Chapter 3

OK, when Dad said they were moving to Canyon, Texas, he'd clearly used the term "to" loosely. Dean didn't think this shack could possibly be within any city's limits. It was more than a mile down a dirt road, which turned off a ranch road several miles past any town or village that he'd noticed.

Dean sighed. They'd probably have to catch the school bus at the butt crack of dawn, and only after a predawn hike to the highway. And a town this size? No way those things would be air conditioned.

Shit. At least the house had electricity and indoor plumbing, though. Sometimes they didn't. Still no air conditioning, however, which was fast becoming a theme of this trip.

They quickly set to work unpacking the car, then Dad left to make a supply run while he and Sam set up camp. Or it was supposed to be him and Sam. Sam, however, was continuously drawn to the window, which looked out over a rolling green pasture with something that could be horses grazing in the distance. Or it could be cows. Or, from this distance, zebras.

Regardless, when he opened his mouth, Dean figured he knew what was coming and gave him a preemptive no.

"What?" Sam asked, peevishly.

"No, you can't go out there and see if those are horses."

Sam's jaw thrust forward. "That's not what I was going to ask," he lied. Dean wasn't fooled.

"Oh no? What were you going to ask?"

Sam shot him a mutinous look, but his brother was nothing if not a quick thinker. "I was going to ask, did you know that it's illegal to graffiti someone else's cow in Texas?"

Dean snorted. "Well, good to know. I'll have to scratch that off tonight's agenda." He turned back to the box of battered pots he was unpacking, and counted down.

Three.

Two.

One.

"But why can't I go see if those are horses?"

Bingo. Dean smiled and shook his head at his family's predictability. "Because that's not our land. You'd be trespassing."

"You and Dad trespass all the time."

"That's different."

"How?"

"Because it is."

"Uh!"

"Besides, there's probably snakes. And … what were those things again? Horny frogs?"

"Horny toads. And they're not poisonous. They don't even bite."

"Why would they choose a state mascot that can't even bite?"

"It can shoot blood out of its eye," Sam answered, which, yeah, was pretty cool. "Besides, it's not a state mascot. It's the state reptile. Just like the state bird is the mocking bird and the state small mammal is the armadillo and the state large mammal is the longhorn and the state fish is the Guadalupe bass and the state insect is the Monarch butterfly."

"A butterfly? What a bunch of wusses."

"The official state dish is chili," Sam offered placatingly. He'd already forgotten that he was mad at Dean. It never took long.

"Mmm," Dean answered. "Chili."

Sam grinned at him. "Yeah. We should have that for dinner, huh? To be official and all."

Which was how Dean ended up chopping the official state vegetable a few hours later: 1015 sweet onions. Tomorrow was hamburgers, which Sam informed him had been invented in Texas.

OOO

By the time Sam got up the next morning, Dad was already gone, and Dean was looking unhappy. Sam figured the two were related. Since Dean had started hunting with Dad a little over a year ago, he hated seeing Dad go off on his own. Dean always said it was just that he wanted to go, too, but Sam didn't believe him. His theory was that Dean was worried that something would happen and he wouldn't be there to help. He was just too cool to admit that he was worrying.

Even so, that meant more worrying for Sam, because there was less certainty in Dean's voice these days when he told Sam not to worry if Dad was going after something new or late getting home.

But Sam wasn't worried right now, not about that, anyway. Dad had just left, and he didn't even know what he was going after, yet. It'd probably take him several days of researching before he got to the dangerous part. So, for now, Sam could focus all his nerves on preparing for his first day of school.

He put on his best jeans and his blue shirt. The same outfit he'd worn for all his first days this year. 'Course, he'd worn it a lot more times since the first days in Maine and South Carolina, but still. There was a nice symmetry to wearing it for all the first days.

Then he looked over his supplies. He should start all over in new notebooks, so that the new class notes wouldn't get mixed up with the old ones. But Dad said there was no point buying new notebooks when school was going to be out in two months. Just like he'd said there was no point in buying new ones for South Carolina when the old ones only had four months' worth of notes in them. Sam had talked him into some new pencils, but only because they were cheap and he'd chewed the erasers off all his old ones.

He'd left all his school books back in South Carolina, so his backpack was saggy and light for their first early-morning trek down the dirt road to meet the school bus. He bet it'd be heavy on the way home, though. Not for Dean, of course. Dean was only carrying one tattered notebook now and would probably carry that same notebook home at the end of the day. He'd stopped doing homework once he got to high school. He said it was because it got to be too much trouble to keep up, moving so often. But Sam thought it was really just that he lost interest.

That, and the fact that a backpack would cramp his style.

They reached the end of the dirt road, and settled in to wait next to a long row of aluminum mailboxes labeled with the same route and varying box numbers. Sam opened the one that matched their new address, just for the heck of it. There was no mail, but a big brown spider had built a nice web inside. Sam wondered if the mailman would deliver mail with a spider in their box. Not that they ever got mail, anyway.

