Finding Mighty

by Sheela Chari

  “My key doesn’t work,” Nora said.

  Finally I couldn’t keep quiet anymore. “You shouldn’t be here. Not without Margaret’s permission.”

  “Myla,” said Ana, “I’m sure it’s okay.”

  “Don’t worry, I’m leaving,” Kai said, but she kept trying the door.

  I crossed my arms and glared at her.

  Kai shrugged. “All right. After you, ladies.”

  We walked back down past Nora, until we were in the foyer. Kai reached for the front door and stopped. “Wait, how did you two get in?”

  My heart started beating. Not because I was scared, but because I had to lie. Something told me not to tell her about the key in my pocket. “The front door was open,” I said.

  “Well, the door is locked now.”

  I held my ground. “It was open. Maybe I locked it afterward. I don’t remember.”

  “You’re sure, Myla? You don’t have the key?”

  I could feel Ana’s eyes on me, but she didn’t say anything.

  “How do you know I’m Myla?” I asked, changing the subject.

  “I know your parents,” Kai said. “I know they live next door with you and your brother, who won a spelling bee last year. I know Ana is your best friend, and she lives down the street. I know she rides horses and takes photos of them, which she prints out at CVS. And I know you’re scared of heights, Myla. I know your mom tried to enroll you in rock climbing because she thought it would help, but then she had to cancel for a full refund.”

  I stared at her, my face flushed red. How did she know all these things about me and the people in my life? Also, why did she seem to know only the good things about everyone else, and the most embarrassing stuff about me?

  Kai pulled out two business cards. “Listen, you don’t realize it, but every town depends on people like you and me to keep us safe. If either of you sees something suspicious about the people moving in—anything—let me know. My number is on the card.”

  Ana felt the embossed letters on the front of the card with her finger.

  “What do you mean, suspicious?” I asked. “What’s wrong with the new renters?”

  For the first time Kai’s face softened. “Not sure. Could they be the same Wilsons?”

  “The same Wilsons as?”

  But Kai didn’t answer me.

  Outside, Ana and I watched Kai get into a small, gray sedan parked down the street. One thing I knew: I wasn’t lifting a finger to help that snoop. She’d been looking for something in Margaret’s house. Whatever it was, I would figure it out first. If only to prove that Kai Filnik didn’t know everything there was to know about me.

  The night before we moved, I slipped out while Ma was asleep with her earphones on.

  They were all there on the side of the parkway, like I’d heard they’d be.

  “Hey, it’s Petey.” MaxD saw my face and laughed. “And he’s been eating somebody’s fist.”

  The rest of them greeted me with varying levels of insults.

  “You’ve seen your brother?” asked Skinny as he sprayed some seriously messed-up letters on the wall. He couldn’t tag to save his life, but the crew kept him on because he was the only one who was eighteen and could buy paint.

  I said no, I hadn’t seen Randall.

  The Points then speculated about him being thrown in jail, which made them laugh and laugh. I seriously wondered what my brother saw in them. I remembered when they both wanted to be Point. They started fighting over it, so Randall made one of them Point Up and the other Point Down. Which made them sound even dumber, like they were both giving you the finger.

  “He’s got him those magic shoes,” said Point Up. “Those fakes will spring him out of jail.”

  “Look, I’m flying!” shrieked Point Down, his arms spread out.

  More laughing. I didn’t get it. I knew they liked Randall, so why were they ragging on him? I guess it was me they hated, pure and simple.

  “So none of you hear from him?” I looked at Nike, who kept quiet. He’d recently dyed his hair a rusty brown. But his eyelashes were still dark and long, making his face babyish. He worked at Music Land on Central Ave—the only one of these punks with a job.

  They went on painting. I looked at Up, who was spraying a crooked arrow pointing up to nowhere, and Skinny, writing his letters all blown up so they were unreadable. It proved what I already knew: they were a bunch of toys with their crappy hand-styles, painting where no one could see their work, on the wrong side of the parkway. I was about to walk away, when I stopped.

