Hunting in Harlem

by Mat Johnson

"I'm not some violent beast, you can see that. I'm not the criminal type in the slightest. There was nothing I did I wasn't forced to. I'm just another victim, like you. Put my trust in him, look where it got me. You really want your freedom? I do too. I need a man on the inside of his operation, you need a man on the outside who can make things happen. Put that gun down and let's talk. Together, we're going to make this happen. You and me, we're the same man."

  Snowden was about to say yes yes yes when the door in the hall opened behind him and in came, connected by their shoulders, the three other men. Snowden didn't know he had stopped pointing the gun till the disturbance shot it back up again. His fear convinced him he would see guns pointed directly back at his own, but not even their eyes were on him. The two men on the sides were too busy trying to carry the unconscious one in between them. The man's head hung limply on his own shoulder. There was blood splattered across all three of them, but the most was on the one in the middle, increasing in density the higher Snowden looked on him. The bloody man's face looked like someone had tried, rather successfully, to open it with a rusty can opener. An animal, was all Snowden could think. The only thing that could mutilate a man's face like that was an animal. Even if it was Homo sapiens it was nothing more than an animal. What was not ripped was so swollen that it took Snowden a moment to recognize that it was Horus he was looking at.

  "OK boss, you win. This nigger ain't saying shit so we'll kill him," the beast to the left of Horus said.

  When Snowden looked back to the kitchen, Parson Boone had scurried across to the far counter, gotten his paws on a gun from the cudery drawer, and was about to turn around with it. Snowden caught him first in his shoulder and then directly in the middle of his throat when the force of the first shot snapped him back again. Spinning around, Snowden saw that Boone's brutes had finally deemed to notice him. Horus flopped hard to the floor. Hostages, you canjust tie and leave them here, Snowden's mind was already bargaining, but both reached behind their backs for their weapons simultaneously and Snowden was back to shooting, his will to live directing him. Aiming the thing as it bounced in his hand turned out to be harder than he'd imagined, but Snowden kept pulling the trigger, anyway. That Horus was already on the ground was the only thing that saved him from the fate of his captors.

  Horus was so damn heavy that Snowden kept checking his pulse, half hoping the he was dead so he could drop him. If there was anybody downstairs when the shooting started, they were gone now, but Snowden didn't put the gun down until they were at the front door and, despite Snowden's screaming, Horus refused to wake up and open it. The green van was down the block just like Lester said it would be, but the tires were slashed and the back window was broken. His spine feeling like it could snap like a pencil, Snowden ran with the weight of Horus folded over him, dropping him against a bodega grate before running out onto the street and praying for headlights. A hack, a hack, my kingdom for a hack, yet when one finally appeared it only slowed down long enough to see Horus's blood and Snowden's hooded face before peeling off again. From the sidewalk came moans from the fallen brute, so Snowden yelled, "Shut the hell up, you're not helping."

  The situation had started to gain comic momentum when the #3 bus came down the street towards them. Who am I to choose? Snowden asked himself, and then ran back to get his compatriot. It actually stopped. The driver actually waited for Snowden to drag Horus on board, he even dropped the hydraulic lift a bit to help them climb up. As they started moving, Snowden dug through Horus's pockets for the change that would save them. That's what it took to wake Horus up. "Cheap bastard," Snowden cursed at him.

  Snowden had always heard that New Yorkers never pay attention to anything, that no one will look up to stare at even the most extreme irregularity. This rumor was entirely untrue, spread by someone with a fairly rigid idea of normalcy. You take a guy in an extremely dirty ninja outfit two sizes too small for him, add a barely conscious man whose face is bleeding so much you can't differentiate the skin from the meat, stick them both on a downtown bus at half past three in the morning, you'll see people staring. Staring shamelessly. Snowden stared back at them, refusing to take off his mask till after they got off at 125th Street. What the hell were they looking at in the first place? Had they no concept of the creatures these men had just rid the world of? Who were they, to look at these men like that? What kind of people rode a bus through Harlem at three-thirty in the morning, anyway? Snowden wanted to know. He and Horus were not the problem elements on the bus, most certainly. Snowden looked around from under his black hood, and he could identify the people who needed to go immediately. "Her, him, and him," he said out loud to no one. It was so obvious. All you had to do was knock them off and then their little mobile community would be heaven.

