Winning Texas

by Nancy Stancill

  “I hope Sam Wurzbach isn’t just another secessionist,” Travis said. “It sounds like a different thing. Preserving the German heritage in Texas seems sensible – seceding from the United States just seems crazy.”

  “Yeah,” Annie said. “But I’m skeptical about the German-Texas movement, too. What do they really want? We have to find out.”

  CHAPTER 28

  “Hungry? There’s a good little barbecue place up the road that might be quicker than trying to eat in downtown Austin,” Travis said.

  Annie had lulled herself to sleep in the passenger seat. She sat up straight and stretched her arms. Food would probably blast away her late-morning lassitude.

  “Good idea.”

  Minutes later, he pulled into a rustic log building that Annie had noticed on previous trips. It wasn’t quite noon, but already cars half-filled the parking lot of Stumpy’s, a modest café on the outskirts of Austin. That boded well for the quality of the barbecue inside.

  “There are picnic tables in back and a nice view of the creek,” Travis said. “It would be fun to sit outside, if I can land a table in the shade.”

  They walked inside a rectangular dining room with old-fashioned knotty pine paneling and long communal tables. Two older women served customers behind a short cafeteria line and a muscled young man with dreadlocks tamed by a hairnet chopped beef brisket on a butcher-block slab behind them. The steaming meat looked dark and crusty on the outside, the way Annie liked it, and smelled smoky and peppery. The menu was short: brisket sandwiches and plates with baked beans, slaw and a few other sides. The restaurant also made its own pecan pie and served it in thick slices with ice cream, but she’d be good and skip it.

  Annie and Travis got sandwiches and iced tea, paid at the cash register and walked their trays through the back door to the grassy picnic area. They selected a shaded picnic table with a good creek view, put their trays down and settled in, facing each other.

  The back door opened again. Annie looked up and almost choked on her iced tea. She recognized Rob Ryland, a former Times reporter she had worked with four years ago with disastrous consequences. Dressed in dark jeans and a black T-shirt, he looked a little older, but still had the hazel eyes, longish brown hair and the deceptively wholesome looks of a young Paul McCartney. They’d worked together reporting on Tom Marr’s gubernatorial campaign with its links to the Nation of Texas. She’d been Rob’s mentor and they’d spent weeks working side-by-side on the big story. Then she found out the young reporter was the nephew of secessionist leader Dan Riggins and secretly had spied on her and jeopardized the newspaper’s investigation. She had confronted Rob and he left the paper, but later threatened to kidnap her from a hospital’s parking garage. A Texas Ranger had arrested him on the spot. He’d been lucky to get off with probation and a pledge to stay away from secessionist activities.

  Darker memories surfaced as Rob stood at the restaurant’s door with his tray. She remembered the night he’d brought her home from a bar and taken advantage of her weakened state. She’d been mourning the death of her best friend by drinking heavily with other Times staffers. Rob had spent the night, ostensibly to make sure she was all right, and had forced himself on her. She’d blamed herself afterwards, but his insistence that he’d done nothing wrong had shaken her. She’d kicked him out the next morning and they avoided each other until they were both assigned to the secessionist story. He’d worked with her cooperatively, until she found out about his betrayal.

  She composed herself and spoke to Travis. “I just saw Rob Ryland, Dan Riggins’s nephew who used to work at the Times.”

  “That scumbag who spied on your investigation and tried to kidnap you?” Travis asked. “What’s he doing here?”

  “I heard he was living in Austin,” Annie said. “Not sure what he’s up to. I think we should follow him.”

  Travis’s eyes shone. He loved intrigue of any kind. “Let’s do it.”

  Annie described Rob, and Travis took his half-eaten lunch inside to look for him. Annie finished her lunch quickly and walked around to Travis’s car in the graveled parking lot at the side of the building. She waited until she saw Travis coming out behind Rob. Rob got into his pickup and she and Travis followed him. They drove a few miles into Austin and turned into a parking lot just after Rob. The building was one Annie was familiar with: the headquarters of an alternative paper called the Austin Comet.

  Unfortunately, Rob had caught them and strode to Travis’s car, where he tapped on the passenger side window. Busted! They got out.

  “Annie Price, were you following me? Are you trying to harass me?” Rob was furious and loud.

  “We didn’t mean any harm, Rob,” she said. “We saw you leaving Stumpy’s Restaurant and needed to take the same route. Wondered what you were doing these days.”

  “I have a good job covering music and local politics for the Austin Comet. So now you know,” he said. “It’s a fresh start for me. I’d hope that you wouldn’t deny me that.”

  “Of course not,” Annie said. “Rob, this is Travis, my reporting partner at the Times. We’re actually here on a story.”

  “And what would that be?” Rob said belligerently.

  “Since you’re working for a newspaper now, I’d better not say,” Annie said. “Competition, you know.”

  “Does it have anything to do with the secessionist movement?”

  “Can’t talk about that,” Annie said. “But since you mention it, we’ve heard that your Uncle Dan is still active in the cause, though he’s a fugitive. Has he been back in West Texas? Can you tell us anything?”

  Rob’s face changed quickly, but Annie couldn’t read it.

