Finding Mighty

by Sheela Chari

“One cappuccino for me,” Tops answered. “What about you, Mighty?”

  “I don’t drink that stuff,” I said.

  While his coffee was being made, he said quietly, “The old one’s met your grandmother.”

  “No way,” I said, surprised. I checked him out over Tops’s shoulder.

  “He’ll have info for you. But I’ll tell you now. They won’t make it easy for you.”

  “Why, they don’t like talking to urban youth?”

  “No, because you’re Rose’s grandson. The trick is to tell them just enough to—”

  The counter lady set the drink down with a bang. “Three bucks,” she said.

  “—make them happy,” Tops finished with me. “Got that?”

  I nodded, even though I wasn’t sure just how I was going to do that.

  “Morning, Michael,” said the crime boss guy when we sat down.

  Tops glanced at me as if to say, Yeah, that’s me. “So he’s here like you wanted,” he said.

  The other two stared at me. Now I was near them, I saw they were my age, but bigger and heavier, like they could kick my ass any time. They had identical tattoos on their fat biceps: three black lines made a fence. And just like that, I started to get nervous again. We’re in a coffee shop, I told myself. What could happen here? But that didn’t make my uneasiness go away.

  Crime Boss looked like an owl behind his glasses. “You’ve got a name, son?” he asked.

  “Mighty. What about you?” I might as well know who I was talking to.

  “You can call me Bernie,” he said. Meanwhile, the other two sat on either side of me with their fence tattoos, so it was like I was fenced in.

  “He’s famous,” said one of them. He was butt-ugly and wore a ring on each finger. At first I thought he meant Bernie was famous, but then I realized he meant me. Why would I be? I watched as the guy reached for a folded newspaper on the table but stopped when Bernie shook his head.

  “So you’re Rose’s grandson,” Bernie said.

  “Yeah,” I said. I’d almost forgotten what she looked like. But I remembered her hands were rough, her fingers thick with calluses. “She died when I was little.”

  “Died!” said the guy with the rings. “More like she cashed it in.”

  “Jimmy,” said Bernie. “Show respect.”

  “And the word is she left it behind,” Tops said, “or else we wouldn’t be here, right?”

  “Well, the ‘word’ is that Scottie’s getting out of Sing Sing next week,” said Jimmy. “And we’re wasting time. No disrespect, but you should let us take care of this our way, Uncle Bern.”

  “You kids. Always want to solve everything with your fists.” Bernie turned to me. “Look, it’s like this. We’ve got no bone to pick with anyone—not you, not the police, not my brother, Scottie. We’re just a family, and we want to go on doing our business.”

  “And what’s that?” I asked.

  Bernie looked at me for a second. “Why, we’re cheese guys. We sell cheese. What else?”

  Tops gritted his teeth as the Fencers let out a guffaw.

  Bernie’s face became stern. “In all seriousness, who do you think has been running this operation for the past eight years? It’s certainly not Scottie, sitting over in Sing Sing behind bars. It’s someone else, someone with grit and smarts. And you’re looking at him right here.”

  Grit and smarts? It sounded like something you ate for breakfast.

  “You’re great, Uncle Bern,” said one of the Fencers. “Scottie’s got nothing on you.”

  “Yeah, nothing on you,” the other one agreed.

  Bernie nodded, looking satisfied. “Now, Michael’s brought you here,” he continued with me, “because there’s an . . . outstanding balance left by your grandmother, and then your father. We’re ready to look the other way if you can . . . clear the balance.”

  Clear the balance? I looked at everybody, and then Bernie’s words started to sink in. They knew my grandmother and she was dead. They knew my pop and he was dead, too. Now here I was. I felt my mouth go dry. Did I really think I could walk in here and get out of this?

  Jimmy leaned in. “Remember, you’ve got your family to think about.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked warily.

  “Me and Tyson know they moved from Yonkers,” he said, the fence rippling on his arm like a snake. “But not before we caught up with your little brother. Him and my rings.”

  I sprang up. “What did you do to him?” I shouted.

  Tops reached out to touch my arm. “Sit down, Mighty,” he murmured.

