Finding Mighty

by Sheela Chari

  He shrugged. “I don’t care if people notice me. But at least they’re noticing Om.”

  After we were done in the kitchen, I went to the family room to get my book.

  Outside, the sun was setting and I could see the Palisades fading into the darkening sky. I thought of Cheetah’s Rock of Gibraltar, and what Dad said. What lasts, lasts. The Palisades had been there as long as I could remember. That was a kind of lasting, wasn’t it? Remembering. I’d have to tell that to Cheetah.

  We started from the Lower East Side, working our way slowly until we got to Midtown. Then we went to a courtyard that Tops said was important, where Pop used to go because the concrete benches and wall were great for doing vaults. I stalled, letting Tops go first.

  “You’ll never find his tag if you stay on the ground,” Tops said. “He wasn’t stupid enough to leave a tag in plain sight. Climb up this wall when you’re ready. You’ll see something different.”

  Truth was, concrete was a whole different ball game from the cushioned playground. But I did what he told me. I jumped onto one bench, then another, and did a cat onto the wall, and hoisted myself to the top. I didn’t stand on it like a crazy person, but I was able to see, and Tops was right. There was all of East Fortieth Street ahead of me. I could see the streetlight, and taxicabs, and the corner of Second Ave. But no Om. So I took out my Sharpie and added my own.

  We continued through Midtown, along more courtyards and walkways between buildings. I’d had all these grand plans to out-step Tops, to PK past him on our quest to find any clues my pop had left behind. But the honest truth was that by Fiftieth Street, I was dog tired. “How many tags you think he did?” I asked as we crossed the street to the other side. “Cause I haven’t seen one.”

  “A lot of them are gone. The city went and cleaned them up. But there are still a few in the Sixties. And there’s one on the FDR, but it’s not a place to hide anything.”

  “Maybe Pop didn’t hide them at all. Maybe we’re searching for something that doesn’t exist.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Tops asked. “What makes you say that?”

  “Running the past few hours with you. Partaking in the craziness.”

  “Maybe he said something to you, Mighty. Think. Did he give you any kind of clue?”

  I shook my head. There were stars dancing inside my head, I was that tired.

  “What about his black book? Maybe there was a clue there.”

  I saw him watching me intently. I was so tired, I could barely think. Maybe this was his plan all along—to wear me out until I told him everything I knew. Why else go from jump to jump like a madman? Wouldn’t he have done these runs already? Wouldn’t he have scoured the territory when he had a chance? It was the black book he was after. I could see it in his stinking face. So I said, “I don’t think he had one.”

  “Mighty, we both know he did. If we could find it, it might answer a whole lot of questions.”

  The black book. I had looked through it night after night, while Petey was asleep in his bed. And I could say with my life betted on, and Petey’s too, there was nothing in there. For sure, the black book wasn’t something Pop had on him when he died. That thought stopped me. “Wait. We’re here.”

  “Where?”

  My tired feet picked up. “We just passed it. Fiftieth Street. I have to go back and see it.”

  “Whoa, hang on.” He jogged behind me as I hurried to Fiftieth Street and turned. I didn’t know where the building was exactly, only the address: 303 East Fiftieth Street.

  After a block or so, Tops called, “I think it’s a mistake. You don’t want to go there and . . .”

  We stopped.

  We were standing in front of it: Crestwood Residential Tower. I peered up and felt dizzy. Maybe he’d landed where I stood. I pressed my eyes with my palms. “I have to go in,” I said.

  “Mighty, you can’t,” Tops said. “They won’t let you.”

  “It’s the place he died. Somebody’s got to let me in. It’s the decent thing.”

  “No, it isn’t. This isn’t a place of visitation. It’s a place of residence.”

  “Maybe,” I said slowly, “but I can try.” Before he could say more, I ran to the front doors.

  “Randall, wait!” he shouted, and I almost stopped in my tracks at the sound of my real name, the one I’d never told Tops. But I kept going because that was the only way in.

