Hunting in Harlem

by Mat Johnson

  "To renewal!" Lester toasted, finally lifting his glass and Snow­den's hopes, then dropping both back down again, nary the drop of whiskey removed. In disbelief and defiance, Snowden swallowed another double of the same, determined to make himself useless if no alternative presented itself.

  "Renewal has to be the most beautiful, the most unexpected thing life has to offer. Things fall into ruin and you think, That's it, it's over. But you hold on long enough and you see that even the worst things fall apart, eventually. This joint we're sitting in, it was closed till last summer. Now look at it. See that mirror behind the bar?"

  Snowden was very familiar with the mirror behind the bar. Snowden had been waving a twenty at it for nearly five minutes now in the hopes Maisy would recognize the universal symbol and send replacements for the fallen soldiers standing hollow on the table before him.

  "It's hung up there sixty years, since when Billie Holiday played here on the regular. Had a nicotine film on it a centimeter thick; you could barely see through it before they renovated. Had to use razor blades to get it off. Now look at it. So clear you can see the future in it if you look hard enough."

  Snowden was rescued. More for the batde. He tried to order reinforcements for his ally, but Lester declined, asked for a glass of water instead since the pretzels made him thirsty. Maisy didn't smile this time and Snowden was immediately awash in regret that he'd been caught registering her condition the visit before. In response, his tip was far, far more than her service merited and still failed to emit more than the rumor of a grin in response. Same drink still full in one hand, Lester pointed toward her receding presence before reaching for his snack.

  "Take Maisy. Renewal, that's what she needs. Breaks your heart, doesn't it, seeing decent, polite folk like her walking around like that? It's an affront. Can you believe she's homeless?"

  Snowden looked over at the woman making change at the register behind the bar, got excited, "See, that's it! That's where we got to put our energy tonight! We got to hook her up with a place to live. She's decent, you just said, right? She got a job. Right now, couple more drinks, that's what we need to get into tonight."

  "Oh no, you misunderstand me. She has a lease. She has a Horizon lease, a lovely fifth-floor two-bedroom with original tile in the bathroom - I cleaned the grout myself. But two weeks ago, I was dropping off some late tenant's clothes at the women's shelter and there she is, Maisy Williams who works at the Lenox Lounge, walking past the lobby to do her laundry in the basement, looking even worse than she does now if you can believe it. See, Maisy has a nigger. He moved in with her this year — so far she's visited the shelter three times since. Three times, and once the year before. Always the same thing. Comes in beat the hell up, heals, goes home, doesn't press charges. At this point, she wants to kick him out but won't because she thinks he'll kill her. He will, of course, if it continues on this tangent."

  "She told you all that?" Snowden asked.

  "No, no, decent folk like Maisy don't go spreading their pain like that, man. They know it's wrong, see? Not only would they not perpetrate insanity like that, they're ashamed of even being a victim to that mess. The social worker who takes the donations from Horizon told me this info - he wanted to know if I could evict the bastard. See, this nigger, he's got no job, he's just sitting up in her apartment all day, smoking weed and playing video games on her television. Orders pizzas every night, the exact same time too during the opening montage of the Star Trek reruns on Channel Nine. This bully, he even has whores over after that, calls them out the phone book and screws them right there on her bed, doesn't even change the sheets before he passes out."

  Snowden collapsed further with every additional detail offered. He took care to swallow the remainders of every bottle before him before breaking the silence.

  "Lester, how the hell do you know all that?"

  "The apartment's on the top floor. The windows are tall, nearly all the way to the ceiling. If you go on the roof, lean over the edge carefully, you can look down into the rooms through the space above the curtains. You'll see, we're going there now," Lester said, slapping a hand on one of Snowden's near vertical shoulders. Lester looked at his other hand, shrugged before sheepishly pushing his drink across the table. "You want to finish this? At six bucks a glass, I just hate wasting."

  Nine streets south and half an avenue over, it was raining. Sloppy, uneven precipitation that left Snowden with the feeling that the universe was giving up just like he was, that it wasn't even bothering to perform consistent weather anymore. Lester, several steps ahead since they left the bar, finally paused to aim his watch at the light from the street lamp. Walking ahead even faster, Lester stopped farther down the block at the meager shelter of an open pay phone.