  “I’d be shocked if he’d been in Texas,” Rob said. “As far as I know, he and Alicia are hiding somewhere far away. Your guess is as good as mine. I’m just a law-abiding journalist these days.”

  “Do you keep up with the Nation of Texas folks? Or is that group more or less dead?”

  “Are you kidding?” Rob said. “As long as Texans love their state, the Nation of Texas will never die.”

  “No, I’m prohibited from being involved in that group, as you may recall,” he added. “But things are even worse now than they were four years ago – terrible leadership from the President, Congress and the courts. Why would Texans want to be part of that?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Could it be they believe in something larger than Texas? After all, our ancestors fought for our independence. Could it be that most Texans still think the United States is a pretty good country?”

  Rob shook his head and gave her a withering look.

  “You could have been part of a historic new republic, but you chose to do everything you could to hurt Texas,” he said. “I’ll never understand that.”

  “Rob, we’ll never agree on this, so there’s no more to say,” she said. “Are you enjoying your reporting job?”

  “I love my job with the Comet,” he said. “I’m doing exactly what I want to be doing. Sorry I sounded off, Annie.”

  “Bye, Rob.”

  Rob nodded to her cordially, but turned to Travis with animosity. “Follow me again and I can guarantee that you’ll be very sorry.”

  He strode across the parking lot as they got back into Travis’s car. Annie shook her head.

  “Sorry, Travis. Bad idea. Following him didn’t work out too well.”

  “What a nasty guy,” Travis said. “At least we know what he’s doing now.”

  “Maybe,” Annie replied. “He’s working as a reporter, but he still talks like a secessionist.”

  CHAPTER 29

  Soon after the encounter with Rob, Travis pulled into thei
r budget motel on the outskirts of Austin. In the spirit of economy, Annie had made reservations at the cheapest of the chains. Travis noticed the parking lot had cracked in several places, probably from truck tires beating it down for decades. He checked out his small single room, pleased to note that it was next door to Annie’s. He sat on the double bed with its cheap floral bedspread, checking emails on his smart phone. She’d asked for time to freshen up, so they met twenty minutes later for the drive downtown.

  He was annoyed to see that she’d dolled herself up, changing into a straight black skirt with a purple top that he thought showed too much cleavage, a black blazer with rolled-up sleeves and sexy, high-heeled sandals. She’d brushed her hair back from her forehead, put on mascara and eyeliner and outlined her lips with deep pink lipstick. Of course she’d want to shine for Satterfield, that hound dog of an ex-boyfriend. He felt protective of Annie and jealous of her attention to men who didn’t deserve her. He admired her in so many ways and felt sorry that she carried the torch for that bastard politician.

  “Nice outfit,” he said. “Should I change?” He was wearing khaki shorts and one of his more subdued Hawaiian shirts.

  “Thanks,” she said. “I don’t think so. You look fine.”

  She seemed preoccupied and didn’t smile, staring ahead as they passed office towers, gas stations and chain businesses on either side of the freeway toward downtown. He drove quickly and stopped to let her out on Congress Street. She’d walk to Jake Satterfield’s office from there. He’d park the car at a nearby garage before heading to his own interview with Sam Wurzbach.

  “Bye, Travis,” she smiled. “Check in with me later to let me know how things are going.”

  “Are we going to have dinner together?” he said, trying not to sound too hopeful.

  “Let’s play it by ear. See how long these interviews take. We shouldn’t make definite plans yet.”

  Her noncommittal answer depressed him, but he tried to concentrate on his upcoming meeting with Wurzbach, the darling of the German-Texas movement. He arrived ten minutes early after exploring the Capitol and cooled his heels in the outer office. Wurzbach and most other legislators were housed in the fancy four-story underground extension to the Capitol. A fire in the 1980s had inflicted serious damage, and renovations included constructing a massive addition underneath and adjacent to the building. Located at the top of Austin’s Congress Street, the Capitol set a dramatic stage for trendy businesses sloping down to Lady Bird Lake, renamed for the late, beloved first lady. At night, when the Capitol was lit up, Travis thought its elevated, bronzed exterior looked as majestic as anything he’d ever seen.

  He didn’t want to dwell on Annie’s meeting with the fat-cat Satterfield, whom he’d heard was dating their former Times colleague, Maggie Mahaffey. The stuck-on-herself reporter and self-absorbed politician deserved each other. Travis had never gotten to know Maggie, so he hadn’t exactly mourned her departure. He’d judged her as attractive but superficial, and knew she wouldn’t waste her time on him when she could vamp a powerful player.

  Travis was attracted to Austin for its quirky blend of music, youth-oriented nightlife and lucrative tech jobs. Many of his college friends had migrated there for high-paying positions, but he loved journalism, so he’d settled in Houston because of its larger newspaper. What if Annie was right that print journalism was destined to devolve into a bunch of competing websites? He loved technology, but a website without a newspaper would feel as empty as a world without trees. He wasn’t sure why, but he guessed he had what the Times’ geezer subscribers were always talking about – an irrational need to hold onto something tangible, to feel the carefully curated package of news in his hands as he sipped his morning coffee. Seeing his byline on a printed page always felt special. If the print edition disappeared, he guessed he could move to Austin and become a wealthy techie.

