Face-Off at the Alamo Read online

  The community was also a reversal. Tamarack was tiny; San Antonio was huge, its population nearly one and a half million. If there was a similarity between the two places, it was a stretch: Tamarack had a gentle river splitting the town in half; San Antonio had River Walk, a series of shallow canals that turned and twisted through a maze of shops and restaurants in the city’s downtown. Tamarack’s river had snowmobiles moving along it in winter, canoes and speedboats in summer when the tourist season began. San Antonio’s canals had small water taxis. They moved through a city that seemed, Travis thought, to be locked in an eternal tourist season.

  Then there was the hockey rink. Travis took one look inside the Ice Center at Northwoods – home of the American Hockey League’s Rampage – and felt like he had just stepped through a time machine right back into Tamarack’s Memorial Arena.

  Sure, the San Antonio rink was much newer and far larger, but there was the same smell of Dustbane cleaner, even the same soft whisking sound of one of the arena staff slowly pushing a broom across the cement floor of the lobby. There were the same bright lights slowly popping on, one by one, then in bunches, as the arena was lit up before the Owls’ first skate. There was the sound of skates being sharpened coming from a back room – a grating, singing, hot sound that, only to the ear of a hockey player, is pure music. And then there was the ice: glistening, hard, smooth, an off-white color bordered by the startling bright blues and reds of the painted lines and face-off circles.

  Travis was home.

  So, too, was Nish.

  If Travis thought his best friend had come down from his sugar attack since the flight from Chicago, he was wrong. If anything, Nish was even more wound up. And he was already causing trouble.

  Travis had been driven to the rink by his billets, Mr. and Mrs. Finebester, who had also taken in Little Simon Milliken, Dmitri, and Derek Dillinger. The four Owls arrived after the rest of the team, and for once Travis was glad to be late.

  Nish had somehow arrived first. He had, as might be expected, immediately set to work with his ridiculous pranks. First he had loaded up a garbage pail with water and carefully balanced it on the dressing-room door so that the next person to shove open the door dumped the pail on his head.

  That would be Jesse Highboy, sitting soaked to the skin and looking miserable in a locker in the far corner of the room.

  Nish had also taken advantage of Mr. Dillinger’s hard work with the equipment. Mr. D had neatly laid out the players’ equipment in their stalls, each with a name tag and number filled out by the Owls’ manager with a thick Sharpie pen. He had placed the shin pads, carefully turned right side up, above each locker. Nish had taken note and filled several of the pads with cups of water, knowing that none of the Owls was tall enough to see and would simply reach up and yank the pads down.

  That would be Gordie Griffith and Fahd, each sitting in another corner with soaking wet faces and hair.

  Travis shook his head and refused to give the giggling, red-faced Nish the attention that he craved. He tried to concentrate on the music pounding out from Data’s fancy sound system, but not even his favorite hockey tune – Queen’s “We Are the Champions” – could distract Travis as much as he wished from the locker next to him.

  Nish had his equipment bag open, and it seemed to be filled with rotting dead animals. How, Travis wondered, could such a stink survive all summer long? Did Nish not get his equipment washed like everyone else? Did he not notice? Or did he just not care?

  Travis was late because Mr. Finebester had been held up in traffic on his way home. Mr. Finebester had hurried to get his four guests to the rink, but by the time they arrived, the rest of the Owls were already well into their dressing. The three girls – Sam, Sarah, and goaltender Jenny Staples – were already in full equipment and doing stretches outside the room they had been assigned.

  Travis hurried, but he stuck to his ritual: right, left, right, left.… He kissed his practice jersey as he pulled it on and bent over to hurry up with his skates. He grabbed the right laces first, carefully looping the long ends through the fingers of each hand, and pulled up hard.

  Snap!

  The laces broke. And so, too, did Nish. He burst like a balloon that has been blown up too tightly, air and spit spraying the room as well as poor Travis. Nish, fully dressed himself, leaped to his feet and with great drama tapped his little captain on the shin pads.

