The Alien at the Alamo

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The alien at the Alamo met me during a sweltering San Antonio afternoon, one of those days when even the adobe walls of that sacred monument itself seem to melt in the unforgiving sun. He (if gender even existed) was disguised as a human cowboy—short, not over five foot six, very skinny in his tight jeans and white long-sleeved shirt, looking Hispanic. The dark shadow of his white cowboy hat hid the details of his face, but I could tell he was alien. I had encountered a few before (by way of involuntary abductions), and this one had the same not-quite-on-a-human-key look. A cowboy! I laughed silently.

The alien had interrupted a reverie of sorts. As I always did while visiting the Alamo, I’d been humming the tune “San Antonio Rose,” by Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, broken words, empty tunes I knew. Hours earlier, I had left a cooler, windy Padre Island on the Texas Gulf Coast to come look over some architectural details of the scarred mission, as research for an article on Texas history for one of the statewide magazines still in print. I needed the extra income because my retirement was not quite working out financially, not with half my Social Security pension, like everybody’s, going toward the wars in Venezuela and Bolivia.

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