Fancy Pants (19 page)
* * *
Dallie won the Lake Charles tournament."Of course you won the damned thing," Skeet grumbled as the three of
them walked into the motel room on Sunday night with a silver
urn-shaped trophy and a check for ten thousand dollars. "The tournament
doesn't amount to a hill of beans, so you naturally have to play some
of the best damned golf you've played in two months. Why can't you do
this kind of thing at Firestone or anyplace they got a TV camera
pointed at you, do you mind telling me that?"
Francesca kicked off her sandals and sagged down onto the end of the
bed. Even her bones were tired. She had walked all eighteen holes of
the golf course so she could cheer Dallie on as well as discourage any
petrochemical secretaries who might be following him too closely.
Everything was going to change for Dallie now that she loved him, she
had decided. He would start playing for her, just as he'd played today,
winning tournaments, making all sorts of money to support them. They'd
been lovers for less than a day, so she knew the idea of Dallie
supporting her on a permanent basis was premature, but she couldn't
help thinking about it.
Dallie began pulling the tail of his golf shirt out of his light gray
slacks. "I'm tired, Skeet, and my wrist hurts. Do you mind if we save
this for later?"
"That's what you always say. But there isn't any saving it till later
'cause you won't ever talk about it.
You go on—"
"Stop it!" Francesca jumped up from the bed and rounded on Skeet. "You
leave him alone, do you hear? Can't you see how tired he is? You act as
if he lost the bloody tournament today instead of winning it. He was
magnificent."
"Magnificent my sweet aunt," Skeet drawled. "That boy didn't play with
three-quarters of what he's got, and he knows it better than anybody.
How about you take care of your makeup, Miss Fran-chess-ka, and you let
me take care of Dallie?" He stalked to the door and slammed it as he
went out.
Francesca confronted Dallie. "Why don't you fire him? He's impossible,
Dallie. He makes everything so difficult for you."
He sighed and stripped his shirt over his head. "Leave it alone,
Francie."
"That man is your employee, and yet he acts as though you're working
for him. You need to put a stop
to it." She watched as he walked over
to the brown paper sack he'd brought back to the room with him and
pulled out a six-pack of beer. He drank too much, she realized, even
though he never seemed to show any signs of it. She had also seen him
take a few pills that she doubted were vitamins. As soon as the time
was right, she would persuade him to stop both practices.
He peeled a can from its plastic ring and popped the top. "Trying to
come between Skeet and me isn't a good idea, Francie."
"I'm not trying to come between you. I just want to make things easier
for you."
"Yeah? Well, forget it." He drained his beer and stood up. "I'm going
to take a shower."
She didn't want him to be angry with her, so she curved her mouth into
an irresistibly sexy smile. "Need any help with those
hard-to-reach places?"
"I'm tired," he said irritably. "Just leave me alone." He walked into
the bathroom and shut the door, but not before he'd seen the hurt in
her eyes.
Stripping off his clothes, he turned the shower on full blast. The
water sluiced over his sore shoulder. Closing his eyes, he ducked under
the shower head, thinking about that lovesick look he'd spotted on her
face. He should have figured she would start imagining she was in love
with him. Everything was packaging to her. She was exactly the sort of
woman who couldn't see any further than his pretty face. Dammit, he
should have left things like they were between them, but they'd been
sleeping in the same room for nearly a week and her accessibility had
been driving him crazy. How much could he expect from himself? Besides,
something about her had gotten to him last night when she'd told that
stupid warthog story.
Even so, he should have kept his jeans zipped. Now she was going to
cling to him like a string of bad luck, expecting hearts and flowers
and all that other horseshit, none of which he had the slightest
intention of giving to her. There was no way, not when he had Wynette
looming up in front of him and Halloween beating at his door, and not
when he could think of a dozen women he liked a whole lot better.
Still—although he had no intention of telling her about it—she was one
of the best-looking women he'd ever met. Even though he realized it was
a mistake, he suspected he would be back in bed with her
before too
much more time had passed.
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 tolive. 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 hustle the boys at the country
club this weekend. All in all, I'd say no."
She didn't give up hope. "All right, then, Dallas, I'm asking you to do
your assignment voluntarily. For
the sake of your immortal soul."
He shook his head and stuck a toothpick in his mouth.
She was quite disappointed, but she hid her feelings by rummaging in
the tie-dyed tote bag she'd brought with her and pulling out a
paperback book. "Very well, then. I observed your visual exchanges with
the young ladies in the class today and came to the conclusion that
anyone as obviously interested in sexual activity as you should read
about it from one of the world's great writers. I'll expect an
intelligent report from you in two days." With that, she thrust a copy
of Lady Chatterley's Lover into his hand and left the house.
