Coney Island 2

The streets of Coney Island at night buzzed with low whispers and insect movement.  In intervals, the train clattered through.  I went to sleep there at night with Brad under the bumper cars in the park, and the neighborhoods beyond it shimmered in the streetlights with something less innocent, bordering on the sinister.  Joshua's own unrest, maybe, and all the ways he's a derelict tow truck driver, a street magician, and an unscrupulous porn star.

The fact that things turned on us outside of the park did not go unnoticed by the Gray Family.  The seaside resort town could be as glittering of a gem as the sapphire set in a high school ring on the finger of a virgin, and embody just as much romantic and wholesome fun.  But it was still the drain for the cesspools of Brooklyn, the train bringing out knot after knot of listless teens and bored junkies.  After all, fun comes in all shapes and kinds, and Joshua is its master.

But maybe I said all that already, in the mention of the Rough Rider.  Invoking the name alone takes us down the rabbit hole of terrifying youtube videos and prickling sense of dread that is someone's idea of fun, and not mine.

It's in this way that angels are terrifying - the way I might call their amorality.  Rides are Fun, sex is Fun, games are Fun, candy is Fun, drugs are Fun, pranks are Fun, and Joshua's innocence will never distinguish a difference between them.  So there are syringes in the dumpsters on Neptune Street.

It didn't take long for something to overtake the mood of the Gray boys.

Gray House is a family, but Rosie and I are outnumbered two against ten, and it's easy to forget that while they're brothers, the Gray boys are also wild dogs.

They run through the bayou this way, yapping and biting one another's necks, their social strata unsure and undefined.  Is Clyde in charge?  Is Grady?  Is Brad, today?  Is Adam?  Jack comes home and always tries to make a guess, but what he doesn't account for is this - is Coney.  Jack thinks the social order of dogs is about power.  The Gray boys know it's about Fun.

Slowly, as the nights fell over the carnival lights and the midway games, they each started to chase their own Fun, the way a pack of dogs would, crawling out of the wet alleyways and smelling the air and running fast and deft on silent feet.  Rosie and I watched what they did, from the safety of the second tower loop of the Cyclone, our feet swinging out into black air.

Adam strolled the boardwalk half as casual and his ironclad adulthood would normally allow, itching the insides of his arms and lolling like the sun into the sea.  Brad bit his nails to nothing watching the girls on the beach and one by one, they began to disappear.  Clyde ventured to the far points of the beaches and slept close enough to the water to be drowned by the tide.  Drama vanished into the mechanical heart of the carousel and the songs on the wind.  Grady's hands got caked in layers of paint and engine grease, and his eyes hollowed from lack of sleep as he nightly rode the M train.  John watched the tourists with the ravenous glassy eyes of an unseen voyeur, and they, too, began to disappear.  Joshua made the mood dangerously summerish keeping the air warm and the rides running all night.  Matthew stalked the dark warehouses and store fronts for things to steal.  Nicholas glutted himself on food and beer and sex in the park bathrooms with strangers.

And something happened to Dean.  I've been trying to say what happened to him, exactly, for three weeks now.

Dean is the most mysterious and vexing person in Gray House.  At the drop of a hat, he is one thing and then another, one person and then another, and beneath all the people he can become is a shining white marble statue of blank-eyed perfection without personality.  Dean dresses himself in people, but the "real" part of him is as of yet unknown beyond the cool and self-contained emojis of his vapid text messaging.

Only Rosie will ever really know or understand what's inside all that marble.  But of course, she's still trying to get there, like the rest of us.

I feel like I know him.  I've watched him a long time, in order to know him at all, and I think I've seen the real him before, but it's his place to say who he is.  I think I also understand the dance he does, and who he adorns himself in, and when.  I think I understand the reasons he has for hiding himself.  I think I know him best of all, but I guess mothers are like that.  And how I know him - through mostly observation - means that I'll never love him beyond this place where I've become his caretaker.

The one part of Dean I could always count on to explain himself to me is Lucky.  Lucky is the most human and charming part of Dean.  In many ways, he's the simplest and most communicative part.  The trouble with Lucky is that he is either mistaken for the "real" Dean, which he emphatically is not, or he's seen as existing for the purpose of being charming and communicative, over the cold ice of Dean's real heart, and that makes him seem wicked.  It makes him a lie to mask an obvious truth.

The truth is...

The truth is that Lucky exists for a very special reason, that is also not my business to tell.

I had seen Lucky here and there in the park, usually at night.  Lucky looks just like Dean, but doesn't dress like him.  Lucky is the nickname earned because of his heavy accent and Irish charm, as well as the way things seem to turn out right when he's around.  When you see Dean, you'll know it's Lucky by the sound of his heavy, war-torn black boots and the smell of his sweat.  While Dean's hair is clean and highlighted and trimmed, Lucky's is long and dirty and hangs in his eyes.  Dean's movements are rigidly executed with a dancer's precision.  Lucky's shoulders are lax and usually dropped in a laugh.  Dean's eyes are warm, always, and forgiving.  Lucky's eyes turn both cold and angry.

See, he's a person, seemingly designed to shrug off all that which is familiar in the angelic sharp corners of Dean.  The antithesis of the Dean we know, I might even go so far to say.

What makes him Lucky here is evident by his red leather vest, sewn with the familiar insignia of a winged skull, declaring him a Warrior.

I want to be a Warrior, too.  Maybe we all do.  So somehow, Lucky became this voice in my head, explaining the story of us to me while I watched it unfold.

"Look there," I heard him whisper, and I saw four of the Gray boys, ignoring one another as they went about their business of Fun.  Clyde, Grady, Joshua, and Brad.

"D'ye see what I see, just over there?" he asked me, and I looked.

"What?"

And he whispered on, his hand light on my shoulder.

"Ah, so you want me to just tell you.  Alright, alright.  See, there's four men waiting for the word of God to fall on them like lightning."

Clyde watched the ocean.  Grady painted a message onto a wall.  Joshua threw old hot dog buns to a stray dog.  Brad carved his name into a telephone pole.

"How do you know?" I asked him, unable to resist throwing my own voice into the same lilt as his, and become Irish myself.  I felt him laugh from where he stood just behind me.

"Well, miss, I know because I know.  Can you not smell the fire in them?"

"I only smell the water."

"Oh my, that's what's got them restless," he told me.  "They need a purpose.  A mission.  A man needs a mission, I'll have you know."

"I didn't know."

He squeezed my shoulder with his dirty hand, and I felt him smile.

"Yes, he does.  Something is about to happen, you'll see."

That was on February 13th.