Mat Johnson - Hunting in Harlem

Snowden did a U-turn and blew off his quest right there. It took an hour underneath the fluorescent lights of the nearest McDonald's to convince him that he had returned to the rational world once more.

It turned out, Harlem was a ghetto. It turned out, Harlem was loud and overcrowded and there was a lot of trash on the ground. That Harlem fit into this category should not have been a surprise, as Harlem was perhaps the most romanticized ghetto in the world, the endless tour buses packed with European and Asian voyeurs that rattled brownstone windows every Sunday attested to that fact. Nor should the specifics of ghetto life have been alien to Snowden either, as he had grown up in an environment that fit firmly within that category. What Snowden realized, as he walked bemused down Lenox, was that Harlem was not his ghetto. Snowden looked at the faces flooding by and knew none of them, felt no attachment beyond one of basic humanity. This city was naked to him, stripped of personal attachment and familiarity. Without the haze of anecdotal past affecting his vision, Snowden saw chaos: buildings and people crushed together and crumbling from lack of air, poverty and the destruction of the soul it perpetrates. Snowden knew this was only a larger-scale version of the place he grew up in; it angered him that this should be the world he was saddled to, so he escaped back to his shelter. Got into bed and took Bo Shareef's vision of Harlem with him. It was a safe one, orderly, trapped in ink and constructed from accepted ideas and understandings. It had a pretty lady in it, earnest people, jazz. The only conflicts were caused by money, sex, and other people's racism.

The best thing about a Bo Shareef novel was that you knew what to expect from it.

"Arson, in the second degree," Bobby confessed.

"First-degree manslaughter," Snowden offered.

"One count of attempted homicide. Three counts of first-degree manslaughter, sentences served simultaneously. Two counts assault with a deadly weapon, and a couple of them racketeering charges — but that was just some tic-tac shit thrown in because of my gang affiliation," Horus assured. "They even tried to hit me with vehicular homicide, but it didn't stick since the car wasn't moving."

The other two hadn't realized it was a competition, but Horus's voice said it was and that they had lost. The three recruits of the Second Chance Program were waiting at the back doors of PS. 832 as instructed, their formal induction into the Horizon Realty fold only moments away. The stoop smelled of malt liquor and urine, its corners filled with leaves and windblown trash.

"Arson. Don't you know better than to light shit on fire?" Horus laughed in gasping barks, holding his stomach tenderly like the sound hurt to make it. "What happened, little man, you get busted playing flame thrower with your mamma's hairspray?"

"He doesn't have to tell you nothing." Snowden meant this statement as a warning, a defiant stance, but after staring into Horus's dull eyes and smelling his cheap cologne like it was menace, the words came out as a polite offering of minor information. Even still, Snowden looked at the way Horus was looking back at him, then quickly checked his watch to make sure it wouldn't be long before Lester would come to the rescue.

"No, no, really, I don't mind," Bobby interrupted. "I don't mind at all. It's good to get these things out in the open — identifying the problem makes it that much more avoidable, don't you agree? Well, my mom's boyfriend, I burned his house down. The whole thing. Actually, I burned down his house, and I burned down his garage, and also his car, which all should probably count separately since the garage was detached and the car was parked three blocks away at the time. He did something that upset me, not that that's an excuse though. Neither he nor my mother speaks to me now, but that's penance, right? Penance is important," Bobby offered, eyebrows raised and head bobbing like it was a novelty they should try.

"What'd you do hard man? What'd they stick on your ass?" Horus didn't ask Snowden the question, he pushed it into him, shooting his thick arm forward and slamming his open palm into Snowden's shoulder. Caught off guard, Snowden fought to keep his body rigid and balanced, worked even harder to make this look like no struggle at all.

"I killed a man," Snowden said back to him. It sounded hard. It was supposed to sound hard. Snowden didn't say it was his father, that it was a mistake, or that it was one punch and the man's drunken fall had been more responsible for the hemorrhage than his son's initial action. Immediately overwhelmed by the guilt of act and omission, Snowden turned directly to Bobby and said in a different tone, "It was an accident."

"That's good when they can't prove it was premeditated or nothing," Horus mused behind him. "That's what got me out early. There was four of them and just me, so wasn't no way they could prove I started shit. Could have gotten self-defense too, but I got a little carried away, y'know, with that blunt instrument and all." Horus paused, inspected his shoes as he waited for a question that never came. When the back door finally opened, Lester stepping aside to let them in and instructing the men to climb the stairs all the way to the roof's access door, Horus waited until they were two flights up before continuing.

"I would tell you what that blunt instrument was," Horus said like someone had pleaded with him to share this information, "but when people find out it tends to get all sensationalistic. Me, I'm more the subtle type."

There was a hedgehog floating ten yards above them, dropping greetings below.

Not really. It wasn't a hedgehog, it was a man. It was the man who brought them here, the one whose name was his former office. He was floating, though, up there in the air in the round basket of the hot-air balloon he'd rented for the occasion. Men with shirts and hats that said ROSEDALE AMUSEMENTS surrounded a crane, working it around to pull the air monster down by its cabled tether. Slowly, the balloon dipped to the roof the recruits stood on, bringing former Congressman Cyrus Marks down with it.

Snowden looked to his side in disbelief as Bobby joined Lester in waving joyously in the air, as if something great and improbable had been accomplished by this entrance. Next to them, Horus wasn't even looking up, stretching his arms behind his back and pulling his knees to his chest like he was going to jump the remaining distance to their new boss.

"Boys. Neophytes. I was just like you once," Marks began yelling over the edge of his hot-air balloon's basket. "I too did careless, destructive things like you have done. The only difference was that I was smarter than you ever were. I didn't get caught. You are nothing now and you know it, but follow me where I say to go, do what I say to do, and I'll make you something! You have my word, and that's like gold."

"It's like solid gold!" Lester repeated on the ground next to them.

Even standing far below, looking straight up into the air at the man, the congressman appeared squat to Snowden. Compressed, crushed, as if gravity had taken it upon itself to push this full-grown man into as small a physical space as possible. Snowden kept looking up instead of around, trying to ignore the fact that he was standing on a bare roof, with loose gravel underfoot, the only thing keeping him from falling off the edge being friction and willpower. When the basket holding his new boss finally tapped down, Snowden smiled broadly with relief as Cyrus Marks made to exit, unhinged the nest's door like he was preparing to leave the balloon behind. When Marks stepped back from the open gate and gestured instead for his new employees to climb aboard, Snowden fixed his grin into place and made a point to get on last, as if that would save him a moment's horror.