Category: Every car is a story.
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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…
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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…
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MARCHING ORDERS
They filed in the way men do when hierarchy has already decided the order of their footsteps. Not by name. Not by title. By gravity. The senior vice presidents entered first, carrying with them the quiet authority of men who had survived more product cycles than marriages. Then the mid-tier operators, the ones who still…
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THE HAPPIEST PASSENGER
Master Strokes came into Grounds for Divorce carrying a cardboard box, a folded title, and the sort of face a man gets when history has climbed out from under the seat springs and tapped him on the shoulder. He set the box on the big round table. Lucinda stopped pouring coffee. Rex Hall lowered his…
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LINCOLN DODGES A BULLET
Dan Donley was held in a whole lot higher regard back in his hometown of Fort Stockton than he was inside the World Headquarters of the Ford Motor Company in late 1950s. At least by the other executives. As far as The Deuce was concerned, Donley’s last name may as well have been Ford. He…
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SIGN LANGUAGE
By the end of the first week back at the hardware store Trey Hammer and his mother had fallen into a routine. Get up. Have coffee. Take a quick look through the Stockton Telegram-Dispatch to make sure the apocalypse hadn’t started, and then climb into Trey’s truck for the short drive to the store. It…
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PARTS IS PARTS
They don’t call Earl over at Earl’s Salvage Yard & Formalwear the Jeff Bezos of the Wrecking World for nothing. And Earl, being somewhat less than the sharpest screwdriver in the Harbor Freight bargain bin, takes that as a mighty fine compliment. Far as Earl is concerned, Jeff Bezos is just a bald fella who…
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A GATHERING AT THE GFD
The conversation started, as many conversations at Grounds for Divorce do, with something nobody had planned to talk about. I slid my phone across the table. “Tell me that ain’t the most Fort Stockton car you’ve ever seen.” The picture of the blue 1964 Ford Galaxie 500 convertible made a slow lap around the breakfast…
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RIDING SHOTGUN
Rusty Hammer wasn’t sure if it was the smell of breakfast drifting through the campground or Debra Lynn’s ringtone buzzing across the narrow countertop of the Airstream that woke him up first. Either way meant trouble, one just smelled like a better version of it. He stared at the ceiling for half a second trying…
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SMALL WORLD
The first day of Rusty Hammer’s journey toward rediscovering himself went about like a screen door on a submarine. That’s usually how these things start. A man wakes up convinced he needs “space,” “clarity,” or “a fresh perspective,” and before long he’s standing beside a smoking radiator somewhere north of civilization wondering why his lower…