  I did what he told me, my heart in my throat.

  “Someone tell him the floor number,” said Tyson.

  “Yeah, forty floors is a long way to fall,” Jimmy sniggered.

  I was stunned. The memory of that call came back like a punch in the gut: Petey and me at the dining table, crying and crying, then Ma picking up the phone. The person on the other end had said the same thing: Forty floors is a long way to fall. And that was why Pop was dead. Because he had something he wasn’t supposed to have. The next day Ma moved us out of our apartment. From then on, we kept moving. First Tuckahoe, then Mt. Vernon, and finally Yonkers. Since then, nobody’s ever known the floor number, not even the newspaper. Nobody but Ma, Petey, and me. And whoever was on the other end of that call. But now I knew. It was a Fencer who made that call. It was a Fencer who told us about the fortieth floor.

  I looked around the coffee shop. Did nobody notice? Did nobody care that a couple of thugs were coming down on a young bro? But there was only that girl with her book.

  Meanwhile, Bernie turned to me. “Mighty, all we want to know is where the graffiti is.”

  For the first time the girl looked up. She wore shorts and tall boots, a weird thing to notice while I was getting hammered. Was she listening? But what could she do for me?

  When I didn’t respond, Tyson leaned in. “You know, the Om that marks the spot. Did your daddy tell you where to find it, Mighty?”

  “You think I’d be here if he did?” I snapped, finding my voice finally.

  “All right,” Tops said. “Just tell Mighty what he needs to know so he can clear the balance.”

  I didn’t know a thing about clearing a balance. But something else was clear. It was time to get the hell out of here. Bernie must have read my face because he laid a hand on top of mine. It was warm and dry, and I might have pulled away, but it had a weight to it, like he might be my grandfather telling me about a fishing trip.

  “I remember when I met Rose,” he said. “She worked at Rosen & Smith, right in the Diamond District. She was good. She was probably the only female diamond cutter on that street. Now, maybe she didn’t know what she was getting into. Maybe she didn’t know it was only a matter of time before Scottie would be caught.” He lifted his hand, and I felt a cold spot where it had been. “Son, you saw what happened to your grandmother. You saw what happened to your pop. Now, if you know where that Om is, you’ve got to tell us. Scottie’s getting out next week, and I’ve worked too hard to let it all slip away. So find me what I want and we’ll clear the records, and your life goes on. If not, Scottie will find you. Or I will.” Then his face hardened like cement. “Especially if you’re painting train stations. That will lead us to you like a trail of bread crumbs.”

  A ringing started in my ears. How did Bernie know it was me? Still there was this weird satisfaction I felt tingling under my skin. “Well maybe I was looking for you,” I shot back. “Maybe I was the one who was onto you all this time.”

  Tops pulled me back. “Listen, we got it, Bern. What Mighty means is we’ll scout for that Om. I’ll help him.”

  Bernie was glaring. “I don’t care what he meant.” He turned to me. “You’ve got a week.”

  “And I’d watch my back if I were you,” I said angrily.

  Jimmy made a move toward me, but Tops got in between us. “Let it go, will you?” he whispered to me. I crossed my arms, but that was so nobody could te
ll I was shaking.

  And just like that, the meeting was done, as if nobody had said nothing at all.

  “Michael, the boy can go,” Bernie went on, “but I need a word with you.”

  Tops made the angriest face I’ve seen. For one scary second, he looked like somebody else. But he pulled it all in and said, “Fine. I’ll see you back at the gym, Mighty.” Then he turned his back to me, which basically meant leave now.

  Outside, the air filled with car horns and exhaust as I raged at the world around me. I’d put on an act of bravado in there, but now that I was alone, I was feeling a fear rise up in me. I wondered if I should get on a train and never see Tops or those losers again. I could disappear. I could hide out somewhere in Westchester where no one would know my face.

  Then a breeze blew an old newspaper onto my feet. That’s when I remembered Jimmy reaching for the paper and Bernie stopping him. I picked it up and opened to the front page. My stomach clenched in my throat. “Oh, man,” I said out loud.