  Inside, the air was cold and dry. A doorman stood there blocking my way. He was maybe only a few years older than me. His face was cold like the air. “Who you want to see?” he asked me.

  I didn’t know what to say. So I said, “Someone on the fortieth floor.”

  He gave a laugh. “That’s impossible. This building only goes up to thirty.”

  “But that’s wrong. I know, because my po—my father helped build this place.”

  He shrugged. “Yeah, well, unless you know somebody here, I can’t buzz you in.”

  I glanced at the elevator behind him, at the numbers at the top. He was right. I could see there was no number 40. Instead 30 was lit, as if to say, that’s how far anybody can go.

  Outside the building, Tops was waiting. “You okay?” he asked when he saw me.

  We got as far as the end of the street and then just like that, I sat down on the sidewalk. My arms and legs throbbed, and I could feel a vein pulsing in my throat.

  “Come on, Mighty,” he said. “Get up. You can’t sit here.”

  “I give up. This is the end of the road. My pop isn’t here. His tags are gone. He’s gone!”

  A few people glanced at me as they walked past us on the sidewalk.

  “Mighty, calm down.” Tops bent down so he was at my level. “You have to keep going.” He saw my face. “And not for anybody else. You look for the diamonds because they belong to you.”

  “Really? They belong to me?”

  Tops stood up. “As much as anybody.” He helped me up.

  I stared a moment longer at my shoes, the way they stood over a crack in the sidewalk. When I was young, I’d imagine myself a giant, walking over cracks like they were the Grand Canyon, and across sticks like they were the George Washington Bridge. I started shaking. But I don’t know if it was from fatigue, or from the idea I just got. I was no giant, but could my feet take me there?

  “What are you thinking, M?” asked Tops.

  “There’s one place we haven’t tried,” I said slowly. “It’s the place my pop still lives on.”

  I lied when I told Tops I’d never been to the city with my pop. There was one place he did take me. I was almost nine years old, when we got on a bus at St. Vincent Ave because he said there was something he wanted to show me.

  It was cold and bright inside the bus, the air-conditioning humming like a bee. I sat next to Pop, and I could see our reflection in the window. Everybody said I looked like him, and here I could see it. The same sharp nose, the same shoulders round at the top, the same lanky arms hanging on both sides. We spent the whole time chilling, listening to Pop’s music on his phone. He brought earplugs, one in his ear, one in mine, and we listened to “Little Wing” by Jimi Hendrix, which Pop said was his favorite song in the world, which is why I can’t listen to it even now.

  When we got to West 176th, it was dark with streetlights cutting through the night air. Pop and me walked along the sidewalk until we got to the park. It was a disaster, garbage everywhere, weirdos hanging around giving us dirty looks. But I was with Pop, and I wasn’t afraid. We kept walking until we got to a lookout where we could see a bridge stretched across the Harlem River.

  Pop pointed. He told me how the bridge went all the way to the Bronx, how when he was little, he and Grandma Rose walked across it during the summers to go swimming in High-bridge Pool. But now the bridge wasn’t open. It was broken down and nobody walked on it anymore.

  From his knapsack, Pop pulled out binoculars. What I saw through the lenses made me suck in my breath. How, what, where? All these questions stuck in my throat. I
t occurred to me then that my father really was a superman. There was no other explanation for how he’d landmarked an Om where no human could reach. Remember that one, he told me. Remember because nobody’s washing it away.

  “We should have started here,” Tops kept murmuring. “It’s his masterpiece.”

  “You don’t need to tell me that,” I said. It was getting so I hated it when he told me stuff about Pop now. In the big picture, who was he anyway, except some chump my pop ran with?

  We walked through the park until we got to High Bridge. It was open to the public now. Ma and Petey didn’t want to go, so I went by myself during the summer without telling them. There was a ceremony—you know the kind, where some bozo cuts a ribbon and everyone cheers and walks through. I was one of the people walking through, and I made a beeline for the other side, where I knew it would be. And it was. And damn, there was nothing better than the satisfaction of knowing the Om survived. It survived. I didn’t go back again after that. Not until now.

