Lives Less Valuable by Derrick Jensen

Author:Derrick Jensen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction/Espionage
ISBN: 17532
Publisher: PM Press
Published: 2008-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

Ray-Ray starts to say something, then stops. He starts again, “Why—”

Dujuan cuts him off, “Don’t fuckin ask.”

“You don’t even know what—”

“—Don’t fuckin go there. It don’t matter.”

“Okay,” Ray-Ray says, then under his breath, “Dumb-ass nigga.”

Dujuan says, “I can’t hear you. Don’t talk under yo breath.”

“I didn’t even say nothin.”

Dujuan barks, “That’s what I thought.”

Silence.

Dujuan says, “You ain’t the only one who...”

Ray-Ray asks, “Who what?” Though he asks, he knows without asking—but could not possibly have articulated, nor even brought anywhere near consciousness—the rest of Dujuan’s sentence: You’re not the only one with a hundred emotions scratching at your guts, trying to get out. You’re not the only one who sometimes needs to hit someone to prove you’re alive.

Dujuan says, “Nothin. Just forget about it.”

There’s a silence before Ray-Ray says, “Forgotten.”

There’s another silence before Simon says, from the back seat, “Why don’t you hit the radio?”

Ray-Ray turns it on, but doesn’t pay attention. He’s thinking about those emotions scratching to get out, and he’s thinking about violence. He doesn’t consider himself a violent man, even though he has hurt a lot of people. He’s beaten them, cut them, put a cap in their ass: whatever Dujuan wants him to do or what he feels like doing himself because somebody isn’t giving him what he wants. But in his own mind he isn’t violent, because he’s never killed anyone.

Or so he says.

But that isn’t true. He has killed someone. Two people, in fact, although the second one doesn’t count.

He killed his first human on a sunny, windy day in April a couple of years ago. It was one of those spring days when sunshine makes all the difference in the world. Step into it and you’re warm in short sleeves. Step into a shadow and you’re chilled in a coat. He’d been in the sun, so it felt like June. He was kicking it downtown, nothing to do, wandering window to window looking not so much inside the pawn shops, record stores, and sorry diners—he couldn’t have seen the interiors anyway because of the glare—as at the spears of sunlight reflecting off the glass. They’d hurt and dazzled him, and he’d liked it.

Ray-Ray’d caught himself thinking that, and almost laughed. Staring at reflected sunlight? He was boring himself silly.

He’d turned a corner and passed from sun to shade, also leaving the lee of a building. The wind caught him in the face. It was no longer June, but February. A few steps, and he ducked into an alley. He followed it. Eventually it opened into a sunny, calm alcove. Dumpsters and shuttered back doors of businesses lined crumbling brick walls.

A man slept curled in a bright corner. Ray-Ray walked to him. The man was a bum, with long dirty blonde hair and a beard the color of dead grass. Ray-Ray saw a can of hair spray a few feet away. “Fucking waste,” he said.

He stood, nodding for a moment, then quietly slipped his gun out of its resting place beneath his jacket and under his belt in back.

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