  "I can't be out in this climate. For real, I get pneumonia easy," Snowden said when he reached him. From his black raincoat, Lester pulled a leather organizer, located a folded piece a paper that he then pressed into the closest of Snowden's limp and swaying hands. By the time Snowden pulled it up the page was already darkening and distorting from the water on his cold, rain-pickled fingers.

  "What am I supposed to do with this?"

  "What in God's name do you think you're supposed to do with it? Just stop the bitchy moron act, OK, Snowden? It's not cute. Read it back to me," Lester snapped. This was Lester nervous. Spend enough time with someone, you get to see his interpretation of all the standard emotions. Snowden could think of several common ones he hoped he'd never see Lester demonstrate.

  " 'Nine-one-one. Shit, you got to come - '"

  "Oh bullshit, Snowden, that first part's the freaking telephone number. Tell me you did not know that. The sentence, just read the sentence. And act it this time. It has to sound completely real, understand me? They tape emergency calls, they'll review it later, so do it right."

  Snowden closed his eyes, put his head down for what he hoped was a demonstratively reverential time before announcing his intention to read again with a long sigh. " 'Shit, you got to come quick. There's someone shooting in this apartment. There's screaming, there's all this shooting and shit you got to send someone quick. It's 425 West 116th Street, off Adam Clayton Powell. It's apartment 5E, that's 5E, I could hear the kids screaming right through the door! Repeat facts as necessary! Hang up!'"

  "Jesus, you're not even joking, are you?"

  "Look man, what do you want from me? It's cold, OK? It's raining, for chrissakes. I haven't even eaten dinner. And I didn't write this thing, did I? Like, maybe you should have given it to me earlier, huh? Don't blame me for that shit."

  In response to Snowden's whines, Lester's arm swung back and Snowden prepared to be slapped, but Lester only pulled something from out his jacket, stepped within inches from him. The silent prayer, Dear God, don't try and kiss me again, was answered when instead Lester stuck the barrel of his snub-nose under Snowden's jaw, the rest of the gun hidden in his raincoat's cuff. "Turn around and dial the number." The metal reached Snowden's throat just as the operator's voice reached his ears. Snowden's tongue ran, from one to the other. When he was done, Lester put the gun back in his shoulder holster, hugged him. "That was . . . inspired. You are a natural. I mean that," Lester whispered into his ear as he was pulling away. Then he hugged him again, gripping tighter.

  The building was only a hundred yards away and a left turn at the corner. Lester hopped up the steps in perfect peppy rhythm, past the fifth floor where he pointed at an apartment door without breaking stride. The door to the roof was open by the time Snowden caught up to him, his own breath and heartbeat loud, their rhythms clashing against each other. It was raining harder. Water filled abandoned buckets of tar and made the loose shingles slip from under the feet when walked on. Lester went to the ledge at the rear of the building, leaned over like he could break the laws of gravity as easily as he did so many other ones. Seeing something he liked, he turned around and gave two thumbs-ups before walking back again.

  "I'm really afraid of heights," Sno
wden told him when he got closer. Lester grinned, nodded, pulled the gun from his holster and stuck it sideways in Snowden's hand.

  "Only natural, nothing to be ashamed of. Biological, I think. Just takes practice," Lester assured him. The gun had felt cold on his neck, but in Snowden's hand it felt hot, heavy. It made him want to shoot it. He could easily shoot Lester. The thought was comforting, that he was in control of his destiny after all because he could shoot Lester. It was just that after that he would have to shoot Marks too, and then things got a lot messier. There were all the children. There was also of course the fact that Snowden didn't think he was capable of shooting anyone, or at least in any place other than a limb or foot.

  Lester wrapped his arm around Snowden and with gentle assurances pulled him to the back ledge, pushing him down into a squat once they got there. It felt good to Snowden to sit down. Even in the rain, even with the cold water finding its way quickly to the more intimate regions of his ass, it felt good, or at least better. They both sat leaning against the little brick wall just tall enough to give their lower backs support. Lester slapped his own bent knee, then Snowden's.

