Alamo Wars Read online

  ALAMO WARS

  RAY VILLAREAL

  Alamo Wars is funded in part by grants from the City of Houston through the Houston Arts Alliance and by the Exemplar Program, a program of Americans for the Arts in collaboration with the LarsonAllen Public Services Group, funded by the Ford Foundation.

  Piñata Books are full of surprises!

  Piñata Books

  An imprint of

  Arte Público Press

  University of Houston

  452 Cullen Performance Hall

  Houston, Texas 77204-2004

  Cover illustration by Gary Swimmer and Giovanni Mora

  Cover design by Mora Des!gn

  Villareal, Ray.

  Alamo Wars / by Ray Villareal.

  p. cm.

  Summary: When a Texas school puts on an original play about the Alamo, the students and teachers confront modern conflicts about history, identity, and the meaning of courage.

  ISBN: 978-1-55885-513-7

  1. Mexican Americans—Juvenile fiction. [1. Mexican Americans—Fiction. 2. Bullies—Fiction. 3. Prejudices—Fiction. 4. Theater—Fiction. 5. Schools—Fiction. 6. Texas—History—Revolution, 1835-1836— Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.V718AI 2008

  [Fic]—dc22

  2007047466

  CPI

  The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

  © 2008 by Ray Villareal

  Printed in the United States of America

  8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  DEDICATION

  For the 1992-1993 fourth grade teachers and students

  at Rosemont School in Dallas

  “Remember the Alamo!”

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Also by Ray Villareal

  CHAPTER ONE

  The problems started when Miss Josephine McKeever died.

  Miss Mac, as she was called, had taught English at Rosemont Middle School for fifty-one years, almost as long as the school had existed. She never married and refused to use the title Ms.

  “Sounds like a mosquito buzzing in someone’s ear,” she would say.

  Although she had become eligible to retire seventeen years earlier, Miss Mac continued to teach, despite growing health problems that any seventy-three-year-old woman could expect to have. So devoted was she to her profession that her coworkers sometimes joked that Miss Mac would die in the classroom.

  One afternoon, during her planning period, while she sat at her desk grading papers, a sharp, fiery pain zipped up her left arm. It exploded in her chest. Miss Mac jerked her head up, clasped her hands over her heart, and collapsed in her chair.

  When her students arrived a short while later, they discovered their teacher slouched in her seat. Her head was tilted back. Her eyes were closed, and her mouth was wide open. The kids giggled, thinking she’d fallen asleep. Several times before, they’d come to class, and discovered her sleeping in her chair.

  Raquel Flores urged Marco Díaz to nudge Miss Mac awake, but Marco refused. He didn’t want to be the one responsible for waking her up to a classroom full of laughter and humiliation.

  No one tried to wake her up. Instead, the kids took their seats. They pretended to work on their book reports, all the while trying to stifle their laughter.

  Billy Ray Cansler, who sat at the front desk of the third row, wadded a sheet of notebook paper. He handed it to Luther Bowers who sat across from him. Billy Ray dared Luther to toss it into the teacher’s mouth.

  “Come on,” Billy Ray whispered. “Five bucks if you make a basket.”

  Luther giggled nervously. He glanced up at Miss Mac’s open mouth. It was certainly an inviting target. From where he sat, he was sure he could sink it.

  Two points!

  Luther imagined the teacher waking up, gagging, with a ball of paper stuck in her mouth. It would be a laugh riot! He’d be the talk of the school for days.

  But Miss Mac would know he’d done it. Even if none of the other kids squealed on him, which was unlikely, especially with Myra “The Fastest Mouth in the West” Coonrod in his class, she’d know. Just like she’d known that he and Billy Ray were the ones who’d been flooding the boys’ bathrooms.

  Luther and Billy Ray had been cramming toilet paper rolls down the commodes and then flushing them, spilling streams of water onto the floor and out into the hallways.

