Hunting in Harlem Read online

  "No one. So I'll keep it quiet."

  "Exactly. The other two, your coworkers, don't even tell them. The point is, Snowden, to protect the client, the neighborhood. People are always looking for bad things to say about Harlem, let's not even give them an excuse."

  When you die, it shouldn't be like this, a stranger and a brightly dressed man breaking the silence of your abandoned home to go through your things and throw most of them in the trash. Lester leaned a chair against the splintered front door to keep it shut, started giving out his orders. They were so specific, so mundane. Clear a room at a time, you start from the back, I'll start from the front. Place all electronics and small appliances in the center of the living room, all books in the bathtub, all photos and official documents in white kitchen bags, clothes in the green trash bags, the rest in the black lawn bags to be thrown out. Glasses, dishes, silverware: trash. Double-bag them.

  It was a two-bedroom. In the back was the kitchen, behind that a small room being used for storage. It was amazing how fast it was possible to clear away someone's life when you threw it in the trash. A couple of full arm sweeps into open bags and the kitchen was nearly barren. Snowden was even more impressed with how much was obvious from the trash he was dumping. The dead guy was Carlton Simmons (cable and electric bills stuck to the freezer door identified). Mr. Simmons had family in Buffalo: Rena Simmons, whom he called for brief minutes during the week, longer on holidays and weekends (Verizon). If Mr. Simmons cooked, it was fast and simple: spaghetti or an occasional burger. Of all the pastas available to him on the grocery shelf, the only one he'd bought was angel hair, probably because it cooked fast and he was impatient. The frozen burgers were bought in prepackaged bulk, the meat mechanically shaped into CD-thin wafers. Carlton Simmons must have liked the idea of health because there were greens in the crisper, but he wasn't completely invested in it, because each individually bagged bundle was completely untouched and rotting. What this brother really liked was Chinese food. Evidence lined every shelf in the refrigerator as proof of a daily habit. Fried and breaded pieces of dark meat glazed red or brown on beds of yellow rice. Imported bottles of blistering hot sauce in the cabinet a nod to some West Indian or African ancestry.

  Snowden the detective, Snowden the archaeologist on a dig into the permafrost lining the freezer, searching for artifacts. The more mundane the job, the more his imagination took over, the more fun it became.

  In the back bedroom, Snowden lost himself between his janitor motions and his detective dream. The clues were endless, heavy, the garbage much the same. Carlton Simmons ate fatty foods and dreamed of the skinny days he'd long deserted. Nearly all the worn pants were forty-two waist, disregarding a few scarred and veteran forties, and then on the top shelf of the closet Snowden found a stack of pants size thirty-six waist. They were different colors but all the same brand, all new with their retail folds undisturbed and starchy, a purchase for a waistline that would never return until the fat decomposed off of him, and then he wouldn't need pants anyway.

  One large box remained at the back of the closet floor when all the clothes had been evacuated. Inside, obscured underneath a pile of video game magazines, was a beige metal safe the size of a dictionary and a paper grocery bag. Snowden pulled at the safe, played at cracking its combination for a bit before growing bored, and took the bag. Pictures, loose and organized in books. Snowden decided it was time for his break, took a seat on one of the fully packed bags of clothes.

  Carlton Simmons, his face in repetition. They were the same age, Snowden and the dead guy, had shared the same era of childhood. Snowden recognized the clothes, the hair, fell into the past and saw the other there as if he had known him. Carl had been to Atlantic City, there was a picture of him leaning back on a bench with the Sands behind him. Carl had been to the Washington Monument. Carl had a daughter. Her pictures, from newborn to infant, joined his own.

  Trying to pile the loose photos together, Snowden noticed a white envelope lying at the bottom. It held a key inside, one he soon found out worked on the beige safe. The safe had no money in it, just another, older envelope inside.

