This Way Slaughter

by Bruce Olds

  I sensed that the 40-year-old, reef-wrecked, sodden brig of a man sitting in the chair beside me was disintegrating spanker by spar before my eyes.

  “One and only time I ever had need of its use as a fighting weapon,” he said. “That farcical one-off dust-up.”

  “Still,” I said, “impressive piece of hardware.”

  “Oh sure, sure,” he said. “Sharp enough for a razor, hard enough for a hatchet, broad enough for a paddle, long enough for a sword. I like to say I keep its blade edge so keen, it cuts through water without getting wet. I had a lady friend once, back in New Orleans, who commented that just to look at it gave her a throbbing case of the sops.”

  I laughed. “Yes, well, one can only imagine.”

  “Besides,” he said. “Truth? My nerves are about all shot to hell, Buck. Not my nerve, mind. Nerve I’ve got aplenty, too much maybe. But a man forgets, loses focus, gets distracted, stops paying attention. All it takes is a single slip of the wrist and—slanch!—self-inflicted, you’re bleeding out. Lookee here.” Lifting his right arm, he held it outstretched before him. Stiff as lumber. Save for the hand. The massive, massively scarred hand which trembled as if palsy-struck. “Is that not,” he said, “one helluva fine howdy-do?”

  At a loss, I chose to change course. “So, Colonel Bowie, what are we going to do then?”

  “Do?” he said, quieting the right hand in his lap, massaging it with his left. “About what, Buck?” Pouring himself some of the mezcal and offering me the same, which I waved casually off, he raised the jicara in a toast to the portraitured image—arriba, abajo, al centro, adentro; up, down, center, within—and tossed it back. Then in swift succession another. And another. “Ah,” he said, “there’s the steady.”

  I believed he knew perfectly well about what. “About la escritura en la pared, Jim,” I said. “About the writing on the wall.”

  He hesitated a moment, appeared to mull some. “You know why I drink, Buck? I drink for the same reason most people drink—to forget, drown the pain, the hurt, the memories. But you know what? Know what I’ve learned?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Pain swims.”

  “Ah,” I said, not knowing what else to say until after what I considered an acceptable pause I tried again. “Two matters are most pressing, Jim—command and defense. As you are aware, more than half the men here are volunteers. That’s a full four companies over which I have no authority whatever. They are free to stay or go as the spirit may move them, and a good half of them, as you know, have expressed their intention to do the latter momentarily. Nor, with Neill gone, can I say I blame them. They do not know me, and what they may think they know does not cut to my benefit. At best, our situation here is unenviable. At worst, untenable. Were such a depletion to occur now, it would constitute an unmitigated disaster. We are a paltry few as it is. We can ill afford the loss of a single man.”

  “Agreed,” he said, appearing to muse a moment. “There is a way around that, you know. To ensure they stick.”

  “Yes?”

  “Election.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Show of hands, Buck. Let them vote in their own head man. Give them a reason to stay. A say. Invest them personally in remaining an active part of our effort here.”

  “Split command?”

  “Share it. Partnership. Co-equal partnership. Two heads better than one.”

  “They’ll vote you.”

  “Goes without saying.” He paused. “Anything to keep those men on board.”

  His arm was outstretched across the table, hand out. Helluva hand. Callused, nicked, cratered. Gouged. Hideously gouged. Scars layered atop scars. I gripped it in my own.

  He said nothing. I said the same. And then I said, not knowing I was about to say it, “WHY? Why didn’t you just blow the damn place to Hades, Jim? That fucking Alamo out there, the way Houston wanted, the way he told you? I have no use for that man personally, you know that, but about that papist cesspit, he is correct. It is of no military value whatever. Too far west, too isolated, too exposed. How did he put it to me? ‘It is beyond our sphere of influence and safety. If need be, fall back to a more eligible position. Blow it to hell, or let the Mex have it.’ I know he advised you likewise.”

  Bowie did not respond save to mutter, “That was a suggestion not an order. That was left to my discretion. Sam Houston is a good man, but Sam Houston is not here. I’m here.”