  “D, that’s not your tag,” I said. I tried to keep calm, but I couldn’t believe what I saw.

  MaxD finished his three black lines. “Maybe I have a new one. You got a problem, Petey?”

  I made myself look at him, even though all I could think of were those same three lines slashing through Randall’s tag. “I know those lines have a bad stink.”

  “Moron, these aren’t lines. Don’t you know a fence?” MaxD reached into his pocket, and my heart seized. But all he pulled out was a comb, and he combed and combed that hair of his, short and mangy as it was. “You tell your brother, he better not show himself here. I have us a new allegiance, know what I mean? And the Fencers will find him as soon as Mighty tags again.”

  The Fencers? Skinny and the Points looked uneasily from MaxD to me. Seemed this like was news to them.

  “Om,” MaxD said, full of scorn. Then he turned away. But I couldn’t leave it at that, MaxD having the last word.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Because we’re moving away from your tired behinds.”

  I caught Nike’s baby eyes for a moment before he stepped back in the shadows.

  The rest jeered at me, and the Points sprayed paint in my direction. Then they went back to cackling and doing their ugly tags, and when I walked away, not one of them called after me.

  Later that night I sat on my bed. Three lines made a fence. I didn’t know everything, but now I knew the tat guy who punched me was a Fencer. I didn’t know why the Fencers were after Randall. But if the tat guy could find me, then he and his Fencer friends would find Randall soon enough, especially with MaxD helping. I was losing time.

  I drummed my fingers against the mattress, the locked duffel bag in front of me. I had two options. One was to cut open the duffel bag. It was made from canvas, but nothing a pair of scissors couldn’t make a hole through. The second was to find that key. So far I’d packed everything. I’d searched everywhere. I’d even looked out on the fire escape. If Randall had left that key behind, he’d hidden it someplace good.

  I stretched out on my bed until my feet hit the footboard. When I was little, I remember my pop lying beside me, his feet resting against the same footboard. I told Randall, and he was all, “You remember it wrong. That was me.” But I knew my brother never slept next to me. I knew because Randall never spent a minute more than he had to in my company. He was always out the door with me running to catch up. No, it was my pop’s feet I remembered clear as day, his toes long and thin like fingers, every toenail perfectly shaped and clean. Which was weird—remembering his feet when I didn’t remember his face, except for what I’ve seen in photos.

  I tried to recall now what Randall did every time he opened the bag. Where had he gone in the room? To the closet? Under his pillow? Over by the window? One by one, I ticked off these places in my mind. Then I closed my eyes and asked for the universe to help.

  When I opened my eyes, they fell on the two posters still on the wall. The last items left to pack. Carefully I took down the Michael Jordan poster, which had been taped down on all sides. Nothing but blank space. Next, the New York City poster. But this time I felt a slight bulge in the corner. I peeled away the poster, and something fell to the ground. It was the world’s smallest key, but I knew—this was the key that unlocked the duffel bag.

  My heart thudded as I inserted the key, crazy thoughts filling my mind. Last year in school we had to research a poet, so I chose
John Keats because he and Shakespeare were the only ones left on the shelf by the time I got to choose, and Shakespeare looked too hard. So I read through the Keats book, and there was a poem about a basil pot, and I couldn’t believe what was in that pot. I thought of that poem now, because I sure didn’t want to find somebody’s head.

  So I took a deep breath and turned the bag upside down, shaking everything onto the floor. Not the most delicate way, but I was glad a head didn’t roll out. Instead, I found a bunch of things, most of which I’d never seen before. I made a list:

  1 large harness

  8 different types of stainless steel round hooky things

  3 metal clasps

  Several yards of rope

  1 plastic container marked climbing chalk

  1 pair of gloves

  1 necklace

  1 small black book

  I picked up each item, the harness, the hooks, the metal clasps. I didn’t know what they were, except maybe things a construction worker used. They made me realize, like I had my whole life, how little I knew about my pop. Then there was a necklace. It was all scratched up, a pink-and-purple flower with a symbol in the middle of it.