  In the span of time it had taken Snowden to clear out most of the kitchen and what amounted to a large closet, Lester had cleared out the living room, the bathroom, and was sweeping up the debris from his assault on the master bedroom. Along the far walls of each room were stacked layers of blank brown boxes, topped by trash bags, plush and shiny and full. It was the precision of repetition, of muscle memory of countless other jobs like this one. For Lester, this duty seemed to have the meditative value of pulling a rake through a Japanese rock garden. The only thing that brought him out of the action of moving the straw broom across the wooden floor was the way Snowden sounded at the door.

  "What am I supposed to do with this?" Before him Snowden held out the white envelope like someone had just hit him with it. The thing was so worn, the paper so dirty, uneven and stiff in his hand, it was like it had been left out in the rain for an entire season. Lester removed the plum kerchief from his jacket's breast pocket and held the envelope with that by its corners. When Lester took it from him, Snowden looked relieved to not hold it anymore. Inside, Lester found Polaroids with their stiff white borders, took them in a stack and let their packaging drop to the floor with the rest of the trash.

  The first picture was of a woman naked, leaning back on the couch of the room he'd just cleaned. Even if Lester was attracted to women, he doubted this one could excite him. You could see the dark brown blotches on her legs, the even darker flesh under eyes as wide and dead as deviled eggs. Around her skull a legion of hair had reverted to chaos, rioting in neglect. On her breastbone was the wrinkled line of a pulled-up shirt, at her calves matching crumpled pants, both articles ready to be pulled back into position as soon as the flash had dimmed. Lester looked at the track marks on the arm, tried to locate the fresh one. The second photo was of a mother and her infant child, whom she held on her side as she leaned forward to fellate the cameraman. The third was of a little girl, dressed only in her colorful braids. It took a moment for Lester to recognize her as the one who'd just peeked out at them from down the hall, the one Snowden had been talking to. What Lester noticed the most about this photo, as opposed to the ones of her that followed, was that you could clearly see the dollars in her hand, gripped fiercely in discomfort.

  There were at least a dozen more photos, but Lester reached for the dirty envelope on the floor, stuck the contents back inside, took a roll of packing tape off the bed to seal it up thoroughly before reopening a trash bag along the wall and sticking it deeply inside.

  "Is that all we're going to do?" There was indignation in Snowden's voice, but there was relief too.

  "There's nothing else that needs to be done. He's dead now."

  "How did he die?"

  "He had an accident." Lester picked up his broom and started sweeping again. Snowden needed to sit down. He walked over to the bare mattress, became nauseous at the sight of it and opted for a bare wall and floor.

  "Someone like that, someone like that deserves worse than that."

  "I don't know. Apparently, his brakes went out on him on the FDR. From what I hear, it was pretty gruesome. Couldn't stop, knew he couldn't stop. Speeding to begin with. A lot of sharp turns on that thing, heavy, fast traffic. Very narrow lanes. Must have made for some pretty scary minutes." Lester's tone was casual, calming. It was like none of the facts present were new to him.

  "You knew about this?"

  "What?" The way Lester said it, Snowden immediately regretted the question, was about to apologize when Lester continued. "I knew he was a registered sex offender. We found that out after we bought the property. Specifics? Of course not. But there's only one cure for people like that, isn't there?"

  Lester stopped sweeping, looked over at Snowden for him to take over the exercise, then took his seat against the wall.

  "Well that's the thing, am I right?" Lester continued. "You take almost any bl
ock in Harlem, almost any apartment building, and out of every hundred people, ninety are basically decent, hardworking folk just trying to take care of their own. But that ten, the drug dealers, the thugs, thieves, and rapists, those that abuse their children directly and through neglect, the ones who have no respect for others, civilization, society, all of these parasites set the tone that everybody else has to live by. 'The Terrible Tenth,' I like to call them, that keeps everybody else down."

  "At least, with this bastard's death, it's down to 'The Terrible Nine Point Nine Nine Percent' now," Snowden said, immediately regretting the callousness of the statement. Lester just smiled though, sat there puffing on his cigarillo, watching his smoke rise around them.

