Birds of Bad Omen

Author: Greg Jefferson

  • The Final Battle of the Alamo

    Every January, when leisure travelers are staying away and the convention business is slow, city workers drain the portion of the San Antonio River that snakes through downtown and dredge its mucky bottom. They usually find chairs from restaurants’ patios, pint glasses, wine glasses, and shot glasses, cell phones, jackets — everything you’d expect to fall into the river from the limestone paths and restaurant patios of the River Walk. But last year they found the Alamo on the riverbed near the Navarro Street bridge. It was covered in layers of thick, grayish-brown mud. Judging from the shape, the workers thought it was maybe a Volkswagen Beetle. But as they began washing off the mud with sprayers, they pretty quickly realized it was the Alamo.

    The church had been stolen five months earlier. (The perpetrators left the Long Barracks and Low Barracks.) City and state officials held several emergency meetings and, to avoid the humiliation of losing the Alamo on their watch and lawmakers’ demands for their heads, decided they would replace it with a replica that had been built in the early aughts for a movie about the Battle of the Alamo. They covered up the gap where the Alamo had been with a large canvas tent, told the public they were giving it a thorough cleaning, and brought in the replica in the middle of the night. Visitors to the Alamo noticed the difference, though they didn’t realize it was a fake Alamo. The site’s customer experience scores increased markedly. Within a few weeks, the number of visits was up dramatically. The two most common remarks in surveys were that it looked exactly like the Alamo they’d seen in that movie and that it was more uplifting than they’d expected. More importantly, the experience left them inexplicably happy, almost euphoric in some cases, the result of some particular combination of quarried Austin limestone, mortar, and craftsmanship that stirred something in them.

    But a problem came to the surface as the Alamo’s popularity surged. The Battle of the Alamo ended in an appalling defeat, with as many as 257 dead Texians and Tejanos, and many triumphant Mexicans. And it didn’t take a military expert to understand what an absurd strategic blunder its defenders had made. There was a yawning mismatch between the historical facts visitors were given during the tour and how the structure made them feel. The managers of the Alamo responded by putting more emphasis on the battle’s importance as a rallying cry for fighters later in the war for Texas independence. But when that failed to close the fact-experience divide, they changed the defeat to a victory that was biblical in scale. The only ones who complained were professional historians. The Texas Board of Education was definitely ready for a simpler, more glorious story.

    The discovery of the real Alamo in the San Antonio River was an unwelcome development. The same functionaries who decided to replace it with the replica now had to decide what to do with the original. Storing it at some secret, secure location was tempting, but were there any truly secret locations left these days? It seemed unlikely. So, they opted to pulverize the Alamo.

    After hosing off the mud, the city workers were given orders to cover the church with a tarp. At 2 a.m. on a Thursday, two days after discovering the Alamo, a crew of six descended to the riverbed, set up three powerful work lamps, and threw themselves on the structure with jackhammers and sledge hammers like it was prey.

  • The Mayor of Titty City

    Joaquin LaMore, the mayor of Titty City, stood on the front porch of his bungalow and watched white sand swirling up his street, escaping from his beach. The wind off the Gulf of Mexico was strong this time of year, just after the summer crowds had gone home. The sand reminded him of when he was eight or nine and his father had taken him on a business trip to New York. He parked Joaquin on a sidewalk in Lower Manhattan, told him not to leave that spot, and stayed gone for six hours while the boy watched snow blowing along the street. He’d never seen snow before. He stared at the two- and three-foot drifts, so like the dunes on the barrier island his father had just bought and named Titty City.

    The moon was just starting to show over the water.

    The other bungalows on his street were dark and empty. Some of them were short-term rentals and the rest were vacation homes for wealthy families from Houston and San Antonio. Joaquin was the only local living that close to the beach. He remembered Titty City’s wild days when dogs that had gotten hopelessly separated from their drunken owners among the dunes. They lurked between the bungalows. You couldn’t see them but you could hear their whimpering. They went feral in three or four weeks, and Joaquin’s dad had his police chief go around and shoot them.