  I wondered if the necklace was Ma’s. She didn’t wear jewelry, except for her diamond earrings, which had belonged to her grandmother. Ma was born in India, then came to the United States by herself in high school, and stayed with her aunt in Poughkeepsie until she went to college. Ma’s parents were still in India, and so far we had seen them twice, once when I was a baby. They were quiet-footed, reading the newspaper and taking short walks around the apartment building. Granny Mala wore a lot of “tacky” jewelry, according to Ma. Maybe this was one of those tacky necklaces Granny Mala gave Ma, and she put it away, first chance she got.

  Or maybe the necklace belonged to my pop’s side. We have just a few pictures of his family. Like one of my pop’s parents at a Fourth of July parade, taken in Connecticut before my grandfather Leroy flew off to Vietnam to die in the war. It’s my favorite picture, and sometimes I pull it out when no one’s looking, because I always think there’s something there, some clue about who we are and where everyone’s gone. In it, Grandpa Leroy is wearing his uniform and looking all serious, but he’s holding an ice cream cone, and it makes me wonder if he’s waiting for the picture to be taken so he can eat his ice cream. Grandma Rose is next to him, and has bright red hair and freckles, and looks a little like my pop around the eyes, but that’s what people tell me—I don’t remember it myself.

  Randall said it was a big deal for Rose and Leroy to marry, because he was black and she was white. That’s why her family disowned her, and we never saw them. When I asked Ma, she said, “Rose’s parents didn’t disown her. They were poor—they couldn’t make it out here often. Rose had to do everything on her own when she moved from Arizona.” Either way, there were hardly pictures of anybody on my pop’s side until my parents got married. There’s a photo album of their wedding, but Ma says it makes her too sad to look through it.

  I picked up the black book. I went through it, slowly turning the pages, the size of index cards. There were drawings of a bridge, a few cars and trucks, but mostly letters. It was like a little gallery of graffiti, with pages of alphabets, then my father’s name, OMAR. It changed with the pages until it became Om, the first two letters of his name.

  “Om,” I said out loud. What it meant, I didn’t know. But I knew it started there, from my pop’s notebook, to Randall painting that tag, and why he disappeared the next day.

  Dobbs Ferry is one of those towns people call nice. Dinky shops, rolling hills, houses with porches and pointy roofs, and in the distance, the Hudson River and those cliffs called the Palisades. But where we lived, we were down the street from the auto-body shop. You could spit on the sidewalk and no one cared. And that suited me fine.

  We were moved in by Labor Day, but Ma had to work, and she wanted me to come with her to the hospital. “I hate that place,” I grumbled. I’d only been there once, but I couldn’t stand the smell of antiseptic and the lab with those vials filled with blood.

  “Just one day, Petey. Humor me. I don’t feel right leaving you by yourself the first day.”

  “If I can walk home from school and stay by myself tomorrow, I can stay by myself today.”

  She shook her head. “You start tomorrow. Today you’re coming with me.”

  On Monday morning, there was fog along the river, so I put on Randall’s blue hoodie. The front door was sticky, and it took Ma a few times before she got the door to lock. We turned down Walnut Street, and it was so steep, for a second it looked like we were walking right into the Hudson.

  We kept going down the hill until we reached the train station below. A few people were there already, the ones who were working on Labor Day. Ma didn’t look like any of them. She didn’t have a newspaper in her hand, she didn’t carry a briefcase, and she didn’t buy her coffee from outside. Instead she was drinking it in big gulps from her insulated mug.

  I looked around for graffiti. There was none. Which made me fidget all around, and Ma told me to stand still. Then, while she was drinking, we heard somebody calling her name. She stopped, her mug halfway to her mouth. “My God.” She stared ahead, her eyes goggling.

  A tall, lanky guy came toward us. He’d come off the train from the other side.

  “Shanthi,” he said, this time more quietly. He reached up to take off his shades, his fingernails trimmed with dirt, and I saw that his eyes were a watery gray, like the Hudson. He was wearing boots, which were deep red and muddy, like he was a cowboy dropped down in Dobbs Ferry. Maybe he rode horses. Or he was from somewhere else.

