She stood up and walked around the fire, which allowed him to turn and warm his backside. With his teeth no longer chattering, he could concentrate on the strange pretty girl, with her dark hair hanging free, decked with flowers, tiny bells and clay jewelry, before an open fire on the sand. Night winds moved under the pier to push hair from her face and make tinglings among her bells, building a picture of witchery that made him shiver.
“We’ll take you,” she said.
“You off your nut?” said Andy. “If the hired apes upstairs catch us with him, well all take a real bad trip!
“Besides,” said Charlie, “who wants to leave the fire? We’ve been out on the beach since sundown, and it’s anything but summer. Come off it, Mai-let him go, but don’t mix us in.”
She laughed, and looked right at Napoleon. Her foot kicked twice, and the fire was nearly smothered with heavy sand. “There’s no action out there yet, or you ought to have seen it. When they decide to go looking for him, they’ll charge out yelling and flashing lights, like when we steal something. You know there isn’t one brain to share around for all of them, except Arnold, and he usually has to stay back to hold Fatty’s hand. Anytime I can’t take a herd of camels through one of their search parties, I’ll throw away my retrievable subway token.” She stopped in the night to chuckle right in Napoleon’s face.
“Besides, he’s got flowers on his shorts, so he’s cool. He doesn’t look like much all cut up and half-drowned, but he comes on right; he doesn’t give an inch. Anybody who swings can’t be all bad.”
And like that, the four of them were heading across the sand, with Napoleon dose to the girl, flanked by her mascots.
Keeping his voice down, he asked her, “What’s Mai short for?”
“It’s kind of Greek,” she said. “My full name is Phroso Popia Boulis, but that was good for when I lived at home. Not now.” With one hand she indicated the direction of Brooklyn and brushed her hair back over one shoulder in a single wide sweep, continuing to drive a long, fast pace over the sand. “I was raised near 50th Street, good Greek Orthodox family. When things started seeming a little silly, I split. And if you don’t get married or hit college at that age, you end up a part of some gang. For a couple months I worked in a store, and ran with a bunch of ragged-ass kids, mostly Greek and Puerto Rican.” As they hurdled the boardwalk at a low point it occurred to Napoleon that this was a long explanation for such a short name. He hadn’t time to say anything to her, though, because as all four of them came up onto the boardwalk two Thrushes appeared from shadows and the furtive beach ramble turned into a free-for-all.
Napoleon ran head-on into one of the hoodlums and caught a blackjack across his forearm before he could put his left hand into the man’s solar plexus. Turning, he found Andy sitting piggy-back on the other one, with Charlie doing a land of half-twist to put his bare heel into the Thrush’s groin.
“Hurry!” whispered Mai. “There’s more of them along the walk!” She stopped to hit each of the unconscious Thrushes quickly behind the ear, and then noises from both sides made them hurry off through Coney.
“The bugger tried to bite me,” muttered Andy, while they did four statue imitations in shadow. Mai shushed him.
When two more Thrush agents came together over the unconscious pair, took counsel and split up into the darkness between buildings, Mai took her brood out again. They loped along for four blocks, springing across lighted area, and finally the urgency quieted down. “I think they’re looking for us to be quivering in a comer back there near the bodies,” said Mai. “If we loop over now and head for the coffee-house area, we won’t cover any place they’ll be
looking.” At a quick walk, she led Napoleon while Andy took point and Charlie covered the rear.
“So the P.R.s never bothered me, but the other Greek kids did. They figured they were big men, and kept after me one way and another. I finally learned to stop saying no, because when I just stood and said, Oh, yes, indeed/ they got all hot and bothered, and got close enough for me to half murder ‘em.” She smiled wickedly through her hair at him. “I got to be sort of famous at dirty fighting in my own gang,” she beamed, “and got named for it. Mai is short for ‘Malista’ my nickname. It means Yes, indeed/ in Greek.”
Napoleon smiled in the night. When the two from Thrush jumped out at them, he hadn’t seen Mai raise a finger. The boys had let him do his share, and they’d taken care of the other one with vicious teamwork. Yet he had a feeling both Thrushes wouldn’t have stood a chance against this snip of a girl.
For a while, as they got further from the beach toward brighter street lights, they hurried and Napoleon decided not to say anything when he could use the energy to keep up with his trio of guards. Charlie and Andy kept an alert lookout for more black-clad men or for the more dangerous street-wanderers who might call up a local gang. They waited in a space between buildings near an open nightclub, and while they watched for cabs he wondered how rugged life might be in a Brooklyn tenement. If a clear-eyed pretty girl like Mai chose a gang for a second family, things must have gotten way past ten-to-a-room at home.
“Now you live out?” he asked her. “No place in out of the snow?”
“Not much snow yet this year,” she said, “and when it comes we’ll do just like last year. Sleep on subways, in johns, in that funhouse you bust out of, or more likely in somebody’s pad, when we figure a way to click with vacations. Lot of people live here half a year, trundle off to Florida all winter.”
“Not likely this year,” said Andy, wishing he were back by their fire. “Lot of blowy weather coming up that tore a piece off Florida last week. Any day we’ll get a whole beach full of rain.”
“Charlie and Andy don’t like rain. It was raining the1 night they tried to mug me, last November in Gravesend.”
“Mug schmug,” said Andy. “The subject is sore in need of a change.”
“They braced me near a park, and walked me into it.
I was just going to see how well I could handle the two of | them, when something happened.”
“Something happened,” said Andy.
“She shoulda murdered us,” said Charlie.
“I was just back from a love-in. I went to dig the hippies, and I spent all day trying to figure what made’ them tick. Big bruisers with motorcycle boots and chains, little geeks with glasses, and kids like me. All running around with silly grins, handing each other flowers. Before I got out of there. I was all over flowers from guys and girls who kept talking about agape.”
“Agape,” said Charlie. “She shoulda murdered us.” Both boys kept looking right and left, trying to ignore the talk while they looked for cabs.
“It’s Greek,” said Andy, answering Napoleon’s unasked > question. “It means love. No hot pants, just love, with flowers and kissing each other on the eyes.”
Napoleon held the word in his mouth, and looked at the two boys, who shifted their gaze away. Three syllables, a-gah-pay, and these two rangy, muscled would-be hoods would rather be beaten. Charlie pushed at his sun-bleached straight hair, and said, “We made nice with her, and planned no bruises or cuts, no stealing, just a little sharing the wealth. What could be simpler?”
“And I got ready to break anything they let me get 1 hold of,” she said in a flat voice, with her eyes shining out bright, “when suddenly the light turned on. I knew what 1 the hippies were after, and I had it.”