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 macramed 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.'
As she thought of the great literary rebels of the past, she knew it was hardly likely such an awe-inspiring word would ever be applied to her. After all, she had begun her rebellion only twelve years before, when, at the age of fifty-four, she'd quit the teaching job she'd held for thirty-two years in a prestigious Boston girls' school, packed her possessions, and moved to Texas. How her friends had clucked and tutted, believing she'd lost her senses, not to mention a sizable portion of her pension. But Miss Sybil hadn't listened to any of them, since she had been quite simply dying from the stifling predictability of her life.
On the airplane from Boston to San Antonio, she'd changed her clothes in the rest room, stripping the severe wool suit from her thin, juiceless body and shaking out the neat knot that confined her salt-and-pepper hair. Re- outfitted in her first pair of blue jeans and a paisley dashiki, she had returned to her seat and spent the rest of the flight admiring her calf-high red leather boots and reading Betty Friedan.
Miss Sybil had chosen Wynette by closing her eyes and stabbing at a map of Texas with her index finger. The school board had hired her sight unseen from her resume, overjoyed that so highly acclaimed a teacher wanted a position in their small high school. Still, when she'd shown up for her initial appointment dressed in a floral-print muumuu, three-inch-long silver earrings, and her red leather boots, the superintendent had considered firing her just as quickly as he'd hired her. Instead, she eased his mind by spearing him with her small no-nonsense eyes and telling him she would not permit any slackers in her classroom. A week later she began teaching, and three weeks after that she lacerated the hbrary board for having removed The Catcher in the Rye from their fiction collection.
J. D. Salinger reappeared on the library shelves, the senior English class raised their SAT verbal scores one hundred points over the previous year's class, and Miss Sybil Chandler lost her virginity to B. J. Randall, who owned the town's GE appliance store and thought she was the most wonderful woman in the world.
All went well for Miss Sybil until B.J. died and she was forced to retire from teaching at the age of sixty-five. She found herself wandering listlessly around her small apartment with too much time on her hands, too little money, and no one to care about. Late one night she wandered beyond the bounds of her small apartment into the center of town. That was where Dallie Beaudine had found her sitting on the curb at Main and Elwood in the middle of a thunderstorm clad only in her nightgown.
Now she glanced at the clock as she hung up the telephone from her weekly long-distance conversation with Holly Grace and then took a brass watering can into the living room of Dallie's Victorian Easter egg house to tend the plants. Only a few more hours and her boys would be home. Stepping over one of Dallie's two mongrel dogs, she set down her watering can and took her needlepoint to a sunny window seat where she allowed her mind to slip back through the years to the winter of 1965.
She had just finished quizzing her remedial sophomore English class on Julius Caesar when the door of the room opened and a lanky young man she had never seen before sauntered in. She immediately decided that he was much too handsome for his own good, with a swaggering walk and an insolent expression. He slapped a registration card down on her desk and, without waiting for an invitation, made his way to the back of the room and slouched down into an empty seat, letting his long legs sprawl out across the aisle. The boys regarded him cautiously; the girls giggled and craned their necks to get a better look. He grinned at several of them, openly assessing their breasts. Then he leaned back in his chair and went to sleep.
Miss Sybil bided her time until the bell rang and then called him to her desk. He stood before her, one thumb tucked in the front pocket of his jeans, his expression determinedly bored. She examined the card for his name, checked his age-nearly sixteen-and informed him of her classroom rules: 'I do not tolerate tardiness, gum chewing, or slackers. You will write a short essay for me introducing yourself and have it on my desk tomorrow morning.'
He studied her for a moment and then withdrew his thumb from the pocket of his jeans. 'Go fuck yourself, lady.'
This statement quite naturally caught her attention, but before she could respond, he had swaggered from the room. As she stared at the empty doorway, a great flood of excitement rose inside her. She had seen
a blaze of intelligence shining in those sullen blue eyes. Astonishing! She immediately realized that more than insolence was eating away at this young man. He was another rebel, just like herself!
At precisely seven-thirty that evening, she rapped on the door of a run-down duplex and introduced herself to the man who had been listed on the registration card as the boy's guardian, a sinister-looking character who couldn't have been thirty himself. She explained her difficulty and the man shook his head dejectedly. 'Dallie's starting to go bad,' he told her. 'The first few months we were together, he was all right, but the kid needs a house and a family. That's why I told him we were gonna settle here in Wynette for a while. I thought getting him into school regular might calm him down, but he got hisself suspended the first day for hitting the gym teacher.'
Miss Sybil sniffed. 'A most obnoxious man. Dallas made an excellent choice.' She heard a soft shuffling noise behind her and hastily amended, 'Not that I approve of violence, of course, although I should imagine it's sometimes quite satisfying.' Then she turned and told the lanky, too-handsome boy slouched in the doorway that she had come to supervise his homework assignment.
'And what if I tell you I'm not doing it?' he sneered.
'I should imagine your guardian would object.' She regarded Skeet. 'Tell me, Mr. Cooper, what is your position regarding physical violence?'
'Don't bother me none,' Skeet replied.
'Do you think you might be capable of physically restraining Dallas if he doesn't do as I ask?'
'Hard to say. I've got him on weight, but he's got me on height. And if he's hurt too much, he won't be able to
