By Walter Agnew Moore II,

My son Joseph and I tool down the west side of San Antonio past cheap apartments, tattoo parlors, body shops and strip clubs. “Hey Joseph, if we can sell this gun for at least 50 bucks, we can dart down to Mexico for the day.”

The gun is an old Russian Mosin-Nagant rifle, circa World War Two, maybe earlier. That’s it banging around the back seat of the Tracker wrapped in a faded pink towel that smells like cigarette smoke. We’ve got the Tracker’s top completely removed because the sky says no rain coming for days.

At the windowless gun place, I open the rifle’s bolt before knocking to be let in—don’t need any Republic of Texas types getting twitchy and putting a laser dot on my forehead.

“Sorry, sir, what you’ve got here is a wall-hanger, anything I could offer you would be an insult. We get these in by the truck-load, I pay maybe 30, 35 bucks for perfect specimens, and this one…”

Back into the pink towel with the Mosin-Nagant. It bounces on the seat as I toss it over the back.

We drive towards the middle of town.

“This place sorta reminds me of Mexico, but sorta not,” I say.

“What part doesn’t remind you of Mexico?”

“The wood-frame houses. How the houses don’t touch. Half the signs being in English. Little things like the shape of signs, sidewalk designs.”

Joseph says, “I like this downtown. It looks the way a downtown should.”

We ditch the map and decide to just find the Alamo by nosing around.

“Hey Joseph, you know that maybe a cousin of ours got killed at the Alamo?”

“Really? They catch who did it?”

“No. It was way back when.”

We get to the familiar back wall of the Alamo, circle around, and brake for a wide-eyed frizzy-blond woman in flower-print clothes dragging a string of kids across the street.

“Tourists, man… they always act like they are moving under fire.”

Good smells of Mexican food drifting out of nice restaurants get our attention. We are both hungry. “Well, son, we can either eat here for 20 bucks, or go back to the neighborhood and get the same thing for a couple dollars. Seeing as how we didn’t sell that gun, let’s go find a little place on the west side.”

We head back out of downtown on little side-streets. Joseph asks about a sign or two. I translate:

“’Guero’s’? That’s some dude with blue eyes, or pink cheeks, or blond hair, or any combo of the three. It’s like ‘White Boy’s’. You and me are Gueros. It’s pronounced like w-e-d-d-o.”

“Weddo weddo weddo.”

“Eso es. Gueros locos!”

The girl selling candied apples on the corner walks up to us when we pull into the gas station.

“Apple?”

“Nah, actually we are looking for some tacos ricos.”

“Good tacos? Hmmm… you ever hear of Taco Cabana?”

Yep. Better than Taco Bell, but what isn’t. “Well, yeah… but we were hoping to find a nice neighborhood place…”

“OH. Well, in that case, the place you want is right up this street about two blocks, on the corner of Poplar.”

We tool up NW. 24th to Poplar, and a young man on the sidewalk wearing loose-fitting sports attire is yelling “Gueeeero guero guero guero” in our general direction. He seems only mildly surprised to see the Tracker whip across two lanes of traffic straight at him up into the parking lot of a yellow stucco building called “Casa Dos Laredos”. This is our place.

We walk in. Joseph says, “You worried about the gun just sitting in the back?”

“Nah.”

We take the Enchilada Specials, $2.99 each and better than what the tourists downtown ever ate. I start out speaking English to the waitresses, who answer in Spanish, so I play along and ask Joseph what he wants in Spanish too, and he figures it out and pretty much rolls with it. We are speaking more Spanish than the other customers, and the waitresses act like that’s perfectly normal too.

There are big life-sized photos of Pancho Villa on all the walls. “Check it out, Joseph, those guys in that one have an old French Hotchkiss machinegun!”

“French?”

“Yeah, during the Revolution, they used everything, why, that rifle out in the car, who knows…”

“In my experience, any restaurant with Pancho Villa on the wall, it’s a safe bet the food is good.”

“You know, if we’d lived back then, Pancho Villa would’ve paid us in gold to work demolitions, stuff like that. He hired lots of gringos.”

“Cool.”

We pay. The waitress hopes we’ll be back. Sorry, we certainly would, but we are just visiting from Alabama. Oh, OK.

We head back out the Bandera Highway towards my dad’s, the pink towel flapping around the old rifle as I make up a story to go with it. “It was sent from Russia to Mexico in the 30’s for the Spanish Republicans, but some guy who looked like Humphrey Bogart swiped it…”

Who knows.

“Hey Joseph, I think this road we are on is the one that Santa Ana’s cavalry used on their way in to the Alamo.”

“Really?”

“Maybe. But my dad doesn’t think so.”

“No?”

“No. He says they used I-410.”