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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SUV OF BROKEN DREAMS
The flatbed came east on Dickinson Boulevard a little after nine on a Saturday morning, moving slowly enough that everybody sitting around the big round table in the Grounds for Divorce had time to see what it was carrying. Conversation stopped. That was the first indication something serious had happened. Silence at the big round…
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NADA CHANCE
Manny had written RARE SOVIET CLASSIC across the windshield in yellow shoe polish, which was unfortunate because the car was also yellow. From the highway, the advertisement appeared to be a municipal warning about a lemon. It was a 1977 Lada Niva, a small, square, three-door four-wheel-drive that looked as though somebody had asked a…
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LIGHTNING IN A BOTTLE
By the time R.C. Sullivan III checked into the Naughty Pine Motel, Leon had already asked whether he wanted a smoking room, a nonsmoking room, or a room that had recently become nonsmoking through the intervention of the Pecos County Fire Department. R.C. chose Number Seven, paid for two nights, and declined the complimentary continental…
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TWELVE MINUTES IN
There are days that divide a man’s life so cleanly that everything before them eventually begins to feel as though it happened to somebody else. The clothes are familiar, the photographs prove you were there, and you can still remember what you ate for breakfast if somebody gives you enough time. But the fellow standing…
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OPERATION BEAVER DROP
The trouble with Lake Leon began, as trouble around Fort Stockton often did, when somebody decided to improve it. For years the lake had existed a few miles outside town without asking much from anybody. Calling it a lake required a certain generosity during dry spells, but West Texans have always understood that bodies of…
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MOVIE REVIEW: THE THRILL OF IT ALL
By Jimmy Don Ventura, Motion Picture and Automotive Correspondent, Stockton Telegram-Dispatch and monthly contributor to the CMC Blog. There are motion pictures in which automobiles are props. There are motion pictures in which automobiles are important to the plot. And then there are motion pictures in which James Garner drives a black 1958 Chevrolet Impala…
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THE BED BUG
The first thing Yelena Mazanik learned about powerful men was that they seldom noticed the people who made their beds. By September of 1943, this had become more than an observation. It was something upon which a life could depend. Minsk had been occupied for more than two years, long enough for fear to become…
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IT WAS WHITE WHEN SHE LEFT IT
There were four styling chairs at the Klip-N-Dye, although Trixie had not needed all four at once since sometime during the first Reagan administration, when Fort Stockton women still regarded a weekly appointment at the beauty shop as one of the obligations of citizenship. The chairs were upholstered in red vinyl and mounted on chrome…
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FORT STOCKTON CONFRONTS FATE, Part III: The Aztek From Chile
PART III OF A THREE PART STORY By the third night, Fate had developed a parking problem. On Friday it had arrived in Fort Stockton aboard an olive-drab UAZ-69A driven by a Russian cosmonaut who had once been removed from a space mission because somebody saw a suspicious shadow on an X-ray. On Saturday it…
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FORT STOCKTON CONFRONTS FATE, Part II: Not So Tall in the Saddle
PART II OF A THREE PART STORY The next evening, Fate came back to Fort Stockton wearing rhinestones. This was not entirely unusual. Fort Stockton had seen Fate dressed as drought, foreclosure, marriage, divorce, football, livestock, Internal Revenue Service correspondence and, on one memorable occasion, a suspiciously inexpensive shrimp buffet. But rhinestones were new. So…