    Joaquin got in his truck and drove to the Baptist church for his A.A. meeting. You couldn’t see the building from the main strip. Joaquin’s father spared a line of dunes from the graders he’d used to level Titty City, and he hid the church behind it. He felt it would be wrong to not have a church on his island, to the same extent it would be wrong to distress a man emerging from one of his strip clubs or poker rooms to have to look at a church.

    On an island with 1,200 people living there year-round, the best turnout Joaquin could hope for on a Tuesday night like this was seven or eight, including himself. The core group was him and three old timers, all of them former employees of his father: Bill, Dale, and Alice. None of them liked Joaquin much because when his father died and he took over the island, he mismanaged the businesses on the strip and let the beaches become littered with empty beer cans and balled-up dirty diapers. And when he got sober, he did it by finding Jesus. He offered national chains and legitimate regional retailers all kinds of inducements to come to the island — to attract a cleaner, more stable kind of visitor and replace the strip clubs, massage parlors, and bars. Bill, Dale, and Alice got thrown out of good-paying jobs and into near minimum-wage work. But Joaquin at least kept the name Titty City, for his father. He just called it to “The Grand Island of T.C.” in the marketing materials and advertising, and eventually trimmed it to “The Grand Island.” By the time he gave up on religion in the late 1990s, the Jesus freaks were taking over Texas politics. He decided to leave well enough alone and not try to bring back the sin trades.

    Joaquin turned on the fluorescent lights of the church’s community room and set up six folding chairs in a circle in the middle of the room.

    He heard the rattling engine of Bill’s very old Plymouth in the parking lot. He hoped Bill wouldn’t be the only other one to show. Of the three of old timers, he’d been closest to Hassle LaMore and so he was the one most disappointed with Joaquin.

    “Howdy, mayor,” Bill called out from the dark hallway.

    “Hey, Billy. You think it’ll be just us tonight?”

    “Maybe. Dale and Alice are still recovering from the end of the season, and who knows if anybody else will show.”

    Joaquin winced.

    Before Joaquin’s ascendancy, Bill’s job was to run whatever errands needed running between Hassle’s business interests on the island and beyond. Hassle had taken out hundreds of millions of dollars in bank loans, mostly from S and Ls but also from a few big commercial banks, and bought raw land, office buildings, car lots, an airplane leasing business, an insurance company, pawn shops, bars, restaurants, three department stores, and Dairy Queens in Houston, Corpus Christi, San Antonio, Brownsville, Harlingen, and McAllen. Hassle crowned himself king and made Titty City his capital, and Bill became his secrets keeper. Hassle never repaid the money he’d borrowed. He constantly shifted funds from one account to another to another, knowing the churning would look like prosperity. Bill helped him do that. Eventually, his empire collapsed and the only thing he managed to keep was Titty City. It was the only thing he really wanted to keep.

    Now Bill’s job was to keep track of the hundreds of golf carts on the island and make sure they were clean and fully charged before they were rented out again.

    “Well, we may have a whole fucking cake to eat between the two of us,” Bill said as he sat a pink cake box on the card table.

    “Good thing I haven’t eaten since breakfast.”

    Bill looked him over slowly.

    “Look at you: rail thin. You never had much of an appetite. Your dad used to worry about that.”

    Joaquin knew he was lying. Sometimes Bill wanted the two of them to share moments when they remembered Hassle lovingly, without rancor on Joaquin’s part.

    The wind picked up and rattled the windows. Sprays of sand hissed against the glass. If it didn’t let up overnight, the preacher would have to sweep half a foot of sand off the porch in the morning.

    The strength and insistence of the wind was starting to unsettle Joaquin. He hadn’t kept up with the weather reports that day. He’d spent it at home plowing through some of his father’s legal detritus, looking for accounts in which Hassle might have squirreled away a few dollars to keep it out of the hands of the feds. The ledgers and stuffed file folders counted as photo albums in the LaMore family.

    “You know what I caught two drunk kids doing on Broadway Saturday night?” Bill said, now sitting opposite Joaquin in the circle, the two of them forming its poles. “Jousting with golf carts and using folded up beach umbrellas as lances. And the one who fought the hardest to keep going was the one who was most fucked up. He had a nasty gash on his cheek and blood all over the front of his shirt. It reminded me of Titty City’s glory days.”

