The first chapter of a five-part series.
The Lucky Lady Lounge was not where sensible ideas went to be born; it was where they went to be dared. Over the years it had incubated innovations such as Rusty Hammer’s Hammer-Hatchet-Bottle-Opener (two injuries, three ruined fence posts), the Goat Roping Indoors Experiment (do not ask about the ceiling), and Hairless B29’s sonnet hour (attendance peaked at four—if you counted the bartender and a lost UPS man). But on a dust-velvet Wednesday night, it went from harmless foolishness to legend.
It began with an accusation shaped like a compliment.
“Not a one of you,” Rusty said, leaning across the table with the gravity of a man who’d married a level and a tape measure, “has the grit my daddy said a proper Fort Stocktonite needs.”
Lucinda cocked an eyebrow the way she’d trained it to—like a flick knife you could serve with pie. “Your daddy’s grit was mostly overdrafts and a deep personal relationship with layaway. Sit down, carpenter king.”
Hairless B29 polished the shine on his bald head with a napkin and aimed a quote at the ceiling. “As the Bard said, ‘The readiness is all.’”
“Shakespeare didn’t have to drive a three-on-the-tree,” Trixie observed, lighting a cigarette and examining her nails like they’d failed her morally.
Delgado, who wore black the way a crow wears feathers, folded his hands. “The only honest measure of a person is how they conduct themselves on the road and at the breakfast table. In both places, you keep pace with dignity.”
“Darlin’,” Lucinda said, “if you drive the way you make Huevos rancheros we’ll never get out of Pecos County.”
A challenge gathered itself out of the vapor. By the time the tequila made its last slow lap around the table, they had sworn, bar-napkin solemn and ankle-deep in Lone Star longnecks, to recreate La Carrera Panamericana—five cars, five teams, pride on the line, and, depending on who you asked, provisional custody of the deed to Rusty Hammer Hardware (handwritten on a Lucky Lady napkin and notarized with ketchup).
The Send-Off
Weeks later, the courthouse square looked like Founders’ Day had eloped with Judgment Day. Five teams, two people each team, and five cars that had been prepped for the recreation of the race, Fort Stockton-style. Lucinda and Delgado in a 1956 Lincoln Premier, Rusty Hammer and Hairless B29 in a 1954 Ford Customline, Sister Thelma and Trixie from the Klip-N-Dye in a 1954 Lincoln Capri. Somehow Chad from the Piggly Wiggly had talked Angus Hopper into financing the conversion of a stock 1965 Falcon for an entry into the race, Angus demanding to go along to protect his investment. Rex Hall, the pharmacist from Rex Hall Drug and Cutter Bridges, owner of Bridges Funeral Parlor, went in together on a 1953 Studebaker Commander, wanting to either relive their youth or just drum up business for each of their respective businesses.
Kids clacked tin noisemakers shaped like pistons. The Jim Bowie High band attacked a medley that began as “La Cucaracha” and wandered into “Louie Louie.” Paisano Pete, the giant roadrunner, wore a checkered flag as a cape. Sister Thelma circulated with a jam jar of holy water, blessing anything that wasn’t moving and attempting to bless Rusty’s Ford twice.
Lucinda came out of Grounds for Divorce like a matinee starlet: polka-dot dress, lacquered hair, lipstick the color of a stop sign that actually works. She carried a thermos of Folgers like an heirloom. Delgado brought around the car—their car—the 1956 Lincoln Premiere, two-tone blue and white, a boulevard ocean liner with brightwork that could signal ships at sea.
Everybody in town had lore about that Lincoln. A Dallas oilman’s widow, they said. A diplomat who played poker badly. A Dairy Queen sign with the scar tissue to prove it. The truth was less cinematic but more Fort Stockton: Lucinda had found it through a cousin in Odessa who knew a man who knew a car with “good bones and bad luck.” Delgado, who believed dignity could be rubbed into metal if you were patient and respectful enough, had straightened the bent trim, massaged the creases out of the fenders, and buffed until the paint could hold a conversation with clouds.
He gave tours of its virtues as though it were a chapel. “Listen,” he’d say, tapping a knuckle against the door. “That’s weight speaking. Not fat—gravitas.” He loved its long hood like a priest loves a homily. Lucinda loved what happened to men’s necks when the car slid by and they tried to look twice at once.
