No Beast So Fierce Read Online Free PDF

down a rising hunger with the thought that they would come with work and patience. Those who had the things I desired had been striving for them while I vegetated in prison. Only crime would allow me to catch up overnight, and that was out of the question. In many ways I’d never catch up. I accepted that reality.

3
    T HE automobile that double-parked and honked aroused stares of disapproval from several pedestrians, but made me grin. Willy hadn’t changed. He bought wrecks for fifty dollars, tinkered until they moved, and when they gave out he abandoned them. This one had a dead headlight, an asthmatic motor, and a broken muffler.
    Willy’s wife and two sons were in the car. I’d known Selma since she was eleven and I was fourteen. I’d met Willy at her house; her sister was my first girl friend. The boys had been babies when I last saw them. It was odd that Willy brought the family. It was as if they were a shield. He had no reason to fear me, but in the criminal world (Willy was more drug addict than criminal) there are many guilts and fears. Constant suspicion is good for survival. Willy had a reason—and all I could think of was that his brother had turned stool pigeon three years before. He might have fears that someone would use him as a surrogate for revenge.
    â€œI didn’t believe it was you,” he said when I was beside Selma. She was carrying a baby in her arms. Considering that Willy had been imprisoned for two years, either the baby was not Selma’s or she’d been stupid.
    â€œHow’re Joe and Mary?” I asked.
    â€œHe’s back in Folsom on a parole violation.”
    â€œWhen was that?”
    â€œTwo, three months ago.”
    â€œHe and Mary broke up anyway,” Selma said.
    Joe had been out a year. Word should have come from Folsom but had obviously missed me. Willy explained that Joe had been doing “good”, which was a criminal euphemism for making “good” money illegally. “He beat a possession,” Willy continued, “and by rights it wasn’t his shit. He had a dude in his car and the heat gave them the red light. The other dude threw a bag out the window. He got on the stand and cut Joe loose, but the fuckin’ narks didn’t go for it. They made sure he was violated.”
    â€œJoe had a new car and everything,” Selma said. “Mary could’ve had it, but she couldn’t make the payments.”
    Joe’s fall was bad luck for me, too. I now remembered the word that he was making a bundle of money. He would have helped me get on my feet. We’d been teen-age crime partners, smoking marijuana, drinking wine, and riding in stolen cars with rhythm and blues honking from the dashboard radio. We’d burglarized together, committing strong armed robberies, and we’d snatched purses. Over the years he’d been incarcerated when I was out, and vice versa. Our styles had also gone separate ways. Where I’d become an active thief—burglar, bandit, forger—he’d become a drug peddler and sometimes pimp. Yet he would have helped me, as I would have helped him.
    Willy turned onto the freeway but crawled along the slow lane. At fifty miles an hour the automobile shook violently.
    In the quick, flicking shadows I looked at the couple beside me. Willy, as usual, radiated seediness; the best suit became wrinkled and sloppy the moment he put it on. In the odd light it was hard to see Selma clearly, but I did see gauntness and hardness. She’d never been pretty, but in her youth there had been a sensual bloom. That had withered with her arid life.
    Beyond downtown, Willy got off the freeway, following boulevards and side streets east through the seamy core of the city. He’d gotten a ticket on the freeway for the missing headlight a few nights earlier and wanted to avoid meeting the same highway patrolman.
    One of the boys in the back seat complained to Selma that he was