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No mention has been made of the snowplow that seemed always to be there, scraping snow off our narrow road-an artery cleared, though neither of us could have said where the heart was.

T.C. Boyle T. CoraghessaJl Boyle was 170m ill 1948 ill Peekskill, New York. He re- ceived an M.F.A. from the .lowa Writers' Workshol) and a Ph.D. ill Nilleteenth Century British Literature from the Uniuersitv of Iowa. His 17 books of fiction illelude Tooth and Claw (2005), The Inner Circle (2004), the National Book Award Finalist Drop City (2003), The Road to Wellville (1993), and the Pen/Faulkner Award-wil1lling World's End (1987). lit his essay "This Monkey, My Back," he discusses the ways ill which his writing habit is stronger than any drug: "I can see how my books and stories are tied inextricably, how the themes and obsessions- the search for the father, racism, class and community, predetermillation versus free will, cultural imperialism, sexual war, and sexual truce-keep repeating. I can see this, but only ill retrospect. That's the beauty of this addiction-you baue to move 011, no retirement here, look out ahead, though you can't see where you're going. First you have nothing, and then, astonishingly, after ripping out your brain and your heart and betraying your friends and ex-lovers and dreaming like a zombie over the page till you can't see or hear or smell or taste, you have something. Something new. Something of value. Something to hold up and admire. And thell? Well, you've got a [ones, haven't you? And you start all over again, with

/lathing. "

Creasy IJalzc It's about a mile down on the dark side of Route 88.

-Bruce Springsteen

There was a time when courtesy and winning ways went out of style, when it was good to be bad, when you cultivated decadence like a taste. We were all dangerous characters then. We wore torn-up leather jackets, slouched around with toothpicks in our mouths, sniffed glue and ether and what somebody claimed was cocaine. When we wheeled our parents' whining station wagons out into the street we left a patch of rubber half a block long. We drank gin and grape juice, Tango,

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The taillights of a single car winked at us as we swung into the dirt lot with its tufts of weed and washboard corrugations; '57 Chevy, mint, metallic blue. On the far side of the lot, like the exoskeleton of some gaunt chrome insect, a chopper leaned against its kickstand. And that was it for excitement: some junkie half-wit biker and a car freak pumping his girlfriend. Whatever it was we were looking for, we weren't about to find it at Greasy Lake. Not that night.

But then all of a sudden Digby was fighting for the wheel. "Hey, that's Tony Lovett's car! Hey!" he shouted, while I stabbed at the brake pedal and the Bel Air nosed up to the gleaming bumper of the parked Chevy. Digby leaned on the horn, laughing, and instructed me to put my brights on. I flicked on the brights. This was hilarious. A joke. Tony would experience premature withdrawal and expect to be confronted by grhn-looking state troopers with flashlights. We hit the horn, strobed the lights, and then jumped out of the car to press our witty faces to Tony's windows; for all we knew we might even catch a glimpse of some little fox's tit, and then we could slap backs with red-faced Tony, rough- house a little, and go on to new heights of adventure and daring.

The first mistake, the one that opened the whole floodgate, was los- ing my grip on the keys. In the excitement, leaping from the car with the gin in one hand and a roach clip in the other, I spilled them in the grass-in the dark, rank, mysterious nighttime grass of Greasy Lake. This was a tactical error, as damaging and irreversible in its way as Westmoreland's decision to dig in at Khe Sanh. I felt it like a jab of in- tuition, and I stopped there by the open door, peering vaguely into the night that puddled up round my feet.

The second mistake-and this was inextricably bound up with the first-was identifying the car as Tony Lovett's. Even before the very bad character in greasy jeans and engineer boots ripped out of the dri- ver's door, I began to realize that this chrome blue was much lighter than the robin's-egg of Tony's car, and that Tony's car didn't have rear- mounted speakers. Judging from their expressions, Digby and Jeff were privately groping toward the same inevitable and unsettling conclusion

as I was. In any case, there was no reasoning with this bad greasy charac-

ter-clearly he was a man of action. The first lusty Rockette kick of his steel-toed boot caught me under the chin, chipped my favorite tooth, and left me sprawled in the dirt. Like a fool, I'd gone down on one knee to comb the stiff hacked grass for the keys, my mind making con- nections in the most dragged-out, testudineous way, knowing that things had gone wrong, that I was in a lot of trouble, and that the lost

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ignition key was my grail and my salvation. The three or four succeed- ing blows were mainly absorbed by my right buttock and the tough piece of bone at the base of my spine.

Meanwhile, Digby vaulted the kissing bumpers and delivered a sav- age 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 unim- pressed. 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.

