Hunting in Harlem

by Mat Johnson

  The best thing about a Bo Shareef novel was that you knew what to expect from it.

  "Arson, in the second degree," Bobby confessed.

  "First-degree manslaughter," Snowden offered.

  "One count of attempted homicide. Three counts of first-degree manslaughter, sentences served simultaneously. Two counts assault with a deadly weapon, and a couple of them racketeering charges —but that was just some tic-tac shit thrown in because of my gang affiliation," Horus assured. "They even tried to hit me with vehicular homicide, but it didn't stick since the car wasn't moving."

  The other two hadn't realized it was a competition, but Horus's voice said it was and that they had lost. The three recruits of the Second Chance Program were waiting at the back doors of PS. 832 as instructed, their formal induction into the Horizon Realty fold only moments away. The stoop smelled of malt liquor and urine, its corners filled with leaves and windblown trash.

  "Arson. Don't you know better than to light shit on fire?" Horus laughed in gasping barks, holding his stomach tenderly like the sound hurt to make it. "What happened, little man, you get busted playing flame thrower with your mamma's hairspray?"

  "He doesn't have to tell you nothing." Snowden meant this statement as a warning, a defiant stance, but after staring into Horus's dull eyes and smelling his cheap cologne like it was menace, the words came out as a polite offering of minor information. Even still, Snowden looked at the way Horus was looking back at him, then quickly checked his watch to make sure it wouldn't be long before Lester would come to the rescue.

  "No, no, really, I don't mind," Bobby interrupted. "I don't mind at all. It's good to get these things out in the open - identifying the problem makes it that much more avoidable, don't you agree? Well, my mom's boyfriend, I burned his house down. The whole thing. Actually, I burned down his house, and I burned down his garage, and also his car, which all should probably count separately since the garage was detached and the car was parked three blocks away at the time. He did something that upset me, not that that's an excuse though. Neither he nor my mother speaks to me now, but that's penance, right? Penance is important," Bobby offered, eyebrows raised and head bobbing like it was a novelty they should try.

  "What'd you do hard man? What'd they stick on your ass?" Horus didn't ask Snowden the question, he pushed it into him, shooting his thick arm forward and slamming his open palm into Snowden's shoulder. Caught off guard, Snowden fought to keep his body rigid and balanced, worked even harder to make this look like no struggle at all.

  "I killed a man," Snowden said back to him. It sounded hard. It was supposed to sound hard. Snowden didn't say it was his father, that it was a mistake, or that it was one punch and the man's drunken fall had been more responsible for the hemorrhage than his son's initial action. Immediately overwhelmed by the guilt of act and omission, Snowden turned directly to Bobby and said in a different tone, "It was an accident."

  "That's good when they can't prove it was premeditated or nothing," Horus mused behind him. "That's what got me out early. There was four of them and just me, so wasn't no way they could prove I started shit. Could have gotten self-defense too, but I got a little carried away, y'know, with that blunt instrument and all." Horus paused, inspected his shoes as he waited for a question that never came. When the back door finally opened, Lester stepping aside to let them in and instructing the men to climb the stairs all the way to the roof's access door, Horus waited until they were two flights up before continuing.

  "I would tell you what that blunt instrument was," Horus said like someone had pleaded with him to share this information, "but when people find out it tends to get all sensationalistic. Me, I'm more the subtle type."

  There was a hedgehog floating ten yards above them, dropping greetings below.

  Not really. It wasn't a hedgehog, it was a man. It was the man who brought them here, the one whose name was his former office. He was floating, though, up there in the air in the round basket of the hot-air balloon he'd rented for the occasion. Men with shirts and hats that said ROSEDALE AMUSEMENTS surrounded a crane, working it around to pull the air monster down by its cabled tether. Slowly, the balloon dipped to the roof the recruits stood on, bringing former Congressman Cyrus Marks down with it.

  Snowden looked to his side in disbelief as Bobby joined Lester in waving joyously in the air, as if something great and improbable had been accomplished by this entrance. Next to them, Horus wasn't even looking up, stretching his arms behind his back and pulling his knees to his chest like he was going to jump the remaining distance to their new boss.

  "Boys. Neophytes. I was just like you once," Marks began yelling over the edge of his hot-air balloon's basket. "I too did careless, destructive things like you have done. The only difference was that I was smarter than you ever were. I didn't get caught. You are nothing now and you know it, but follow me where I say to go, do what I say to do, and I'll make you something! You have my word, and that's like gold."

  "It's like solid gold!" Lester repeated on the ground next to them.

  Even standing far below, looking straight up into the air at the man, the congressman appeared squat to Snowden. Compressed, crushed, as if gravity had taken it upon itself to push this full-grown man into as small a physical space as possible. Snowden kept looking up instead of around, trying to ignore the fact that he was standing on a bare roof, with loose gravel underfoot, the only thing keeping him from falling off the edge being friction and willpower. When the basket holding his new boss finally tapped down, Snowden smiled broadly with relief as Cyrus Marks made to exit, unhinged the nest's door like he was preparing to leave the balloon behind. When Marks stepped back from the open gate and gestured instead for his new employees to climb aboard, Snowden fixed his grin into place and made a point to get on last, as if that would save him a moment's horror.

