Category: Every car is a story.
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THE BOX BEHIND THE HUMP
The Car That Outlived Her Clarice had been gone three months. Heart gave out in her sleep, quietly, without fanfare. The mail still came, the wind still blew, and the Continental sat there, bearing witness like it always had. Her nephew, Travis, came down from Midland to settle the estate. He was the kind of…
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THE LAST CONVERTIBLE AGAIN
The 1937 Packard Super Eight Convertible Sedan that came up on Bring a Trailer looked less like an auction lot and more like a ghost of American ambition. The photos caught it standing in the sunlight, its long, sweeping fenders polished deep blue, whitewall tires glowing like a grin too wide to hide. Packard called…
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THE FIBERGLASS GOSPEL
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THE BARON OF PECOS COUNTY
There weren’t many things in Fort Stockton that gleamed. Not the courthouse dome, whose copper had long gone the color of a neglected penny; not the sign at Rex Hall Drugs, which flickered between “EX HALL RU” and “RE ALL UGS” depending on the weather; and certainly not the men who leaned on their tailgates…
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JAGUARS AND JETSTREAMS
The Lucky Lady Lounge sits one block off the courthouse square, in that limbo hour when the sun still pretends it has business out west and the neon says otherwise. Hank was polishing a glass with the same rag he’s been threatening to retire since the Clinton administration, the jukebox was lost in a 1982…
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DOIN’ THE CONTINENTAL
The Continental Solution When the Cattle Baron Hotel reopened its doors, Fort Stockton didn’t quite know what to make of it. The old place had been boarded up for so long that most folks forgot there’d ever been a lobby beneath the pigeon stains. But a handful of investors, drunk on oil money and optimism,…
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A BIRD IN THE HAND
The walnut-paneled conference room at Ford’s World Headquarters looked like the inside of a country club that had given up on good taste and doubled down on power. The carpet was so thick it could hide a Pinto recall. Brass ashtrays gleamed under fluorescent lights. A model of the 1979 Thunderbird, all long hood and…
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CHAIR FORCE ONE
Angus Hopper’s red ’65 F-100 growled into a diagonal spot outside Grounds for Divorce like it was clearing its throat to give testimony. The morning was the color of Folgers, sun just coming up over the courthouse dome, and Lucinda had the front window propped with a salt shaker to let October ride the room.…
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THE EXACT MOMENT
Stewart Somerville had never been a flashy man. Even as a boy, he’d been the type to smooth out his hair with a damp palm instead of grease and turn in his baseball cards for model rockets. By the time he and Trudy graduated from Jim Bowie High School, they’d been dating long enough that…
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THE AEROVAULT ARRIVED BEFORE NOON
By nine-thirty the Grounds for Divorce was buzzing like a cicada caught in a fan belt. Out front, parked nose-first against the curb, sat a gleaming white spaceship of a trailer. Curved like a fighter jet, rivets neat as pearls, it looked like it could outrun the wind standing still. Folks craned necks at it…