Jeff was on the guy's back, biting at his ear. Digby was on the ground, cursing. I went for the tire iron I kept under the driver's seat. I kept it there because bad characters always keep tire irons under the driver's seat, for just such an occasion as this. Never mind that I hadn't been involved in a fight since sixth grade, when a kid with a sleepy eye and two streams of mucus depending from his nostrils hit me in the knee with a Louisville slugger; never mind that I'd touched the tire iron exactly twice before, to change tires: it was there. And I went for it.

I was terrified. Blood was beating in my ears, my hands were shak- ing, my heart turning over like a dirtbike in the wrong gear. My antag- onist 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. "Motherfucker," he spat, over and over, and I was aware in that in- stant that all four of us-Digby, Jeff, and myself included-were chant- ing "motherfucker, motherfucker," as if it were a battle cry. (What hap- pened next? the detective asks the murderer from beneath the turned-down brim of his porkpie hat. I don't know, the murderer says, something came over me. Exactly.)

Digby poked the flat of his hand in the bad character's face and I came at him like a kamikaze, mindless, raging, stung with humilia- tion-the whole thing, from the initial boot in the chin co this murderous primal instant involving no more than sixty hyperventilat- ing, gland-flooding seconcls-I came at him and brought the tire iron down across his ear. The effect was instantaneous, astonishing. He was a stunt man and this was Hollywood, he was a big grimacing toothy balloon and I was a man with a straight pin. He collapsed. Wet his pants. Went loose in his boots.

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A single second, big as a zeppelin, floated by. We were standing over him in a circle, gritting our teeth, jerking our necks, our limbs and hands and feet twitching with glandular discharges. No one said any- thing. We just stared down at the guy, the car freak, the lover, the bad greasy character laid low. Digby looked at me; so did Jeff. I was still holding the tire iron, a tuft of hair clinging to tbe crook like dandelion fluff, like down. Rattled, I dropped it in the dirt, already envisioning the headlines, the pitted faces of the police inquisitors, the gleam of handcuffs, clank of bars, the big black shadows rising from the back of the cell ... wben suddenly a raw torn shriek cut through me like all the juice in all tbe electric chairs in the country.

It was the fox. She was short, barefoot, dressed in panties and a man's shirt. "Animals!" she screamed, running at us with her fists clenched and wisps of blow-dried hair in her face. 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 emerg- ing 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. It didn't. Before we could pin her to the hood of the car, our eyes masked

with lust and greed and the purest primal badness, a pair of headlights swung into the lot. There we were, dirty, bloody, guilty, dissociated from humanity and civilization, the first of the Ur-crimes behind us, the second in progress, shreds of nylon panty and spandex brassiere dan- gling from our fingers, our flies open, lips licked-there we were, caught in tbe spotlight. Nailed.

We bolted. First for the car, and then, realizing we had no way of starting it, for the woods. I thought nothing. I thought escape. The headlights came at me like accusing fingers. I was gone.

Ram-barn-barn, 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, discon- solate, incriminating, the screams of the Sabine women, the Christian

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martyrs, Anne Frank dragged from the garret. I kept going, pursued by those cries, imagining cops and bloodhounds. The water was up to my knees when I realized what I was doing: I was going to swim for it. Swim the breadth of Greasy Lake and hide myself in the thick clot of woods on the far side. They'd never find me there.

I was breathing in sobs, in gasps. The water lapped at my waist as I looked out over the moon-burnished ripples, the mats of algae that clung to the surface like scabs. Digby and Jeff had vanished. I paused. Listened. The girl was quieter now, screams tapering to sobs, but there were male voices, angry, excited, and the high-pitched ticking of the second car's engine. 1 waded deeper, stealthy, hunted, the ooze sucking at my sneakers. As I was about to take the plunge-at the very instant I dropped my shoulder for the first slashing stroke-I blundered into something. Something unspeakable, qbscene, something soft, wet, moss-grown. A patch of weed? A log? When I reached out to touch. it, it gave like a rubber duck, it ga ve like flesh.

In one of those nasty little epiphanies for which we are prepared by films and TV and childhood visits to the funeral home to ponder the shrunken painted forms of dead grandparents, I understood what it was that bobbed there so inadmissibly in the dark. Understood, and stumbled back in horror and revulsion, my mind yanked in six differ- ent directions (I was nineteen, a mere child, an infant, and here in the space of five minutes I'd struck down one greasy character and blun- dered into the waterlogged carcass of a second), thinking. The keys, the keys, why did I have to go and lose the keys? 1 stumbled back, but the muck took hold of my feet-a sneaker snagged, balance lost-and sud- denly I was pitching face forward into the buoyant black mass, throw- ing Out my hands in desperation while simultaneously conjuring the image of reeking frogs and muskrats revolving in slicks of their own deliquescing juices. AAAAArrrgh! I shot from the water like a torpedo, the dead man rotating to expose a mossy beard and eyes cold as the moon. 1 must have shouted out, thrashing around in the weeds, be- cause the voices behind me suddenly became animated.