  The night ended with beer, two forties held one in each of Snowden's arms like he was headed for a party. Walking up his building's steps, Jifar was in his path. The boy was laid out on his dirty landing with paper and crayons. It was one o'clock in the morning.

  "What are you doing?" Snowden asked him.

  "What's it look like I'm doing? I'm drawing."

  "Drawing what?"

  "I'm drawing the Chupacabra." The paper had been cut from the side of a brown paper bag, on it was the image of a green fanged thing with too many arms.

  "You got school tomorrow, you need to be in bed. What's a Chupacabra?"

  "It's the monster eating people in Washington Heights. Mannie Ortiz knows someone who saw it. If I do this good, we're going to give it to the police so they can catch him."

  "Why aren't you in bed, little man?"

  "I'm locked out, and I left your key in my room, in my hiding space," Jifar admitted.

  There was music vibrating the door of Jifar's apartment. After a while, Snowden gave up on knocking, just started kicking it until the sound stopped and the peephole darkened.

  "Come get your boy," Snowden said into it. The door began unlocking.

  "Nigger, you woke me up." Baron Anderson in his gray WELCOME TO NEW YORK, NOW GET OUT T-shirt and wrinkled Y-fronts. Snowden attempted to continue the discussion but Anderson walked out in the hall in his bare feet yelling, "Get the fuck in here," grabbing his boy by his arm and disappearing again, the door slamming in back of them.

  The final sound sent other doors along the floors slowly unlocking, other heads leaning out doorways to stare at Snowden as if he was the villain. Snowden ignored them, reached down and rolled up the picture, forcefully shoved each crayon back in the box, imagining he was cramming them up the father's nose instead.

  BOBBY FINLEY, THE GREAT WORK

  AFTER CLASS SNOWDEN would go over to Bobby's house and they would get drunk. The game was to go to a new bodega each time and get 160 ounces of the cheapest beer they could find. They called it a game because to acknowledge that it was all they could afford was depressing. Then they would spend seventy-five cents on the New Holland Herald and Bobby would read the misprints and more egregious grammatical errors out loud. At first, Snowden didn't know what the big deal was, at least the paper was trying, but some of these bloopers were just too ridiculous and after a while they were both laughing until they just couldn't anymore because it hurt too much. This would usually be followed by a discussion on the future of black people, hopeful or pessimistic. Both had majored in African-American studies during their college careers, one of many similarities they were discovering. If you added the amount of undergraduate credits they had together it was enough for one bachelor's degree, which gave them a bit of confidence in putting their heads together, even though they were pretty drunk heads by the time they really got into it.

  Once they had been peeing clear for hours, when simple things like balancing a bowl of cereal in their hands became nearly impossible, the conversation often reverted to simple primal confessions. This is when Bobby slurred that he'd burned down his mother's boyfriend's house after the man raped her, that the man was alive but probably wished he wasn't. This was when Snowden talked about all the foster homes, told the funny stories he could about the quirks of each one, how he had been returned to his father in ninth grade, how even he was surprised at the way his father's nose disappeared into his face when he punched it. How he couldn't even remember the last thing the man had said to him that had pissed him off so much, but would never forget the smell of the adrenaline-rich blood that filled his own nose, the orgasmic bliss of momentarily giving his anger free reign.

  Bobby's place was smaller than Snowden's, made even more so by the books in milk crates that lined the walls. Aside from the ones on the shelves in the bathroom, every single book in Bobby Finley's

  house was a hardcover first edition of The Great Work, a novel by Robert M. Finley, all signed and numbered by the author himself. He had so many that he used them for furniture, laying a wooden plank and cushions over crates for his couch and bed. Bobby started this collection four months after the publication of The Great Work, three years before, picking up the first editions at near 85 percent discount on the remainder shelves of large bookstore chains. They seemed so forlorn sitting there, each his dream incarnate, rejected, abandoned. That was how the collection began.