    Bill’s digs about how small life on the island had become didn’t upset Joaquin anymore. He felt the loss, too.

    They reminisced about the time that woman showed up on the island with her husband and two days later went home with two new ones. And when gonorrhea became so prevalent that the toilet bowls and urinals in the bathrooms of Titty City were stained green. And when a man’s bloated body washed up onshore with a chord tied around its neck, and the police chief said they didn’t need to bother the medical examiner on the mainland for what was obviously an accident.

    Bill laughed and shook his head in mock disbelief the way he usually did, and Joaquin chuckled.

    After a few seconds of silence, Joaquin said, “You ready to get started?”

    From the moment he stepped into his first A.A. meeting, there was no question that he’d chair them all until he relapsed, moved away, or died.

    Joaquin’s authority – his right to rule Titty City and its people – covered nearly everything on the island.

    “No. I’m not ready,” Bill said. “In fact, you know what? Let’s just call it a night. I don’t need the Serenity Prayer, or a relatable story from you, or a reading from the Big Book to stay sober, at least not today.”

    “Why’d you come over then? You even brought a cake.”

    “I don’t know. I haven’t been thinking clearly lately. In fact, I’ve been thinking it’s time for me to retire. Maybe it’s past time. I’m 72.”

    “We’d miss you, Billy. A lot. The two of us are the last real connections to Dad.”

    Bill pursed his lips and studied his boots. Bill had forgotten what his own father had looked and sounded like, but he could close his eyes and see each one of Hassle’s many faces and remember whole conversations the two of them had had. Joaquin, with an awkward, involuntarily jerk of his head, looked out the window.

    “Joey, what are you going to do? You told us that you were renouncing the throne and you took the title of mayor. You said you’d stand for election, and that it would be free and fair. And here we are – Titty City has been holding its breath for a year and a half – and nothing’s happened.”

    “You want to run against me – is that what you’re getting at, Billy?”

    “I’m saying something has to change. This island needs something more than you’ve been able to give it. It needs a stronger hand.”

    Joaquin’s face flushed and he could hear his heart beating in his head. He kicked the folding chair closest to him, sending it skittering across the room and slamming into the card table. The devil’s food cake that Bill had taken out of the box made a wet sound when it hit the floor.

    Joaquin stormed out of the room.

    Hours later he sat cross-legged on the beach watching waves carry moonlight to the shore. A bonfire popped and hissed fifty yards or so behind him, close to where thin patches of wild grass grew out of the sand, the border between beach and dunes. Joaquin turned around and saw a hunched figure wrapped in a light blue blanket. He squinted. It was a man who getting just close enough to the flames to light a cigarette. A wind gust came through and sent a shower of embers and sparks over the dunes. Joaquin saw the faintest outlines of what he thought were people walking between and over the mounds. The man straightened up, turned toward Joaquin, and waved, inviting him to the bonfire.

    “Where’re you from?” Joaquin said as he took his place next to the man, who was maybe 70, lean, dark, and completely bald.

    “Titty City, just like you, mayor.”

    “Sorry, sir, but I don’t think so. I’ve lived on this island since I was nine, and I know every soul on it. Between my father and me, we signed every birth and death certificate, officiated at most weddings, and done favors for and given gifts and loans to everyone. And I’ve never seen you.”

    “Well, I’ll prove it with what I know. I know you’re giving up your birthright and that the people of Titty City are both heart-broken and relieved. Your failings have deepened the sense of loss we’ve felt since your father died.”

    Joaquin wanted to push the old man into the fire.

    “Look, my father was a great man, so a lot of people felt like they knew him. They didn’t. They didn’t know a thing about him.”

