Hunting in Harlem

by Mat Johnson

  "So? Maybe the man's got a crime fetish. Yo, people are into that death stuff. Perfectly normal, don't worry about it. Or they were applications. Most of those people lived in Horizon-owned housing," Snowden offered, involving himself in the ritual of tobacco lighting so he didn't have to look at her as he said it.

  "These weren't applications, Snowden. I'm not a moron. I know the difference between prison records and credit reports. You're not listening to me. Some of these folders even had notes on the subject's lifestyle habits - it was like whoever wrote it was stalking them. I'm going to check, but I'm almost certain some of the dates on the fax receipts for the documents predate their deaths."

  Snowden kept shrugging, putting more emphasis into his shoulders. He tried, and failed, to laugh. "Piper, Piper, Piper," he started, half relieved when she interrupted him, as he had no idea what to say next.

  "Snowden, look up at me. Do me this favor: listen. Don't tell me I'm being hysterical. Don't just come up with uninformed explanations, OK? Snowden, some of these people listed, I didn't recognize. Some of these people aren't dead yet. I know it sounds nuts and, if it is, I would be the happiest one if you can give me a rational explanation for this, but I think your boss Lester is somehow connected to all this. It makes sense, right? I mean, who else would have the keys to all these apartments in the first place?"

  "I don't know, how about a locksmith?" Snowden attempted.

  "All right, so I'll say it, I'll put it out there and if it sounds ridiculous, that's fine, I can deal with that." Piper paused before continuing, taking a deep breath as if she needed a lot of air to push the statement out. "Based on the evidence I just read, I'm eighty-five percent positive Lester Baines is some kind of mass-murdering, vigilante maniac."

  Piper waited for the laughter, for Snowden's patented derision. Piper waited to be exposed as the pathetic snoop with an overactive imagination she knew herself to be. There would be a rational explanation coming, and it would undoubtedly make her look like a fool, but Piper was prepared to face that. What Piper was not prepared for was Snowden smiling calmly back at her, shrugging yet one more time and saying, "Ah, come on, I don't think you're being fair. Think about it, is what Lester's doing really all that bad?"

  "Excuse me?" Piper asked, and she really did want to be excused, because even though he was sitting down, the look on Snowden's face made her start stepping back. Her imagination, in a backlash against its earlier forced restraint, really took off as Snowden got up and started following after her.

  "Piper, be honest with yourself. You read their folders. These people were scum, they were parasites. I know it sounds harsh, but just be real for a second. Armed robbers, burglars, drug dealers, pedophiles, they were all people who specifically lived by creating misery for the rest of us. In lots of countries people are executed for living like that. Come on, if you read the files, then you really saw them. Imagine what this neighborhood would be like if all those animals were still around?"

  Snowden could tell that Piper wasn't even trying to imagine. She was too busy walking away toward the door. He jumped forward after her, regretted that the action just made her turn and start running. "Piper, it's me, relax, just stay, we have to talk about this," Snowden said, but Piper just started screaming, "No!" back at him, yanking her arm away violently every time he tried to hold it.

  When Piper got to the door, Snowden couldn't bring himself to slam it. He couldn't bring himself to do anything more, either. As Piper flew out into the hall, Snowden remembered her naked, on top of him, what her hair looked like as she leaned forward to kiss his mouth, what it tasted like when she did. It was a shame that it would all end like this, Snowden was thinking as he watched her literally run away from him.

  Snowden wasn't expecting Horus to pop out from the shadows of the hall any more than Piper was. But there Horus appeared in all his destructive brilliance, ready and eager to change everything.

  As Piper got to the stairs, Horus came from behind her, in motion. He must have been hiding in one of the other doorways the whole time, Snowden figured that out later, when there was time. His shoulder forward, his head down, Horus slammed into Piper Goines's unprepared spine, her body folding backward like a fortune cookie from the force. Standing in his doorway, Snowden watched Piper hit the metal railing from the momentum, saw how in that instant she tried to lean her torso away from the void. Horus took his two thick hands to her two soft ankles and lifted her up and over like he was dumping a wheelbarrow. Piper cleared the railing as smoothly as if she wanted to. Snowden never even got to see her face again, just a blur of limbs and clothing as she grabbed at the air. Then she was gone. That quickly. Horus leaned over the ledge to watch her land.