  “Fair enough,” I said. “But unless we are massively reinforced, Bejar is positively indefensible and that Alamo out there is a perfect deathtrap. Twenty-one cannon mounted, each requiring a six-man crew to operate at anything approaching maximum proficiency? We are going to need three, four times the number of fighting men we have at present. Six-hundred minimum, 800 to be comfortable.”

  Sighing, Bowie leaned back in his chair using its arms to hoist himself more upright, wincing for the effort. “Those cannon,” he said, “represent the largest collection of artillery amassed in one spot east of the Mississippi. We hadn’t, as we still haven’t, the means to remove and salvage them, and I’ll be damned if I am going to abandon a bounty like that to Santa Anna or anyone else. That’s one. Two, is that contrary to Sam’s opinion that the place is of no importance, Bejar represents the far-forward frontier piquet guard protecting the route into our interior settlements, and in my considered opinion, holding it represents la salvación de Tejas. Which is why, Buck, when I wrote Sam that we would rather die in these ditches than give the place up to the enemy, I was as I am still in dead earnest. To be a Texian is to wager one’s life on staking one’s claim. Simple as that. And three, three Buck”—both hands were clenched tight, balled to fists—“this…is…my…home! I live here. I choose to live here and nowhere else.”

  “Indeed,” I said, “as do I. Still, as much as I despise Santa Anna, as much as I detest his government, as much as I have suffered personally at its hands, as much as I love Tejas, Tejas at day’s end is theirs. By law.”

  “Maybe. Technically. For now.”

  “And that doesn’t give you pause? Doesn’t, pardon the lawyer talk, mitigate to a degree what we are about here?”

  “No, it doesn’t.”

  “No qualms?”

  “Why? In what sense? Moral? That’s hairsplitting, Buck. No. No qualms. Not one.”

  “Look, Jim, you know my feelings, but it serves no purpose to pretend that what we are about here is other than strictly illegal. If we succeed, if we pull this thing off, it will be nothing less than the biggest land grab in American history.”

  “Yes,” he said, “it will, and deservedly so. Mexico doesn’t deserve to keep Tejas, Buck. She’s forfeited all right to her, moral right above all. I’ve bunked or bivouacked hereabouts for most of a decade, and I can tell you for a damn fact it’s always treated her, this territory, like a curb-kicked forgotten cur. Mexico City has no more idea of how to govern Tejas, Buck, than I know how to knit mittens or play the harp.”

  I smiled. “You sound like Austin,” I said. “Often heard him remark, sooner give a loaded pistol to a two-year-old, than endow a Mexican politician with authority. He understands nothing save despotism on the one hand, or anarchy on the other, and given the day of the week or hour of the day, there is no saying which path he may choose to follow. One moment he is for republicanism, the next for fanatical heptarchy, the next for military dictatorship, the next for some jumbled mixture of the most retrograde elements of each.”

  Bowie smiled back. “Before we moved in, Buck—and let me be clear, we did not intervene or invade, we didn’t show up where we weren’t wanted or had no business being, we were encouraged, invited, enticed in at 12 ½ cents per tax-free acre.”

  “The fox welcomed into the henhouse, that it?”

  “You could say that. Or serpent into the garden, the same garden that same serpent worked tirelessly to make flower, bloom, bear fruit. Before we moved in, Buck, it was nothing. Tejas was nothing. Una frontera. The perfect No man’
s Land. Un despoblado perfecto. An enormous ghost town, save that no one ever had bothered to build the town. They wanted us, pleaded with us to reclaim it from los indios barbaros y tribus salvajes. 50,000 of them in those days. Comanch, mainly. Fucking centaurs! Killed more Americans per their own number than any tribe on the continent! You aware of that Buck?”

  I shook my head.

  “And now, after cleaning them out, civilizing things for them, building things up, venturing some capital, applying some elbow grease, risking life, limb and damnation, now after 15 long, hard, damn dangerous years of investing our blood, sweat and tears, the while being obliged to bend over and spread ’em every time Mexico City sprouts a hard-on, now because Santa Anna has his knickers in a knot over how we choose to manage our affairs, he wants not only to kick us out on account, but kill us off?” He shook his head. “No. I don’t think so. Not without a fight.”