  "Now the fun part. I'm going to ask you to turn around, kneel, then bend over the roof's ledge and look in the bastard's window. The trick is, once you're about to go over the edge you close your eyes. Otherwise you get nauseous. The apartment window's only a foot below the level we're sitting on. The trick is you got to lean as far forward as you can, OK? And bend your head down as far as it'll go. Once you get into position, then open your eyes, not before. Trust me, you'll feel much better if you do it that way."

  "Lester, I get on my knees and lean forward as far as I can, I'll fall off the side of the building," Snowden said and immediately regretted it. Part of it was that he worried he had insulted the Chupacabra, part of it was he didn't want to give him any more ideas. "Why don't we just go to the back fire escape, peek in that way."

  "Too risky, we could be seen. Besides, it's raining and you could slip on the wet metal and break your neck. Don't worry, silly, I'll be sitting on your legs. You're lucky, when it was just me I had to tie myself with climbing rope back to that vent. Come on, move it, they're going to be here soon."

  "Who'll be here?"

  "One thing at a time, I'll tell you in a minute. Hurry."

  Snowden got on his knees. This was an appropriate position, because Snowden was praying, and since in moments of normalcy he professed not to believe in God, Snowden was praying really hard to compensate. Lester sat on his legs. The man's ass was sharp and bony and underneath it Snowden's shins were shredded into the gravel lining the roof. As Lester began pushing Snowden's shoulders forward over the edge, the pain was the only thing to hold on to.

  "Pretend you're flying." Snowden tried, but it didn't work, so instead, hands gripping the rail so hard flecks of mortar fell five stories down like industrial dandruff, he tried for the less ambitious goal of pretending he couldn't fall.

  When Snowden opened his eyes again, he realized he was crying. Despite that, he could clearly see the solidified air bubbles in the bricks only inches away. A glance up (or down) and there was the room and guy in question, Snowden's view was inverted but otherwise lucent and unobstructed. There was a knocking at the base of his spine.

  "What's he doing?" Snowden heard lightly behind him. He was sitting and watching the television, as foretold. He was a moron. It was evident to Snowden on first glance, even from looking upside down in the rain twenty feet away through the window. There was a reason for the descriptor slack jaw. There were simple etymologies for the words lumbering and blockhead, staring at this subject's profile, Snowden was struck with the notion that it had been carved from an uprooted stump with a butter knife. There was a Wednesday class, during the history portion months before, when Lester made mention of the days when white would-be scientists would stroll 135th Street trying to measure black people's skulls to prove the race's mental inferiority. Looking at the mug on the guy through the window, Snowden - so much blood rushing to his head he could smell it - wondered if anyone had ever tried to measure intelligence via facial expressions as well. It seemed so obvious an indicator to him, hanging there watching the look on this guy's face as he sat inches away from the television scooping handfuls of cereal from out of the box and shoving what he could fit into his mouth, letting the remainder fall to the floor in front of him.

  "Now that it's aimed right at me, I have to say this: You've got a really lovely derriere," Lester told him.

  "What?" Snowden started squirming, trying to pull himself up again. Lester laughed, slapped him lightly on the region in question.

  "Oh come on, just a joke. Just a bit of humor to lighten the situation."

  Maybe he just wants me to hang here, Snowden assured himself. Maybe it was as simple as making a phone call and whatever the Chupacabra wants to happen was put in motion and nothing more will be asked. Snowden decided that could be true, chose to ignore the gun that had become a part of his hand. There was an optimist deep inside Snowden. No one could be more surprised than Snowden himself, but there was an optimist deep inside him, hidden in some dark, warm, waterproof crevice. As Lester tugged on his back and Snowden began pulling himself back up, this internal optimist decided to make its voice heard. I've been in worse situations than this one, most definitely. See, it's over, I didn't fall. I haven't done anything really serious. I'm an innocent, it's true. I don't even know what's going on.