    “I was one of your father’s bankers. I was the CEO of the First Intercontinental Bank of Dallas, one of the biggest S and Ls in Texas. And I personally signed off on every loan we gave him, met with him over dozens of lunches and dinners, went hunting with him, and when it all crashed down, I had a revelation: your father was the realest man in Texas. So I moved here and spent a lot of time with him. Did you ever ask who found him after his esophageal varices ruptured? It was me. He was on the floor of the private bathroom in his office. But the entire building was flooded with his blood. As we discovered later, it had even seeped into the foundation.”

    Another wind gust blew in from the Gulf of Mexico, the sharpest yet. It sprayed their backs with sand and sent the flames desperately reaching for the dunes and the wild grass, crazy to get at them.

    “I know you sent out a message to the town council and administrators tonight calling an election in November and declaring that you’re not running. I’m not here to try to talk you out of it. It’s the right thing. And I’m not here to tell you how disappointed Hassle would be in you. He foresaw that you’d nearly break Titty City, and he forgave you. I’m here to tell you that everyone on this island saw your father for the man he was, a king, and they loved him. You never understood him like we did. That’s how it is with great men: their subjects know and love them better than their supposed intimates. But I didn’t come here tonight for recriminations, so I’m sorry. Truly. I came here to thank you. The islanders will eventually summon our next Hassle into being, just like the people of Texas summoned your father. They’ll create him out of nothing but their longing. And you’re making that possible.”

    The old man then bent down, reached into an old satchel and pulled out a bottle of whiskey. He handed it to Joaquin, who accepted it gratefully but had barely enough strength left to open it. He turned away from the banker and for a couple of minutes watched black waves shatter the silver moonlight on the surface of the Gulf. The sand stung his eyes. He took two long gulps and then walked toward the dunes, which were deserted now — the people were gone. He sat down in the seam between two dunes. He crossed his legs, drank, and wept. He passed out after an hour or so.

    The wind was howling by then, driving the sand relentlessly against Joaquin’s body. It invaded his nose and mouth, blinded him, and stopped up his ears. And it soon covered him completely.

  • Port Aransas

  • An Alamo Joke and a Follow-up Joke

    When General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna saw the Alamo for the first time, he said to no one in particular, “I thought it would be bigger.”

    A lieutenant standing a few paces behind the general grinned and couldn’t help himself: “Your wife said the same thing!”

  • Settling Up

    He had a hard time with debt. It started when he was four or five and realized that he was accruing debts he could never repay. He believed his parents would hold the notes for the rest of his life. (He could imagine himself dying but not his parents.) Just tracking all the money they spent on his food, clothing, school supplies, sports equipment and fees, zoo admission, movie tickets, and the rest of it would’ve been impossible. He hated the control Dirk and Alice exerted over his life because he was poor and dependent. They told him when to go to bed and when to clean his room, and what could he do? He owed them. He came to understand that his parents schemed to make him subservient and keep him that way. It was a system. As he learned more about slavery and other economic injustices, he saw his parents as worse than the worst pawn shop owners and company town bosses.

    Despite the futility of his situation, he swore to them that he’d someday settle the debt. Dirk and Alice told him not to be crazy, that he didn’t owe them a thing, not a cent. They said that if it helped him, he could think of their expenditures as investments. He would take the enrichment they’d given him into adulthood, become a responsible man with a good job, and eventually take care of them in their old age. At other times, they said he could think about what they spent on him as charitable contributions, like the annually renewing contributions they gave to the public radio station. They also pointed out that there were tax advantages to having him as their child. But he wasn’t stupid, far from it. He saw right away that the investment thing was nothing more than a clever repackaging of the entanglements that set the constricted boundaries of his life. Same thing with thinking about his parents as his own private philanthropists. He was their ward, and he owed them in ways that were hard to understand — even though he hadn’t asked for any of it. And he knew that their earned income credit would never come close to what they were spending on him. His mind boiled.

    He gave them half of his allowance, which was itself a touchy subject because he couldn’t choose the chores for which he would be paid or negotiate the pay rate. Even at that, Dirk and Alice thwarted him by secretly putting the money into a savings account that they gave him access to when he turned 18.

    During his college years, one of his roommates told him late one night that someone who achieves a perfect credit score can kill people with no legal ramifications. They got a special dispensation from the government. He immediately fell in love with the idea and set about organizing his life to achieve a score of 850 as soon as he could.

