Hunter Richardson washed the dust of Fort Stockton off once he left and never really looked back.  He made his move to Houston and then his fortune.  The place he’d grown up became like an old yellowed newspaper.  He’d read the all stories and there was no point in re-reading any of them.

He’d returned for the occasional funeral early on.  He’d taken his first wife back to show her his boyhood home.  He took his second wife back with him for his 25th Class Reunion, mostly top show off the enhancement surgeries she’d recently had.  His third wife  never made it west of San Antonio, his fourth one rarely left River Oaks.

Going back after all these years wasn’t something he’d planned on or looked forward to, but he needed to settle what was left of the meager family holdings.  Plus, it gave him an excuse to get away from his current wife for several days and put some miles on the brand new Chevy Suburban he’d just picked up.

He’d toyed with the idea of a Cadillac Escalade, but his old man had been a ‘Chevy Guy’ and it was as much a part of Hunter’s DNA as the green eyes and unwillingness to compromise he’d also inherited from his dad.

Driving west, the unique scenery of the Edwards Plateau put Hunter in a reflective mood.  He stopped for a burger and beer in Junction.  It was while waiting for the burger – the grilled jalapeños always take longer – that he glanced over at the parking lot next to Junction Auto Parts.  The gold horizontal fins poking out from behind an old patina’d Pontiac caught his eye.

He knew immediately it was a ’59 Chevy.  His folks had bought one brand new and kept it past becoming an embarrassment.  He grabbed his beer and walked towards the front door for a better look.  Damned if it wasn’t a Brookwood wagon, just like the folks’.  He yelled back to the kitchen to keep his burger warm as he headed across the street.

The taillights were the same shape as his mother’s Ray Bans, he remembered.  The faded stickers all over the back windows were from every vacation his family had taken growing up.  It was their old wagon.  Every faded sticker was a story he hadn’t thought about in nearly half a century.

Hunter opened the driver’s door, both groaning with age.  He smelled his dad’s Aqua Velva and his mother’s Newport Menthols and the unique aroma of GM foam rubber decomposing into dust.  He slid in behind the wheel and looked in the rearview mirror and saw himself in the backseat, older brother on one side, older sister on the other.  He remembered how much he thought of being an only child back then, but how much he regretted being the only one left now.

He stared at the cluster of gauges in the giant round pods in front of him; they’d reminded him of The Jetsons when his dad brought it home from the dealership.  By the time he was in high school he told the ol’ man the car looked like something from The Flintstones and refused to be seen in it.

“Can I help you?” some thirty-year-old kid asked him.  Had kind of an attitude.

“Does it run?” Hunter asked.

“Well yeah, but that’s not the point.” the kid replied.

“How much?” Hunter cut him off.

“It’s not . . .” the kid stammered.

“I’ll give you twenty grand and the use of a brand new Suburban for a week.” Hunter said as he grabbed the checkbook out of his back pocket.

Hunter gave the owner of the old Chevy wagon the keys to his brand new Suburban, grabbing the worn leather duffel bag out of the back seat and tossing it into the backseat of his new acquisition.

“I should probably wait to see if this check clears before I sign over the title to this classic,” the kid said.

“You should probably just thank me for overpaying times twenty.  If the check doesn’t clear, you can keep the Suburban.  It sticker’d near eighty grand.  I wrote a check for that one too, he snickered.

Though the entire transaction took less than twelve minutes, when he got back to the diner his burger was colder than his first wife’s heart.  “I thought you were keeping this warm for me,” he told the waitress.

I thought you were stealing my mug,” she shot back.

“Does everyone in this town think they’re getting ripped off?” he asked.

“Only by people who aren’t from this town,” she replied.  “I’ll grill you up another burger at no charge or you can keep that one and I’ll comp you another beer.  Your call.”

He handed her the mug which she promptly put in the sink with the other dirty dishes and pulled a frosty cold one out of the cooler.  As she walked back to the tap to fill it, he watched her as she walked away.  She was about 29 going on 50.  He pondered just what it was that small towns did to women that made them age so prematurely.

“Didn’t you drive that new Suburban into town?  Still had dealer plates on it,”  she said putting the cold mug down in front of him.

“Yeah,” he said.

“Well Ricky Dean’s sweet little girlfriend just got in it and seems to be heading towards the highway,” she asked.

“We have an understanding,” he explained.  “I bought that old Chevy wagon parked beside his store.”

“The Old Gold Beast?” she chuckled.

“Yeah.  It’s got history.” he said.

“Well the last chapter of that history was Toots McCoy signing the title over to Ricky Dean to settle a $300 debt on some brake work he couldn’t pay for,” she relayed.  “What you give him for it?”

“Let’s just say Ricky Dean doubled his money.  At least I know the thing will stop for sure,” Hunter said.

“Doubt it,” she told him.  “The brake work was on Toots’ old Dodge truck.”

The burger was darn good, even at room temperature.  The second Pabst Blue Ribbon may have made it taste even better.  The third one got Hunter relaxed enough to think about the long drive he still had to Fort Stockton.  He quickly changed the subject in his mind and tried to calculate the odds of stumbling on to the old Chevy Brookwood he’d grown up with in Junction, Texas, of all places.  He’d made his fortune on figuring the odds of most unusual circumstances, but this one was harder to calculate than most.

Wiping the grease from his lips with the thin paper napkin from the dispenser on the table, Hunter tried to think back to the exact time and circumstance of the last time he’d seen the car across the street.  He was only able to narrow it down to one of the last trips he’d made back home while still in college.  He vaguely remembered gathering up Rusty, Chaw, and Bobby, and Carter and some combination of old girlfriends – seemed like it was like a square dance with everyone always changing partners – and taking the old wagon out to the edge of town with more time than they needed and less beer than they wanted.  Not much occurred to him after that.  He didn’t remember seeing it when he went back for his father’s funeral, but was sure it had probably been in the carport and just didn’t notice it.

The waitress brought him his check, one of those small green and white stripped affairs ripped from a pad with everything written out by hand and priced individually.  She had nice penmanship, he thought, and underrated virtue.  He thought for just a split second that maybe he should have rescued her from Junction instead of the old Chevy Brookwood.  He quickly remembered though, that would have cost him a whole lot more than twenty grand, and he was looking to relive some history, not create some.

He slid a fifty and the $14 dollar check under the empty mug and headed across the street to the gold four door wagon, wondering just what had possessed him.  It wasn’t the first time he’d been impetuous, some would even say foolish.  And it’s not like twenty grand was the most expensive random act of impetuousness he’d ever preformed.  There were some involving matrimony he was still paying off.  But it was his willingness to make decisions on the fly and act on a hunch that had made him a wealthy man.  It also cost him his second wife, but he couldn’t ever determine if that had been a downside or not.