  If Piper made a sound falling down to the lobby five stories below, Snowden didn't hear it. He was too busy lunging forward to the last place she was standing, firmly grabbing the railing that she'd failed to. Piper was already lying still on the ground so far below by the time Snowden arrived to help her.

  It wasn't that bad, is what Snowden said to himself to contradict the horror he was feeling. She didn't suffer the terror of the whole drop, surely she hit her head in the narrow stairway before she got that far. It's a shame that had to happen. Dear God it's a shame, that it had to, that it had to happen. An unspeakable tragedy, that this was a necessity. To ensure that Horus, who appeared beside him with a hand firmly on Snowden's shoulder, didn't attempt a repeat performance, Snowden repeated those thoughts aloud for him.

  "It's a damn shame," Horus agreed, looking down, a direction Snowden looked purposefully away from. "A fine-looking woman like that one."

  "They already know, don't they? You were sent to back me up, in case I didn't do it, weren't you?" Snowden asked him. Horus kept looking down at the body but started squeezing Snowden's shoulder so hard that it hurt.

  "First of all, I'm not no one's 'backup,' OK? I done told you about that shit before. Think of my role in this venture as more 'quality control' if you want a name for it. Second of all, it ain't always about you, is it? See, that right there is the man I'm supposed to be overseeing." Horus pointed below.

  Snowden forced himself to look down in the direction of the corpse once more and this time saw Bobby standing over it. The faintest of hopes fluttered through him and he thought Bobby would reach down for a pulse and find one and just as suddenly as things turned morbid they would spring back to being merely bleak again, but looking down at the body's anatomically impossible position, Snowden wasn't surprised Bobby didn't bother with the formality. Nor that Bobby should look straight up with the anger and pain distorting his face as they did. So many exhaustive trials Snowden had undergone since arriving in Harlem this last year, so many elaborate tests of moral fortitude and determination, but none more demanding than just meeting Bobby's stare without flinching.

  Even after Bobby ran off, Snowden kept looking down because there was no turning away or back anymore. All the fear, the revulsion, the guilt, and disgust bubbling within him at the distant sight of Piper's broken body, Snowden identified, named as the price for Utopia. Doors on other apartments started opening, other heads poked out into the stairway just as his did, but Snowden forced himself to keep looking, to acknowledge the price before continuing.

  OF SHRIMP AND OTHER SMALL BAIT

  A YEAR CAN go by rather quickly when you're busy. exactly 365 days after their first Horizon meeting, the winner of the Second Chance Program's leadership challenge was announced, and Cedric Snowden Jr. accepted gracefully. No balloons, no cake or streamers, just a firm handshake from a former congressman and a date for the press conference when, on site, the keys to the prized brownstone would be handed over. "If it doesn't happen in front of cameras," Marks chuckled away Snowden's reservations, "then it doesn't exist." In the end, the competition was far from stiff. Bobby hadn't shown up for work or answered his phone in the two weeks since the incident, and Horus was Horus, so the choice was rather obvious. Snowden felt proud anyway, took it as an hono
r because he felt he'd earned the right to.

  Cedric Snowden tried to think about this honor as much as he could, about the responsibility of watching over the new recruits in the year to come, of overseeing their evolution into the men of Horizon. Cedric Snowden like to think about this because he found that when he wasn't, he was thinking about Piper Goines instead, a subject he drifted to even more despite a concerted effort not to. In Snowden's waking moments in the days before Piper's funeral, it was the image of her disappearing so easily over the railing that had captivated him. Snowden thought bloop every time he remembered it, as if attaching a cartoon sound effect would minimize the impact for both of them. Bloop.