    But that required him to take on and maintain debts of various kinds and sizes — because you couldn’t handle debt perfectly without actually taking it in your hands. So he overrode the part of him that despised debt. Within a few years of graduating with a degree in computer engineering, he owned a car, a house, and boat, and he was routinely paying off and building balances on eight credit cards, always careful to keep his overall usage rate under ten percent. Once he had this system of credits and debits down, it was only a matter of repetition. But as his score approached 850, his progress slowed dramatically. It was down to time. The credit-rating agencies had to decide at which point he’d responsibly handled credit long enough. They decided on a little more than five years.

    On the morning he checked Credit Karma and found that he’d finally attained a perfect score, he called his boss to say he was taking a personal day and pulled a box that contained a Glock and bullets from under his bed. He’d bought the gun with cash from his first real-job paycheck after college.

    He parked up the street from his parents’ house and hid in the tall bushes next to the driveway. When his father came home for lunch, he followed him into the kitchen where his mother was waiting. He shot them both in the centers of their foreheads. He was an excellent shot. He’d gone target shooting hundreds of times.

    An hour later, a small crowd of neighbors watched from the end of the driveway as he casually pulled up his credit score on his phone and showed it to the two officers standing in front of him. They frowned and slowly shook their heads — not because there was no such dispensation, but because it was never intended for people like him.

  • Accident Scene

    Cristina and I were going to Burger Boy on North St. Mary’s Street to pick up dinner. It was dark and I was driving. I’d taken the exit from Loop 410 to Interstate 10 East, speeding down the on-ramp, when we saw a girl face down on the road about 50 feet or so in front of my car. Her left arm was bent around her head, the hand laying on the pavement and partially covered by coils of her black hair. Her right arm was angled like she was waving to someone in the distance. Her legs were straight, the sandaled feet turned inward, the toes almost touching. She was intensely motionless, like she hadn’t moved for a long time and maybe would not move again. The girl was tall but obviously a child. She was bony like a 11 or 12 year old. She wore a tank top and matching shorts, speckled with pastels. She glowed in my headlights. Her body captured and contained the light — it didn’t reflect it. The girl looked like a luminous cutout set on a black, felt-covered board, an object that consumed space but not time.

  • Mount Simile

    Her heels striking the terrazzo tiles sounded like explosions deep in the seam between two mountains.

    As the storm clouds moved in, a shadow spread over one of the Davis Mountains and onto the plain like a drop of black ink in a dish of water.

    From the airplane, the Davis Mountains looked like brown bacteria erupting in a dirty yellow solution.

    I traced with my index finger the foot trails across the mountain’s southern face from a couple of miles away. Most of them began and ended abruptly like scars on a face years after it had been slashed in a knife attack.

  • What the Boatman Said

    Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Over the next 45 minutes it’ll be my pleasure to tell you the story of San Antonio and its world-famous River Walk.

    But first I need to go over a few rules. One, please keep your arms and legs inside the tour barge at all times. Two, please do not throw anything, like a candy wrapper or empty soda cup, into the river.

    Please follow my directions to the tee in the unlikely event of an emergency. And don’t gesture to or otherwise address anyone on the River Walk’s beautiful limestone walkways, especially groups of drunks, unless you want to know what getting hit with a fusillade of beer bottles feels like.

    And please don’t stare at or ask about my robe and hood.

    You also need to be aware that gravity is denser on the San Antonio River and so time is slower down here than it is on the River Walk. If you left any friends or loved ones up there, once you’re reunited with them, they will talk sadly about the many long days they endured without you, and they will be that much older than you. While the new difference in your ages won’t be that much, only a few days, it will eat away at the foundation of your relationship. It has to do with the shock of becoming aware that time doesn’t insist on treating you and others the same, even those close to you.

    Finally, tipping is strongly, very strongly, encouraged.

    Now let’s get started.

  • Real Texans

    “There are things you’ll never understand about this state or about being a Texan,” Michael said.

