Hunting in Harlem

by Mat Johnson

  In one move, Horus was on his feet, the look on his face saying whatever rage had dissipated over the last hours had now been completely replenished. His arm pulled back, brick in hand, and it was very clear what Horus's intentions were. Horus was going to bash Snowden's skull in.

  "Cease!"

  The command came from behind Snowden. Snowden didn't move to see the source because Horus froze when it was yelled so Snowden assumed the person had a gun and worse, a badge that would actually let him shoot it. Tai chi slow, Horus dropped the rubble and let his arms glide up into a Y

  "Mr. Snowden, at ease," Lester ordered. I've never been fired from a job by gunpoint, Snowden was thinking, but when he turned around it wasn't the snub-nose he'd seen in the truck's glove compartment. Lester held a hundred-dollar bill over his head with both hands.

  "Mr. Manley, I do believe we can resolve this in an immediate and nonviolent manner, don't you?" Lester shook the note before him, the bill was crisp and new, and it crinkled as it flapped. Lester in lavender, immaculate with jacket and purple shoes on. A grin exploded across Horus's mug, erasing all trace of the homicidal mask of moments earlier. Coming closer, Horus snatched the money out of Lester's fingers like it might be a trick, gave a victorious yelp before offering his thanks, examining the C note up to the sunlight as he walked off.

  Lester made the dazed Snowden sit in the truck's cab while making sure everything was OK with the customer. It took that smell of brave Wendell to reacquaint Snowden with his senses, an entirely uncalled for, overdone remedy in Snowden's opinion. Wendell had all the regular canine odor expected from such an active dog, but his more disturbing smell was of cologne. It lay on him so thick you could smell the alcohol in his fur. This was not a new discovery, Bobby had mentioned it weeks ago and the two of them had a running bet on what brand it was. The wager was doomed to remain unresolved. Neither one would dare ask Lester about it, let him know they had the image of him down on his knees, spraying his ridiculous dog. Snowden was in the process of trying to roll up the window when Lester yanked the door away from him, pulled on the fabric above his knees before bending his legs up and inside.

  "Mr. Finley called me, told me what was happening. I was waiting here in the cab, I wouldn't have let it get too far." Lester scratched at Wendell's ass as he talked. Wherever you put your hand on Wendell, he always moved so that it was soon on his ass.

  "If you know what happened, then why'd you just give Horus that money?" Snowden asked.

  "Sometimes you have to throw a dog a bone," Lester told him, falling into a baby voice right after to ask Wendell, "Isn't that right?" repeating this until the dog licked his face in response.

  "Protecting the weak, taking a stand against the odds, that's what Horizon's all about. The congressman would be very proud. So as a reward, I'm giving you a special project from now on. It'll provide you an additional opportunity to learn the business and earn some extra dough," Lester said, Snowden's acceptance of the offer assumed. "Tomorrow, six A.M. Not in front of the office, but at the lodge entrance. This is your special project, so keep this to yourself. And you don't wear your uniform for this job."

  CLEARING OUT

  NOTHING RAGED LIKE a Harlem night. There was no quiet acceptance of the day's end, no dying of streetlight. Through his shades, an orange, hopeless glow landed in strained parallelograms across Snowden's walls and ceiling, keeping his room lit like it was dusk till dawn. Harlem at midnight was louder than some parts of Midtown during the day. Noise as consistent as boisterous, a seamless stream of audio pollution, poor people loud because sound was the only thing they could afford in quantity.

  Snowden had a game. Lying sideways in bed, pillow pulled over the ear exposed upward, midnight hours behind him, the goal of his game was to count ten seconds of silence to fall asleep within. Hours of reaching to three or four before being halted by conversations yelled from one end of the street outside to the other, honking livery cabs too lazy to ring a bell, kids screaming in joy or horror. One, two, three, four, then something. Always something. It was almost magical, how one sound would die down always to be replaced by another, just as piercing, just as inconsiderate.

