after the first year of college, spend their time driving their town’s strip, drinking, and dancing. On the third day of the break, the narrator, Jeff, and Digby find themselves bored and decide to drive, in the narrator’s mother’s car, to the popular hangout spot called Greasy Lake.
There they see a riderless motorcycle and a single car in which a couple is having sex. Digby thinks the car belongs to their friend Tony, so the three friends pull a prank by rolling up quietly and honking and flashing their lights. As they get out of the car to share a laugh about the prank with Tony, the narrator drops his keys in the tall grass and has a feeling that things are about to go wrong. The car, which is not Tony’s, disgorges an angry large man wearing “greasy” jeans and steel-toed boots. He kicks the narrator, who is kneeling to find his keys. Digby tries some recently acquired martial arts moves on the large man, who swats him away, and Jeff jumps on his back and bites his ear. The narrator, suddenly enraged, grabs a tire iron from the car and hits the man on the side of the head. The man falls down, silent, and the friends stand over him, adrenaline flooding their bodies. The narrator sees that some of the man’s hair is stuck to the tire iron and drops it, thinking of the consequences of murder.
Just then, the woman, whom the narrator calls “the fox,” gets out of the car. Wearing only a man’s shirt and her panties, she rushes at the friends. The adrenaline, “the gin and the cannabis,” and the sight of the fox’s painted toenails somehow combine to incite violent lust in the friends, who grab the woman to rape her. Before they can start their act, another car pulls into the parking lot, and all three flee. Jeff and Digby run to the woods, and the narrator hides in waist-deep water among the reeds in the polluted lake. As he hears the men’s angry voices, the narrator decides to swim across the lake to safety, but right away he collides with something “unspeakable.”
Even in the dark, he knows it’s the bloated body of a drowned man, probably the owner of the motorcycle. He scrambles out of the lake, shouting in fear, and the men—including the large man he had hit with the tire iron—become aware that he’s there. They throw rocks and yell for him to come out, but when he doesn’t, they use the tire iron, branches, and boulders to smash the car’s exterior. They load the front seat with trash from the parking lot as well, but then the fox asks Bobbie, the large man, to give it up. He flings the tire iron into the lake and they drive away, followed quickly by the two men whose arrival stopped the rape and who are now apparently worried about laws against vandalism.
After a few moments, the narrator, near tears and in pain, gets up from the cold mud. His friends join him by the destroyed car, whose condition the narrator is somehow going to have to explain to his mother. Digby points out that the tires are still good, and the light of sunrise glints off the keys in the grass near the car door. The friends shovel the trash out of the car and get in to leave, but just then a Mustang pulls into the lot. Two young women, clearly impaired by drugs or alcohol, get out and call for Al, who the narrator realizes must be the motorcycle’s owner, now drowned by accident or violence, and says nothing. One of the women offers the friends drugs and a chance to “party,” but they decline and drive away as she watches, holding her hand out to offer them pills.