  The balloon operators quickly diminished from reassuring figures to smudges of color you had to squint to differentiate. They were high enough that both the East and Hudson rivers could be seen as mirrored strips all the way south toward their meeting, glancing north that wet slash that separated Manhattan from the Bronx looked like a fresh cut, like the freed island was moments away from floating over toward New Jersey.

  Snowden gripped the side railing so fiercely he became certain he was going to break a piece off, counting down from twenty and looking at his feet when the urge to roll up in a ball threatened to overcome him. It was several minutes into his own drama before he noticed that the other two participants in the Second Chance Program were holding the edge with equal vigor. Even Lester, dressed in a patchwork suit that expressed every shade between pure white and dark brown, had wrapped himself tightly around one of the cables that attached their basket to the floating ball above, his other bejeweled hand resting atop a gentleman's cane, a hesitant nod to fashion. The only one not holding on was the congressman, and that was Snowden's first impression that the man was insane. Even when they came to the end of the balloon's tether, the tension sending them swiftly east and bouncing from the wind's pressure, the congressman just bent what little legs he had and remained standing, hands in his pockets.

  "The Second Chance Program will make you real estate agents, but you'll become more than that, much more. I'm giving you the biggest thing you never had, what every man needs if he's going to accomplish great things in his life. I'm giving you a mission." Marks walked forward, stopped in front of Lester and held his hand out without looking, pausing until his subordinate figured out what he wanted and put the cane into it.

  "See that down there at the bottom, that cluster of skyscrapers off to the left?" Marks pointed the stick south. "That's Wall Street. There used to be a real wall there, hundreds of years ago in the seventeenth century. The whole of New York City fit below it, on that tiny tip of land. The rest," the congressman made a sweeping motion with the cane that included all the eye could see in its entirety, "was trees, brush, and Indians. The first blacks on this island were forced to
live right by that wall, on the woods side, unprotected. Allowed to farm and mind their own only because they'd serve as a buffer in case the natives attacked. The sounds of their slaughter as an alarm system."

  Congressman Marks shook Lester's cane over the edge as he talked, his grip light and floppy. If that thing fell, somebody far below would die a painful and posthumously embarrassing death, but Marks clearly wasn't thinking about this, too focused ahead to see the world around him.

  "They've always done us like that. As the city's grown, they've always displaced us, pushed us to the periphery. See the dome of Madison Square Garden? That land was ours. Used to be the Tenderloin District, but now it's the Garden, the post office, Perm Station. That complex farther up there, that's Lincoln Center. It sits on land that used to be part of a black neighborhood called San Juan Hill. Do you know what happened to the community that lived there? We were evicted. These were people who'd spent their whole lives there, entire families, an entire neighborhood destroyed, but the developers didn't care. Central Park, the same story. Used to house us and some poor micks, the rich whites seized the land and threw everybody out on the streets to make that park happen. Always pushing us farther to the perimeters. You see, that's why we have Harlem. We had nowhere else to go. It was the only place they would let us live anymore: past the park, all the way at the top of Manhattan island where they hoped they could forget about us." Marks was pointing Lester's cane down at 110th Street, the northern edge of Central Park, leaning so far forward that it seemed he might jump out the basket to get there.

  "This used to be a nice place," the congressman pleaded, his tone casually defensive, righting himself and walking away from the edge once more. "It was far from perfect, but we had our own doctors, our own services, our own stores. There was money here, circulating. Then desegregation came, and everyone who could afford to leave, did. Poverty and their own racism were the only things that kept the whites from coming in and seizing the place, but even that's changing now. They're running out of space once more, prices are so high everywhere else that they're even prepared to ignore their fear of us. So that's were you come in."

  Snowden watched the man's ring as he lectured. It was as thick as a chestnut, gold dark enough that it held a red hue. Every time he made a point he felt particularly important, Marks had the habit of slamming that ring into the nearest hard service available, the clang reinforcing his punctuation.

  "You, my handpicked warriors, are needed. Harlem is more than a place, it's a symbol. It's our Mecca, it is our Jerusalem, the historic cradle of our culture, the ark of our covenant as Africans in this Western world. It must be protected, by any means necessary," Marks declared, ring banging. "This is our last chance. If we don't get this place together, attract our own people to come back and make it vital once more, history will repeat itself. Gentlemen, we at Horizon Realty are not going to stand by and let them push us out this time. So it stops here!"

  "It stops here!" Lester repeated, nodding, smiling. A gust of wind sent the balloon dipping sharply to the right, but Lester merely gripped a cable with both hands and kept grinning, undaunted.

  "It stops now!" Marks called, this time all but Snowden loudly responding, Snowden himself having only just enough sense to mouth the words.