That reminded Sam of William Travis' letter, and he set to imagining the Alamo again for the 15 minutes before the bus came. Victory or death. He'd looked up sublimest when he'd unpacked his dictionary. It came from the root sublime, which meant inspiring awe. So William Travis had written the most awe-inspiring document in American history. That surprised Sam, but made him feel oddly proud of the man. He thought they had a lot in common.

The bus arrived and luckily the driver was nice enough to stop and let them on, even though Dad hadn't remembered to sign them up to ride the bus. She said she just figured that if there were kids waiting by the side of the road on her route at this time of day, she should pick them up. They should probably be in school, anyway, she said.

Dean smiled and laughed and thanked her and charmingly assured her that, yes, school was exactly where they were trying to get to. Sam tried not to blush at having this woman know that Dad had forgotten again.

The bus wasn't crowded, so Sam was faced with a choice. Sit by Dean or find a seat to himself. Used to, he'd always sit by Dean. But lately he'd become uncomfortably aware that it wasn't cool for a high school junior to sit with a seventh grader. Dean hadn't said anything, but then, he wouldn't. Still. Sam knew how hard it was, starting over at a new school, and he didn't want to embarrass his brother any more than he probably already was.

Dean stopped just past an empty seat and turned, waiting for Sam to slide in by the window.

"Uh," Sam stammered, ducking his head. "That's OK. I'll sit over there." He indicated a seat a few rows past.

"Oh," Dean said, surprised. "OK." He flattened himself against the seatback so that Sam and his backpack could slip by. He was sitting down by the time Sam got to his chosen seat, but there was a tense set to his shoulders that Sam wasn't sure how to interpret. He saw Dean beginning to twist around to check on him, and quickly turned to rummage through his backpack so that he wouldn't meet his eye.

He kept his nose buried in his book until the bus pulled to a stop at the high school. Dean slowly got up and turned to give him a final wave before heading toward the door. Sam bit the inside of his lip and gave a small wave back.

OOO

Dean was memorizing the Declaration of Independence for the third time this year. He'd pretty much decided that this was probably normal, that all government classes spent all year memorizing the thing, maybe interspersed with a few stabs at the Bill of Rights.

"We hold these truths to be self evident …"

Dean had come up with his own set of self evident truths. That all men were not created equal – Winchesters were clearly superior. That Impalas rock. That school is stupid. That history is boring.

Then again …

He thought back to what Sam had been saying in the car and flipped to the table of contents in his new history book. Sure enough, there were three whole chapters on Texas history, enough to constitute a full section of the tome. God this state was vain. He turned to the appropriate page number and began scanning. Spain, Mexico, France. Sheesh, was he glad he wasn't in seventh grade this year. The flags alone would be enough to do him in. There. The Republic of Texas.

And of course, a convenient little subsection on the heroes of the Alamo.

Jim Bowie. Born in Kentucky, 1795. Blah blah blah. Six feet, one inch tall. Huh. Just like he was. That's probably what caught Sam's eye. He was obsessed with Dean's height lately. Dean had made the mistake of telling him that he was the same height that Dean had been when he was 13, and Sam had gotten it into his head that that meant he would be the same height as Dean when he grew up. Dean hoped he was, because if not, Sam was going to be some kind of majorly disappointed.

It was all there, and then some. Alligators, knife fights, treasure hunting. All kinds of get-rich-quick schemes. More than willing to bend the truth a bit when the purpose suited him.

On the other hand, he spoke three languages. Actually did get rich quick. Charmed everyone he met, including his beautiful young wife …

Who'd died. Along with his two children. And mother- and father-in-law. All in the span of three days. He'd sent them out of town to avoid an epidemic, and they'd all died of it anyway while he was away. He began to gamble, drink, lose money and friends and sell the land he'd worked for years to amass. He lasted three years before finally finding a way out at the Alamo. There he'd fallen ill just in time for the siege, and died with a pistol in each hand, presumably taking out as many Mexican soldiers as he could from his sick bed before taking a few dozen bayonets to the chest.

Well. That was cheerful. He let the book fall closed.

He didn't know what Sam had seen in the guy to remind him of Dean, but now he felt nervous. Dean didn't know if it could be called superstitious, knowing what he knew, but what if Sam was right and he was like this guy, doomed somehow to follow in this poor schmuck's footsteps. God. He didn't even want to imagine what he'd do if his family was gone. Drink, gamble, find a losing battle to fight. Those all sounded like good starting points.

His mind returned, uneasily, to the hunt John had left for that morning. Two hunters dead already, and no clue even what he was heading into. Dean didn't like it. But what could he do about it? Not like he could tell Dad not to hunt, even if he wanted to. Even if Dad was listening.

And for the record? Dad wasn't listening.

One year and two months. That's all he had left. Then he'd be done with school, quit wasting eight hours of his day and maybe be able to find the time to look after both Sam and John.