Most days the Grounds for Divorce is home to witty banter and the steady repartee of old guys debating Chevy engines in Fords and changing the color from original, or whether Lucinda looks better in the tight sweaters of fall or the halter tops of summer.  In other words, debating things that can never be proven and will always be relevant.  The Folgers helps keep everyone awake; the Captain My Captain mugs it’s served in, a reminder to not take ourselves too seriously.

That’s MOST days.  Yesterday seemed to be a reflection of the times, and darned near every car or truck brought up on Bring a Trailer served to be a trigger for bigger topics instead of a diversion from them.  I guess that has to happen occasionally, but it was unexpected.

It started off innocently enough when Rusty, from the hardware store, pulled up a 2019 Ford F450 King Ranch, something near and dear to the hearts of the Lone Star state.  In fact, so near and dear that messing with one can take you down roads you’d wished you’d never gone down.  No sooner had Rusty proclaimed his desire to one day be the proud owner of his very own King Ranch, when New Guy relayed the story of the owner of a King Ranch in San Antonio who recently had his stolen.

“I probably would have done the same thing he did,” New Guy proclaimed.

“Which was?” Rex, the Fort Stockton pharmacist, asked.

“Turned on the tracker he had on the truck.  Followed directions to where it was located and found it in the parking lot of a local mall nearby,” New Guy said.

“Seems like a pretty quick and easy ending to the story,” Rex offered.

“Well,” New Guy told him.  “Not quite.  Seems the thief was sitting in the truck, his girlfriend next to him.  When the owner pulled up in the spot right next to him, the owner drew on the thief with the 357 he kept in the glove box of his wife’s car.”

“That took a turn I wasn’t expecting,” Sister Thelma said.

“Same thing the thief thought, apparently,” New Guy admitted.  “At gunpoint, the thief and his accomplice / girlfriend were forced to exit the vehicle and have a seat on the curb while the owner of the King Ranch phoned the police and called in the stolen truck and mentioned he’d apprehended the thieves.”

“In the old days of the wild frontier the owner of the stolen horse would have just gone lookin’ for a tall tree  and used a short rope to administer justice,” Lucinda said as she refilled all the mugs.

“Let me finish the story,” New Guy said.  “It seems that once he knew the cops were on the way and he and his honey would be headed for the hoosegow, the pick-up bandito pulled his own pistol, concealed in the waistband of his Wranglers and took a shot at the owner who’d apprehended them.”

“What could go wrong?” Chad asked.

“Plenty,” New Guy was quick to point out.  “He was not much better at being a good shot than he was a good thief.  He grazed the owner of the truck, but didn’t do any real harm.  The owner, however, had spent some time on the shooting range and dropped the thief in his tracks.  One right to the heart.”

“And the girl friend?” asked Lucinda.

“She learned from her departed boyfriend’s mistake and sat tight for the law to show up,” Rusty said.

“What’s the rest of that story?” I asked.

“No charges filed.  The owner of the King Ranch was treated for superficial wounds and went home with his truck.  Seems the ‘Castle Law” applies, even when you leave your castle and pursue a thief who steals your truck,” New Guy informed everyone.

“Seems kind of extreme,” Sister Thelma said.  “I mean, it’s still only a truck.”

“It was a KING RANCH!” Rusty exclaimed, leaving us all to wonder if the stolen vehicle had been a base model F-150 or, God forbid, a Prius, if the story would have had the same ending.

Before we could even go down that road, Pastor Peterson pulled up a 1961 Crown Supercoach School Bus and said something about the start of school and cooler weather and whether or not the Jim Bowie High football team was going to have a winning record this year.  Rather than just go with that, New Guy mentioned how Houston Public Schools had been taken over by the state.  There’s always that one guy.

“First thing the new state-appointed superintendent did was close the libraries and turn them into discipline centers,” New Guy said. “Seems logical that if kids aren’t going to read, they may as well use that space to punish the unruly ones.”

“At least until we can figure out a way to get them behind the wheel of a stolen F-150,” I said sarcastically.

“Damn right!” New Guy said.

Sister Thelma started swiping through her phone, trying to find something less controversial.  “Here.  Here we go.  Look at this old Airstream.  Who wouldn’t like to hitch up one of these to the back end of their car and take it someplace cooler and be able to sit back and reflect on God’s wonders and mercies?”

New Guy glanced over at it.  “Looks just like the one I read about in Texas Monthly.  Hell of a story.”  Everyone just stared down into their Folgers.  Nobody wanted to be the one to ask.  “So this guy in the panhandle buys an RV off his neighbor.  Seems the neighbor had been renting it out to someone who was living on the property.  The guy renting it died, so the neighbor sold the RV to his neighbor.”

Everyone around the big table was glancing at their watch, then the front door, then the parking lot.  All of us were looking for a way out, but none of us could find one.

“So the neighbor pulls it over to his place and starts the process of cleaning the thing out so he can use it,” New Guy explains.  “In the course of cleaning it out, he finds boxes of newspaper clippings, photographs, and other stuff.  Creepy stuff.  Over two hundred pages of handwritten notes.  Turns out the guy who’d been living in the RV had brutally murdered a woman in Stephenville back in the 80s.  Everyone in town thought it was the ex-husband.”

“It’s always the ex-husband,” Lucinda said as she walked by.

“Exact same thing everyone in Stephenville said!” New Guy replied.  “And usually that’s the case, but not this time.  Case went unsolved for decades.  Turns out it was the son of a prominent family right there in town.  Hidden in plain sight all those years.  A real monster, that one.”

I thought about looking on my phone for another car. Something to lighten the mood. End the morning on a good note. But then I figured it might be best to leave well enough alone. Every car is a story. But not every story has a happy ending. Some of them take a long time to play out. Some of them never make sense. Hopefully next time we meet at the GFD there will be a beautiful Ford that somebody changed the color on and stuffed a Chevy 350 motor under the hood and that will be all the auto-related controversy we need for the morning.

And maybe the New Guy won’t show up.