For nearly a month she relentlessly dogged the small apartment,
thrusting banned books at her rebellious student and badgering Skeet to
put tighter reins on the boy. "You don't understand," Skeet finally
complained in frustration. "Regardless of the fact that no one wants
him back, he's a runaway and I'm
not even his legal guardian. I'm an
ex-con he picked up in a gas station rest room, and he's been pretty
much taking care of me, instead of the other way around."
"Nevertheless," she said, "you're an adult and he is still a minor."
Gradually Dallie's intelligence won out over his sullen-ness, although
later he would insist she had just worn him down with all her dirty
books. She talked him back into school, moved him into her
college-bound class, and tutored him whenever he wasn't playing golf.
Thanks to her efforts, he
graduated with honors at age eighteen and was
accepted at four different colleges.
After he left for Texas A&M, she missed him dreadfully, although he
and Skeet continued to make Wynette their home base and he came to see
her during vacations when he wasn't playing golf. Gradually, however,
his responsibilities took him farther away for longer stretches of
time. Once they didn't see each other for nearly a year. In her dazed
state, she had barely recognized him the night he found her sitting in
the thunderstorm on the curb at Main and Elwood wearing her nightgown.
Francesca had somehow imagined Dallie living in a modem apartment built
next to a golf course instead
of an old Victorian house with a central
turret and pastel-painted gingerbread trim. She gazed at the windows of
the house in disbelief as the Riviera turned the comer and slipped into
a narrow gravel driveway. "Are those rabbits?"
"Two hundred fifty-six of them," Skeet said. "Fifty-seven if you count
the one on the front door. Look, Dallie, that rainbow on the garage is
new."
"She's going to break her fool neck one of these days climbing those
ladders," Dallie grumbled. Then he turned to Francesca. "You mind your
manners, now. I mean it, Francie. None of your fancy stuff."
He was talking to her as if she were a child instead of his lover, but
before she could retaliate, the back door flew open and an
incredible-looking old lady appeared. With her long gray ponytail
flying behind her and a pair of reading glasses bobbing on the gold
neck chain that hung over her daffodil yellow sweat suit, she rushed
toward them, crying out, "Dallas! Oh, my, my! Skeet! My goodness!"
Dallie climbed out of the car and enveloped her small, thin body in a
bear hug. Then Skeet grabbed her away to the
accompaniment of another chorus of my-my's.
Francesca emerged from the back seat and looked on curiously. Dallie
had said his mother was dead, so who was this? A grandmother? As far as
she knew, he had no relatives except the woman named Holly Grace. Was
this Holly Grace? Somehow Francesca doubted it. She'd gotten the
impression Holly Grace was Dallie's sister. Besides, she couldn't
envision this eccentric-looking old lady showing up at a motel with a
Chevy dealer from Tulsa. The cat slipped from the back seat, looked
around disdainfully with his one good eye, and disappeared under the
back steps.
"And who is this, Dallas?" the woman inquired, turning to Francesca.
"Please introduce me to your friend."
"This is Francie ... Francesca," Dallie amended. "Old F. Scott would
have loved her, Miss Sybil, so if
she gives you any trouble, let me
know." Francesca darted him an angry glare, but he ignored her and
continued his introduction. "Miss Sybil Chandler . . . Francesca Day."
Small brown eyes gazed at her, and Francesca suddenly felt as if her
soul was being examined. "How
do you do?" she replied, barely able to
keep herself from squirming. "It's a pleasure to meet you."
Miss Sybil beamed at the sound of her accent, then extended her hand
for a hearty shake. "Francesca, you're British! What a delightful
surprise. Pay no attention to Dallas. He can charm the dead, of course,
but he's a complete scoundrel. Do you read Fitzgerald?"
Francesca had seen the movie of The Great Gatsby, but she suspected
that wouldn't count. "I'm afraid not," she said. "I don't read much."
Miss Sybil gave a disapproving cluck. "Well, we'll soon fix that, won't
we? Bring the suitcases inside, boys. Dallas, are you chewing gum?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"Please remove it along with your hat before you come inside."
Francesca giggled as the old woman disappeared through the back door.
Dallie flicked his gum into a hydrangea bush. "Just you wait," he said
to Francesca ominously.
Skeet chuckled. "Looks like ol' Francie's gonna take some of the heat
off us for a change."
Dallie smiled back. "You can almost see Miss Sybil rubbing her hands
together just waiting to get at her." He looked at Francesca. "Did you
mean it when you said you haven't read Fitzgerald?"
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