  At night, asleep, the image Snowden was haunted by was altogether different, though equally singular. It was Piper Goines falling down the stairway wearing a long flowing white dress, endless folds flapping. It was the type of dress Snowden doubted the real Piper would wear even if you gave it to her. In the dream, Snowden's view was centered on her as she fell down, the dirty tenement stairs a blur for both of them. Eventually his own vantage would halt and Piper's body would go flying below it, upon which point Snowden would kick himself awake as quickly as possible. The dream tended to come to him in those transitory moments at the beginning and end of sleep, leaving Snowden unsure if he was just imagining it, an uncertainty that led to Snowden rejecting his closet hideout for his well-lit bedroom instead.

  The vision continued until the funeral, a bleak, silent affair even for its kind. The event created new images of Piper to replace all the others, surprisingly pleasant ones fueled mostly by the childhood pictures arranged as a collage before Piper's closed casket. Snowden had feared meeting the famed Abigail Goines of Piper's tales, but the woman up at the front pew was so drugged that Snowden doubted she knew that he or most of the other guests were there, even as she nodded and smiled at them.

  People pointed at him, the last one to see her alive, the fateful friend with the fourth-floor walkup, yet nothing more came of it. But why should it, Snowden kept reminding himself. It was an accident.

  Snowden kept looking over his shoulder, up into the rafters of the Episcopalian church, for Bobby Finley to arrive and declare differently, but the skinny man never appeared.

  The congressman arranged for the ride to and from Connecticut to be provided by Piper Goines's former editors Olthidius Cole Jr. and Sr. The younger of the two drove. The older of the two yelled at him to pass any car within fifty yards, once going so far as to shove his battered cane onto the gas pedal in response to the disobeying of a direct order. For a while, Snowden amused himself by watching the large man cursing at his son and every single driver he managed to overtake on 1-95, pausing only to go off on tangental tirades about the Jews, the honkies, those bastards at City Hall, "those goddamn Dominican Puerto Ricans," and the niggers. Excluding the mention of the last two groups, Mr. Cole's private rants sounded much like his front-page editorials, evoking in Snowden the same exhaustion from their tediousness, only this time he couldn't just shut it off by putting the page down, so Snowden closed his eyes and pretended to fall asleep instead.

  It was dark, late, and they were approaching a toll booth when Snowden had the dream he'd been waiting for. One minute his legs were numb and Olthidius Cole was leaning over his son to curse out the collector, the next Snowden closed his eyes and it began. In his mind, Piper came to his house just like before, dressed like her too, the same bags under eyes, the lack of makeup - it was very realistic. The biggest difference was that this time she knew everything. Everything. Like how important it was, what they were doing. Like how a piece of their soul was part of the deal, but that it was worth it. It wasn't just Piper who understood now, they all did - and by that Snowden took to mean all the unintentional martyrs even though she spared him the pain of listing them. "I understand," she said again to him, and then Piper looked right at Snowden and said, CiBloop," and was gone again. Snowden opened his eyes and they were in front of Horizon's storefront grate. Olthidius Cole turned around in his seat screaming, "Get out my car you freeloading prick," out his flapjack face.

  Walking back home with that night-city elation, Snowden went to bed and slept well, got up the next day feeling even better. For the week that followed, the same thing kept happening. When Snowden finally recalled the dream, he couldn't remember if it really was one or just his groggy mind imagining, but it didn't matter. Either way it paused his anxiety long enough for his life to get going again.

  Snowden found it was a glorious thing to have a purpose, to have one was to know what he'd always been missing. When each day began Snowden knew what he had to do and why he had to do it. When each day ended Snowden found himself running out of hours instead of having to drink the last few away. There was bliss in certainty. The Horizon man found being one intoxicating.

  It takes a while to build a home out of a Harlem shell. You start with the abused structure, long the victim of poverty and neglect, and you salvage what little you can from it: a facade, some original woodwork, a porcelain fixture nobody in fifty years could figure out how to rip out for profit. Put a new roof on top to keep the elements from causing further damage, then under its protection you can begin to develop what's inside of it. The first thing to do is get the electrical work and plumbing up to date, followed by the windows and walls, winterizing and painting. Unless you're doing major structural construction, the last thing you deal with is the floor beneath your feet. To look at his prize in the beginning, Snowden's brownstone seemed a hopeless cause, a place that would never be inhabitable let alone one he'd enjoy living in. But it was, like all things in Harlem, a matter of small steps and patience, dedication to a vision, the determination to see it to fruition no matter what the cost.

