This is the final chapter of the seven part series that has run all week.

When Roger Dimmit made partner at the firm in the spring of 1950, his first response was to go to Cactus CHEV-Olds for a new car, something befitting his new position.  Dimmit was not alone in that line of thinking.  The car in the driveway was a reflection of the man in the house.  Dimmit was no longer pre-war Chevrolet material.  He’d hit the Big Leagues and the neighbors in Fort Stockton damn well needed to know it.  His time in the trenches across the pond fighting for America’s freedom was not in vain.  The American dream was wearing wide whitewalls and packing Rocket V8 power.  The salesman at Cactus CHEV-Olds was more than willing to state how well the two-toned gray 1950 Oldsmobile Ninety-Eight Futuramic Deluxe 4 door sedan set off the gray flannel suit he was wearing.  Nothing Dimmit didn’t already know, but it never hurt to have someone corroborate the evidence, as he used to tell his secretary.  

That would be the same secretary who’d be driving the Oldsmobile Ninety-Eight sedan four years later.  Dimmit solidified his reputation in the legal community when he argued the Lawrence vs. Stanley paternity case.  Lawrence ended up having to pay out a settlement that assured the child in question a life of luxury, and enabled Dimmit to order a new Cadillac Sedan De Ville.  Rather than trade in the Olds, he gifted it to his secretary, who’d done so much to help him prepare for the case.  “The way she was able to get Lawrence to admit that he had, indeed, slept with Miss Stanley, is what clinched the case.  Her efforts at the Lucky Lady that night became the stuff of legend in Fort Stockton.  The wire she was wearing when she recorded him confessing to the affair later became known as ‘The Barbed Wire’ in the Stockton Telegram-Dispatch, when they reported the verdict.  The irony of one of the most important ranchers in the area being strung up by such  thing nearly won the paper a Pulitzer.

The secretary drove the Olds for another four years.  By then it was long in the tooth, still running, but as out of style as the polka.  She traded it in on a new Chevrolet Impala back at the same dealer who’d sold the Olds new.  The used car manager at Cactus didn’t see the need to keep it on the lot; it was wholesaled at the auto auction in Marfa.  From there it changed hands a number of times.  It was owned by a school janitor in Alpine, found its way back to Fort Stockton where the butcher over at the Piggly Wiggly picked it up for almost nothing.  When he passed, it wound up in a field where it sat for almost twenty years.  Time was not kind to the old Ninety-Eight during those years.

A family of possums took up residence in the backseat, generation after generation watching the two tone gray paint fade like a school girl’s dreams.  All four tires had been flat and rotted for years.  Rust was slowly reclaiming for nature what the earth had given up to create the car four decades earlier.  That’s the field in which Zach Bowen found the Olds.

The Olds and Zach had more in common than was obvious at first.  Zach was only seventeen and had just fathered his first child.  The baby momma was ten years older than Zach and should have known better, but common sense nor good judgement had ever been her strong suit.  Had they been, she would have found someone other than Zach to keep warm with in the single wide she called home, one pasture over from where the Olds was lying in repose.

Two more offspring quickly followed because, of course they did.  Nobody was sure if it was an effort to support his growing family, or a way to get as far away from them as he could, when Zach joined the military.  He was deployed twice.  The first time was to Iraq.  The second time was to Kosovo.  At the Lucky Lady he let it be known that the horrors of war were nothing compared to the single wide in the pasture.  The military had taught Zach a number of things; parenting skills and how to be a husband were not included on the list.  He stuck around long enough to get the Oldsmobile to actually run.  

Four used tires that wouldn’t pass inspection were put on the Oldsmobile that no longer had a registration.  Waking up before his wife was sober and the kids were awake, Zach gathered what little he had in a duffle bag and threw it in what had one time been the back seat of the Ninety-Eight sedan.  He headed east towards the rising sun.  He’d made a promise to himself that he wouldn’t tope as the mobile home got smaller in the rearview mirror.  He stopped at the Eggs & Ammo for gas and beer and was probably drunk by the time he was half way to Ozona.  At least the 303 cubic inch Rocket V8 was running clean, though it was leaking oil like a sieve.

Like an old Spanish galleon that had been lost at sea, the Ninety-Eight and its captain pulled into New Orleans, grateful to have survived the journey.  The Oldsmobile finds it was to the seediest part of the city.  Zach pours oil into the Rocket V8 at the same pace he pours alcohol down his throat and soon both are ready to fight another day.  He doesn’t take long to find a bartending job.  Like magnets, he and another bartender soon meet and are drawn to each other.  

Addie Hall had a past that could match that of Zach Bowen nearly tit for tat.  Before long they are an item, driving the Oldsmobile to places that would be at home in an episode of The Twilight Zone to buy drugs, get wasted, or crash for the night.  Those who knew them weren’t sure if they were forging a romance or a pact with the devil.  The only thing that pairs up better than the two lost souls was the alcohol and cocaine they use to fuel their passions.

As if the situation isn’t stormy enough on its own, Mother Nature gets involved.  Katrina blows into the Big Easy with more of a vengeance than Zach Bowen in his Oldsmobile.  While the entire region is devastated, Zach and Addie dodn’t notice that much of a change in their lifestyle as the waters recede.  They are living off the grid, mostly out of the Oldsmobile, in a relationship that would spirals up and down on a daily basis depending on Addie’s moods and Zach’s addictions.  The return of electricity to the region does nothing to shed any positive light on their conditions.  In fact, that’s when things get even worse.