  He was wheezing. His lungs sounded graveled, grit scrape on a washboard. I hesitated to say what was on my mind until I found myself saying it. “Afraid?” I said.

  “Of what, Buck?” He wiped his lips with the back of his hand.

  “I dunno, Jim. Death, I imagine. Dying.”

  “That?” He almost chuckled. “Nah. No. Not to mention. Too late, Buck, too late for that. After Ursula, I just gave up on it. Not all at once, a little here, a little there, until after awhile….Besides, there’s enough to be scared of without being scared of that.”

  “Tejas,” I said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Tejas. Live in her long enough, there’s so much of it everywhere around, so much death, a man gets so used to it, scarcely notices anymore. Gets used to it, or gets the hell out. What’s it the Mex say? ‘La vida nos ha curado de miedo.’ Life has cured us of fear.”

  Bowie cocked his head and smiled. “Spoken like a true Texian, Buck. So you with me, Colonel? Up for the fight of your life? Prepared to fuck ol’ Santa Anna in the ass and leave your big swingin’ dick behind as a token of your appreciation?”

  I looked hard at Jim Bowie then, looked hard and right on through him. Not that he blinked. He wasn’t the blinking sort.

  “Fighters,” I said evenly, suppressing the impulse to sigh while feeling myself figuratively sighing. “If we are going to do this, Jim, if we are going to have a prayer of doing this, we are going to need to round up every available, able-bodied fighting man in the territory. Is that possible? Can we manage such a thing?”

  “I have no idea, Buck.” He shrugged. “Does it matter?”

  “It might, if the object is to walk away to fight another day.”

  “And is it, Colonel? In your considered judgment, is that the object here?”

  “According to my orders, the object is to hold this position at all cost.”

  “And so we shall, Buck, so we shall. Hold it. You and I. Together. At all cost.”

  Travis Diary, Feb. 6, 1836:

  Useful parley with Bowie. But I worry. Nothing could be more apparent than that his health, already eroded to an alarming extent, may break at any moment. That the man cannot be dissuaded from consuming deplorable amounts of hard liquor is only pitiful—a more ardent sot it would be difficult to imagine—though admittedly there is little I or anyone else can profitably do in that respect. I must only trust that he will remain sober & steady on his feet long enough to effectively meet the challenges he is certain to face in consequence of our new arrangement in joint command. Should he fall too ill to do so, such a blow could well prove mortal. I need him. I need Jim Bowie, have need of his constancy, to be as much of himself entire at all times as he can muster the wherewithal to be. As for our gentleman’s agreement, henceforth he shall take tactical charge of our Volunteers while I continue in command of the Regulars, but any strategic decision affecting the garrison as a whole shall be arrived at jointly, by mutual consent and accord. Notwithstanding the man’s more glaring deficiencies of character, I pray that we shall find it to the benefit of what we are trying to accomplish here to work together in good faith towards the realization of that object which we both of us hold so dearly deep in common. I cannot help but respect Jim Bowie more than I admire him, but that he is a fighter for mi Tejas, for nuestro Tejas, of that there can be no question.

  Figure & Ground: Cul de sac

  The Alamo, at least as it was configured at the time, amounted to little but a walled-in compound enclosing some three acres more or less oblong in shape. It might better be described as a rectilinear polygon, an asymmetrically enclosed, polygonal open space of trampled-flat, relatively level ground after the manner of a sprawling courtyard or plaza, one boxed in on four sides by walls of varying lengths, heights (eight to 20 feet), thicknesses (three to four feet), and angularities.

  Composed of locally-quarried limestone augmented with adobe, the shortest of these walls, the ones to the North and South, were 200 to 250 feet long. The longer ones, to the East and West, roughly twice that. All told, some 2,100 rectilinear feet, each one of which required armed defense.

  Along the inner side of the walls were located certain contiguous and/or adjacent structures that included perhaps a dozen thatch-roofed jacale mud huts—the largest of these, lying midpoint along the West Wall, known locally as the Treviño House, served as my quarters—a series of elongated flat-roofed single-story barracks rooms, a single two-story flat-roofed building called the Convento that housed our infirmary, and tucked into the far southeast corner, the ruins of a 30-foot high, cruciform-configured, roofless church (subdivided into chancel, transepts, nave, sacristy, baptistery, confessional, lavatorio and monk’s burial chamber) known simply as the Chapel.