Cutter Bridges, of Bridges Funeral Home, handed out printed “programs” where the entrants were listed with odds in favor of survival and, in smaller type, refreshments to follow at the Lucky Lady if anyone made it home. Chad from the Piggly Wiggly sold hot dogs from a cooler and offered to stamp passports with the store logo “for authenticity.” Rusty taped a sign to the Customline that read RUST NEVER SLEEPS. Trixie arranged herself beside her Capri in a way that made the town photographer’s viewfinder fog up.
They set off with horn blasts, cheers, and one solitary boo from a man who disliked anything that interrupted diagonal parking. The high school band chased them to the edge of town and then reconsidered cardio. Fort Stockton receded in the rearview like a secret they were suddenly in on.
Southward, and Sideways
No one writes songs about border paperwork, but they should. The first station insisted Angus Hopper’s middle name must be declared in triplicate; Angus declared the entire station an outpost of Mayor Goodman, which improved nothing. Chad produced a passport from a Piggly Wiggly freezer bag and then produced two more, one of which turned out to be a laminated coupon for 10% off deli meat. Trixie tilted her sunglasses and melted a customs official from stern to helpful in seven seconds. Sister Thelma administered glares with the accuracy of a throwing knife.
By the time Tuxtla Gutiérrez opened its arms—green hills, bright shirts on lines, the kind of sunlight that tastes like fruit—the Texans had graduated from novelty to parade. They parked the five cars along a street that smelled of cinnamon and corn masa. Lucinda insisted on café de olla before anything else; Delgado monitored tire pressure like a cardiologist. He had a little ritual with the Lincoln: a hand on the fender, a quiet word, the way you talk to a skittish horse that could also bench-press a house.
Spectators collected not because they thought the Texans would win, but because you don’t miss a circus when it parks in your town. Boys in school sweaters pointed at the long fins and elbows; old men nodded at the chrome as if greeting another old man who remembered when gasoline had manners.
“Ready?” Lucinda said.
“I was born for this,” Delgado answered.
“You were born to dress for this,” she said, and climbed in.
The starter’s flag snapped like a towel. Cars leapt and lunged. The Lincoln inhaled, considered, and then set about moving with the stubborn dignity of a courthouse.
Climbing to Oaxaca
Roads that roll out like ribbon are one thing; roads that loop and coil like a rattler irritated by poetry are another. The Sierra Madre doesn’t care what you’re driving. The Lincoln climbed anyway.
Inside the cabin, the argument that had technically begun at the Lucky Lady refined itself into an art form.
“If you ease up any more,” Lucinda said, “you’ll be backing into Texas.”
“Speed without ceremony is vulgar,” Delgado replied. “One must ascend as one approaches a pulpit.”
“We’re not approaching a pulpit; we’re approaching a curve with a bus in it.”
The temperature needle tried flirting with the red. Delgado pulled over. He worked the radiator cap carefully, as one does when one has learned the easy way and the hard way and prefers the first. The cap sighed, and hot breath blew off into the mountain air. He waited, produced a small battered flask.
“Don’t,” Lucinda said, but she was laughing already.
He dribbled two solemn drops of holy water. “Symbolic.”
“You know what else is symbolic? A tow truck.”
Back on the grade, the Lincoln resumed its campaign. A bus full of schoolchildren passed them on a curve that was 80% prayer, 20% asphalt. The kids thumped the glass and cheered. Lucinda blew kisses like confetti. Delgado crossed himself and then crossed the Lincoln, too, on the off chance.
A man by the roadside waved a stalk of sugarcane, the universal sign for “you look like you need blessings or calories.” Delgado bought one, split it with a pocketknife, and they chewed in rhythm with the big engine’s hum. The roadbook, printed in a font that assumed you were calm, warned of descending hairpins, sudden livestock, and a scenic overlook that had been scenic before the last rainy season carried it three switchbacks downhill.
They were overtaken by a Volkswagen Beetle upholstered with family—grandmother in the backseat, three chickens debating theology in a crate. The grandmother waved. Lucinda waved back. One chicken crowed with what sounded like cruel encouragement.
“We are being mocked by poultry,” Delgado said.
“Then do something dignified.”
“I will not race chickens.”
“Well, pass something, then.”
He did. Not chickens—those were spiritually out of reach—but he did coax the Lincoln into a ballet step of torque and patience that slipped them past a Renault gasping in second. The driver stared, offended, as if passed by a couch wearing jewelry.