  No one had seen them do it; Luther was almost positive of it. Because even after Mr. Rathburn, the principal, announced that he was offering a twenty-five-dollar reward to anyone who could help him catch the person or persons responsible for flooding the bathrooms, no one came forward to collect the money.

  Yet somehow Miss Mac knew he and Billy Ray were the culprits. Even in a school with almost seven hundred potential suspects, she zeroed in on the two of them. She didn’t come right out and accuse them of flooding the bathrooms. But when she addressed the problem to her seventh graders, her wide, hazel eyes bore down on Luther and Billy Ray the whole time she spoke.

  “Mischievous minds, like idle hands, are the devil’s tools,” Miss Mac proclaimed, delivering one of her trademark fire-and-brimstone sermons. “The vandals think they are clever. They think they have gotten away with their misdeeds, but … ‘Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord!’” She wagged a long, bony finger, like a conductor’s baton, first at Billy Ray, then at Luther.

  After that, Miss Mac moved them to the front desks in the second and third rows. And neither one of them was allowed to go to the bathroom alone, not even if they claimed it was an emergency. They had to wait until class was over to do their business.

  “Ten bucks!” Billy Ray goaded, hiking the offer. “Ten bucks if you can knock it in.” He held out ten fingers in front of Luther’s face.

  Luther was giddy. Ten dollars was a lot of money, and he knew Billy Ray was good for it.

  Luther stared at Miss Mac. She looked as if she was leaning back in a dentist’s chair, with the dentist standing over her, telling her to say ah while he got ready to yank out her tooth.

  Luther squeezed the paper ball tightly in his hand. His tongue slid out of the corner of his mouth, like a snail peeking out of its shell.

  “Do it, Luther!” Billy Ray commanded. “C’mon, do it. Do it now!”

  Whether Luther would have actually shot the wadded paper ball into Miss Mac’s mouth, Billy Ray never got the chance to find out. Because at the moment he said, Do it now! Mrs. Frymire, the science teacher, ste
pped into the classroom. She had spotted her unconscious colleague from the hallway.

  As soon as she entered, the class roared with laughter and pointed at their teacher.

  Mrs. Frymire smiled weakly. She gave Miss Mac’s arm a gentle tug. “Wake up, dear,” she called in a soft voice.

  Miss Mac’s head lolled from one side to the other.

  The class howled.

  Mrs. Frymire let out a nervous chuckle. “Miss Mac? Your students are here.” She took her by the shoulder and gave her a firm shake.

  When Miss Mac’s limp body failed to respond, a dawning horror filled Mrs. Frymire’s face.

  “Miss Mac? Oh, my … Miss Mac!”

  She recoiled, as if she’d been stung by a bee.

  The kids’ grins quickly melted as they finally realized, to their dismay, what had happened to their teacher.

  Raquel Flores’s face drained of color as she stared at the lifeless body.

  Myra Coonrod sat at her desk, gawking, her eyeballs bulging out like goose eggs, her mouth as wide open as Miss Mac’s.

  Luther Bowers gaped in stunned silence. A wave of nausea swept up from the pit of his stomach. It rose up his throat. Luther bolted from his seat and scrambled to the back of the room, sure that he was going to puke at any moment.

  Billy Ray Cansler sprang from his chair and joined him.

  Mrs. Frymire, having initially panicked at the grisly discovery, now regained her composure. Trying to hold back her tears, she told the class, “Boys and girls, I … I’d like for all of you to step into the hallway … and line up … outside my room.”

  “Is … is Miss Mac … ?” Raquel Flores started, but the words refused to come out.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Miss Mac’s funeral service was held on Saturday morning at ten o’clock at the West Cliff Baptist Church. Hundreds of mourners, many of them former students, filled the sanctuary. Dozens more spilled into the foyer.

  The pastor, the Reverend Jimmy Hodges, praised Miss Mac for her “many years of commitment and dedication to the Lord’s work at West Cliff Baptist.” She had served as church pianist, Sunday school teacher, and, more recently, head of the senior citizens’ group, the ADM—Age Doesn’t Matter.