  “Let’s go, Trav! You’re running late!”

  Travis looked up, his face burning red. He could see his teammates laughing at him, though some didn’t dare to look his way.

  He had just been caught in hockey’s dumbest prank – the half-cut skate laces. He tried his left skate, grabbing the laces and pulling hard. Snap!

  Caught twice.

  Travis groaned. He would now have to unlace both skates and thread in new ones – carefully crossing them in the pattern Sarah had taught him – and he wouldn’t be out in time for Muck’s whistle.

  Muck would not be amused.

  The rest of the team hurried out and onto the ice while Travis furiously sought to replace his laces and catch up. He finished, pulled on his helmet and his gloves, jumped up, and yanked his stick from the stick rack.

  It felt different.

  But nothing really felt right to Travis. He still didn’t have the feeling that his skates were part of his own body. He still hadn’t reached that soaring moment in the season when it was no longer necessary to think about what he was doing on the ice. Instead, he lumbered around the rink a couple of times, trying to ignore Muck’s hard stare and the slow shake of his head. He did his quick stretches and then lined up for a few practice shots at Jenny Staples and Jeremy Weathers in goal.

  Travis was next after Lars Johanssen, the nifty little defenseman who had moved from Sweden to Tamarack and who was so slick with the puck. Lars picked up Muck’s pass from the corner, raced in, hit the brakes just as Jeremy guessed he was about to go around him, and waited while Jeremy slid out past him. Lars was all alone with the puck on his stick and a completely empty net. The rest of the Owls pounded their sticks on the ice in admiration as Lars, as gently as if he were pushing an egg, deposited the puck in the net.

  Now it was Travis’s turn. The puck bounced awkwardly off his stick and away. He had to skate back to pick it up.

  The puck felt all wrong. His stick seemed to weigh a ton. He felt weak. He knew what he wanted to do, what he always wanted to do: put the puck off the crossbar. He never cared during practice or warm-up whether or not he scored. It was far more important to hit the crossbar.

  He skated in, feeling like he was using someone else’s legs. He set himself to shoot, feeling like someone else’s arms were holding his stick. He shot, and the stick was like a lead pipe in his hands.

  The puck never even left the ice.

  Travis cut back. He could hear pounding. Sticks on the ice. He looked over his shoulder. All his teammates were saluting him as if he had just scored the greatest double-fake, between-the-legs goal in hockey history.

  Sarah, giggling, skated over and took Travis’s stick out of his hand. She glided to the penalty box and carefully used the blade of her skate to pop off the rubber plug at the top of Travis’s stick before she returned it to him.

  Someone had filled it with water.

  He didn’t need to ask who. Travis looked for Nish and saw him skating loops and circles by the far boards. Nish, acting as if nothing whatsoever had happened, was wearing his best choirboy face.

  Travis hated that look.

  4

  Dmitri was the first to say out loud what every one of the Owls was thinking.

  “Is it ever small!”

  The Screech Owls had come downtown from their various billets in the surrounding San Antonio suburbs. Travis, Simon, Dmitri, and Derek were all staying with the Finebesters in Hill Country Village, out by the airport. Nish and Fahd were in a nearby development called Hollywood Park – “Naturally,” Nish boasted, “they put me up in Hollywood” – and various Owls were staying with families in different parts of the city itself, all within short driving distance of the downtown core and the famous River Walk.

  They had parked at the Rivercenter Mall and first toured through River Walk. Travis wondered what Tamarack would look like with a similar development. He could not imagine two floors of shops built along the banks of the river back home. Or seeing the alders and Scotch pines all along its banks replaced by the huge planters filled with shrubs and flowers that gave River Walk a slightly sickly sweet smell. Instead of the canoes and speedboats back home and the kids diving off the Tamarack bridge after the boats had passed under it, they would have to move about in small gondolas poled from end to end and around the sweeping corners of the shopping area. It just wouldn’t work back in Tamarack.