"What was that?" "It's them, it's them: they tried to, tried to ... rape me!" Sobs. A man's voice, flat Midwestern accent. "You sons a bitches, we'll

kill you!" Frogs, crickets. Then another voice, harsh, r-Iess, Lower East Side: "Mother-

fucker!" I recognized the verbal virtuosity of the bad greasy character in the engineer boots. Tooth chipped, sneakers gone, coated in mud

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and slime and worse, crouching breathless in the weeds waiting to have my ass thoroughly and definitively kicked and fresh from the hideous stinking embrace of a three-days-dead-corpse, I suddenly felt a rush of joy and vindication: the son of a bitch was alive! Just as quickly, my bowels turned to ice. "Come on out of there, you pansy mother-

tucKers!"-fllebad greasy character was screaming. He shouted curses till he was out of breath.

The crickets started up again, then the frogs. 1 held my breath. All at once there was a sound in the reeds, a swishing, a splash: rhunk-a- thunk. They were throwing rocks. The frogs fell silent. [ cradled my head. Swish, swish, thunk-a-thunk. A wedge of feldspar the size of a cue ball glanced off my knee. I bit my finger.

It was then that they turned to the car. I heard a door slam, a curse, and then the sound or the 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. I inched forward, el- bows and knees, my belly pressed to the muck, thinking of guerrillas and commandos and The Naked and the Dead. I parted the weeds and sq uinted the length of the parking lot.

The second car-it was a Trans-Am-was still running, its high beams washing the scene in a lurid stagy light. 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. Whomp. Whomp. Whomp-whomp. The other two guys-blond types, in fraternity jackets-were helping out with tree branches and skull- sized boulders. One of them was gathering up bottles, rocks, muck, candy wrappers, used condoms, poptops, and other refuse and pitching it through the window on the driver's side. [ could see the fox, a white bulb behind the windshield of the '57 Chevy. "Bobbie," she whined over the thumping, "come on." The greasy character paused a mo- - rnent, took one good swipe at the left taillight, and then heaved the tire iron halfway across the lake. Then he fired up the' 57 and was gone.

Blond head nodded at blond head. One said something to the other, too low for me to catch. They were no doubt thinking that in helping to annihilate my mother's car they'd committed a fairly rash act, and thinking roo that there were three bad characters connected with that very car watching them from the woods. Perhaps other possibilities occurred to them as well-police, jail cells, justices of the peace, rep- arations, lawyers, irate parents, fraternal censure. Whatever they were thinking, they suddenly dropped branches, bottles, and rocks and

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sprang for their car in unison, as if they'd choreographed it. Five sec- onds. That's al\ it took. The engine shrieked, the tires squealed, a cloud of dust rose from the rutted lot and then settled back on darkness.

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-a tree had fallen on the car, I was blindsided by a bread truck, hit and run, vandals had got to it while we were playing chess at Digby's. Then I thought of the dead man. He was probably the only person on the planet worse off than I was. [ 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. The owner of the chopper, no doubt, a bad older character come to this. Shot during a murky drug deal, drowned while drunkenly frolicking in the lake. Another headline. My car was wrecked; he was dead.

When the eastern half of the sky went from black to cobalt and the trees began to separate themselves from the shadows, [ pushed myself up from the mud and stepped out into the open. By now the birds had begun to take over for the crickets, and dew lay slick on the leaves. There was a smell in the air, raw and sweet at the same time, the smell of the sun firing buds and opening blossoms. I contemplated the car. It lay there like a wreck along the highway, like a steel sculpture left over from a vanished civilization. Everything was still. This was nature.

I was circling the car, as dazed and bedraggled as the sale survivor of an air blitz, when Digby and Jeff emerged from the trees behind me. Digby's face was crosshatched with smears of dirt; Jeff's jacket was gone and his shirt was torn across the shoulder. They slouched across the lot, looking sheepish, and silently cam~ up beside me to gape at the ravaged automobile. No one said a word. After a while Jeff swung open the driver's door and began to scoop the broken glass and garbage off the seat. I looked at Digby. He shrugged. "At least (hey didn't slash the tires," he said.