  The bridge was closed at night. There was a fence with a lock, so Tops and I did our thing, him with his chalk, me with his hands as my foothold. On the other side of the fence, we walked across the bridge carefully and quickly. Finally we got to the other side, yards away from the Bronx. We looked down at what we knew was there, a few feet below us on the curve of the last arch.

  “Still here after all these years,” Tops said.

  Most tags are block or bubble letters, but not my pop’s. His Om always had a face inside the “O.” Sometimes I wondered if it was his own face he painted. The straight line of the nose, the round lips that were his and mine, and not Petey’s. But the eyes were always two horizontal lines—they were closed. When I asked him why he painted them that way, he told me, that’s how you show thinking. His was a thinking tag.

  Tops was searching. “Where would he hide them? Everything’s so open. Look at the masonry.”

  My heart started pounding. I pictured my pop traversing below, one foothold at a time. “You’ve got it all wrong. The Om isn’t where we are. It’s down there.”

  Tops stopped. He stared slowly over the railing. “You think it’s . . . there?” He looked back at me, his face round as the moon. “But . . . that’s impossible. I don’t even know how your dad did it. That’s not parkour. I don’t know what it is.”

  “I’ve seen videos of people climbing bridges. Sometimes with ropes. It’s done.”

  Tops shook his head. “Don’t get me wrong. It’s brilliant. No ordinary person would dare to look for the diamonds there.” He paused, measuring his words. “At least not me. I’m too big, too heavy. One gust of wind would knock me over.”

  While he spoke, I scanned the area. For the first time I wished I had the duffel bag. Pop used a harness and ropes and pulleys to get himself over. I didn’t have those. I could go back and buy some equipment. There was a 24-hour hardware store on Broadway. But that would mean leaving, and chances were Tops would find a way to stop me from coming back. And then come later without me. It was now or never, with this fool Tops assisting.

  “Look,” I said. “Here’s what we do. I’ll get over the two fences and climb down. When I get to the bottom of the outside fence, you hold me by my hand through the opening. You brace me until I reach that ledge down there. Once I’m on it, I’m safe.”

  Tops went over what I said, peering between the spires to an outcrop jutting from under the bridge support. “You think you can reach that ledge if I hang you?” he asked.

  “If you’re man enough to spot me.” There, I’d said it. There was no turning back.

  Tops paused. “All right, Mighty. Go for it,” he said, his voice low.

  I turned to the two fences. The inner one was shorter. Tops made the foothold I’d grown accustomed to using. All the while, I made myself focus. I thought how Pop and I had the same narrow, long feet. I pictured him climbing the fence now, not me, one foot in front of the other. He had his harness and rope. I didn’t have those. But I could still pretend I was him. It was a matter of using those fences and holding on. And just a few feet away was the Om.

  The sound of traffic faded away into a distant hum. The only sound I heard was my heart, so loud it was in my ears and throat and behind my eyes. Time slowed down to a halt as I imagined myself climbing with Pop’s feet and hands, up and down the fences. On the other side was victory, I told myself. On the other side was a whole new life, where we wouldn’t live day to day but year to year, planning big. Like Petey going to college. My ma taking a trip to India. And me painting canvasses like a professional bad-ass.

  Tops’s voice was part of the distant hum of everything else . . . lean in, keep your body pressed to the fence . . . But it was easier to ignore him. Think of Pop’s feet, I said to myself. One foot in front of the other.

  It was his feet that climbed the first fence. It was his feet that climbed the second one. It was his superman feet that were going to get me to the arch. The air was blowing in my ears on both sides. I was hanging, maybe flying, with Pop’s feet as I inched slowly down the length of the second fence. I was near the bottom when I looked up and saw Tops’s hand through the spires. It was out ready to brace me, ready for me to hang from. The hand was worn and callused and squat. It was the hand of life or death. I didn’t know which.