“You hear that?” Lucinda said.
“What?”
“Your graveyard voice perked up.”
“It merely acknowledged proficiency.”
She grinned and patted the dash. “Hear that, darling? He sees you.”
The sunlight thinned into that high-altitude kind of gold that makes you believe in the word “pure.” Shadows lengthened, conversation softened. The Lincoln, for all its mass, found a kind of floating rhythm. Gravity and dignity negotiated a truce. When Oaxaca finally arrived—roofs like red punctuation, domes shining like declarations—the Lincoln eased down as if it had always intended the day to end here.
They rolled into town with chrome dulled by a day’s worth of grit and a posture that said: we did not hurry, we rightlyarrived.
Lobby Politics and Bar Confessions
The Hotel Monte Albán’s lobby offered wicker, tile, and the unmistakable smell of travelers who had won arguments with distance. The other teams gathered like planets drawn to chaos. Rusty had a story about a goat that had lunged at his fender with criminal intent; the only part nobody disputed was the damage to the fender. Trixie had collected phone numbers like parking tickets and was deciding which to pay. Angus Hopper opined that the tollbooth three towns back was a false-flag operation funded by Mayor Goodman, to test local compliance. Sister Thelma administered glares with the accuracy of a throwing knife.
Lucinda signed the register with a flourish, took two keys, and handed one to Delgado without looking at anyone else. “Come on,” she said. “We need to discuss strategy.”
“What sort?” he asked, but he was already following her into the elevator.
Hairless B29 watched them go with a scholar’s interest and a teenager’s delight. “There will be poetry,” he predicted.
“Lord help us if there’s rhyme,” Rusty said, and headed for the bar.
Room 203 (What the Seismologists Later Called “The First Event”)
The door clicked behind them. For a half-second they were quiet in the way people get quiet before a roller coaster drops.
Lucinda turned, back to the room, and leaned against the door like she’d been planning that lean all day. “You gonna talk to me the way you talk to the Lincoln, or you gonna drive?”
Delgado’s mouth twitched—dangerously close to a grin. “I respect machinery.”
“Then show me respect.”
“You wish to be tuned?”
“I wish to be listened to.”
They crossed the room from two angles, met in the kind of middle that erases math, and the bed said oh, my in springs.
There are things one does not describe in a family newsletter and things one can. This was a plenty loud symphony of the latter: laughter that started low and then found new gears, a headboard that attempted to re-negotiate its contract, a nightstand that crept sideways like a crab, a curtain rod that craned forward to watch the game, and a mattress that learned several forms of diplomacy. By the second verse of the second chorus, the lamp took a knee and the Gideon Bible slid out of the drawer in a show of ecumenical support.
Lucinda was, as always, the conductor who knew when to double-time and when to let the horn section breathe. Delgado, discovering there were registers above baritone, matched her not with athletic foolishness but with that reverent intensity he saved for V-belts and fragile trim clips—careful, precise, then not careful at all, like a sermon that catches fire.
Across the hall, Hairless B29 set Milton down and said, aloud to no one, “I retract everything unkind I ever said about free verse,” then fanned himself with a hotel notepad and considered becoming religious.
Next door, Sister Thelma launched into prayer at a pace that would have winded a rosary. The thudding from 203 supplied the percussion. “Lord,” she whispered, switching to a whisper when the tempo demanded it, “forgive them their… exuberance. Also forgive me for being aware of its meter.”
Downstairs, a bartender paused mid-pour as the bottle shoulders burred against their neighbors. “Temblor?” a tourist asked.
“Texans,” the bartender said, and steadied the shelf.
The wall clock in 203 lost time, found it, and then decided time was a social construct. At one point, Lucinda laughed so brightly the laughter itself seemed to turn on a lamp; at another, Delgado uttered a sound somewhere between a hallelujah and a lug nut finally breaking free. The bed, having filed several formal objections, rattled itself into acceptance.
In the quiet crest that followed, a kind of oxygen returned. Lucinda, hair an adventure in topography, lay on her back smiling like a woman who had just negotiated a superior trade with the universe. Delgado, dignified even in collapse, looked as startled as a stoic can look.
“You all right, undertaker?” she asked, eyes sideways.
“I have… revised certain positions,” he said, and then blushed at his own choice of words.
She grinned and threaded her fingers through his hair, which is to say through the idea of his hair. “I knew you were more than a slow parade.”
