Hunting in Harlem

by Mat Johnson

  By the time Lester pulled him back up, Snowden's mind was as much a mess as his clothes. Lester tried to hug him, calm him down, but Snowden pushed the man away. The gun was not his friend, it was not a natural extension of his arm, and Snowden slammed it down in front of himself and as it bounced yelped in fear at what he'd just done. Lester just picked it up, then pulled Snowden by his arm out of there.

  Snowden found himself standing atop an entirely different roof at least five buildings over and didn't remember walking there, climbing over the small brick walls that divided each of them. Lester was talking. Lester was saying, "Snowden, listen to me, I'm so sorry that I didn't just trust your judgment, your timing. I don't know what came over me, but I would never have dropped you. You know that, right?"

  "I let him get to the door, open it." Snowden finally started talking. Actually, this wasn't strictly true: Snowden had been saying "shit" repeatedly since he reached solid ground, but now he was moving on to complete sentences. "I let him get to the door. He opened it. They saw him standing there with his wallet in his hand and they shot him anyway. They shot him. They shot him so many times."

  "Oh my God," was Lester's response. He pulled away, walked hands to his head ten feet on only to say, "I can't believe it," and walk back again. Snowden, who'd taken to hugging himself, pulled his head up to watch the man. There were so many emotions, too many things to be reacting to, moments and things to feel, but Snowden looked at Lester's shock and felt hope. He realizes, he finally gets it, the insanity of all it all. He finally gets it.

  "You get it," Snowden said when Lester returned.

  Lester smiled back at him. "Are you kidding? I get it! I totally get it. The wallet, letting them get a glimpse so they thought it was a gun when they heard the shot. The Amadou Diallo shooting, right? I'm just . . . I mean . . . awe. You improvised that hanging there? Forget Bobby Finley, you're the artist. All I can say is, 'Wow' An homage?

  They went back to the Lenox Lounge. Lester insisted on this, and then he walked so fast Snowden could barely drone stiffly behind him. As soon as they were inside, Lester wrenched off his coat, yanked his watch, and laid it faceup on the table. "We stay till at least one," Lester said as he ripped through his organizer in search of the leather pouch, cursing till he found it then shooting off to the bathroom.

  Lester came back a half hour later, sat down at the table, and then nodded for another half. They weren't sitting in the same seats as before. This was a good thing because their new seats where secluded far in the back by the leopard-print wall, and Snowden was just coming back to himself enough, was just starting to worry about less significant things like the fact that he was sitting in a public place absolutely soaked, in part by his own urine.

  "Drunks. Make great. Alibis," Lester said. It took him a couple of minutes, eyes floating in their lids, but he got it out. Snowden ignored him. He didn't feel like listening, he felt like drinking, and he wanted to do that and watch her. She was still there, working. She was still there and her face still looked like someone had used it to kick the dirt off his boots, and Snowden was glad she still looked like that. He wanted to remember every detail of the abused face, every pus-bloated curve, every darkened shade her makeup failed to camouflage. Take that as the image you remember from this night, Snowden begged himself. Those fists will never hit that face, Snowden kept forcing himself to acknowledge. It offered little solace, but a little was something so he kept doing it. Slamming it down with six-dollar shots of whiskey until the logic made more sense.

  Even by Snowden's standards he was exceptionally drunk by the time the watch admitted it was one o'clock. It was a belligerent, deceitful device, and he was pretty sure it had paused a few times when he wasn't looking (eleven twenty-seven, for instance, went on forever, and it had been twelve forty-nine for generations). Snowden fell asleep watching it, woke up thirty-four minutes past confused about where he was and what reality everybody was using, the one from his dream or the other one he now could recall only vaguely.

  Trying to stand up, it was pretty clear that by consensus the world had changed its rules of gravity and nobody had bothered to tell him which pissed him off but Lester was saying something about "be careful" so maybe that's what he was talking about. The bladder said bathroom first, then when he was walking back out it was her again at the table collecting her tip and saying "Thank you" and Snowden said " J u s t be careful who you love next time" but it was loud and she didn't quite hear him.

