Category: Every car is a story.
-
THE PIGGLY WIGGLY TAKES A BULLITT
There are towns that embrace culture naturally. Austin thinks it invented culture. Marfa charges admission for it. Alpine hangs it on a wall beside abstract paintings of horses that look emotionally exhausted. Fort Stockton, meanwhile, generally prefers culture fried, covered in gravy, or mounted above a television playing regional high school football. Which is precisely…
-
TEMPERATURES RISING
By the second week of June, Fort Stockton was already hot enough to make folks question their morals and their Freon levels. Heat shimmered above Dickinson Boulevard in silver waves. The courthouse bricks sweated through the afternoons. The Dairy Twin ice cream machine had already quit twice, and Chad over at the Piggly Wiggly swore…
-
THE CATTLE BARON AIRPORTER
By the time most folks in Fort Stockton first laid eyes on the wagon, they already knew it was either the greatest marketing idea in West Texas history or the sort of decision usually made after three tequila sunrises and a near-death experience involving livestock. The truth sat somewhere in the middle. The 1976 Ford…
-
THE LARK, THE LADY, AND THE TRAVELODGE
By the spring of 1965, Fort Stockton had mostly forgiven Owen Oakley for the Lucky Lady bar. Not entirely. Forgiveness in Fort Stockton was never a full pardon. It was more like letting a man back into the Dairy Twin while still remembering what he’d done to the napkin dispenser. The carved Lady remained behind…
-
THE LARK AND THE LADY ON THE BAR
By the summer of 1959, Fort Stockton had already learned two immutable truths about Owen Oakley. First, he could sharpen a plane blade so finely it would shave the hair off your forearm without drawing blood. Second, if you tried to get cute in his wood shop class at Jim Bowie High School, Home of…
-
AMERICA’S DAD
By the summer of 1953, Fort Stockton was still a town that believed in ordinary miracles. Nobody would have called them miracles, of course. People simply called them life. A man went to work every day. Children played outside until supper. Church bells rang on Sunday mornings. Somebody always knew whose dog had gotten loose,…
-
ANSWERS IN THE ALLEY
The alley behind the old Ben Franklin building in Fort Stockton had a way of collecting things people wanted forgotten. Broken Pearl beer bottles. Bald tires. Stray dogs with one eye and opinions about everything. Election signs from men who’d already been indicted. And sometimes, answers. The problem was that answers in Fort Stockton usually…
-
PARK AVENUE ASPIRATIONS, METHODIST MANNERS
The Pontiac wagon had served the family well. Never shirked its duty despite Dorothy Hardin’s tendency to kiss curbs like they were distant cousins at a family reunion, despite little Julie throwing up in the third-row seat every time the family crossed county lines, and despite Hank Hardin’s stubborn refusal to stop and ask directions…
-
WHEN TIME GLOWED
The first thing folks noticed about the girls from The Facility was that they laughed louder than other women in Fort Stockton. The second thing they noticed was that they glowed. Not enough to light a room. Nothing theatrical like in the moving pictures. But on warm desert evenings, when the girls rode in the…
-
DAZED AND CONFUSED
The cold woke Rusty before the fear did. Not all at once, either. First came the ache in his shoulders, sharp and electric like somebody had tried to crank-start his arms with jumper cables. Then came the realization that his hands were somewhere above his head and he couldn’t feel three of his fingers. Then…