  They got as far as the wiring by the day of the Second Chance Program press event. It was enough that there would be power for lights, video, and sound equipment. Snowden was allowed to come inside his new home for the first time that morning. It was a prime location on 120th Street, directly across from Mount Morris Park, you could even see the fire tower from the street. Walking up the front steps Snowden thought, This is my stoop. Moving through so many empty, dark rooms Snowden thought, These are mine and I have a lifetime to fill them.

  The townhouse was full of surprising details. The removal of the mirrored wall off the sitting room had revealed a chipped but salvageable mural that Lester hoped would prove to be an Aaron Douglas when authenticated. Between the stairs was a full-sized manual elevator, installed for a wheelchair-bound resident in the thirties and still fully functional. Lester took great pleasure in showing Snowden how to pull on the looped rope to make it go up and down as they stood inside it. On the third floor, Snowden found the remnants of a building-length bookshelf built into the eastern wall, a beautiful if battered piece of oak cabinetry that caused Snowden to wonder out loud if he'd ever own enough books to fill it.

  Lester let the comment hang out there for a moment, echoing in the empty space, before saying anything. "Look, I made an awful, unfortunate mistake in going to him about the Piper situation. I didn't realize they had any sort of relationship, let alone what I now know of it. That was a horrible position I put him in, inadvertently of course, but it was my mistake. That said, you're the one in charge of the program now. He has to be dealt with."

  "Bobby will be just fine," Snowden told him. "He'll get over it. You want to worry about something, worry about your dog, you know what it means when he starts sniffing the floor like that."

  Wendell's butt rocked back in forth as it wandered out of the room. Lester called the dog, but Wendell just looked over his shoulder at him in annoyance before turning around again.

  "Snowden, you don't get over losing someone you consider that important easily. I know, I was a mess after Jesse passed. Don't tell anyone, but I missed that man so much I used to spray Wendell with his cologne at night just so I could pretend it was him sleeping next to me," Lester confessed.

  "I will deal w
ith Bobby. Reasonably. I sent him an invite so you never know, he might show up today. You put me in charge, so you'll just have to trust me with it. I tell you who is in mortal danger, though: your dog. I don't care if the floors aren't done, if he shits on my new home he's dead."

  "Wendell would never do that," Lester said, but he hurried down the hall in search of him anyway.

  There was a joke told by white supremacists that all you had to do to round up black people was get a big bucket of fried chicken. This was not only racist and offensive, it was also entirely untrue. It wasn't fried chicken, it was shrimp. If you sent out flyers advertising free all-you-can-eat jumbo shrimp, you could attract more Negroes than a Red Lobster on Sunday. Another little-known fact: The same rule applied to a subset of journalists as well, the lazy kind who actually liked press events, liked having their stories prepackaged and lobbed underhand to them. Tertiary news stories were chosen or ignored based on the quality of the buffets at their press events, and a good seafood teaser could make the difference between peripheral public awareness and complete obscurity. Combine these two categories and you could create the kind of mob that began to form in Cedric Snowden's future living room early that evening, struggling to push past each other without spilling their plastic plates and champagne flutes.

  Congressman Marks stepped up on the stool he'd placed discreetly behind the podium and began clearing what little throat he had to get their attention. When that didn't work, Marks pulled from inside his lapel what Snowden hoped was a starter pistol and shot it straight up above him. "Ah, an ode to the bad old days of Harlem," he joked to the stunned and silent crowd, but it actually garnered a few laughs after a second.

  "Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining me in bearing witness to this great day for Harlem. In a time when more black men go to jail than college, it is more important now than ever that we create a second chance for our men, our community, and ourselves . . ."