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“You coming?” I asked her, knowing full well her cutoff point is November. She loves the water and will go in when it’s pretty damned cold. Which is how we’d first met. Both of us taking a dip in the Coney waters late October two years back. The girl doesn’t mind cold water. Just not this cold.

“No way,” she shook her head. She’d come to stand closer to me now. I saw that her long black hair was knotted and that she had bags under her gray eyes. She looked like she’d tumbled out of bed, put her coat on and come to the beach.

“I’m just waiting for Attila, he’s running,” she said, motioning toward Brighton.

“The jockey?”

“Yeah.” She looked sheepish and I could see she had in fact just tumbled out of bed.

“I can’t believe you’re going out with that guy,” I said.

Ruby and I had been talking about Attila Johnson one day just a few weeks before she’d met him. I like to play the horses now and then and Ruby and me were talking about some races. I’d noticed, as she had, that there was a new apprentice with an unlikely name. Especially considering he was a little blond-headed white guy. Seemed to me Attila Johnson sounded like the name of a massive black guy, not a shrimpy little blond guy.

“I gotta go in the water, I’m freezing my dick off,” I announced to Ruby—then immediately felt funny for saying it because Ruby is, after all, a lady. I’ve heard some foul phrases come out of her mouth and I’ve always felt at home with her the way you usually only do with a guy, but all the same, she’s a lady.

She held my bag of clothes for me as I jogged ahead to the water. I stopped and took my boots off right at the edge, just where the snow ended and the water started. I ran in until I was waist high, dove under for a few screaming seconds, then raced back out.

“Good?” Ruby asked, handing me my bag.

“Very.” I pulled my towel out and wrapped it around my waist. Took my bathing suit off like that, right there on the beach, with just the towel for cover. I started packing on layers of clothing. Ruby just kept gazing out toward Brighton.

“Coffee?” I asked her once I had my clothes on.

“Nah, gotta wait for Attila to get back,” she said and, right on cue, a small blond man came running toward us. With him was a black guy, the two running in tandem, Attila’s head barely chest high to the black guy.

Attila stopped in front of Ruby. His eyes were huge and he looked insane. He was also soaking wet. The black guy stopped a few feet back, looking a little confused. I realized the black guy was the guy Ruby calls Rite of Spring Man, a sort of lunatic job that walks around Coney with a boom box on his shoulder blaring classical music.

“Someone just tried to kill me,” the jockey announced.

“What?” Ruby frowned, like she was hearing a bad joke.

“This guy saved my life,” Attila indicated Rite of Spring Man. “Somebody was trying to drown me.”

Attila’s teeth were chattering and his lips were turning almost as blue as his eyes.

This was all a little too much for me. I’d come out here to have a quick dip, hadn’t even planned on stopping by to see if Ruby was around. Was just going to cool my head off a little then go home and see what the wife had concocted for dinner because in eight years of being married to the girl, I still sometimes go home full of hope. About dinner being palatable, about her liking me a little.

Ruby had covered the jockey in her fake fur coat and was saying something to Rite of Spring Man, who didn’t look particularly shaken about any of this and was just standing there looking mildly baffled under the steel-gray sky. I thought about just quietly walking away and heading back to my truck parked there in the lot near the Cyclone roller coaster. But at one point Ruby put her hand on my arm, letting me know she wanted me around. So I stayed.

I walked with Ruby and the jockey back to Ruby’s place, witnessing an argument between the two about calling the cops. Ruby couldn’t understand why Attila wouldn’t let her call them. Attila, whose sketchy past was mapped out