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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BAND OF BUICKS, CHAPTER II
CHAPTER II OF A FOUR PART STORY. On Calle Bonita, sunrise didn’t so much arrive as seep in, the way coffee does through a paper filter—slow, warm, and carrying the faint bitterness of another day. The first soul to step outside each morning was always Reable Fisher, long before the milk truck or the air…
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BAND OF BUICKS, CHAPTER I
CHAPTER I OF A FOUR PART STORY Mozelle Pilgrim drove her 1969 Buick Electra 225 Custom Convertible the way other women carried pocketbooks—with purpose, pride, and the unspoken threat that she might swing it at you if provoked. The Electra was the sort of car that made a statement even when the engine wasn’t running.…
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MVC AT THE GFD
“If pigs could vote, the man with the slop bucket would be elected swineherd every time, no matter how much slaughtering he did on the side.” Rusty Hammer was in rare form. Nobody at the Grounds for Divorce had a clue what that had to do with the Most Valuable Commenter Award, but we’ve come…
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THE SULTAN’S SANDCASTLE, Part II
Part II of II They said you couldn’t outrun a legend. But in Fort Stockton, all you needed was a 1978 Mercury Marquis — 400 cubic inches under the hood, rust under everything else — and a couple of good ways to keep folks guessing. It was five months to the day since the silver…
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THE SULTAN’S SANDCASTLE, Part I
Part I of II If you’d told the regulars at Grounds for Divorce that Fort Stockton would one day be blessed—in the biblical sense—by something called a Lamborghini LM002 Wagon by Diomante, they would’ve nodded politely and blamed your condition on dehydration, heatstroke, or Rusty Hammer’s expired beef jerky. Nobody in Pecos County had ever…
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LEADERSHIP FOR A NEW DECADE
They said the gym still smelled of victory the morning after the election — floor wax, crepe paper, and whatever passes for hope in West Texas.Under the sagging banner that read HOME OF THE FIGHTIN’ KNIVES, the new mayor stood at center court, tie narrow, smile wide. Jim Kilgore was twenty-nine and looked like he’d…
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HEADED FOR VENEZUELA
The thing had arrived quietly—too quietly for something that looked like it had opinions about borders. Long, black, swollen in places cars weren’t supposed to swell, with odd headlights up front like a jury that hadn’t reached a verdict yet. The engine hummed from the rear, backward and confident, as if it had already decided…
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THE TEENAGER, THE TIGER, AND THE TOWER
Liliana never asked to be the only girl in a family with six brothers, but life rarely asks permission.In 1966, she took what it gave her — a strict daddy, a future planned down to what she’d study in college, and a Sunbeam Tiger in Forest Green so pretty it ought to have been parked…
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BEATNIK KILLERS
Most stories that eventually make their way to Fort Stockton start with a whisper, travel by diner-counter gossip, and end up embroidered into the town quilt whether they belong there or not. Every once in a while, though, a story comes along already soaked in gasoline and sulfur. One that needs no exaggeration from Lucinda…
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AND SO WE MEET AGAIN
If you ever spent time around the Bridges family—any branch of that creaky, funeral-home-bred oak—you eventually learned two things: Fort Stockton knew Cutter Bridges as the present-day face of that dynasty: the man behind Bridges Funeral Home, the only place in Pecos County where you could get embalmed before noon and buried by supper. Cutter…