Hunting in Harlem Read Free

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,