  Snowden preferred obsessing about the literally disturbing sounds outside his window. If he got angry about them, made them the focus of his frustration, he was less likely to notice the sounds emanating from the apartment below. The vibrations of shrieks that rose through the ceiling, through insulation to floorboards, trailed up the post of Snowden's bed to tremble his mattress in sympathy. The beatings. Lying there, Snowden waited for the next percussion of skin on skin, for it to shut up the yelling or ignite more. Eyes closed, wishing ears had the same option, Snowden's mind could provide information his senses couldn't. From the sound of the hit, Snowden could tell impact location, force, and source. In his mind he could clearly see Jifar, the boy who lived down there, taking the blow. Snowden could differentiate the resonating smack of open hand to the side of the face from the quick thud of a palm thrust to the back of the head, and remember exactly what it felt like to be something small and confused as someone impossibly large and inconceivably hostile assaulted you.

  Worse, the sounds that followed. The father, Baron Anderson, made a habit of singing to his karaoke machine in the shower after most skirmishes, belting out canned tunes with a guilt-free and joyous enthusiasm. Pleased, wailing vocals over music caught and gutted of voice and harmony. Snowden hated Baron Anderson for being tone deaf, felt it was deliberate, felt it was gloating. A list of music Snowden was slowly beginning to detest as much as the man who mangled it: every single track of Marvin Gaye's Forever Yours (despite himself), all Smokey Robinson's post-Miracles creations and even some before that ("People say. . ." People say shut the hell up it's two o'clock in the morning), every top ten hit between 1981 and 1987.

  Snowden awoke at five-thirty A.M. to the sound of crickets. They weren't really there, but with the window closed and rain muting the neighbors outside, his room was quiet enough to hear the sound of home on a summer morning, light chirping of crickets in his mind. After over a month in Harlem, Snowden's Philly seemed in contrast impossibly southern, spacious, slow, and behind him. Out his front door half asleep, his waking mind lost in memory, Snowden nearly tripped over the bundled body lining the top of the stairs in the hallway, clutched desperately at the rail to keep from falling over it, through the wide stairway shaft, and five stories down.

  The memories of a child's screams that had plagued Snowden's dreams were understood as he kneeled next to the little figure, lifted off the cloth at the end he assumed was covering Jifar's head, just like he always did when he found the boy sleeping in the hall.

  "Little man." When Snowden lightly squeezed Jifar's cheek, the boy's eyes began to open, looked up at him blinking, pupils barely lifted from lids. Jifar yawned, the hot smell of morning blowing across Snowden's face.

  "I was camping. You woke me up." Maybe it was the light lisp of his voice that doomed the boy, maybe it was that simple. Maybe the sound reminded the brute who was his father of the wife Snowden deduced had left him far behind. Or maybe Jifar's father was one of those people who didn't need a reason, just enough drink to bring out his character. Maybe he was just bad, like there are some people who are just good in this life.

  "You can't stay out here like this, somebody's going to trip over you and fall down the stairs, break their neck."

  "Somebody did fall once, right before you moved here. The woman who used to live where you do, she jumped right down," Jifar said, staring at the stairs beside him. "She was lonely. And mean."

  "You want to go back downstairs and get back in your bed? He's probably passed out by now." Jifar pulled his blanket over his head again, its cartoon pattern faded and dotted with fabric pills instead of pixels. Snowden looked at his watch, thought of Lester doing the same in front of the office, pulled his keys out and into Jifar's hand.

  "Now listen. These are yours. Anybody gives you trouble, you ever need to
get away, you use these. This apartment is your safe place, OK?" Snowden told him, wishing there was someone he could call instead, wishing that he hadn't been through the foster care ring himself and could believe it was that simple. That this was a world in which you could pick up the phone and then find yourself in a better situation than the one you were already trapped in.

  Jifar glanced down at the keys before pulling them within the blanket without comment. If he'd bothered to shrug, even that message of ambivalence was lost in the folds of the cloth. Lester and Wendell paced in circles in front of the lodge, the man absentminded and heavy footed, the dog intense and intent on finding a square foot of concrete good enough to poop on. The dog was surrounded by young admirers, children in maroon blazers with gray shorts and skirts who called Wendell by name as he ignored them. Lester shooed them off as Snowden approached, and the children shot up the lodge's steps, the last boy making a great effort to close its towering door without slamming it.

