The Fox emerges from The Bad Character’s Chevy after the narrator has knocked The Bad Character unconscious with a tire iron. She is in “panties and a man’s shirt,” and wears a silver anklet. Her painted toenails signal to the narrator, Digby, and Jeff, in their intoxicated, frightened state, that she is “already tainted,” and they attack her, “tearing at her clothes, grabbing for flesh.” When a Trans-Am pulls into the lot, the boys abandon her, and she cries to the two blond men driving the approaching car that the three boys tried to rape her. The Fox brings out the boys’ true badness and represents their descent into actual danger and violence—when they attack her, they are no longer playacting at being a cool kind of bad, but instead they have descended into true moral decay.
“The Fox” Quotes in Greasy Lake
The Greasy Lake quotes below are all either spoken by “The Fox” or refer to “The Fox”. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Note: all page numbers and citation info for the quotes below refer to the Penguin edition of Greasy Lake published in 1986.
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Greasy Lake
Quotes
We were bad characters, and we were scared and hot and three steps over the line—anything could have happened.
Related Characters:
The Narrator (speaker), Digby, Jeff, “The Fox”
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
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“The Fox” Character Timeline in Greasy Lake
The timeline below shows where the character “The Fox” appears in Greasy Lake. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Greasy Lake
A scream rips through the silence of the dark night—it is The Fox , emerging from the Chevy “barefoot [and] dressed in panties and a man’s shirt.” She...
(full context)
...and the narrator runs across the dirt lot to the lake’s edge. He can hear The Fox ’s screams in the night. He pushes on into the water, planning to “swim for...
(full context)
The narrator, realizing he has made some noise with all his thrashing, hears The Fox telling someone: “It’s them: they tried to rape me!” A voice with a Midwestern accent...
(full context)
...iron and with the help of two blond men, destroying the narrator’s mother’s Bel Air. The Fox begs the Bad Character to stop, pleading with him and calling him “Bobbie.” Eventually he...
(full context)