Fancy Pants (Wynette, Texas #1)(67)

You're a real bastard, aren't you, Beaudine?

The Bear loomed up from the back recesses of Dallie's brain with a corona of Jesus-light shining around his head. The goddamn Bear.

You're a loser, chum, the Bear whispered in that flat midwestern drawl of his. A two-bit loser. Your father knew it and I know it And Halloween's coming up, just in case you forgot....

Dallie hit the cold water faucet with his fist and drowned out the rest.

But things with Francesca didn't get any easier, and the next day their relationship wasn't improved when, just the other side of the Louisiana-Texas border, Dallie began complaining about hearing a strange noise coming from the car.

“What do you think that is?” he asked Skeet. “I had the engine tuned not three weeks ago. Besides, it seems to be coming from the back. Do you hear that?”

Skeet was engrossed in an article about Ann-Margret in the newest issue of People and he shook his head.

“Maybe it's the exhaust.” Dallie looked over his shoulder at Francesca. “Do you hear anything back there, Francie? Funny grating kind of noise?”

“I don't hear a thing,” Francesca replied quickly.

Just then a loud rasp filled the interior of the Riviera. Skeet's head shot up. “What's that?”

Dallie swore. “I know that sound. Dammit, Francie. You've got that ugly walleyed cat back there with you, don't you?”

“Now, Dallie, don't get upset,” she pleaded. “I didn't mean to bring him along. He just followed me into the car and I couldn't get him out.”

“Of course he followed you!” Dallie yelled into the rearview mirror. “You've been feeding him, haven't you? Even though I told you not to, you've been feeding that damned walleyed cat.”

She tried to make him understand. “It's just— He's got such bony ribs and it's hard for me to eat when I know he's hungry.”

Skeet chuckled from the passenger seat and Dallie rounded on him. “What do you think is so goddamn funny, you mind telling me that?”

“Not a thing,” Skeet replied, grinning. “Not a thing.”

Dallie pulled off onto the shoulder of the interstate and threw open his door. He twisted to the right and leaned over the back of the seat to see the cat huddled on the floor next to the Styrofoam cooler. “Get him out of here right now, Francie.”

“He'll get hit by a car,” she protested, not entirely certain why this cat, who hadn't given her even the smallest sign of affection, had earned her protection. “We can't let him out on the highway. He'll be killed.”

“The world'll be a better place,” Dallie retorted. She glared at him. He leaned over the seat and made a swipe at the cat. The animal arched his back, hissed, and sank his teeth into Francesca's ankle.

She let out a yelp of pain and screeched at Dallie. “Now see what you've done!” Pulling her foot into her lap, she inspected her injured ankle and then shrieked down at the cat, “You bloody ingrate! I hope he throws you in front of a bloody Greyhound bus.”

Dallie's scowl changed to a grin. After a moment's thought, he shut the door of the Riviera and glanced over at Skeet. “I guess maybe we should let Francie keep her cat after all. It'd be a shame to break up a matched set.”

For people who liked small towns, Wynette, Texas, was a good place to live. San Antonio, with its big-city lights, lay only a little more than two hours southeast, as long as the person behind the wheel didn't pay too much attention to the chicken-shit double-nickel speed limit the bureaucrats in Washington had pushed down the throats of the citizens of Texas. The streets of Wynette were shaded with sumac trees, and the park had a marble fountain with four drinking spouts. The people were sturdy. They were ranchers and farmers, about as honest as Texans got, and they made sure the town council was controlled by enough conservative Democrats and Baptists to keep away most of the ethnics looking for government handouts. All in all, once people settled in Wynette, they tended to stay.

Before Miss Sybil Chandler had taken it in hand, the house on Cherry Street had been just another Victorian nightmare. Over the course of her first year there, she had painted the dull gray gingerbread trim Easter egg shades of pink and lavender and hung ferns across the front porch in plant hangers she had macraméd herself. Still not satisfied, she had pursed her thin schoolteacher's lips and stenciled a chain of leaping jackrabbits in palest tangerine around the front window frames. When she was finished, she had signed her work in small neat letters next to the mail slot in the door. This effect had pleased her so much she had added a condensed curriculum vitae in the door panel beneath the mail slot:

The Work of Miss Sybil Chandler

Retired High School Teacher

Chairperson, Friends of Wynette Public Library

Passionate Lover of W. B. Yeats,

E. Hemingway, and Others

Rebel

And then, thinking it all sounded rather too much like an epitaph, she had covered what she'd written with another jackrabbit and contented herself with only the first line.

Still, that last word she'd painted on the door had lingered in her mind, and even now it filled her with pleasure. “Rebel,” from the Latin rebellis. What a lovely sound it had and how wonderful if such a word actually were to be inscribed on her tombstone. Just her name, the dates of her birth and her demise (the latter far into the future, she hoped), and that one word, “Rebel.”