  The lodge was also Cyrus Marks's home, in addition to being Lester's and the property the Horizon storefront was connected to, so Lester made sure to get his newspaper down before Wendell's feces landed so as not to leave the slightest stain behind.

  "Who are those kids? Are they visiting from a Catholic school or something?" Snowden asked, but Lester ignored him, focused instead on the dog crap being excreted, carefully bagging and removing it when Wendell was done. The storm grate on Horizon's facade was still down, locked. Compared to the other buildings on the block the lodge was not only much larger but also immaculate, as if some local superstition protected it from vandalism.

  In the truck, Wendell sat on the floor beside the stick shift, staring at Snowden. Snowden couldn't figure out if the dog was looking to be entertained or was considering lunging at him. Lester began making a series of sudden, fast turns that forced Wendell to lie down, his paws outstretched for balance. After ten minutes of driving, Lester had managed to put only six blocks between them and the office, and Snowden was about to ask if they were lost when, before a red light at Adam Clayton Powell, Lester pulled the gear into park.

  "We're being followed." Lester's hand shot in front of Snowden to reach in the glove compartment. Even Wendell was surprised by the action, bouncing to his feet to get away. Removing a heavily rumpled brown paper bag, Lester slammed the little door shut again.

  "Listen, when I jump out this car, you get in the driver's seat. As soon as I get back in, you pull off." Then Lester jumped out, slammed the door behind him.

  Snowden scooted over, looked out the side mirror. Lester was talking to the second car that was stuck on the narrow street behind them, the passenger responding with motions of misunderstanding and denial. Snowden watched as Lester lifted the brown paper bag and pointed it right up against the driver's head.

  There was no job on earth, no dream Snowden could imagine, that would keep him from hitting the gas if he heard a shot ring out. It was a one-lane road, cars parked on both sides, and there was a little Toyota in front of the truck that he'd just have to roll over. Wendell started barking and then Snowden couldn't think straight, told him to shut it, please just shut up. When Snowden looked back in the mirror, Lester was gone. The driver still sat in his white Taurus, wiping the sweat from off the top of his bald pink head, his other hand dialing a cellphone.

  "Drive to 345 East 117th Street. Between Park and Lex." Wendell stopped barking. Snowden jumped, but when he turned and saw Lester sitting at his right he played it off like he was adjusting his seat. Snowden pulled out halfway into the intersection before checking to see if the light was green. In the rearview mirror, the white car screeched into a right and was gone.

  "These real estate agents from downtown, they have no ethics, no morals. He thought he was going to ghost us, cherry pick some new properties for his clients downtown. Just an opportunist. There's no love there." The explanation was unsolicited and pretty unwanted. Snowden's only desire was to drive, to get to fresh air to cancel out Wendell again.

  "My man, you hungry? You need some breakfast before we get busy today?" The affection, concern, Snowden didn't for a moment think Lester was talking to him. Out of the corner of his eye, Snowden was almost sure he saw Wendell nodding yes. Lester reached in the brown paper bag just as Snowden was stopping at the next red light and removed his weapon from it: a shiny glazed cruller, already bitten into. Lester ripped another bite away, pulled the piece out of his mouth and threw it to his dog. Wendell ate it in desperate, choking gulps, immediately begging for more.

  The apartment building was much like Snowden's own, a four-story tenement with kids and debris blowing around outside. From the look of the block, its narrow street of renovated townhouses, the shining doorknobs and newly stripped doors of the recent arrivals, Snowden knew that this was the building they all looked over at and wished they could blow up.

  The only buildings in the world dirtier than New York City tenements didn't count because they were made from dirt itself. Floors, ceilings, and walls encrusted in thick, multilayers of scum, the product of a century of tenants too busy and exhausted to take care of anything beyond their own apartment doors, a testament to supers who were so in name only. That's why this building looked so dramatically different inside, why Snowden's neck rotated from awe. It was simply clean.

  Lester on its pale white marble stairs, hand on the freshly painted rail, turned to see the frozen figure behind him.