  My parents were talking about the Om tag on High Bridge on Monday morning while I was in the hall packing up for school.

  “I thought graffiti can be removed,” Dad said.

  “Not always,” Mom said. “Sometimes the paint seeps too deep into the masonry. Traces will still be there, like a ghost. That’s probably what you saw. What a shame. All that money spent on the bridge and the graffiti stayed!”

  I couldn’t hear Dad’s response because Cheetah came up to me and held the front page of the Westchester Times in front of my nose.

  “Cheetah!” I batted the newspaper away from my face.

  “Thought you’d like to see this before Mom and Dad do.”

  I looked at the cover photo and almost dropped my backpack. There it was, Saturday night with the Om at the train station, and Randall’s startled expression under the bright lights of Kai’s camera. Thank God the Westchester Times wasn’t delivered on the weekends. Otherwise, my parents would have seen this by now. “Give me that,” I said.

  Kai had promised she wouldn’t mention my name, but I had to see it for myself. I scanned the Om article and was relieved to find no mention of a short Indian girl who’d foiled the cop.

  I tried to be casual. “So what? Why shouldn’t Mom and Dad see it?”

  Cheetah’s eyes shifted. “No reason.”

  Then it came to me. “Wait, you saw me. It was you at my window.”

  “I wasn’t trying to spy, honest. I came to your room because I had something to tell you, and you weren’t there. Then I saw the window open. I couldn’t believe it. You! Climbing!”

  I grabbed Cheetah by his arms and stared hard at him. “You can’t tell Mom and Dad.”

  “I was so scared,” he whispered.

  “I’m fine. Nothing happened. Promise me you’re not telling Mom and Dad.”

  “I promise,” he said. “But I knew where you were going, because we’d talked about it.”

  I’d forgotten he was the one who showed me the moon forecast in the first place. I let go of his arms. “Well, it’s not important. I’m surprised you remembered.”

  “I remember everything you tell me,” he said.

  Later in the car, as we were driving to school, I thought of what Cheetah said. It couldn’t be true, could it? He couldn’t remember everything. But he did seem to know things I never said out loud to anyone. I remembered his worried look in the hall when Kai came. He was always watching. Normally I found it annoying, but today I felt unsettled as Dad and I dropped him off at his school. How much did I remember of what he said to me?

  In American Studies, everyone was talking at the same time. Peter pulled me to one side and got out the same paper I’d stashed in my backpack. He said that as soon as he saw the front page, he hid it from his mom. “But that’s not the worst part. Even if she doesn’t see it, everybody else has.”

  “Yeah,” I whispered, “now they know Randall’s face.”

  “No, they know about the diamonds!” Peter hissed.

  Wait, what? I turned around, and that’s when I noticed what other kids were saying.

  “Do you think it’s in the train station?” asked a boy named David.

  “That’s just a copycat one that boy did,” said Sam, who sat next to him. “The real one has to be somewhere else important, like the library.”

  “My mom thinks the church on Broadway,” said Lauren, a girl in the back.

  “I’m not even saying where I think it is,” said Violet.

  By then Mr. Clay asked the class to be quiet as he took attendance, but that didn’t seem to work. Then after a while, even Mr. Clay got into the discussion about where the diamonds could be, because he said missing treasure was “the stuff great history is made of.”

  “Where do you think they are, Mr. Clay?” asked David.

  Mr. Clay’s voice dropped to a murmur. “I don’t know. If Mr. Biggs hid them, you have to consider his time and place roughly ten years ago. Where was he going? What was he seeing?”

  “The Cedar Street Café,” said Ana. “That’s been around for ten years.” She checked my face to see what I thought. She had seen Peter and me talking earlier, and I knew she was curious.

  “The bank,” said Violet. “Nobody’s thought of hiding them at the bank.”

  “You can’t do that,” Sam said scornfully. “Not if you’re a criminal. They take your account away, don’t they, Mr. Clay?”

  “You’re all forgetting about the Om,” said Lauren. “You have to find the Om if you want to find the diamonds.”

  “What’s an Om?” David asked.