  FICTION OR NON

  THE SAD TRUTH was that the little runts couldn't write worth a dime, let alone the thirty-five cents an issue they were charging. Sitting behind the fortress of her large wooden desk, face to face with them at their little plastic ones, Piper looked out and silendy resented them for their illegible prose, their erroneous grammar, the fact that they seemed to find it impossible to sit still for more than two minutes or keep from yawning at least long enough for her to turn to the blackboard. Piper kept saying to herself, Give them a break, they're sojoung, and as guilty penance even made a rare call to Abigail Goines, put up with several reminders of why she rarely called to get her box of childhood writing samples sent down express to her. A bad idea, it turned out. For one thing, asking her mother to go into the attic for one box started the discussion about all of the others Piper had quietly decide to leave there, but more disturbing was the quality of her own adolescent clippings. When Piper was eleven years old she was writing comparative essays on the difference among private, public, and home school education, pondering the larger sociological significance of the Emmanuel Lewis—Gary Coleman miniaturized Negro craze, and experimenting with present-tense second-person-singular in her review of the double-loop roller coaster at Great Adventure ("You feel the bar press down upon your lap cold and hard. As your car goes into free fall your grip on that metal is colder and harder because you know no matter how loud you yell no parent nor teacher can save you."). Now, as a teacher herself these decades later, the most impressive submission Piper Goines had received from her class was "That X-Men Cartoon Isn't Real," which distinguished itself not by its prose, or even by managing to spell the majority of its words correcdy (it didn't), but for the utterly original proof on which it based its thesis: the fact that there were discrepancies in character age, team composition, and story line between the cartoon and the comic book version, which the author took as the definitive, factual text.

  At first, Piper was convinced she'd been stuck with the "special" class, that the hidden clause in Marks's offer was that she spend the year baby-sitting the runts of the Little Leader litter. After a while, though, their editor realized they were too well behaved for that group, and the ones who did act a fool were quickly removed. An advocate of not naming names, Piper hadn't even reported the boy who'd decided it was appropriate to use the class tape recorder to preserve a repetitive, derivative string of expletives for posterity, yet the boy, like all the other discipline problems Piper had encountered over the weeks, never appeared for class again. When asked where their housemates had disappeared to, her remaining students explained that the bad kids had to go out on the street and sell candy bars to raise money. Having read their work, Piper thought that was probably a better career path for them, anyway. Regardless of how many disappeared, the class continued to grow. Piper was sure there'd only been a little more than a dozen when she started.

  They were good kids, for kids, Piper came to realize. They were just poorly educated and talendess, even for nine- to twelve-year-olds. Though, to be fair, the last bit was hard to say, for most lacked the basic skills necessary for style, although Piper still had her suspicions. After reading their papers, after all her self-pity that her lot had been lin
ked by fate to their own had subsided, Piper cursed the New York City public school system for failing them. It was a large, slow-moving target and therefore should have been perfect for assault, but Piper found it lacking in its ability to carry the full burden for her writers' inadequacies. There were parents to be blamed. It was inevitable. Regardless of whatever tragedy had created these orphans, those parents dead or missing could not avoid responsibility for much of it. Even destitute, Abigail Goines would never have let her daughters wallow in ignorance. Of course, Abigail Goines was the product of middle-class education and values and wasn't faced with the challenge of breaking free from poverty and ignorance in the first place.

