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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OH GOD. WHAT HAVE WE DONE? Part I: How Detroit Nearly Killed the Full Sized Dodge
The story of how Detroit nearly destroyed the full-sized Dodge, how a young man from Fort Stockton helped save it, and how the whole business eventually went to grass. There is a particular kind of silence that occurs in the executive offices of an automobile manufacturer when several hundred million dollars have been spent developing…
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EARL’S FORMULA ONE & FORMALWEAR
Earl had been selling the history of transportation and renting the appearance of respectability out of the same building for years, but it was not until he bought Max Verstappen’s racing suit that he realized the two departments could share inventory. The suit arrived on a Thursday in a box that looked disappointingly ordinary for…
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THE FIRST
I have reached an age where I can remember the exact location of the headlight switch in an automobile I haven’t owned in fifty years, but occasionally find myself standing in the kitchen wondering what I came in there to get. I can remember the sound of a particular engine turning over on a cold…
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MISTAKEN IDENTITY
B.J. Stepford had always believed that an automobile ought to tell strangers something about its owner before the owner was required to tell them himself. This was why he drove a Mercedes-Benz. The Mercedes was dark blue, expensive and German, three characteristics B.J. considered important enough that he occasionally managed to work all of them…
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THE HEART OF THE MATTER
Hank had been tending bar at the Lucky Lady long enough to know that a man studying his drink might be thinking about a woman, a bill, or something he had done before either one became a problem. He generally waited for the man to identify the category. It saved time and prevented unnecessary advice.…
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DODGING HISTORY, Part III: The Truth Will Set You Free
PART III OF A TRILOGY Within a week of returning to Fort Stockton, Walter Cates began to suspect that surviving a hydrogen bomb might have been the easy part. The telephone rang shortly after supper on a Tuesday evening. Walter was sitting at the kitchen table with his mileage notebook open, attempting to reconstruct the…
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DODGING HISTORY, PART II: The Trip West
PART II OF A TRILOGY The Cates family knew enough to be frightened. They did not know enough to understand how frightened they should have been, and in January of 1961 there was no reason to believe anyone intended to tell them. Walter knew that a B-52 had broken apart almost over the house where…
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DODGING HISTORY, Part I: The Trip East
PART I OF A TRILOGY Walter Cates had owned his new Rambler for twelve days before his wife discovered its principal design defect. It held too much. That was not how Walter saw it. Walter regarded the cargo capacity of a 1961 Rambler Classic Super Cross Country as one of the automobile’s stronger arguments for…
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OH, ROB.
The morning smelled of bacon, warm biscuits, and the faintly scorched coffee Lucinda insisted was a characteristic rather than a defect. October sunlight lay across the Grounds for Divorce in long rectangles, illuminating the sugar somebody had spilled beside Chad’s elbow and a fly that had survived more attempted executions than a Tennessee prisoner on…
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A SHALLOW GRAVE
Halloween had fallen on a Saturday that year, which meant the Grounds for Divorce was staying open two hours later than usual because Lucinda had discovered there were apparently people in Fort Stockton who wanted pie after dark. She considered this evidence of declining standards. By nine-thirty, most of the children had disappeared from the…