  Then the class went into a discussion about yoga. A girl named Allison said Om was what you said before praying, because that’s what her ballet teacher said. Violet, who was in the same ballet class, said Om was a way to “get in the zone.” David thought it was a kind of exercise. I kept raising my hand. I wanted to explain how they were all wrong, that Om was what you said to clear your mind. It was what you said to make your body still. At least, that’s what I’d figured out by watching my dad. But everyone was getting so carried away with their theories that they didn’t hear me or one another.

  Then I saw the dismayed look on Peter’s face, and I knew what was going on in his mind: What if someone found the diamonds before us? Would Randall ever come home?

  Myla was waiting for me after school so we could walk home together and talk about the diamonds. In all my classes, kids were whispering about it—what if they were hidden by the train tracks, or under a brick at the library, or behind a painting hanging in the Historical Society? Myla said she kept hearing the same thing, too. “But don’t worry,” she reassured me. “We’re still far ahead of everyone else.” I wasn’t so sure.

  At the light, we passed by a school bus. I recognized Dan and Theo from math class, sitting at one of the windows. They waved and I waved back. Was I starting to, like . . . know people here?

  Myla noticed. “You know them?” she asked.

  “Yeah, don’t you?”

  She shrugged and kept walking. I couldn’t tell, was she pissed? She was this mixture of open and closed, loud and soft, brave and timid. I had no idea how her mind worked at all.

  We turned the corner and she asked, “So, have you ever . . . painted anything?”

  “Why, do I look like a tagger?”

  She looked at me, considering. “No. You look too scared.”

  This annoyed me. “You can’t tell just by looking at somebody.”

  “I know. That’s why I asked.” She ran her hand along the side of a building as the road sloped.

  This was where you could see the Hudson and the cliffs on the other side. I thought of George Washington standing here with his troops more than two hundred years ago. Mr. Clay says we’re crossing the footprints of Washington all the time in Dobbs. There was something magical about that, my Jordans crossing over where Washington’s revolutionary boots had gone.

  “I like graffiti,” Myla said. “Sometimes I write down w
hat I see.”

  “Yeah, like what do you see?”

  She named the ones everybody’s heard of, like CAP2 and NINETY. When she said Mighty, I was startled. How could Randall, all the way in Yonkers, reach this girl in Dobbs Ferry? “No kidding,” I said slowly. “You like Mighty? Because he’s my brother.”

  “Get out of here!” Myla didn’t believe me at first. “He’s so cool! So is your dad’s Om. I guess graffiti runs in the family?”

  I snorted. “It skipped my ma and me. The only thing she draws is blood!”

  Myla laughed.

  Meanwhile, I was thinking of our trip to High Bridge. Even though Myla and I hadn’t found anything left behind by Grandma Rose, I’d found something else just as important: Pop’s Om. That still sent chills through me. Except for the duffel bag, I hardly had anything left in our house that he’d touched. But the Om on High Bridge was a piece of my father that had survived the rain and snow and who knows what else? Last night, I’d got out the duffel bag and tried on my pop’s harness.

  I put on the gloves and ran the rope through the pulley, and it sounds crazy, but I stood at my open bedroom window and imagined Pop climbing the side of that bridge. Last thing I’d do was something crazy like he did, but the power of it, feeling the harness strapped around me went right to my head, leaving me giddy.

  Just then a shop door opened as we passed by and Kai appeared.

  Myla stiffened. “Careful or she might take a photo of you,” she said.

  “Maybe she can do a class on how to rat someone out with a camera,” I suggested.

  Kai sighed. “Don’t be sore, guys. Myla, I said I wouldn’t mention you, and I didn’t.”

  “Yeah, but you endangered someone else’s life,” Myla said. “How do you feel about that?”

  “Oh, that guy. He’s in bigger trouble.” She saw my face. “Wait, do you know who he is?”

  “Don’t say anything, Peter,” Myla warned. “Or she’ll print it next in the paper.”

  I sighed. At this point, Kai had done her worst. “He’s my brother. He’s been missing.”

  “I had no idea.” Kai looked genuinely concerned. “I saw him this morning.”