Hunting in Harlem (2 page)

On 125th Street, Snowden wasted time at a book vendor's table before walking farther, shelled out the twenty for the new Bo
Shareef book,
Shuckin
' '
n
'
Jivin
Do
wn Lenox
,
and managed not to admit to himself that in the next few days he was going to have time to read it.

135th between Lenox and Fifth was also known as Astor Row, one block of wooden, country-style houses that there'd been a blurred
photo of in Horizon's pamphlet. The homes looked misplaced in the picture, architecture meant to be surrounded by barns, not
bodegas, but it looked less surreal in person, mostly because at least a third of the houses were as devastated as the rest
of the neighborhood. Some with soiled bedsheets hung in windows as curtains, others with no windows at all, just punctured
holes where frame once held glass. A quarter of the way down the block, Snowden saw that one of the houses had been destroyed
by fire, long enough ago that a treelike weed reached from the top floor up through the hole in the roof, but recently enough
that a charred couch still sank into the mud on the front lawn. At the far end, trying to admire the absurd architecture,
Snowden noticed a brown flash that poked out and disappeared again in an attic window of an abandoned building just past him.
Aside from that one small lookout, the building was sealed, sheet metal nailed over every opening and covered in graffiti
for good measure. Snowden tried to calm himself, ignore the sight, but was overtaken by fears of crackhead snipers and looked
back up at the window. The head was there, staring down at him. The woman's hair shrieked from her scalp, her eyes as empty
as the room behind her. Her face was negative space: the hole of her mouth, the hollow of her cheeks and sockets. The only
thing that kept the woman from looking dead was that she was rocking back and forth, moaning.

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.

The balloon operators quickly diminished from reassuring figures to smudges of color you had to squint to differentiate. They
were high enough that both the East and Hudson rivers could be seen as mirrored strips all the way south toward their meeting,
glancing north that wet slash that separated Manhattan from the Bronx looked like a fresh cut, like the freed island was moments
away from floating over toward New Jersey.

Snowden gripped the side railing so fiercely he became certain he was going to break a piece off, counting down from twenty
and looking at his feet when the urge to roll up in a ball threatened to overcome him. It was several minutes into his own
drama before he noticed that the other two participants in the Second Chance Program were holding the edge with equal vigor.
Even Lester, dressed in a patchwork suit that expressed every shade between pure white and dark brown, had wrapped himself
tightly around one of the cables that attached their basket to the floating ball above, his other bejeweled hand resting atop
a gentleman's cane, a hesitant nod to fashion. The only one not holding on was the congressman, and that was Snowden's first
impression that the man was insane. Even when they came to the end of the balloon's tether, the tension sending them swiftly
east and bouncing from the wind's pressure, the congressman just bent what little legs he had and remained standing, hands
in his pockets.

"The Second Chance Program will make you real estate agents, but you'll become more than that, much more. I'm giving you the
biggest thing you never had, what every man needs if he's going to accomplish great things in his life. I'm giving you a mission."
Marks walked forward, stopped in front of Lester and held his hand out without looking, pausing until his subordinate figured
out what he wanted and put the cane into it.

"See that down there at the bottom, that cluster of skyscrapers off to the left?" Marks pointed the stick south. "That's Wall
Street. There used to be a real wall there, hundreds of years ago in the seventeenth century. The whole of New York City fit
below it, on that tiny tip of land. The rest," the congressman made a sweeping motion with the cane that included all the
eye could see in its entirety, "was trees, brush, and Indians. The first blacks on this island were forced to live right by
that wall, on the woods side, unprotected. Allowed to farm and mind their own only because they'd serve as a buffer in case
the natives attacked. The sounds of their slaughter as an alarm system."

Congressman Marks shook Lester's cane over the edge as he talked, his grip light and floppy. If that thing fell, somebody
far below would die a painful and posthumously embarrassing death, but Marks clearly wasn't thinking about this, too focused
ahead to see the world around him.

"They've always done us like that. As the city's grown, they've always displaced us, pushed us to the periphery. See the dome
of Madison Square Garden? That land was ours. Used to be the Tenderloin District, but now it's the Garden, the post office,
Perm Station. That complex farther up there, that's Lincoln Center. It sits on land that used to be part of a black neighborhood
called San Juan Hill. Do you know what happened to the community that lived there? We were evicted. These were people who'd
spent their whole lives there, entire families, an entire neighborhood destroyed, but the developers didn't care. Central
Park, the same story. Used to house us and some poor micks, the rich whites seized the land and threw everybody out on the
streets to make that park happen. Always pushing us farther to the perimeters. You see, that's why we have Harlem. We had
nowhere else to go. It was the only place they would let us live anymore: past the park, all the way at the top of Manhattan
island where they hoped they could forget about us." Marks was pointing Lester's cane down at 110th Street, the northern edge
of Central Park, leaning so far forward that it seemed he might jump out the basket to get there.

"This used to be a nice place," the congressman pleaded, his tone casually defensive, righting himself and walking away from
the edge once more. "It was far from perfect, but we had our own doctors, our own services, our own stores. There was money
here, circulating. Then desegregation came, and everyone who could afford to leave, did. Poverty and their own racism were
the only things that kept the whites from coming in and seizing the place, but even that's changing now. They're running out
of space once more, prices are so high everywhere else that they're even prepared to ignore their fear of us. So that's were
you come in."