  Outside Snowden remembered more about who he was, the place, the time, all that. And what he was doing. He was walking, each step deliberate - got to land on the foot's ball, lift the knee up high enough, do the right then left or left then right but never the same legs consecutively. It got easier every time he got it right. Then there was where he was going. Snowden was going back there. Snowden was going to tell them what happened, apologize, all that. Shhh, don't tell the sober mind, just keep walking.

  Snowden trudged south on Lenox. The brownstones, they lined both sides of the street, leaning in and bearing witness with so many eyes. This is how it was supposed to happen. The night smelled of burning wood and Snowden knew this could mean only one thing, barbecue, but he stayed course anyway. He was tired, but the weight of his burden propelled him forward. He was lost, but then there came the sirens and they called to him, gave him the sign of flashing red lights and Snowden knew they were waiting for his arrival. Destiny was so amazing, even in this state there was room for awe at this. Just when Snowden feared he'd been led asunder another vehicle would coming running by, its lights and call demanding that he follow, moving so fast it was pretty clear whoever was driving was hungry too.

  As Snowden got closer, the smell of smoke-roasted meat grew stronger, so that by the time he turned the corner and saw all the red and blue lights flashing on top of their vehicles, Snowden was starving, pushing toward them despite the fact that the fog made it hard to breathe. There was a whole house on the corner on fire, but that made sense because there were a lot of people there to feed, and it was that new flophouse, which was fine because nobody wanted it here anyway. People were gathered halfway down the block from it.

  Negroes love some barbecue. Wooden horses had been erected. Snowden, who was finding his ongoing batde simply to keep his eyes open complicated by the gray air, couldn't find the line for the serving area, where to get the paper plates or plasticware. But he did see Bobby in the middle of the street at the very front. Oh friend of friends, so good to see a face of love on a late Harlem night. Bobby would know how to get a meal ticket, where the beer tent was.

  "Where's the food, man?" Snowden put his hands on Bobby's neck, shook it. Bobby's head bounced a little, but the skinny man didn't even bother removing his grip from the FDNY barricade, let alone turn and offer a response. This was not good at all. Snowden was tired, and if he didn't get an answer, goddamn it, he was going to turn around go home, eat leftovers.

  "Bobby, where's the food?" If Bobby knew he wasn't saying. Snowden felt pissed but powerless. Bobby was black and motionless and shiny from sweat, staring forward and up like he was watching a movie. Snowden wanted to punch him, but Bobby looked too much like a tar baby to risk it.

  THEN SHE KEPT COMING BACK

  PIPER WAS BEING followed.

  From the first time she showed up at the smoking ruins of Mumia Abu-Jamal Memorial Halfway House he identified her, noted her presence. Then she kept coming back. On her third visit, as she walked around the site taking yet another set of photos, he walked with her, unnoticed, staying directly behind her the whole time. On her sixth recorded visit back to the scene of the fire, when Piper ignored the police tape's yellow order not to cross its line, he was there waiting for her. He watched intently as she forced herself through the space where the temporary fencing almost met the wall. He was disgusted by the soft, rounded gut that revealed itself when her shirt became stuck on an odd barb, but he crossed the street to get a closer look anyway. To see exactly what she wa
s looking at. As Piper moved through the blackened remains of windows and walls, he kept careful pace with her on the sidewalk beyond. Wondering what she was thinking. Fuchsia fedora pulled down low, raincoat collar up, pretending to walk his little wiener dog.

  What Piper was thinking, in order of least to most importance: If I don't eat that lo mein today it's going to go bad; look for something suspicious; how the hell am I supposed to know what looks suspicious; thank God I finally got assigned a real story; the only reason they gave me this story is Gil Manly is covering the police shooting of Trevor Barber; I bust my ass every day for this paper and now they're cutting me out of Harlem's most newsworthy event.