It was true: the tires were intact. There was no windshield, the headlights were staved in, and the body looked as if it had been sledge-hammered for a quarter a shot at the county fair, but the tires were inflated to regulation pressure. The car was drivable. In silence, al\ three of LIS bent to scrape the mud and shattered glass from the

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interior. I said nothing about the biker. When we were finished, I reached in my pocket for the keys, experienced a nasty stab of recol- lection, cursed myself, and turned to search the grass. I spotted them almost immediately, no more than five feet from the open door, glint- ing like jewels in the first tapering shaft of sunlight. There was no rea- son toget philos-ophical about it: I eased into the seat and turned the engine over.

It was at that precise moment that the silver Mustang with the flame decals rumbled into the lot. All three of us froze; then Digby and Jeff slid into the car and slammed the door. We watched as the Mus- tang rocked and bobbed across the ruts and finally jerked to a halt be- side the forlorn chopper at the far end of the lot. "Let's go," Digby said. I hesitated, the Bel Air wheezing beneath me.

Two girls emerged from the Mustang. Tight jeans, stiletto heels, hail' like frozen fur. They bent over the motorcycle, paced back and forth aimlessly, glanced once or twice at us, and then ambled over to where the reeds sprang up in a green fence round the perimeter of the lake. One of them cupped her hands to her mouth. "AI," she called.

"Hey, All" "Come on," Digby hissed. "Let's get out of here." But it was too late. The second girl was picking her way across the

lot, unsteady on her heels, looking up at us and then away. She was older-twenty-five or -six-and as she came closer we could see there was something wrong with her: she was stoned or drunk, lurching now and waving her arms for balance. I gripped the steering wheel as if it were the ejection lever of a flaming jet, and Digby spat out my name, twice, terse and impatient.

"Hi," the girl said. We looked at her like zombies, like war veterans, like deaf-and-

dumb pencil peddlers. She smiled, her lips cracked and dry. "Listen," she said, bending

from the waist to look in the window, "you guys seen A!?" Her pupils were pinpoints, her eyes glass. She jerked her neck. "That's his bike over there-AI's. You seen him?"

AI. I didn't know what to say. I wanted to get out of the car and retch. I wanted to go home to my parents' house and crawl into bed. Digby poked me in the ribs. "We haven't seen anybody," I said.

The girl seemed to consider this, reaching out a slim veiny arm to brace herself against the car. "No matter," she said, slurring the t's "he'll turn up." And then, as if she'd just taken stock of the whole scene-the ravaged car and our battered faces, the desolation of the

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place-she said: "Hey, you guys look like some pretty bad characters- been fightin', huh?" We stared straight ahead, rigid as catatonics. She was fumbling in her pocket and muttering something. Finally she held out a handful of tablets in glassine wrappers: "Hey, you want to party, you want to do some of these with me and Sarah?"

Ijust looked at her. I thought Iwas going to cry. Digby broke the si- lence. "No, thanks," he said, leaning over me. "Some other time."

Iput the car in gear and it inched forward with a groan, shaking off pellets of glass like an old dog shedding water after a bath, heaving over the ruts on its worn springs, creeping toward the highway. There was a sheen of sun on the lake. I looked back. The girl was still stand- ing there, watching us, her shoulders slumped, hand outstretched.

ROil Carlson

ROil Carlson was born in 1947 in Logan, Utah. A contributor to The New Yorker, Harper's, Best American Shorr Stories, and many other magazines and journals, Carlson is particularly well known for his funny and searing observations all adolescence. He has published the short story collections The News of the World (1987), Plan B for the Middle Class (1992), The Hotel Eden (1997), At the Jim Bridger (2002), and A Kind of Flying (2003). His ttouels include Truants (1981) and The Speed of Light (2003). III all illterview ill Writers Ask, Carlson spoke about the process and disci. pline of writing: "When you're a writer you spend days ill the room with- out knowillg what you've got, but you're still willing to keep reeling it in and [ollou/ing it. You're willing to be true to it. It may mean you have to write thirty pages to get fifteen. The big secret to such writing is the ability to stay in the room. The writer is the person who stays in the room ... all the good writing I've done in the last tell years has been done in the first twenty minutes after the first time I ioanted to leave the room. I've learned to stay there and keep writing. "

Jvlilk They almost fingerprint the children before I can stop them. Phyllis is making a rare personal appearance in my office to help me with a mo- torcycle injury claim, and I want to squeeze every minute Out of her, and I'm taking no calls. We all call Phyllis "The Queen of Wrongful Death," which is the truest nickname in the firm. She likes being a hard