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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AMBASSADORS, RELATIONS, AND BUTT DUST
Rex Hall had the look of a man who’d just learned the pharmacy was out of refills, mercy, and quiet afternoons, all at the same time. He sat at the big roundtable in the middle of the Grounds for Divorce, shoulders slumped, coffee cooling untouched, eyes fixed on nothing in particular. Around him were the…
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HEDGING HIS BETS
Fort Stockton has always treated arrivals like weather. You don’t stop them. You don’t ask where they came from. You just look up, squint, and decide whether to bring the laundry in. So when a black French limousine with a windshield like a cathedral window rolled off the rail spur in 1935, folks did what…
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THE COOL UNCLE, PART III: Looking Forward
THE FINAL INSTALLMENT By the time I was sent north for the summer, the basement curiosities of childhood had matured into a more disciplined obsession. The nurse who once bent slightly too far forward under a bare bulb had been replaced by a fuller syllabus. Above my bed sat a lineup of Revell model cars,…
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THE COOL UNCLE, PART II: The Bird of Paradise
PART II OF III I don’t know if finishing medical school gives a man better taste, or just the means to finally indulge the taste he’s been quietly carrying around like contraband. Maybe it’s both. All I know is this: when the Nash disappeared and the 1957 Ford Thunderbird appeared in our driveway, the neighborhood…
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THE COOL UNCLE, PART I: The Ambassador of Esoterica
PART I OF III I had a cool uncle. That phrase gets tossed around pretty loosely, but this wasn’t the kind of cool measured in motorcycles or bar fights or how many beers he could drink without blinking. This was a deeper, more disorienting cool—an existential cool. The kind that makes a kid quietly realize,…
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THE DAY THE SIGN CAME DOWN
In 2004, Fort Stockton learned about the death of Oldsmobile the way it learned about most things that mattered. Late. Loud. And slightly drunk. The news floated in on the AM radio first, wedged between a grain report and a commercial for carpet remnants in Odessa. General Motors, the biggest industrial cathedral America ever built,…
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CLOUDED FURY
By the late eighties, Fort Stockton had a way of flattening people into silhouettes. Dust did it. Heat did it. Time did the rest. Folks arrived sharp-edged and hopeful and left rounded off, or didn’t leave at all. She arrived already worn smooth. She was in her twenties and had learned early that men tended…
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POVERTY HUBCAPS AND VINYL TOPS
Dad and I bonded over automobiles the way other families bonded over fishing or church—ritualistically, opinionatedly, and with just enough disagreement to keep things interesting. As a mere lad, he taught me how to change a tire in the driveway. He stood there with his hands on his hips, nodding solemnly as I struggled with…
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THE BIG UNIT
By the time Harlan McGinty—known since college as “The Big Unit”—crossed the Pecos in a borrowed Ford LTD, he’d already made peace with America’s two-measurement disorder. Pounds were for brisket; kilos were for countries with good trains. The nickname had started innocently enough at Greater Southwest Central Texas Baptist University, whose motto was Measure Twice,…
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NO RESERVE
Little Grayson didn’t understand ownership the way adults did. He understood arrival. Ownership, to him, was the moment the pedal tow truck came off the trailer and settled onto the driveway with a sound like it meant business. It was Black Opal Metallic—less toy, more promise. Steel body. Painted-on chrome. A tow hook that implied…