  The Great Work received only two reviews, both by publishing magazines pretty much obligated to review anything with pages and a spine. Both were dismissive, seemed confused and not a little hostile, as if the text that had been given to them was not printed on paper but instead tattooed on the shaved flesh of a large and bemused grizzly bear. After reading them, it took two weeks for Bobby Finley to stop fixating on burning the buildings that housed the critics, the magazines, and the distributors, in that order.

  Later, Bobby managed to douse those desires with the knowledge that both critics had been white and unfortunately had proved themselves unable to separate themselves from their preconceived notion of what to expect from an author of African descent, and therefore had blinded themselves to the genius The Great Work really was. This perspective was reinforced by the fact that both reviewers had made major factual errors when describing the plot, errors that coincided with a misprint in the summary on the dusk jacket, leading Bobby to determine that at best they'd given it a sloppy, rushed read or, as he suspected, hadn't read the whole book at all.

  Unfortunately, The Great Work's reviews proved a harbinger for the reaction of the few readers it managed to attract. Though no readings were ever actually conducted for The Great Work (several were arranged, but no one showed up; even the bookstore clerks called in sick), Bobby Finley was still able to determine this by months of long hours of searching newsgroups on the Internet. Bobby Finley took no solace from the fact that all three people who mentioned The Great Work lacked the imagination to use any descriptor other than a conjugation of the verb to suck.

  The purpose of the author's own collection of The Great Work changed dramatically after his first and only signing. A clerk at the black bookstore in the New Carrellton Mall put an accidental zero on the order form and after seven months local author Bobby Finley was called in an effort to move the twenty copies. In an attempt to assist him in this endeavor, the owner had booked Bobby Finley, author of The Great Work, to appear on the same day, at the same time as Bo Shareef, best-selling author of Datz What I'm Talking* 'Bout.

  The two sat at opposite ends of one long fold-out, a fortress of Datz What Im Talkin' 'Bout piled across the table, floor, and back wall on one side, twenty copies of The Great Work in two neat piles on the other. Shareef's publisher had outfitted him with blown-up images of the book and the author big enough to shame Mussolini. In the brief moment Bobby had a chance to speak with Mr. Shareef, he did find him friendly and charismatic, but it was the last chance they would have to talk as Bo Shareef was quickly swallowed by a mob of women Bobby had previously assumed to be the assembling of a large gospel choir.

  Three hours. It seemed as if every black woman in the DC Metro area had been bused in for the occasion. Shocked by the display, Bobby Finley faked a cough, reached back to his bag for his water and then leaned over and vicked a copy of
Datz What I'm Talkin' 'Bout. A far cry from The Great Work's dignified all-white cover with the tide in black twelve-point Courier font, the cover of Datz What I'm Talkin' 'Bout looked like a panel from a self-published children's book. Upon inspecting the first sentence, first paragraph, first page, and first chapter, Bobby found prose with the originality, sophistication, and poetry of the instructions that came with Happy Meal toys. Yet the crowd kept coming. "You are the greatest, Mr. Shareef," they said. "Oh my God, I can't wait for your next one," they told him.

  Bobby read Datz What I'm Talkin' 'Bout in its entirety, right there at the table, too numb to be embarrassed. Of the handful of people that did stop by Bobby's side after the long wait for Bo Shareef's signature, few refrained from making a face when Bobby explained the plot of The Great Work. One said, "Alaska? There ain't no black people in Alaska." Those who didn't tried to get him to give them copies for free. One brother with what looked like a queen-sized bedsheet wrapped around his head demanded to know what his "thesis" was.

  Years had gone into crafting The Great Work. Years had gone into crafting single sentences within it. Authors' entire life works were reread just to inspire certain paragraphs.

  Bobby felt like a chef who had dedicated his life to the study of the greatest culinary techniques, practiced for years to perfect them before presenting his finest dish to the public, only to be outdone by a guy who walked in off the street, shit in a tortilla, and deep-fried it.

  Reeling from the public's failure to recognize the genius of The Great Work, Bobby Finley resolved to determine the reason. That's when he decided that the readers were dung beetles. That they didn't just consume crap, they liked it. That the critics, of course, were much less than that. That there was no one worth writing for.