  A Power Point presentation highlighting Miss Mac’s fifty-one-year teaching career was shown on a large screen set up in front of the baptistry.

  Grieving soon gave way to heart-warming smiles. Tears of sorrow were transformed into tears of joy as pictures of Miss Mac flashed before the congregation.

  There was Miss Mac, playing the piano during a seventh-grade Christmas program she directed. Miss Mac, helping her students into their costumes as they prepared to present an original play she had written called “Medusa’s Bad Hair Day.” Miss Mac, dressed as a giant pencil as part of a campaign to encourage writing. Miss Mac, at bat in a softball game between the teachers and the students. Miss Mac, posing with several Dallas Cowboys players when they visited the school.

  After the service, Mr. Rathburn assembled the teachers in the church parking lot. “I’d like for us to do something special at school to honor Miss Mac’s memory,” he told the group.

  “Absolutely,” Mrs. Pruitt, the Texas history teacher, agreed. “What did you have in mind?”

  Mr. Rathburn pulled a handkerchief from his coat pocket and took a couple of swipes at his nose. “Nothing in particular. I’m open to suggestions.”

  “How about a plaque with her name?” Mr. Watts, the math teacher, offered. “You know, in loving memory of … or something like that. We could hang it in the office or in the teachers’ lounge.”

  “Oh, come on, Barry,” Mrs. Frymire said scornfully. “We can certainly do better than that. After all, she did give fifty-one years of service to the school.”

  “Hey, don’t jump down my throat, Doris. It was just a thought.”

  Mrs. Pruitt’s face lit up. “I have an idea. Why don’t we name the auditorium in her honor? I mean, after all those wonderful stage productions she presented in there, I think it would be very appropriate. We could call it … The Josephine McKeever Memorial Auditorium.”

  The teachers turned to Mr. Rathburn.

  His bespectacled eyes twinkled. “I think that’s an outstanding idea, Claire. I like it.” He pulled the handkerchief from his pocket and blew a trumpet blast from his nose. “It’ll probably have to be okayed by the superintendent and the school board, but I don’t think we’ll have any problems.”

  Rosemont School did not offer drama classes as part of its curriculum. Miss Mac had taken it upon herself to create an after-school theater arts program.

  “It’s an extension of my English class, a visible expression of what the children are reading,” she explained when she asked for permission to establish the program. Miss Mac had no formal theater arts background, but one would hardly have noticed. The year before, she presented Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The show was slated as a one-night-only performance. But due to the overwhelmingly positive response it received, it was presented twice more, to a packed auditorium each night.

  “The Josephine McKeever Memorial Auditorium,” Mrs. Frymire said. Her eyes grew misty. “It sounds beautiful.”

  “We could still hang a plaque on the outside of the auditorium,” Mr. Watts said. “You know, in loving memory of …”

  CHAPTER THREE

  On Monday after school, Mrs. Frymire began clearing out Miss Mac’s room. Bookcases, overflowing with fifty-one years of books, lined the walls of the classroom.

  Mrs. Frymire wondered if it would be better to simply leave the books behind for the new teacher. She quickly dismissed the thought. At the funeral she spoke with Rose Adderly, Miss Mac’s sister. Mrs. Frymire promised she would box all of Miss Mac’s belongings and deliver them to her. It would be up to Rose Adderly to decide what would become of the books.

  Mrs. Frymire folded the flaps of a box shut and stacked it against the wall with the twelve others that had been filled so far. She stretched her aching back. Her arms, too, were sore from all the heavy lifting. Mr. Watts, Mrs. Pruitt, and some other teachers had offered to help, but Mrs. Frymire kindly turned them down. She wanted to do this alone.

  She walked to the back of the room and sank into Miss Mac’s brown, overstuffed rocker. It was an old chair Miss Mac had bought at a flea market.

