STORIES
If our lives are a book, the cars we drive define the chapters.
These are stories featuring cars, trucks, and even RVs that played a role in the lives of the people who owned or drove them. Many are set in Fort Stockton, Texas and involve a cast of characters in and around the dusty southwest Texas town. A lot of the stories are shared around the table at The Grounds for Divorce, where the ‘regulars’ meet.
Pull up a chair and let Lucinda pour you a hot cuppa joe and enjoy.
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WHAT’S UNDERNEATH?
Fort Stockton, Texas April 1986 April of 1986 was not a particularly reassuring month for anybody who believed things were generally better left unopened. It began, for Fort Stockton purposes anyway, on Monday night, April 21, when approximately thirty million Americans sat in front of their television sets while Geraldo Rivera spent two hours preparing…
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“LEAVE IT TO MOTCAT”
Fort Mayfield was the sort of town where every lawn was trimmed, every mother owned pearls, and every father came home from work at exactly five-thirty wearing a suit that had apparently survived the day without acquiring a wrinkle, a stain or any evidence of labor. It occupied that pleasant portion of West Texas where…
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IT’S FRENCH
The Duvals had lived in Fort Stockton long enough that most people had stopped asking where they were from, a process that had taken a little over twenty years and involved considerably more paperwork, volunteer labor, church attendance, Little League participation, and cautious purchasing decisions than either Doug or Daisy Duvall had anticipated when they…
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PAGE 602
There are few moments in a man’s life when he can reasonably expect his family to come running out of the house simply because he has arrived. Roy Wells believed Thursday, July 24, 1975, was going to be one of them. Seven weeks earlier, Roy had walked into Frontier Ford-Lincoln-Mercury, Home of the Straight Shootin’…
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THE SLOWEST CHASE IN TEXAS
There are at least two reliable ways for an automobile to become famous. The first is to be genuinely extraordinary. Build enough horsepower into it, win enough races, appear in enough magazines, or carry someone sufficiently important, and history will eventually remember it. The second way is considerably less predictable. Simply be standing in the…
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THE OTHER SIDE OF THE FENCE
In the summer of 1956, General Motors was not particularly worried about the future. This was understandable. General Motors owned most of it. Nearly one out of every two new automobiles sold in the United States came from one of its five passenger-car divisions. Chevrolet was Chevrolet. Pontiac was moving upward. Oldsmobile had horsepower and…
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SECOND BANANA BECOMES APPEALING
Vice Principal Lutz had spent most of his life standing immediately to the right of somebody more important. It had begun with his older brother, Everett, who had been born three years earlier and apparently used the extra time to claim everything worth having. Everett had been the first to ride a bicycle, the first…
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THE AUTOMOTIVE MULLET
Here’s the thing about having a trunk that has been refurbished to the point that it actually looks better than it did when it left the Ford factory. Eventually, it makes the rest of the car look bad. I mean, imagine parking at the next Folgers and Fenders that Lucinda hosts, lifting the rear deck…
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LE BREAK DE LA DOUCE COLETTE
There was a brief period in the early 1990s when a person could become fabulously wealthy without anybody, including the person becoming fabulously wealthy, being entirely certain why. Computers were beginning to talk to one another. The Internet was still something most people in Fort Stockton vaguely associated with universities, the Pentagon and teenage boys…
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SIN WITH BUCKET SEATS, Part Three: The Backfire
THE FINAL INSTALLMENT OF A THREE PART SERIES The first vehicle to leave Second Baptist was Maybelle Watkins’s pale green Buick, although Maybelle would later insist she had gone directly home and had no idea why three separate people remembered seeing her arrive at the Cattle Baron Hotel before the benediction had finished echoing. Behind…