As if they hadn’t made enough bad decisions, Addie begins working at a strip club in order to fund their addictions and keep oil in the Rocket V8.  Zach, while grateful for the income, resents the source of it and jealously ratchets up the list of problems the lovebirds have to cope with.  Perhaps due to the jealousy, maybe due to the drugs, or maybe feeding a beast that he’d been able to keep chained up for a long time, Zach begins seeing other men, one in particular on a fairly steady basis.  This added element does nothing positive for the relationship, and in fact, causes Addie to become violent when she finds out.

It’s about this time that the couple moves into a small apartment above a voodoo shop at 826 North Rampart Street, somehow a fitting metaphor.  Neighbors in the area quickly get used to the beat up Oldsmobile out front and the screaming and yelling from the apartment upstairs.  Neither of these proclivities do anything for property values.

In between her shifts at the strip club, Addie regularly berates Zach for a list of shortcomings that gets longer by the week, his dalliance with the ‘other man’ most often the one that brings about the most reaction.  The two break up and get back together almost daily proving that misery loves company and they were as miserable as any two people could seemingly get.  There seems to be no end to the amount of drugs they consume, nor the resulting effects that play out inside the apartment.

Well, it might have seemed that way, but in fact there was an end.

On October 5th of 2006, in a drug-fueled rage the couple get into yet another fight that escalates physically in no time.  Addie tries to kick Zach out of the apartment, but Zach is having none of it.  He’s not going to go back to living in the Oldsmobile.  Addie, knowing exactly what words and accusations illicit the biggest reactions, screams homophobic slurs at Zach.  Humiliating things that seem to be even more grotesque than normal.  Things that are meant to take away whatever shred of dignity he has remaining, if there is any.  All the while, she is beating him.  He pleads with her to stop the abuse.  When she doesn’t, he snaps.  Zach chocks the last breath out of Addie to stop the words from coming out of her mouth.

For the next twelve days Zach drinks with his friends and tells them Addie has left him for good.  He seems resigned to the break-up.  When not with his friends, he is in the apartment doing things to his girlfriend’s corpse that are detailed in other places and don’t need to be described here.  On about the twelfth day, Zach gets in the Oldsmobile Ninety-Eight and makes one final drive to the Omni Royal Orleans Hotel.  He goes to the roof top bar on the seventh floor of the hotel and gets drunk for one last time.  Once he’s consumed all the alcohol he can, he makes his way to the edge of the building, makes sure his dog tags and a letter to police are in the plastic bag in his back pocket and steps off the edge of the building.

It would have been the ultimate irony had he landed on the 1950 Oldsmobile Ninety-Eight sedan, but he is found on the roof of the parking garage where it is parked instead.

Police don’t take long to find the letter in his pocket and the keys to the apartment.  The letter reads:

“This is not accidental. I had to take my own life to pay for the one I took. If you send a patrol car to 826 N. Rampart, you will find the dismembered corpse of my girlfriend Addie in the oven, on the stove, and in the fridge and a full signed confession from myself … Zack Bowen.”

In the apartment on Rampart Street, police find  a scene they were not prepared for, nor would they ever forget.  As promised in the note found in his pocket, additional details were provided inside the apartment, not the least of which was a note that contained all of the details of what had taken place almost two weeks previously.

“Today is Monday 16 October 2 a.m. I killed her at 1 a.m. Thursday 5 October. I very calmly strangled her. It was very quick.”

“Halfway through the task, I stopped and thought about what I was doing. The decision to halt the first idea and move to Plan B (the crime scene you are now in) came after awhile. I scared myself not by the action of calmly strangling the woman I’ve loved for one and a half years, and then (desecrating) her body but by my entire lack of remorse. I’ve known for forever how horrible of a person I am — ask anyone — and decided to quit my jobs and spend the 1,500 cash I had being happy until I killed myself. So, that’s what I did: good food, good drugs, good strippers, good friends and any loose ends I may have had. I didn’t contact any of my family. So that’ll explain the shock. And had a fantastic time living out my days … It’s just about time now.”

Folks in New Orleans and Fort Stockton argue whether or not the fact that the apartment was located over Priestess Miriam’s Voodoo Spiritual Temple had a direct hand in the atrocity that took place inside.  Guys argue over beers at the Lucky Lady Lounge that the PTSD Zach brought home with him from Iraq and Kosovo are what caused everything to go so wrong.  Brother Bob preaches on the Seven Deadly Sins in a sermon series that many thought went on too long.

“The idea of Severn Deadly Sins isn’t biblical,” Lucinda notes one morning while everyone is having coffee and remembering the event at the round table in the middle of the Grounds for Divorce.  “That concept started as ‘Eight Evil Thoughts’ propagated by a monk named Evagrius Ponticus in the fourth century.”  Sister Thelma nodded along in agreement.

Rusty Hammer wonders out loud about the nature of man.  Not a topic that normally comes up when discussing Fords and Chevies.  

“There are really two distinctly different sides to this debate,” New Guy says.  “One would argue that man is basically good but can be led down the wrong path by his environment.  The other states that humans are wicked by nature and it is only their environment that is able to make them – and enable them to remain – in any way good.”

He was just about to get started on the Confucian scholar Mengzi’s teachings on the subject when Rex Hall, the pharmacist, asked whatever happened to the Oldsmobile and, thank goodness, brought the conversation back to cars.  Focusing on the gluttony of the last person who rocketed the V8 to his destiny was just overwhelming.

Lucinda, with a fresh pot of Folgers in her hand as she walked over from the Bunn-O-Matic, said, “It’s just like John Bunyan said, ‘One leak will sink a ship and one sin will destroy a sinner.’” Probably not a bad way to close out a series on the Seven Deadly Automotive Sins.