  "This is where we make our last stand, great black warriors of the new millennium! Together, and with the help of all the people we'll recruit to stand among us, we'll bring back the renaissance that once defined this place. We shall not be moved!"

  "We shall not be moved!" repeated the chorus.

  "Harlem is ours!" Marks yelled, spittle shooting forward, tears dripping straight down.

  "Harlem is ours!" the others responded. Snowden closed his eyes, unsure if Harlem was his, or if it was if he really wanted it, and began praying aloud for a safe landing. Cursing aloud that this was his last chance at something better. Nobody noticed, though, with all the clapping.

  MOVING UP

  IN THE WEEKS of moving Horizon's clients into their newly acquired homes, Bobby made a practice of going to the back of the truck and selecting the biggest, heaviest beasts — things Snowden spent the morning looking at and thinking, If I can just get through this day without lifting that, I just might make it — and trying to lift them, carry them down the little ramp and into the property all by himself. Bobby Finley looked like a skeleton dipped in chocolate; his strongman spectacle was intensely unnerving to watch. Snowden would be standing behind him cringing, offering unaccepted help, sure the skinny man's arms would simply distend from the strain, that his femurs would snap in two from the struggle.

  The most disturbing thing about Bobby's behavior, in Snowden's opinion, was that he wasn't even doing it to win the house or job at all, that there was no spur of competition driving him. Bobby didn't care about the brownstone, never brought it up. His only comment if someone else did was, "Fate will decide who's best suited to lead us." Bobby didn't care because Bobby actually believed in what Lester and the congressman were telling him, bought into all of it from the start. Horus was the same way, never questioning, never complaining, but Snowden found this far less remarkable. Having seen Horus eat, Snowden doubted the man questioned what he consumed at all.

  Originally, Snowden assumed Bobby's faith was nothing more than a clever ploy, a work of performance art meant to create the impression that he was the most committed of the three of them, but after weeks of testing this facade with conspiratorial cynicism, Snowden conceded defeat just to get him to shut up. Bobby used the slightest doubtful whisper as an excuse to spew Horizon propaganda back. Fevered, ecclesiastic ramblings that could often be interrupted only by running away from him, which on two occasions Snowden had literally been forced to do. Bobby Finley could spin firm logic from the mist of romance. Both times Snowden had chosen to run were because Bobby was starting to make sense to him.

  Bobby was good with words. He was a writer. Not a very successful one even by his own admission, but a published one nonetheless, a novel he'd called The Great Work. One of these copies Bobby Finley presented to Snowden, who out of a sense of grudging obligation tried to read it, and after several motivated assaults did manage to push through to the third page. This fact irritated Snowden, as it was his habit to take pride in his assertion that he loved reading everything: romance, mystery, science fiction, sometimes even the newspaper.

  Not only did Snowden fail to get beyond the very opening of The Great Work, he also realized — as he struggled for some polite compliment to offer Bobby afterward — that he had no idea what he'd read. The book's sentences seemed to make sense individually. They had verbs and adjectives and nouns, but reading one after another only compounded his confusion. The sole blurb to grace the back cover said " . . . creates an emotional response . . . ," which Snowden had to agree with, as his emotional response had been to scream and want to hurl it across his apartment. Instead, upon reuniting with Bobby, Snowden smiled and said, "I've never read anything like it!" to which Bobby's response was to snatch the book out of Snowden's hands and start frantically wiping away imaginary fingerprints from its cover.

  Bobby Finley was a passionate man, obsessive, covetous. The most absurd proof of this, in Snowden's opinion, was Bobby's take on love and women, or rather the woman. The one: the mythical creature that was Bobby's other favorite obsession, his imagined soul mate. Snowden discovered this particular delusion while the two were stuck in traffic on the BQE and he asked the skinny man, "Have you ever been in love?" It was a question simply meant to throw Bobby off guard, to get him to stop quoting from the Horizon-recommended Social Construction of Community just long enough to let the ringing that had started to vibrate in Snowden's skull subside into a light hum. The question was fortuitous, fateful even. It revealed the only subject guaranteed to distract him.

  At some point in his lonely life, fermented by years of awkwardness, rejection, socially and governmentally enforced isolation, Bobby Finley had decided that the reason things between him an
d every woman he'd ever been interested in had gone horribly wrong was that he was destined for one perfectly matched mate and no other. Bobby shared this with Snowden like it was simple fact, swatting it away as if it was merely one more annoyance fate had burdened him with. Despite the casual manner of his revelation, it was quite a while before Bobby himself changed the subject again. About two weeks. Sometimes even tempting Snowden over to his apartment with promises of free beer just so he could continue his monologue.

  In that time, exhausted but amused, Snowden had actually grown attached to the emaciated man, and having shared the company of several women and fallen in love with something about each one, tried in moments of sympathy to dissuade him. "Promiscuity is good," Snowden explained to his surely less experienced compatriot. "Variety isn't just the spice of life, it's the point of it." It was an argument destined for the disproportionately large yet deaf ears of Bobby Finley.