    He was wrong, of course. I’d moved here from Michigan decades ago, and my carpetbagging made me as Texan as him. But I knew who he was talking about. He meant the kind whose seven-year-old cheeks and forehead were smeared with the blood of the first deer he killed on the family ranch as an old man with thick whiskey breath said some incantation in atrocious Latin as he swayed over the boy. This also probably happened to Michael: his mother sent him and his brother out to shoot doves, and she talked reverentially about her brothers going out to hunt and her father and his brothers before them, and about the dishes she would make out of the meat in the afternoon. But when the boys returned hours later sweaty and grimy, with dozens of doves stuffed in an ancient leather bag, they found her passed out drunk on the toilet. And at one time or other, when Michael was a prepubescent, his parents and aunts and uncles must have encouraged him, through a series of blinks, silences, glances, and small smiles, to touch his first cousin inappropriately. And the secrets he was so good at keeping — about the crimes that were the wellhead of the family fortune, about the rapes and drunken rages that left puddles of blood soaking into hard wood floors. I’d never heard a word about them even though I’d known Michael for 20 years, had spent weekends at his family ranch in South Texas. I guessed, too, that Michael had a handgun with a long silver barrel under the driver’s seat of his Range Rover, a sidearm too beautifully made to ever be fired.

    This I knew for a fact: like most Texans of his caste, he was sent out East for his schooling and then out West to start his career, and he came home to run things.

    But not to rule, as in the old days — and that’s what made Michael flush with anger, push his plate of gnocchi to the middle of the table, and accuse me of being unable to understand Texas or Texans.

    I’d delivered a message from the lieutenant governor, who like me had come from somewhere else and didn’t have a family to brag about. Ambition, debts of various kinds, and a desire to overcome brought us to Texas.

    “The lieutenant governor knows you’re still moving ahead with plans for the office tower even though as a friend he advised you that the market wasn’t quite right for the project, to maybe build it somewhere else. Since indirectness is your ancestral language, you must have gotten the message. Going ahead and bringing in more investors and signing design contracts means you’re being willful. So now the lieutenant governor wants to be very clear — you are a mandarin and it’s time to stop what you’re doing.”

    I can’t describe the joy I felt as he pushed away his plate.

  • Saint Francis and the Dogs of San Antonio

    Saint Francis brought the dogs of San Antonio together in a series of convocations around the city. They met in parks at night. He stood in the middle of packs of hundreds of stray dogs, all of them panting in the lingering heat. No human got close enough to hear what Saint Francis said to them, but the dogs cried and yelped and none of them fought. During the day, Saint Francis walked up and down neighborhood streets stopping at fences to talk in whispers to dogs that had collars and their shots. When he left them after 10 minutes or so, the dogs became taciturn and stared vacantly over the rooftops of their neighborhoods. A month after he’d arrived, Saint Francis walked out of the city on the shoulder of Interstate 10 West. Thousands of dogs followed him in rows of two or three. They eventually stopped and watched him continue to make slow progress in his coarse brown robe. And then they turned around and went to back to where they came from. A few days later, they turned on the humans, attacking them on the streets in blurs of foam and teeth and blood-slick fur. The first day and night, they killed more than 500, mostly old people and children, and maimed 2,000 or so. Most streets and sidewalks were stained with blood and littered with human noses, ears, fingers, limbs, and ragged sheets of skin. The next day, the humans rallied, patrolling in packs of five or six, all of them weighed down with guns and ammunition. The dogs adapted. Dozens of them would rush a patrol. The ones that weren’t slaughtered in the first barrage bore down on the humans, who often fired again in panic, shooting as many people as dogs. Thousands of dogs died, but so did another 400 humans. The third day, the governor declared martial law in San Antonio, ordered people to remain indoors and sent in the Texas National Guard to kill every dog they could find. As San Antonians began burying and cremating their dead, they blamed Saint Francis for the bloodshed. He must have put the dogs up to this. State troopers launched a manhunt, but they couldn’t find him. Over time, however, the message of San Antonio’s archbishop and his priests prevailed: whatever Saint Francis said to the dogs, they must have misunderstood his meaning. After all, they said, dogs aren’t very bright.