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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TAHITIAN CORAL IN A LIMESTONE TOWN
The first time I saw the Plymouth, it wasn’t on the courthouse square or parked outside the Lucky Lady like it had a warrant and a bedtime. It was on Lucinda’s phone, held up over the counter at Grounds for Divorce like she’d just found proof the rapture was scheduled and somebody had misspelled her…
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SURVIVAL BY COMPLIANCE, DEATH BY PAPERWORK
The air was thick around the long African walnut conference table, the kind of thickness you couldn’t clear with ventilation or bourbon. It had weight to it, like bad weather moving in slow and deliberate. The men seated around it were accustomed to being the cause of other people’s indigestion. Entire divisions had learned to…
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BUILT FOR COMFORT, NOT FOR SPEED
There are two kinds of investments in Fort Stockton. There are the sensible ones. Air conditioning upgrades at Bluebonnet Loan & Trust. New asphalt in the Piggly Wiggly parking lot so nobody twists an ankle hauling a flat of Dr. Pepper. A fresh coat of paint on the courthouse that makes it look like it…
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MAKING THE CALL
Rex Hall pulled into the parking lot at Almost United Methodist Church just as the bells were giving up on punctuality and resigning themselves to being decorative. The clock on the dash read 11:04. Close enough for salvation, not quite close enough for good manners. It was the kind of spring morning Fort Stockton specialized…
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NUTS & BOLTS, Part II
In a trifecta of fate that felt less like coincidence and more like a personal audit, Bolts Beaumont’s life came apart all at once. First came the sales reports. They arrived quietly, as bad news often does, buried inside routine emails and politely worded summaries. The Chevy SSRs were lingering. Not moving. Not selling. Sitting…
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NUTS & BOLTS, Part I
Detroit, early 2000s, had perfected the art of looking busy without appearing curious. The General Motors boardroom was a master class in that discipline. The African mahogany table dominated the room, long enough to suggest authority and wide enough to discourage intimacy. It had been polished so thoroughly over the decades that it reflected overhead…
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FOUR OF A KIND
It started with Rusty claiming he’d seen a tailfin where no tailfin had any business being. “Back behind the Piggly Wiggly,” he said at the Rusty Hammer, red beard twitching like it had picked up a signal. “Down that alley nobody uses except teenagers and stray cats. There’s chrome back there.” Chrome is sacred in…
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THE COLONY PARK BRITANNIA
Arthur Bellows did not arrive in Fort Stockton so much as he entered it—the way a man enters a room when he believes the room has been waiting for him. The 1975 Mercury Colony Park did most of the talking. It came in from the interstate with the composure of a long-bodied ship gliding into…
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CLASS OF ‘43, CHAPTER V – Mercury Rising
THE LAST OF FIVE CHAPTERS By the late 1950s, the Cattle Baron Hotel had become Fort Stockton’s most dependable lie. It stood there with its clean brick and bright windows like it had been built for good news, like it existed for weddings and anniversaries and men in hats shaking hands with other men in…
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CLASS OF ‘43, CHAPTER IV – Victoria Vernon
CHAPTER IV OF FIVE Virginia Vernon often felt as though she were watching her life rather than living it. Not unhappily, exactly. More distantly. As if she were seated several rows back in the Bijou, the house lights dimmed, the screen glowing silver and enormous, and the woman at the center of the picture only…