  As he waited, I made the mistake of looking down, not at the river, but at my own foot to see where to place it. Then something strange happened—even though I had Pop’s feet locked squarely inside my mind, I saw the fake Jordans. And it was Petey’s feet I imagined instead. Petey who couldn’t tie his own shoelace years after Pop was gone. Petey who couldn’t do a jump to save his life. Thank god he wasn’t on the tracks with me that night the train came. His feet were curiously big, almost the same size as mine, and on him, they made him look like a clown.

  My arms were cramping, and I heard Tops calling to me. But I couldn’t stop looking at my feet. At the fake Jordans that Petey was so happy to get. “I’m hanging like Jordan!” he yelled, leaping in the air and doing the most pitiful slam dunk imitation I’d ever seen. Like you wanted him off the court where nobody would see him and his fakes. But that was Petey, happy to have fakes.

  “Pop,” I whispered. He was a superman all right. But he had fallen, and he had left us. I don’t know what he was doing in that building that night. I don’t know if the Fencers got to him there or not. I wasn’t sure I would ever really know. But he had put one foot in front of the other, and just doing that had taken him away from Petey and me and our mother. The wind under the bridge howled and I floundered, half on the fence, half not.

  I could feel myself swimming, the water in my eyes blurring the fake Jordans and everything. But not enough that I couldn’t go up, one foot in front of the other. Then again, and again. Pop had chosen High Bridge, and the way of the night. But whatever he left behind, whatever promise finding those diamonds would fulfill, they weren’t what I wanted. Because the fact was, more than anything else, I wanted life. I chose life. I went back up the second fence, and down the first one. Each step was easier than the one before it. When I got back, I threw myself on the brick walkway.

  Tops stood without moving. “You couldn’t do it,” he said, a statement of fact. His voice dripped with the sadness of it all. It was enough to make me want to finally punch him. But there was a sound that stopped me right at that moment. The ringing of his phone inside his pocket. He answered. Then, “It’s for you.”

  Nike’s voice was loud and strong in my ear. “You got to come now. I just heard from Skinny. He says Petey is in for a whole lot of trouble. He wanted Skinny to buy him a load of paint so he could bomb Dobbs. Think MOST14.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Give me an hour.”

  “No, Mighty. We need you here now.”

  “I have to go to Dobbs Ferry,” I said to Tops, “because of my brother.” But when he kept looking at me with that dead expression in his eyes, I knew what had to be done. I said what he’d been hoping to hear ever
since he met me. “And because we have to get Pop’s black book.”

  “I’ll take you now,” said Tops. “I got my car a few blocks away.”

  It’s funny how climbing out of your window gets easier with practice. The scariest part was looking down, so I stopped doing that. I let my feet find their way. They knew where to go, and when they touched the soft ground, I was ready for anything.

  I felt my head to see if my cap was on right. I was wearing everything Peter told me to: a dark cap to cover my hair, a dark gray hoodie, and jeans. Nothing black—Peter said that was the worst color to wear if you’re trying not to look conspicuous. I remembered that from the videos, too, how black made you stand out even in the shadows.

  I heard a sound, like a twig crunching underfoot. I turned around, thinking it was Peter.

  “Cheetah!” I sputtered.

  He ran up to me. “I’m going with you,” he whispered. “I don’t care what you say.”

  “How did you know I was here? Did you climb out the window, too?”

  He shook his head. “I just waited until Mom and Dad were in the kitchen making more tea, and then I snuck out the front door.”

  I groaned. How did Cheetah manage to walk out the door when here I was, climbing out of my two-story bedroom window? “Just turn around and go back, Cheet. You can’t follow me.”

  But he didn’t budge. “It has to do with the diamonds. And you almost got arrested!”

  “No, I didn’t!” I let out my breath. “And I’m helping Peter find his brother.”

  “Who are you talking to?” whispered a voice behind me. It was Peter. He had on the same blue hoodie he wore every day.

  “Nobody,” I whispered back. “Just Cheetah. And he’s going back inside, right?”