  “It’s you,” Ma said. I couldn’t tell, was she happy to see him or not? I searched my brain. He looked familiar, though he didn’t give off a Yonkers vibe.

  Ma said we were renting Margaret’s old place.

  “Margaret!” By the way he said it, he knew who she was. Maybe everyone in Dobbs did.

  “It’s nice to be back,” Ma went on. “I was thinking how long it had been since college. What about you, Richard? I heard you had a landscaping company in the Catskills.”

  He nodded. “Yeah, but I’m here all week working on the waterfront and the Aqueduct.”

  “Aqueduct?” That was me. It sounded like something to do with your toilet or pipes.

  Richard turned his watery eyes on me. “You’re Peter, aren’t you?”

  I froze. Now that was just creepy, this cowboy I’d never seen knowing my name.

  Ma ruffled my hair. “He’s twelve already,” she murmured. She didn’t mention Randall, though you’d think if this Richard guy knew me, he’d know him, too. Instead they went on talking till my ma’s coffee must have gone cold. I heard the word “college,” then something about Pop, which made my ears perk up, but that’s when we heard our train coming.

  “That’s your train,” Richard said. “But call me some time.” On a piece of paper from his pocket, he wrote down a number and gave it to Ma. “Anyway, I know where you live.”

  “Thanks, Richard,” she said. I couldn’t tell from her voice whether she meant it or planned on losing his phone number.

  “You all take care.” His boots made clump-clumping sounds as he walked away.

  Inside the train, we sat down and I asked who Richard was.

  “Don’t you remember? Of course, you wouldn’t. It’s been so long.” Her voice trailed off. “That’s Uncle Richard, your father’s cousin.”

  “Cousin,” I said, surprised.

  “His mom and Pop’s dad were brother and sister.”

  I let my brain muddle through that. “So why do we never see him?” I thought of the photo albums still unpacked at home. Was Uncle Richard in one of those albums? Or was he part of the black hole that had no pictures at all?

  Ma gazed out the window. “He’s busy, I’m busy, it happens.”

  “That’s all you can say? Do you hate him? Did he do something?”

  “Of course n
ot. Just after Pop died, it was hard to keep it all going.” She bit her lip. “You wouldn’t understand. Some day you might.”

  “You think he’ll visit?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  Strangely, that “maybe” was the first hopeful thing I’d heard from her in a long time.

  Still, seeing Uncle Richard must have shaken her up. For the rest of the trip, all she did was stare at that phone of hers. Then I knew she was really off her game, because how else could she miss the world’s most kick-ass tag staring at us right outside our window?

  We were pulling up to our stop, when I saw it blazing in orange on the station wall. “Holy bejesus,” I breathed, forgetting all about Uncle Richard and his cowboy boots. Randall!

  “Watch your tongue,” Ma said, her eyes still on her phone.

  I stared at the orange, drippy letters of the Om tag. Who else could have done it? Who else could have made that tag burn like a miracle sun? “Ma, did you—” I sputtered, but she didn’t see or hear anything.

  As soon as the train stopped, she stood up. “If we hurry, we can make the bus on Lenox.”

  “But did you see?” I tried again, as we hustled down the steps past waves of people to the street below. Even early morning on a holiday, the station was bustling.

  “I’m sorry, Petey, we’ve got to hurry. Once we’re on the bus, we can talk.”

  I looked around us, at all the people and the traffic filling the streets. Was it really only seven o’clock? “Where are we again?” I asked.

  “Harlem,” she said over her shoulder. “125th Street.”

  On the bus, I decided not to tell Ma about the tag. Instead I paid attention to the bus route, where we got on and got off, and how to get back to the train station from the hospital. In the waiting room of my mom’s ward, I said I’d go to the cafeteria.

  “All right, but I can’t come down there to look for you. You’ll be back when?”

  “An hour. There’s newspapers to read.” One hour was plenty. At least I hoped.