  In Abigail Goines's place, these kids had Horizon Property Management, and they didn't even know how lucky they were. Scholarships, private tutoring, one of the wanna-be Eliza Doolittles even wrote a somewhat legible piece mentioning a proper speech and manners course. Their misfortune was their greatest asset. That's how Piper's book would start, the one she sat in class and imagined herself writing on the Horizon Little Leaders League after she seized control of the New Holland Herald. Piper would donate her advance back into the program, use the publicity tour to cross promote the Herald, so everyone's interest would be served. Young, innocent, harmless black orphans saved from the ghetto during their darkest hour, led by a young, attractive, affluent person from the suburbs who believed in them so that they could believe in themselves. Hollywood put a movie out like this every four years, so this would be the next one. A descendant of Lassie would be bred to fill the role of that mutt that insisted on lying in a long smelly pile by the front door every class. Of course, they would insist on putting a Caucasian savior in the "Piper" role, so Piper'd put a racial bonus clause in the contract as a trap for them.

  Piper was planning a speaking tour in her head when one of the boys in the back raised his little suited arm, tie hanging out like a lascivious tongue on the desk before him, and yelled, "Yo! It been time to go!" All the other children turned to look at him, shaking their heads. Piper took a good long look at him too, figuring she'd never see him again, then looked around the room to try and guess which snitch would rat him out first.

  Bag packed, the anticipated Chinese take-out entree already haunting her mouth, Piper turned back to the room to see that one seat had not been emptied. The dog, awakened by the commotion, sat proudly before this little boy. The Harlem Outcry's star political cartoonist, who didn't know a thing about politics but whom Piper had to admit was really good at drawing monsters and superheroes, for his age group. He was a true artist, effete and everything.

  "Look, you want to do an illustration for the X-Men story, that's fine. Copyrightwise, I'm still saying it's not legal, but I doubt those corporate bastards would have the heart to sue you, so what the hell, go for it."

  "Cool!" the boy said, but that's all he did. He wasn't moving.

  "Good-bye," Piper hinted.

  "Good-bye," the boy mimicked, hand running down the dog's head as they both stared intently back at her.

  Piper flopped her bag back on the desk, located her seating chart. One thing she'd already learned about the little urchins is that they didn't respond well to "Hey kid."

  "It's Jifar, right?" Piper asked. The boy smiled politely back at her. "So what do you want? Why are you just sitting there looking at me like that?"

  "We're supposed to. We're supposed to watch out for you, make sure you're OK," Jifar said. He seemed very proud of his duty.

  "We?" Piper began asking, but Jifar nodded and looked conspiratorially to the dog and Piper lost all motivation to pursue that line of questioning. "Why don't you just go now, OK? I'm doing just fine, thanks for your concern, but I got my real job to get back to."

  "I'm sorry, I can't. I promised. I told Mr. Snowden I'd watch out for you, so please let me, OK?"

  "Oh, here we go. That's just great. Look, you tell Snowden from me that I can watch my own back, OK? You tell him that, and then you kick him, right in the shins."

  "What are shins?"

  "Nothing, I was just joking. Don't worry about him, I'll take care of it. You just work on the art. You play your cards right and I'll have you syndicated before puberty."

  When Piper returned to her block that night she saw a man trying to shove a package under her front door. Piper wasn't prepared for the sight but didn't need to be. It was who it was that caught her so off guard, and more than that how excited and nervous she felt just seeing him there. Robert M. Finley didn't even notice her coming. Piper was already at the bottom of the stoop when he saw her between his legs, stood upright, then pulled his pants from were they were lagging.

  "You're late. More than two months late, actually," Piper managed. She wished she was darker. She wished that she had enough melanin to inure her from obvious blushing forever. Piper was fairly sure certain she wasn't blushing just at the sight of him, but simply by questioning if she was blushing or not was enough to increase the chances she was exponentially.

  "Hey, hi, I'm here to . . . I mean I wanted to ask you if I could get the master key to the Harlem Outcry news boxes because I have a bunch of Great Works I need to give away." He wasn't expecting her or he was even more awkward than she'd remembered. "It's just, you know, I did call that morning to cancel," Bobby said. "I had a lot going on in my life at that moment. I'm here now, so can I get that key?"

  "Pick it up in the office. What's that?" Piper poked the air toward the large envelope jammed a third of the way under her front door.

  "Nothing."

  "Not nothing. Something. What is it?"

