Category: Every car is a story.
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FULL CIRCLE
The 1948 DeSoto Custom Coupe arrived in Fort Stockton on a flatbed train car two months after Elroy Brewer returned from the Pacific. Freshly painted in Monterey Blue with tan vinyl seats you could lose a cigarette in, the car looked like something from the future, or at least a future Elroy hadn’t expected to…
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THE NOVA AND THE NEW KID
Fort Stockton, Texas – 1970s Caleb Canton arrived in Fort Stockton with a duffel bag of clothes, a box of books, and an accent that drew double takes. His father’s new post at the Proving Grounds plucked the family from somewhere vaguely referred to as “Michigan,” which might as well have been Iceland for all…
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FIREBOLT IN THE DESERT
Fort Stockton, Texas – Summer, 1962 The first thing anyone ever noticed about the new Polara 500 was how it looked like it was already going 80 miles an hour just sittin’ still. Shell Beige with blue interior, bucket seats up front like a rocket cockpit, and the sort of tail end that’d make a…
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THE LOW BELL OF PECOS COUNTY
The 1963 Chevrolet Bel Air had been the pride of Pecos County for three straight years—not because it was the fastest, prettiest, or best-handling car around, but because it was the only vehicle to ever win both the Ground for Divorce Christmas Invitational Folgers & Fenders and place third in the Boys’ Choir Christmas Parade the…
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CHROME & CONSEQUENCES
The heat had already settled in by nine a.m., thick and unmoving like cotton batting stuffed in your lungs. Even the flies were too lazy to bother buzzing. Downtown, Main Street hadn’t quite woken up, save for the thrum of a swamp cooler over at the Rex Hall Pharmacy and the faint click of Lucinda…
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TOP DOWN, HEART OPEN
They called her Birdie Ligon, though no one quite remembered why. She wasn’t small or especially flighty—just a stout, sharp-tongued woman of sixty-two who’d been widowed for seven years and liked her iced tea with a lemon slice and a splash of Wild Turkey. She lived alone in a modest stucco house with a chain-link…
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DEMOCRACY TAKES A NOSEDIVE
Fort Stockton, Texas – July 4, 1954 It was the kind of summer heat that puckered sidewalks and made cow patties sizzle like fajita platters. Fort Stockton, Texas, sat squarely under a sun that didn’t believe in moderation, but nothing—not blistered asphalt nor swooning livestock—was going to stop the town’s Annual 4th of July Parade.…
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THE GLASS, HALF FULL
Some mornings, I wake up feeling like Fort Stockton’s honorary town crier. If I had a bell and a pair of britches that still fit without a struggle, I’d stand right outside the courthouse and yell the news at passing pickups until someone brought me a sausage biscuit or a cease-and-desist order. Buttercup and I…
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DEMONS AND DIAMONDS
The Fort Stockton Mud Hens had won precisely three games that season, which was three more than anyone expected. Their star shortstop, Calvin “Dugout” Rawlings, had hands quicker than a Pentecostal usher with a rattlesnake under his pew and a backside sculpted by years of squatting into things he didn’t fully understand. He wasn’t known…
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THE BLONDE IN ROOM 3, Part II – Painful Decisions
THE SECOND OF TWO PARTS. A HEAVY TWO PARTS. Leon watched the door to Room #3 like it owed him money. He expected it to open—maybe she’d step out for ice, or hit the vending machine again. Maybe even ease that Mercedes out onto the access road and vanish into Fort Stockton, or at least…