  Travis and Derek ran onto the first bridge across the canal and tried to see down into the water to check for fish, but either the water was too dark or there were none. There were few pleasures Travis enjoyed more than lying on the side of the Tamarack bridge after a good swim and gazing down into the clear water at the smallmouth bass that slipped in and out of the shadows along the wooden footings of the bridge. Sometimes he saw a huge snapping turtle just lying in the water, lazily looking up at the divers lounging about on the side of the bridge, who refused to drop again until the turtle had moved on. There was no such life apparent in the canals that cut through San Antonio, but you would never say River Walk was not lively. There were shoppers and tourists everywhere, and several of the restaurants had live entertainment, including a very loud mariachi band playing on the patio outside a Mexican restaurant.

  The team would eat later. First Muck wanted them to see what San Antonio is most famous for. He wanted them not only to see it but to hear about it and think about it.

  Travis had tried to imagine the Alamo. He knew it was a fort. He had seen an old Disney movie where John Wayne played the hero Davy Crockett, and it seemed to him the fort was huge – sort of a wooden castle in the middle of the desert. The last thing in the world he expected when they arrived at the Alamo was a tiny little earthen wall in the heart of the downtown core. It looked like a child’s fort, a play fort – it couldn’t possibly be real.

  But all Travis had to do was watch Muck to know that this place was important. As he entered the Alamo, Muck removed his Owls baseball cap. He looked up toward the Stars and Stripes and the flag of Texas, and it seemed to Travis as if the Screech Owls’ coach were walking into a church.

  “This is it?” hissed Nish.

  The big defenseman didn’t even bother to hide his disappointment. He had almost broken away from the pack to run to Ripley’s Believe It or Not across the street, but he hadn’t dared. He knew how much this visit to the Alamo meant to Muck.

  “It’s miniature,” said Sarah, speaking far more in awe than insult.

  Muck had arranged for a special tour. The Owls were met by a uniformed ranger – Bill Norton of the U.S. National Park Service, according to the badge on his shirt – who took them off to a presentation room and told them the story of the Battle of the Alamo using old photographs, artwork, and a video presentation.

  Travis was fascinated to learn that one of the commanders of the fort had been William Travis – sort of a namesake – and that the other commander had been Jim Bowie. Several of the Owls had heard of the famous Bowie knife, and the ranger said that Jim Bowie was its inventor.

  Texas was not yet a state in 1836, the ranger told them, and Mexico and the “Texians” – as the mostly American settlers in Texas were called – were at war to see who would control the land. The Texians were terribly outnumbered, with maybe a hundred or so to defend the little fort against the 1,500 Mexican soldiers who were marching on them. The Alamo wasn’t even a real fort, the ranger said, but a sort of rough barricade to protect the settlers against Native raids on their horses and supplies. It could not possibly survive attack by a well-equipped army. There were barracks, a chapel, a well, storage houses, and walls, but the walls were so low they didn’t even have portals for the defenders to fire from.

  The ranger told them how William Travis had begged for reinforcements, but only about a hundred showed up, including Davy Crockett, the famous “King of the Wild Frontier” from Tennessee. The moment Ranger Norton mentioned Crockett and his famous rifle, Ol’ Betsy, Mr. Dillinger shocked the group by breaking into song.

  “Born on a mountain top in Tennessee,” Mr. Dillinger sang in a high, creaky voice, “greenest state in the Land of the Free.”

  But then Muck, of all people, joined in even louder, until in a moment the three grown men – Mr. Dillinger, Muck, and the ranger – were all singing and laughing together.

  “What was that?” Fahd asked.

  “The Davy Crockett song,” the ranger explained. “Don’t you kids know it?”

  “No.”

  “Well, then, you’re missing an important part of your history. Your two coaches sure know it.”

  “My favorite song when I was a kid,” Mr. Dillinger said. “We used to live for the TV show.”

  “They had TV back then?” Nish asked, as if Mr. Dillinger had been born long before the dinosaurs. Mr. Dillinger shot him daggers.