  This compound perched fully exposed, nakedly isolated upon an elevated river plain or benchland roughly 500 yards east-northeast of the outer edge of the town of Bejar, the town center of which, La Plaza de las Islas, was designated by the 65-foot-high, octagonal-walled, domed bell tower of the San Fernando Church, reposing some 1,100 yards distant.

  Interposed between the compound and the town, intermittently oxbowing and hairpinning at virtual right angles, meandered the Rio San Antonio: width, 30 to 100 feet; average depth, four to five feet; temperature, between 68 and 76 degrees Fahrenheit.

  This, then, was the approximate morphological and topological lay-out that Santa Anna called “an irregular fortification hardly worthy of the name, a mere corral and nothing more,” that our own engineer, Green Jameson, claimed was “never built to be a military fortress,” and that I had come to conceive of as THE BURROW.

  With respect to its function as a fort, the glaring weak point of the place, its breach point, penetration point, the obvious point of attack—I knew it, the Mex knew it, everyone knew it, only a dolt or blind man could have missed it—the one clearly inviting the greatest lethal throw-weight, was El Pared Norte. The North Wall.

  There, despite Jameson’s best berming, bratticing and barbicaning, best barricading, bulkheading and breastworking, there despite his counterscarping denticulated trenching efforts, it remained a degraded shambles. Constructed of local limestone, it was 240 feet long, all of 80 yards, and stood twelve feet high. So, at any rate, reported Jameson, who was hard at work bulwarking it with what he called a “revetted,” full-height, two-foot thick, outer facing or facade of excavated earth banked up and braced with tied-and-laddered cross-timbers buttressed with vertical pales.

  In effect, it was little more than a reinforced, packed dirt retaining wall, one along the interior midpoint of which he had had his carpenters assemble a hewn-wood platform, a 54-foot-long parapet or rampart which I soon found myself referring to as the “loft-up,” it reminding me of the deck of an airborne raft or elevated flatboat.

  In fact, it was simply a bed of mesquite wood adzed-andmattocked sufficiently flat and level enough to effectively mount and emplace cannon. Accessed by a 51-foot-long plankwood ramp raised, according to Jameson, in accordance with the engineering rule-of-thumb of six feet of ramp to every one foot of platform height—the d
eck, which Jameson called a battery en barbe, stood eight-feet-seven-and-a-half-inches in the air and 24 feet front to back. All told, 1,300 square feet. Roomy, if not capacious.

  Having knocked out a trio of embrasures in the stone wall for cannon to fire through, Jameson was of the opinion that the wall remained vulnerable even so. I knew it remained vulnerable. Only a dolt or blind man would not have realized that it remained vulnerable. When Jameson told me that wall was in want of further shoring, more elaborate shoring, I could only respond, “Go ahead then, Green. Shore away. What do you need?”

  He had his dunnage list ready. Handing it to me, I read: joists, struts and stanchions, girders, I-beams, rebars, sandbags, Kapok bales, riprap, gabions and fascines, cribbing, cinder block, ferro concrete slab. Backfill of any sort: ballast, bags of talus, groynes, ossified sod and ore slag. Asbestos lagging, creped cellulose wadding, molded pulp, corrugated cardboard, white cork. Insulation. Revetment material: window dummies, hollow-core doors, wrought-iron banisters, red catalfalques, styrofoam peanuts, bubblewrap, air pillows, papar, vulcanized bowling balls and Indians pins. HESCO bastion baskets!

  I am not, I told him, a specialist in Futurist Procurement. Try to do the best you can with what you have and can manage to scavenge. At which moment, I felt the very soul of stupidity. Vapidity. But then, that is what we rapidly were being reduced to by our reduced circumstances: that which was indisputably necessary, was likewise that which was arrantly preposterous.

  The truth was, even at its best, and that best seldom was more than stercoraceous, the place remained redolent of some misbegotten necropolis. A Malebolge, an Evil Ditch, one roosting for the easy pickin’s upon a remote, half-savage, aridly sterile outback that collapsed all horizons to the point of implosion.