Old Ghosts in the 11th Street Bar

Date: Thu, 10 Jan 2002 16:52:25 -0600
Walter Agnew Moore II, Roving Reporter
Bandera, Texas, "The Cowboy Capital of the World"

Dad and I park in the cold drizzly rain at Stein's clothing store across the street from the bar. "This is French weather!"

"You must've brought it with you", he says.

I worry about getting towed from in front of Stein's. Too much time in Austin. My dad doesn't worry. This is Bandera, and if Mr. Stein cares, which is unlikely, he'll probably walk over to the bar and ask us to move the car himself. Or maybe he is already in the bar.

The 11th Street Bar is on a corner back from the main road, in a town you wouldn't think has 11 streets. Techically it does, but streets one through seven or so are just semi-deserted lanes through fields at the edge of town. The bar is an old wood frame structure with a porch, one front room where you drink, about the size of an efficiency apartment. A tiny hall containing video games and the bathroom entrance, and then a kitchen area that has a sign that says "Enter on pain of death". There is a side-yard where bands play in good weather under a big tree, but today that area is closed off behind the two-part Dutch door.

As usual, it is warm, smoky, and crowded. There are already card-players at the tables to the left and regulars at the bar to the right. There are old brasieres hanging above the ceiling fans, skulls and mounted animal heads and fading dusty photos of old friends on the walls.

One of the rugged wind-burned cowboy types at the far end of the bar calls out to us and makes a place for me and my dad by him. He orders two more beers for us. It is Delt.

Delton Sturgis is my ex-step uncle-in-law. He looks like the kind of guy most country singers pretend to be, and he has lived the life. He remembers me after a second.

"How's the back, Delt?"

"Oh, it's fine. It's been about 4 years, and I only break it when it floods."

"Been playing any?"

"Nah. I haven't sung anywhere in, 2 years?"

There's a small American flag pin on the front of his battered cowboy hat. It looks sincere instead of silly the way it would if anybody else put it on.

Delt's drinking buddy John is on our other side. He is a big man wearing work clothes and a blue baseball cap.They are discussing the baby goat that somebody is trying to keep alive by hand-feeding with a bottle; two or three times John has said "You gotta tickle its ass-hole!" and Delt will nod. My Dad says nothing but smiles while his cigarette smoke glides away behind us. I suspect I am being set up for an elaborate joke.

Delt: "Yeah, I told him that too; You gotta tickle the ass-hole or it won't eat."

John: "It's true! That's what the mama does, she licks that ass-hole then the baby starts to nurse!"

Delt: "People don't believe it."

John: "Deer, goats, sheep—they're all like that, gotta tickle their ass-hole and they'll start to eat! My friend had a baby deer, it was *dead*, practically, I told him what to do, he'd take a warm wash-rag with some water on it and tickle that ass-hole, two days later, that little deer was perked right up!"

Somebody At The Bar: "It'd perk me right up!"

Somebody Else: "Me too!"

Maria the owner is messing with Delt and John over some cookies that they want to steal. Home-made oatmeal with some kind of nuts in them. Pecan? I don't know. Very sweet, but good.

Maria and the other woman tending bar both have rust-belt accents. Michigan? Ohio? John and Delt are growly Texas types.

"France?" says John. "What are you building there?"

I try to describe my job, and Delt wants to know if French girls shave their legs. Richard, eating a sandwich at the bar, does not know French, but speaks Mexican, and says chinga'o-this, chinga'o-that to prove it. He is going to Costa Rica tomorrow. John has been to 40+ countries and says his best trick was smuggling illegal chewing gum into Singapore to give to the hookers, who went crazy over it. He regrets turning down that job working on the ranch in Paraguay, but his wife threatened to leave him if he moved there.

"And she ended up leaving anyway."

"Hell yeah."

So Delt's 14-year-old son Cole stayed out late on New Year's with some little girl from the Jones family. Since then, Delt has had a glorious time messing with the kid, getting people to call the house pretending to be Mr. Jones and watching Cole twitch.

When it is time for Delt to leave, his wife comes around the front in the van, and Cole is in there with her. Delt brings him in to say hi to his uncle, my father. As planned, when I hear the name "Cole", I turn around and very seriously introduce myself as Mr.Jones.

The kid's eyes almost roll back in his head, but he manages to shake my hand, before fleeing out the door in front of his father.

My dad and Richard the Costa Rica connection have been talking about Puerto Rico and Cuba, the tricks of getting in and out of Habana without much trouble. I remember visiting Castro's training camp in Tuxpan, Mexico.

"Did you sign the book?"

"Yeah, I signed it."

"Ooh, you've got a file now..."

My dad asks me if I remember B from Selma. I think he died a few years back. My dad winces.

"You know, Walt," he says, "B was a radar-man during the Bay of Pigs. He told me stuff. He could hear the attack on the radio. 'They're slaughtering us!', they were begging for help. He had to sit and listen.

"Walt, they ran the air support through the Alabama National Guard. They were flying A-20s, light attack bombers from World War Two. They sent them down there with no tail-gunners, just a pilot and a co-pilot. They didn't figure they'd need protection, that they'd just be using the front guns to strafe the beaches."

"Then the Cubans came at them with P-80s."

"P-80s? I never heard of that."

"P-80s, also called them T-33s; our very first jet fighter. The Cubans had some, and they would get behind those defenseless A-20s, and they were blowing them out of the sky."

"So it failed from arrogance?"

"That's how it seems to me. We were the all-powerful Americans, nobody could stop us, especially not some funny little island people who probably wouldn't even fight."

"But they fought that day..." I say.

"And fought well."

"So B told me how it was, he had to have top-secret clearance for his job. And Kennedy wanted to act like it didn't happen. To this day we haven't acknowlaged that a single American died down there."

"The families of the pilots?"

"I reckon they were bought off."

We're driving through the dark, back towards his house in the hills between Pipe Creek and San Geronimo, practically non-towns.

I will later find out from my source that my dad, or B, got a couple of details wrong. They weren't A-20's, they were A-26's, but they were very similar to A-20's, only 2 years newer and built by the same company. They never had tail-guns; they had a turret on the rear fusilage, but if it were unmanned, as it was, it would amount to the same thing, no rear protection. The P-80 was technically the F-80, it hadn't been called P-80 since the WWII era. The air support was run from Alabama by a Colonel Shannon. One of the dead pilots was from Birmingham and finally got a medal, some recognition, for getting thrown into that fiasco.

I will find all that out later. Tonight we are going to see Mike, a friend of my brother, who has a new house. Mike got the house and 3 acres of land for 6,000 dollars. Yes, six-thousand dollars. The couple was in a hurry to sell it. It is haunted.

Mike feels things brush against him in the dark. Sometimes he fights off something that is strangling him.

The house was moved from Utah, which is very strange; It is not really old, or big, or historically significant. It must have been as much trouble to move it as it would have been to build one just like it in Texas.

The woman from the couple, the couple who sold it, her mother supposedly committed suicide in the house. You can see the place in the kitchen ceiling where the shotgun pellets hit.

Mike had a job on a fishing boat in Alaska. An Indian told him what to get for an excorcism. He climbed a mountain there where eagles had been nesting and dug eagle feathers out of the snow.