  "Let me tell you what's going on," Lester whispered as soon as Snowden'd risen all the way back up. "In a minute the cops will be here, coming to this apartment, guns drawn. Mr. Trevor Barber down there goes to open the door thinking it's his pizza fix and as he does the cops get nervous and shoot him. End of story. We go back to the bar. I'll buy this time."

  Snowden thought about the scheme for a moment, particularly its lack of demanded action and the fact that it was probably impossible to calculate the improbability of it unfolding successfully without a very large military grade computer, and offered Lester his unbounded enthusiasm and admiration for its construction.

  "Aren't you going to ask why they're going to shoot him?" Lester wondered.

  "No, no, I like the plan just the way it is, no need to question it. I mean, I'm sure the police officers have their own personal reasons, but why pry?" Snowden told him.

  "Because as he goes to the door, you're going to shoot a hole through it. Don't worry, I knocked out the lightbulbs in the hallway and he keeps the light in the living room on, so when the officers hear the shot and see the hole glaring through the door, they'll get the picture."

  Snowden got the picture too. The picture was that there was no way he was going to shoot the gun as suggested, so he began immediately setting up his excuse. "Hey man, I've never even shot a gun before. I'm nervous. What if I shoot him by mistake?"

  "That's fine, the bullet should pass right through him and still do the job. The way his body should look at the end of this, no coroner will have reason to question it."

  "But the cops, man. It ain't right, setting up the people sworn to protect this place. That's not the Horizon way." Snowden was suddenly excited by the discovery of a rational argument by which the irrational might be swayed. "That ain't right! I mean, did you even check this over with Congressman Marks. Congressman Marks has friends in the department."

  "And those friends have enemies, and that's who's scheduled to show up tonight. Now be a good boy and bend over."

  Snowden hung upside down over the edge of the building for six minutes, his sinuses taut and painful, his back aching and promising great reprisals if he ever tried to straighten out again. He knew six minutes had gone by because at the top of every one Lester complained about police tardiness, that someone should be there by now.

  "This is deplorable. Really, what if an innocent really was being shot at? You think he'd have to wait this long on the Upper East Side?"

  Lester was so busy complaining he didn't hear it when the downstair
s door buzzer was finally rung. The dunce did. Snowden watched Barber rise from the couch holding his wallet, walking slowly backward so his eyes never had to leave the television screen, buzzing them in without even checking the intercom.

  "Really, Snowden, do you think? Because I've never lived on the Upper East Side. What was that?" Lester asked. That was a bit of bad luck, because just as Snowden had begun to hope that the moron had his TV so loud that the police would come and go without Lester's knowledge, a moment's pause in the starship action gave the apartment's doorbell silence in which to assert itself.

  "This is it, wait till he gets right in front of the door," the voice said from above Snowden. As if he could see the moment the subject stepped into the proposed line of fire, when the guy did Lester continued with, "Shoot it."

  Snowden wanted to shoot himself. The guy he was now pointing the gun at, he only had one dirty white sock on. From behind, the brown crack of his ass peeked through his drooping sweatpants belligerently, threatening to go lunar with every step. It was a sad life he was watching, and it made his life seem that much sadder that this boar was worth risking it for. "The trigger, pull it or I'm dropping you!" Lester punched Snowden in the ass. Trevor Barber paused a yard from the door, stretched his head so far back Snowden became afraid he'd see him, and over top of the sound of screaming Klingon the man produced a fart so momentous even Lester heard it. Vicious abuser of the weak, unrepentant parasite of the downtrodden, now also freakishly flatulent: Snowden suddenly wanted to kill him. Even so, it wasn't until he could feel Lester starting to let go of his legs that Snowden fired the gun, and even then he waited until the moment the bastard got his door open and the cops had a chance to see him clearly.

  Snowden aimed at the patch of dried dirt by the trash cans far below on the ground. He saw the cloud of dust when the bullet hit, then heard the echoes as the sound bounced off the backs of so many tenement walls. Then Snowden realized it wasn't echoes, and that was when he looked back in the window and saw Trevor Barber dancing, except that that wasn't dancing. That was getting shot. That was glass breaking on the back windows. That whining was the sound of bullets shooting by. That hot rain pouring onto Snowden's face was him peeing himself.