  "You look shocked. This is what it's supposed to look like." Lester kept climbing, his voice reverberating in his wake. "This is Horizon property now. You're looking at the new Harlem."

  "What's up with it? We upping the rent?" We. Always use first-person plural when you refer to Horizon, a habit encouraged since training day. For Snowden, a lifelong I, it was more uncomfortable than wearing the banana outfit. It said, Erase the border between your own objectives and that of the company, loose your individuality in the sentiment of the many.

  "Rent stabilized. Even if we wanted to up the rent, we can only do it by the allotted citywide percentage for the year, understand? Even on new tenants, we can only raise it fifteen percent of the existing rent." His suit was the color of dried roses, his shirt and tie variations of lighter petals. Lester wore many suits but was always a champion of scorned colors. "Even if random evictions were legal, we still wouldn't make money off of them. But see, it's not about the money." If they said it wasn't about the money, they were either lying or they wanted something even more valuable from you, Snowden thought. Dreams, time-shares, God, whatever they were pushing, salesmen always inspired in Snowden the same feeling of revulsion.

  Lester stopped in front of a door on the third floor, dropped his tool bag and started unzipping it.

  "You want I should ring the bell?" Snowden put his finger on the black button, looked over in anticipation of clearance.

  "You can if you want to, but he won't be able to hear you." Snowden did, so did so, hearing the stiff chime echo on the other side.

  "Why's that, he deaf?"

  "No. He dead." Lester stood up with a crowbar in his hand, poking its bucktooth into the minute separation between the doorknob and jamb.

  "Oh shit. I'm sorry." Snowden heard himself and immediately wondered who he was apologizing to.

  "Don't be. He was an asshole. He wasn't supposed to change the locks," Lester strained as he leaned into the metal. The sound of his actions and words echoed from the tin ceiling to the marble floors around them.

  Snowden took hold of the middle of the crowbar, leaned his own weight into it as well. The wood around the lock began to splinter along with the doorframe it was attached to. Before they could get theirs open, another door unlocked and opened three yards to the right of them. The head was so close to the knob, Snowden thought at first the person was elderly, but when a voice called behind her, a moment of distraction let the door drift inches farther. Though a child, the first stages of puberty had already begun elongating her legs out of proportion with the rest of
her body, the man's T-shirt that already hung far above her knees would clearly cease to serve as a nightgown by the following summer. Her braids were the long elaborate strands of a woman, but the yarn woven in, its pink and primary colors, was more representative of the girl who wore them. Lester said, "Horizon Property Management, nothing to worry about," but the girl was already closing the door, disappointed by the sight of them.

  Snowden felt weird being in the dead guy's apartment, guilty for thinking of him as just that, "the dead guy." These are the dead guy's condoms on the coffee table, note the deceased's optimism. This is the dead guy's remote control, its batteries would outlive their owner. This thing they were both sitting on, this was the dead guy's couch.

  "The deal is, a lot of people die in Harlem." Lester removed his Cigarillos tin from inside his breast pocket, lit one. His cigarillos lasted longer than regular cigarettes, stunk worse than regular cigars. "A lot of people die everywhere - everyone dies, to be truthful - but when they die in Harlem, in a Horizon property, we have to clean up afterwards. We got a license with the City of New York Sanitation Department, a special-use permit for the industrial cleaners you can't get over the counter."

  "Is the dead guy in the apartment? Is that what you're going to tell me?" Snowden felt weak, not for what he just asked but for the way Lester laughed at him.

  "Relax, this is an easy one just to get you started. He didn't die in here. It's just, this is your special project with Horizon. You'll be paid bonus money for these hours, since Tuesday's your day off. There's a lot of older folks in Harlem, a lot of people living risky lives, we get jobs like this pretty regularly."

  "I can handle it." Snowden nailed the point home with nods.

  "Good. Thing is, this has also got to be low profile. We have all these people coming back to Harlem now, real estate market booming, vibrant, but it's fragile, see? A lot of it's PR, public perception. Death, that's not something people want to hear about. Especially people looking for a place to live during a housing crunch. Who wants to know they're moving into the home of someone that just kicked it?"