Free Hunting in Harlem by Mat Johnson Page A

Snowden, it was a big place. What surprised Snowden was that almost once
     a week one of them died in a Horizon property. Sometimes it was a preexisting condition finally taking its toll, but often
     it was just a matter of one little misstep, a simple accident, and those that were living, weren't. Snowden's Tuesdays were
     booked with the special project from then on, going in and bagging it up to take it away. Bike riders without helmets or reflective
     gear, residents who chose to avoid the pedestrian route underneath the scaffolding of renovating buildings, commuters who
     ignored the plea to buckle up in the back of taxicabs. Snowden would ask the cause and Lester would tell him and then Snowden
     would spend the rest of the day imagining the end the person came to, piecing together his or her life before as he shoved
     its remnants into the Dumpster.
    In an attempt to prove to himself that sudden death was not this random, that these people had brought this fate upon themselves
     (and therefore it was avoidable), Snowden looked for clues of moral or discipline lapses that preceded their demise. Snowden
     wanted reasons. When they were cleaning out the sty of the guy who croaked in his bed from diabetes, Snowden found two cases
     of Pepsi underneath the sink and caught himself pumping his fist to himself in victory. This was a rational universe. This
     guy was huge too, his mattress bowed like a hammock from the springs he'd crushed while sleeping. The whole thing had acted
     like a sponge. It wasn't the smell of the bed that made Snowden vomit, it was the layer of maggots on top of it, the sound
     of a thousand dry worms in agitated orgy. Together, he and Lester wrapped it in plastic, had to take it straight to the sanitation
     department and come back because it stank so bad. The man's room was a collection of empty ninety-nine-cent boxes of snack
     cakes, gun collector magazines wrinkled and stained, and cheap black porno. Videotapes were strewn across the floor of his
     bedroom, their boxes discarded beneath the bed, images of the poor, tattooed, and desperate covered in a layer of gray dust
     and the congealed remnants of their late owner. When Lester and Snowden finally unscrewed all the locks on the narrow closet
     in his hallway ("You can't bust a door like this, that oak woodwork's irreplaceable"), the final evidence in the deceased's
     damning was the strongest. Shotguns, wood and black metal, some barrels already sawed off by the same hand that had rubbed
     out the registration numbers, but mostly handguns, piled in boxes according to make, caliber. A cardboard barrel with the
     letters SNU written on it was the biggest, the visibly cheap six-shooters piled on one another like so many crabs.
    The next posthumous eviction was a woman who'd lived in the second-story floor-through on 126th, right around the block from
     Sylvia's, the victim of a hit-and-run walking back from a bar all the way over on Amsterdam. It was a nice building too, even
     for a Horizon property, fully renovated the year before. There was a literary agent making an office of the garden apartment,
     the third floor held a thick bit of brown-skinned cuteness who smiled at Snowden in the hall as he carried up sheets of boxes
     to be unfolded. Lester said she was playing the role of a dancing plate in Beauty and the Beast, turned back to caution Snowden not to bug her for tickets to the show.
    Back to work, walking down the apartment's hall for the first time, Snowden saw the children's room. This was a shock because
     usually, when they showed up to clear a place out that had housed children, that presence could be felt immediately just by
     the collage of toys, books, and drawings they left behind. This apartment was spotless. A sparse, mature space without a sign
     of anyone below legal drinking age. Yet here it was, this kids' room, a narrow area with two bunk beds on either side, barely
     enough room for an adult to walk between them. Four