  The last thought was the one that resonated the most, whose hum had endured since she'd listen to Cole Jr. dole out the stories four days before. The Trevor Barber shooting was the big story; the NYPD shoot an innocent, unarmed black man every year or two and it's always the big story. Piper's big story was she was being denied it. The ripples of that fact grew as they moved farther away from the source, leaving questions in their wake. These questions varied greatly in their complexity, creativity, and merit but were uniform in their destructiveness as well as their subject matter: the worth and prospects of one Piper Goines. To drown them out, Piper began creating new ones of her own. They were good ones. They included such enticing distractions as: Why would a building that's just been built burn down as fast as a nineteenth-century log cabin? Isn't it a little convenient that the bane of this community was thwarted before it could even fully open its doors? Who will champion justice for the three parolees who died if I don't?

  "Oh snap, it's Sherlock Homegirl!" was Dumbass's response as he clanked away at the pipes under Piper's bathroom sink with his immaculate tools. He'd been eavesdropping on her and his wife's conversation, his rare visit to the third floor sparked by a brown water stain that had appeared on his office ceiling directly below. "Sister of my love, just because you didn't get the story you wanted doesn't mean your fire is going to magically become more than just that. The dryer in the basement had a bad cord, they already said so on TV. That police shooting is already dying down anyway. I mean, the mayor himself reported the guy had a bunch of sexual assault convictions. Who cares about a hood like that?"

  "Jesus Brian, those were supposed to be sealed juvenile records, the mayor broke the law just by leaking them, and they were almost a decade old. Are you going to tell me you're as gullible as those cynics think?" Piper rolled her eyes for emphasis. Dumbass didn't know what he was talking about. Piper would consider that a general assessment of her brother-in-law's worldview, but in this instance it applied more specifically. Brian hadn't spent the afternoon shifting through files at City Hall, pulling evidence on past building code violations of 437 West 121st Street's contractor. Brian had no idea who Maverick Construction was, let alone that it had been cited on four different occasions in five years for using subgratle insulation, including Propex, a highly flammable form now banned. Brian hadn't spent the week learning what burn points or burn patterns were, or had a connection from his alumni association who worked in the arson division whisper that there'd been only one of the former, and the latter was defined by the ignition of the insulation in the interior basement walls. The fire had shot up a crawl space that went - against several building codes uninterrupted from the foundation to the roof. No one else knew these things, either, or, she hoped, would until the New Holland Heralds next edition.

  Brian also didn't hug Greg Tanen's mother every time she broke down describing her son's life, see the photo from Quinn Jefferson's prom where he smiled as big as the date his arms could barely wrap around, or listen on the phone as Dio Demilo's sister kept repeating, "He was just turning around his life, you know?" so Piper tried to forgive him for saying the following:

  "An armed burglar, a telephone con artist, and a habitual car thief, and a center that was going to bring more of the same if it stayed open the rest of the week, I mean, come on. It's messed up, sure, but you can hardly be surprised the Red Cross isn't handing out Kleenex on 125th Street."

  "I don't know if you know this, but not everybody got to have both parents around growing up, OK? Not everybody got to belong to Jack and Jill. There are actually some people out there who don't have private school educations, who didn't get to go to college, or have their frat brothers hook them up with high-paying jobs for the rest of their lives."

  "No! Really?" Brian jumped up, leaned out the bathroom door to see Piper sitting on the couch in the living room, his shirt wet and monkey wrench in hand. "Are you sure about this? Oh my God! Honey, quick, get me Cornel West on the phone. Underprivileged black people — why, who knew of such nonsense? I tell you, once my man Cornel hears about this, there's going to be some changes around here!"

  "Leave me out of this. Do you want onions in this?" Dee asked her sister. Dee was in the kitchen cooking omelets. They weren't for her. They were for Robert M. Finley, author of The Great Work, and for her sister who would leave them on the skillet and pretend to reheat them when he got there.

  "Yeah, but could you caramelize them separately before adding the eggs to the pan?"

  "Oh right. Isn't that funny how someone who claims not to cook knows how to properly prepare caramelized onions?"