  Mrs. Frymire rocked back and forth, recalling the many times she had passed by her beloved friend’s room. She’d often seen Miss Mac sitting in this chair, her students listening quietly, while she read aloud to them.

  Mrs. Frymire stopped rocking. Her eyes filled with tears as the realization sank in that she would never again see her friend.

  Twenty-seven years ago, Mrs. Frymire began her teaching career at Rosemont School. Miss Mac was the first teacher she met. Being a teacher had been a greater challenge than Mrs. Frymire had ever anticipated back when she was in college. It was Miss Mac who helped her survive that first year. She became her mentor and friend.

  When Mrs. Frymire married, Miss Mac served as her maid of honor. Later, when her two children were born, Miss Mac regularly visited the house to babysit.

  Mrs. Frymire tilted her head upward and closed her eyes. “I’m going to miss you, Miss Mac,” she muttered through her tears.

  After a while, she sat up. She surveyed the room, taking inventory of the unfinished work. There were still piles of books that needed to be packed. Some wall decorations had to come down. Miss Mac’s desk would have to be cleaned out.

  Mrs. Frymire glanced at the gray file cabinet standing behind the desk. She decided to work on that next. Otherwise, she might forget to empty it later. She opened the cabinet drawers and sifted through the file folders. They contained a large surplus of teaching ideas. Certainly Miss Mac’s sister wouldn’t want them, she thought. Mrs. Frymire decided to save the materials for the new teacher.

  It was then that Mrs. Frymire made an intriguing discovery. A crumpled manila folder from the bottom drawer caught her eyes. Sh
e drew it out and skimmed through its contents. She smiled. This is it! This is how we’ll honor Miss Mac’s memory.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Krak-a-tah! Krak-a-tah! Krak-a-tah!

  The old man leaned forward on his cane. His glasses hung at the tip of his puffy nose. His craggy white brows bounced up and down, matching the beat of the speed bag.

  Krak-a-tah! Krak-a-tah! Krak-a-tah!

  “Can you feel the rhythm, Marco?” he shouted in a raspy voice. “Dance with it. There you go. That’s it. 1-2-3! 1-2-3! 1-2-3!”

  Krak-a-tah! Krak-a-tah! Krak-a-tah!

  Marco Díaz followed the cadence of the black speed bag. He drove his fists into it with swift, well-timed punches.

  “Make smaller, circling movements,” the old man dictated. “Swing smaller! There you go. Now pick up the pace. ¡Con más ganas!”

  Marco revved up his punches. The speed bag was now a rapid, rebounding blur against his gloves.

  Satisfied, the old man relaxed with his back against the bench. He sat his cane on his lap and watched Marco work the black bag with a flurry of punches.

  Unaware that he was doing it, the old man clenched his withered hands and jabbed the air, following the beat of the bag.

  Krak-a-tah! Krak-a-tah! Krak-a-tah!

  His mind traveled back to November of 1956.

  That was when he’d fought in the most important boxing match of his career. It was on the undercard of the Patterson/Moore world heavyweight title fight in Chicago.

  Other than his parents and his trainers, no one had gone to see him fight. He was unknown to most of the boxing world. The fans who flocked to Chicago Stadium that night had paid their money to see the brash, twentyone-year-old Floyd Patterson fight against the aging, light-heavyweight champion, Archie Moore. Patterson and Moore were battling for the heavyweight title that had been vacated by Rocky Marciano.

  The old man, who at the time was known as Anthony “El Águila” Dávila, was scheduled to fight Paul “Pinkie” Rosario in a middleweight bout.

  Anthony “El Águila” Dávila was undefeated. He had a 14 and 0 record with eleven knockouts. And after his bout with Rosario, he expected to be 15 and 0 with twelve knockouts. Then he’d be in line for a title fight against the world middleweight champion, Sugar Ray Robinson. And after he beat Sugar Ray Robinson, the whole world would know who he was.