  “There are a hundred stories about Davy Crockett,” Ranger Norton told them. “Some of them are true, some are tall tales. Supposedly he killed a bear that was threatening the Crockett family when he was only three years old. And according to legend, he used Old Betsy, his rifle, to kill some 125 bears in his lifetime.”

  “Do you believe it?” asked Fahd, who always asked the most direct questions.

  “Well, I don’t know otherwise,” the ranger said. “Some say Davy went down at the Alamo swinging Ol’ Betsy like a club, the fighting so fierce he had no time to reload. Some say he had given it to his son before he ever even came to Texas. We just don’t know. But people certainly believe that’s the way he died.”

  “What happened to the rifle?” asked Nish.

  “No idea,” the ranger said. “Burned, likely, with everything else at the end of the battle.”

  Ranger Norton got back to his talk. When the Mexican army arrived at the fort, a siege began that lasted for thirteen days, but the taking of the fort took less than an hour. The Mexicans simply overwhelmed the defenders. They killed some 250 Americans, though it was estimated that the determined defenders of the fort killed or wounded as many as six hundred Mexican fighters. No mercy was shown to the defenders, who, if they hadn’t been killed in combat, were executed on the spot. It was said that Davy Crockett was found surrounded by more than a dozen Mexican soldiers he had killed before he died, supposedly dispatching most of them by using his faithful rifle as a club. The sole survivors were a handful of women and children who had hidden in the chapel during the fighting.

  “Why does the Alamo matter?” the ranger asked. None of the Owls offered an opinion, so the ranger answered his own question. “From that moment on,” he said, “the Alamo stood as an inspiration for freedom and for fighting for what you believe in.”

  He clicked a handheld control, and a portrait of William Travis appeared on the screen. Travis was surprised to learn how young his almost-namesake was, only twenty-six. The famous Travis of the Alamo had light brown, slightly curling hair, much like Travis Lindsay, and they both had sharp, straight noses.

  “Looks like Travis’s older brother!” giggled Sam.

  Travis blushed deeply, but inside he was delighted. William Travis was a great hero. Travis Lindsay only had heroic dreams.

  Ranger Norton told them about the letter William Travis had written at the beginning of the siege. He addressed it “To the People of Texas & All Americans in the World,” and in it he penned the words for which he would forever be remembered: “I shall never surrender or retreat.”

  A true soldier fights on, no matter the odds, William Travis argued in his letter. There can be no giving up. A true soldier, he wrote, can choose only “victory or death.”

  Travis Lindsay sneaked a quick glance around the room. His teammates were paying rapt attention – even Nish, whom one teacher had said could serve as the poster boy for attention deficit.

  In a far corner of the room, standing slightly apart from the rest of the team, Travis noticed Muck. The coach was watching so intently it seemed to Travis that Muck’s eyes were flashing with light. Or perhaps they were glistening; it was hard to tell.

  The friendly ranger told them how, when William Travis realized that a full attack would come at any moment and they did not stand a chance, he had taken his sword – the ranger took them outside and showed them the exact spot where this had taken place – and drawn a line in the sand. William Travis then asked all those who were willing to die for their cause to cross over the line, and he said that any who wished to flee before the Mexicans launched their assault were free to do so.

  Every man in the Alamo crossed over the line. Even Jim Bowie, too ill to stand, crossed over, lying in a cot carried by his men. Bowie was said to have fought to the bitter end even while lying in his bed, a pistol in one hand, his famous knife in the other.

  The ranger then asked the Owls to follow him into the little chapel. Inside, they gathered around a large, ornate box.

  “When the battle was over,” the ranger said, “the Mexican soldiers gathered up the bodies of the Alamo defenders, placed them in a huge pile, and set fire to them. This crypt,” he said solemnly, “holds the ashes of those who died here fighting for what they believed in.”

  He took them on a walk through the large courtyard, past the fort’s well, and over to the huge white memorial built where the bodies had been piled and then burned. Travis read the plaque on the front: “They chose never to surrender or retreat; these brave hearts with flag still proudly waving perished in the flames of immortality that their high sacrifice might lead to the founding of this Texas.”