“I prefer ‘measured procession.’”
“Call it what you want,” she said. “I call that winning a stage.”
A polite silence fell, the kind that says “we did something” and “we could do it again” in the same breath. Outside, motorcycles played tag with the night air. Somewhere below, a glass clinked. The city settled its shoulders and rearranged its streetlight sighs. Room 203 breathed, regained composure, and let the curtain rest.
And then, because there is such a thing as momentum, because there are encore lights that come up without being asked, because some hotels should put yellow tape across hallways when Texans check in, they went again—this time like a jazz reprise, less noise, more syncopation, the bed grateful for the change in arrangement, the nightstand pretending not to notice.
Across the hall, Hairless B29 whispered, “So that’s what they mean by cadence,” and wrote three obscene metaphors he would later censor for publication.
Sister Thelma, having negotiated a truce with the wall’s rhythm, prayed for traveling mercies, earplugs, and mercy again, in that order.
When the encore finally surrendered, 203 lay scattered with the visual poetry of victory: a heel turned sideways like a comma, his black tie ringing the lampshade like a hula hoop abandoned mid-lesson, her thermos leaning against the chair in a posture of applause. The headboard exhaled. The clock agreed to resume measuring minutes.
Lucinda kissed his forehead. “Tomorrow we climb more mountains.”
Delgado nodded, eyes closed. “I will endeavor to maintain… cadence.”
“Do,” she said. “And if you ever talk to the radiator the way you just talked to me, I’ll marry you right there on the shoulder.”
He smiled into the pillow. “I would officiate my own service.”
“Don’t push it,” she said, and turned off the lamp with a sigh that could have powered a small parish.
Breakfast (Also Known as the Aftershock)
They arrived to the dining room at different speeds: Rusty with a gait like a man who had fought a goat and lost on points; Trixie in sunglasses the size of frying pans; Angus taking a census of possible conspiracies; Hairless with a hymn stuck to the roof of his mouth; Sister Thelma red from chin to roots and trying to bruise coffee with a spoon.
Lucinda breezed in unusually serene, like a weather system that had already rained where it needed to. Delgado wore a fresh black shirt as if anyone doubted he owned more than one. They sat. Coffee arrived. Silence tried to organize itself.
Rusty cleared his throat. “Goats are vindictive.”
“Good morning to you, too,” Lucinda said.
Trixie peeked over her frames. “Hear anything interesting last night, Sister?”
Thelma coughed into her napkin with such authority that the table briefly mistook it for a blessing.
Hairless B29 stared into his cup. “I had an epiphany about meter.” He paused. “And drywall anchors.”
“Gentlemen,” Delgado said, as if he were beginning a eulogy and a toast at once, “let us focus on today’s stage.”
“Puebla, then Mexico City,” Lucinda said. “More mountains, more officials to charm, more places to get lost. Delgado will continue his measured procession. I will keep us alive. Between the two of us, we may even pass poultry.”
A laugh went around the table like a relief pitcher—late but effective.
Chad burst in late with a bag of rolls and an apology. “Got lost reading yesterday’s specials,” he said, then realized his mistake and tried to hide in a napkin.
Cutter’s Chalkboard Standings
By the time Oaxaca’s church bells marked the evening hour, Cutter Bridges had propped a portable chalkboard against the Monte Albán’s stucco wall and carefully written out the “official standings”:
- Lucinda & Delgado — 1956 Lincoln Premiere
- Rex Hall & Cutter Bridges — 1953 Studebaker Commander
- Angus & Chad — 1965 Ford Falcon
- Trixie & Sister Thelma — 1954 Lincoln Capri
- Rusty & Hairless — 1954 Ford Customline Tudor
Rusty, beer in hand, squinted at the list. “Hell, that ain’t right. We weren’t that slow.”
“You hit every mountain between here and Tuxtla,” Lucinda smirked.
Hairless sighed, muttering Shakespeare under his breath: “Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.”
Rusty jabbed a finger at the chalkboard. “We’re in that last category.”
Cutter wiped his hands like an undertaker and said nothing. The board said what it said.
One response to “BURNING DOWN THE PANAMERICANA, Chapter One — A Tequila Inspired Challenge”
Ya had me hangin’ on every word, Cap’n, but can’t help feeling the Lincoln did not get the respect she deserves. That baby was built for speed and more than ready to take all the power-shifting of the 408 “stroker” that Delgado could muster!