  Wurzbach came out of his inner office to greet Travis, who warmed to his quick smile and open manner. After a few pleasantries, he led Travis to a conference room, closed the door and they talked for several hours.

  Travis learned that Wurzbach was a native Texan a couple of years older than Kyle Krause. They’d both attended high school in Fredericksburg and bonded as hard-working stars of their wrestling team. While Krause had chased his fortune in Houston with the topless industry, Wurzbach had persevered in the small town with his burgeoning chain of German bakeries. He’d kept in touch with Krause over the years and recently had persuaded him to invest in German Texas.

  “Doesn’t the name Wurzbach come from the Old Country?” Travis said. “Is that how you got interested in the concept of a German Texas?”

  “The name’s about as German as you can get,” Wurzbach smiled. “My ancestors came to Texas in the 1840s, part of the first wave of German immigrants. It wasn’t an easy life for them. Farming in the Hill Country was tough.”

  He told Travis his ancestors had spread through the Hill Country and made a decent life for themselves until anti-German hysteria gripped the state during World War I.

  “My great-grandfather was persecuted during the war,” Wurzbach said. “He wasn’t physically injured, but some of his friends were horsewhipped, and even tarred and feathered, by fellow Texans just because of their German surnames. It was a terrible time.”

  “I never knew that,” Travis said. “Did it happen in other states?”

  “Sure,” Wurzbach said. “But it was worse in Texas because of the state’s isolation and large population of German immigrants. Texans developed an unreasonable fear of people who’d been their friends and neighbors for decades.”

  By 1900, he said, Texas had become home to about 200,000 people of German descent. Most were settled in ten counties where German Texans composed as much as ten percent of the population. Those counties are still regarded as “German” counties.

  “The German Texans loved their state, but desperately wanted to keep their old-country traditions alive – their German hunting and singing clubs, German churches, and German-language instruction,” Wurzbach said. “They were very successful at keeping their culture flourishing until World War I.”

  One well-publicized incident showed how the hysteria affected Texans of German ancestry, he said. On Feb. 12, 1918, a young clerk for the Germania Club in Fayetteville, near Houston, raised the German flag to notify members of a social event that evening. It was an established way to communicate with club members, but on that day, led to unanticipated trouble.

  “Law enforcement officers arrested eleven men and charged them with the federal crime of espionage – simply because they displayed the flag,” Wurzbach said. “Charges were later dropped, but the incident terrified German Texans.”

  By the end of the war, few vestiges of the vibrant German culture remained.

  “German language instruction had been outlawed in most high schools, German street and town names had been changed, citizens were afraid to speak German, cultural clubs had been disbanded and virtually all German-language newspapers closed,” he said.

  “It was a major blow to the German traditions in Texas that continued after the war – with the emergence of the Ku Klux Klan and other groups that detested ‘foreign’ influences,” he added. “German Texans have vowed never to let these prejudices spring up again.”

  “That was a long time ago,” Travis said. “Why would that be a concern now?”

  “The modern-day secessionist movement shocked us all,” Wurzbach said. “Four years ago, your paper published stories about the Nation of Texas and their ruthless quest to force our state to break away from the United States.”

  “But they’ve failed miserably,” Travis said.

  “It’s a threat that’s rising again,” Wurzbach said. “We see signs they’re regrouping, so we want t
o make sure our German culture and traditions are protected.”

  He showed Travis on a map the ten counties that still contain a significant population of Texans descended from German immigrants. Those counties -- Austin, Comal, DeWitt, Fayette, Gillespie, Guadalupe, Kendall, Lee, Medina and Washington – could easily revive German traditions.

  “We want the legislature to designate these counties as the enclave of German Texas,” he said. “Those counties would offer German-language instruction in schools, put up German signs and give German-oriented businesses incentives to locate there.”

  “But aren’t we all Texans?” Travis said. “What about the border counties? The predominant language is Spanish and the majority population is of Mexican descent. Should that area be called Mexican Texas?”

  “No, we fought and prevailed in the Texas Revolution against Santa Anna,” Wurzbach said. “He butchered our brave men at the Alamo in 1836, but a few months later we won the Battle of San Jacinto. The Mexicans forfeited their rights to Texas forever.”

  “I don’t see much difference,” Travis said.

  “We’re not asking for the whole state – just a slice, where German Texans could be assured of maintaining and building on their culture,” Wurzbach said.

  “Do you have the support of the counties to create your enclave?”

  “Definitely,” he said. “People living there think it would be a great economic and marketing tool.”

  He looked at his watch, saying they needed to leave for his first major German-Texas fundraiser. He’d invited Travis to join him, so the two left the Capitol to drive to a restaurant in the countryside.

  CHAPTER 30

  “Mr. Satterfield should be available in ten minutes, Ms. Price,” the middle-aged secretary told her. Annie nodded and shivered in her lightweight summer jacket. Why did Texas government officials always keep their offices so cold? You came in sweating from the summer heat and encountered a blast of frigid air that practically blew you out of the room.