  "I can't cook," Piper told her, "but if I could cook, that's how I'd do it. I hate it when they throw in pieces of raw, crunchy onions. It's tacky. Who wants to seem tacky?"

  "I thought you weren't interested in this guy," Dumbass chimed in. "This is the mover, the guy you wanted me to punch in the mouth if he kept calling the house a couple months ago, right? See honey, I told you it was that guy. So what, he broke down your defenses?"

  "This is not someone I'm interested in, OK?" Piper protested. "This is a talented published author, someone whose work I admire. We had a very long, very enjoyable conversation at the Horizon Ball, and he turns out to be a very sweet guy. He enjoys my work as well. We have an artistic connection."

  Brian came back out from under the sink again for this one. "Wait a minute, he told you he likes your paintings? Those paintings in there, the ones I've seen? Fascinating," he said, hand on chin. "This guy must really be in love."

  "Stop," Dee ordered, distracted by her attempt to wrap both ends of the egg evenly underneath it as instructed. "You guys want to talk about art, look at this, this is art. You sure you don't want these on a plate? I'm feeling very homemakerish at the moment. I could make a garnish with toothpicks and turnip shavings."

  When Piper's phone rang, Dee picked up because she was the closest and it was her habit if not her privilege. By the time Piper had risen to take it out of her hand, the person had hung up. Dee handed the dead phone to Piper anyway, along with the message that Robert M. Finley, author of The Great Work, had canceled.

  "Forget him. That's rude, that's not how a man handles things. If he was considerate, he would have called hours ago," Brian offered. "If you want I can still go and beat him up. Uh, he was that real skinny one, not that big, mean-looking bastard, right?"

  "No, it's not like that," Piper responded. "The guy like had this huge crush on me. I mean, why would he just blow me off after I've gone to the trouble of preparing a meal and everything? Did he say he was sick?"

  "No, he didn't say anything. Just, 'I am Robert M. Finley and I will not be leaving my apartment.' Then he hung up."

  Piper ate both omelets. Then she went back to work, more determined than before. It was difficult reaching contacts on a Sunday, but she searched the Internet for home numbers. On her next job interview, if they asked her what her weakness was, Piper would say, "I work too hard. I'm too thorough. News is the compilation, synthesis, and disbursement of information. I can't stop looking until I know everything, and there is always something more to know, another facet to uncover, which changes the view of the whole. I live for deadlines," Piper would tell them. "It's the only way I can stop myself from looking."

  The doorbell rang and Piper's first thought w
as, It's him. Jumping down the steps, surprised at her elation, the nature of it, trying not slip or produce a rhythm that betrayed excitement. At the door, it wasn't him. It wasn't Snowden either. It was just odd.

  The reason Piper unlocked the door wasn't that she recognized the man. She did, but he wasn't the type with whom familiarity bred comfort. He looked like someone who would hurt someone. He didn't look particularly mean, not like he brought pain out of any sadistic enjoyment or malice. It looked like his nature, as if soft things bruised and hard things just broke in his hands. No, the reason Piper opened her door was that not even the most criminally insane would come to do someone harm dressed like that. Like an admiral in the Martian army.

  "You're Horus, aren't you? The underwear freak. Did Robert send you over with those?" Those were flowers. Birds of paradise, Piper assumed a dozen, their screaming red beaks just adding to the messenger's otherworldly presence.

  "You mean Bobby? Hell no. I was sent here by the man. The man!" Horus pushed the flowers forward. When Piper didn't react by actually taking the massive vase, Horus just pushed it toward her farther till she did, then removed a letter from inside his jacket.

  " 'Former Congressman Marks of New York City's Fifteenth District and current high chairman of the board and COO of the Horizon Foundation, hereby formally invites you to join him in a moment of fine conversation at the company office this very evening. On behalf of Congressman Marks, I, Horus Manley, his humble servant, have been empowered to both invite and escort you. Let me add that the congressman would be greatly honored by your presence, and that he apologizes in advance for such short notice, as it in no way was intended as a slight against your person.'"