  "I brought you a gift." Robert M. Finley turned again to the package, spent an equal amount of energy trying to pull it back out again. "Please, take this, read this. My number's on the last page. When you get to it, call me."

  The envelope pushed into her hand had to weigh five pounds. Before Piper could even manage a firm grip, Bobby was past her, pausing only to give her cheek the quickest peck it had ever received before moving on.

  "Wait! What is this? This is the book you were telling me about, isn't it? The Tome, right?"

  "No, this is an entirely new one. This book I wrote for you." The last sentence Robert M. Finley delivered more to the steps than the woman standing on them.

  "Oh my God, I think that is about the sweetest thing anybody's done for me in I don't know how long. Wow. I've never been in a book's acknowledgments, let alone dedication."

  "No, you don't understand. Not the dedication, the whole book. Read it, call me so we can talk. Please, if you still want to," he said, nodding at the manuscript in her hand.

  "I don't understand. Come on, you're coming inside. You're already here, we can talk now. We'll order food. I'm paying." Piper reached in her pocket and pulled out a rumpled twenty as proof of this statement.

  "No," Bobby said to her, but he wasn't walking away, either.

  "Well, why the hell not?" Piper wanted to know.

  "Really, I got a lot to do. If I'm going to get rid of these extra copies of The Great Work, it's going to take me all night, even if I can get Lester to let me use the moving truck and Snowden to help." Piper just stared at him, lips sucked up into a disdainful ball on the side of her face, so Bobby kept talking. "I mean, I own 2,871 copies of it," Bobby confessed. He couldn't figure out if Piper's look of incredulity was because of the amount or his entire excuse in the first place, so he started up yet again. "OK, fine, I have to go because I know I'm a socially awkward person, and I had one of the best, most fulfilling conversations of my life at the Horizon Ball and based on past experience I'm pretty sure if I stay here much longer I'm going to ruin any chance with you I might have. Because you make me even more nervous than usual. Because I find your beauty, in every sense of that word, literally stunning. If I could but beseech fate to be so generous as to offer me the opportunity to build a love with you, then that amour would resound with the - "

  "Jesus Christ, are you reading off a cue card?" Piper uttered in disbeli
ef. Bobby looked even more shocked to see it in his hand than she did, despite the fact that he'd been staring down at it during his entire monologue.

  "Let me see that!" Piper demanded, started stepping down after him. Bobby backed up, ripping it into desperate little pieces as he went.

  "Look, I'm sorry, I was supposed to memorize that. That's what I'm saying, I'm nervous talking to you. When I write something out, I can reread it, edit it, make sure it's exactly what I want to say. Look, just read the book, OK? It's about us. I mean, it's about what we could be. It starts right now, with me sticking this novel under your door, and follows our relationship over the next six decades. It's called The Orphean Daze. It's a love story . . . See, I told you I shouldn't be talking before you read it! I can see you getting creeped out already!"

  "Oh my God, that's so not true, I'm not creeped out at all! I'm just . . . looking forward to reading it," Piper said. She was lying about the first sentence, underplaying the second. Front door locked carefully behind her, Piper wasn't even done climbing the stairs before she was on to the second page.

  Snowden was very happy in his closet. Happier than he'd been in years. The closet was great because there was only one door and no windows so nobody could sneak up on you, and it was too small for anyone to be hiding in there with you as well. The closet was great if somebody did break in your apartment in the middle of the night because they'd just think the place was empty, and even if they did open the closet door, if you went to sleep underneath a pile of dirty clothes like Snowden did they would never find you. In the closet, when you turned out the lights, you were invisible.

  Snowden had his phone in there, a couple of bags of flavored tortillas, and boxes of snack cakes; it was great. He had eleven different brands of cigarettes and eleven different cigarette lighters he'd assigned to them with careful consideration. He had a couple of books he'd been meaning to read for years and was at around page 11 in all of them, he had an AM radio with only one earphone so he could find out the time and weather and never drop his guard. He had caller ID so he knew who was calling before he picked up, before the voice said, "Cedric Snowden, this is Congressman Marks."