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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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…
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FORT STOCKTON CONFRONTS FATE, Part I: The Man Who Didn’t Go
PART I OF A THREE PART STORY Nobody ever found out why Valeri Kubasov came to Fort Stockton. This was partly because nobody asked the question correctly, and partly because Fort Stockton had long ago developed a civic tolerance for people arriving without satisfactory explanations. Interstate 10 delivered them by the hundreds. They came with…
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THE SPIRIT OF ’76
There are perhaps six days a year in Fort Stockton when the weather has no complaint to lodge against the people living under it. It is neither hot enough to make a man resent the sun nor cold enough to make him reconsider his relationship with the outdoors. A breeze moves through town without bringing…
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CORRECTING COURSE
By February of 1958, the Edsel had been on sale long enough for everyone at Ford Motor Company to agree on one thing. Nobody wanted to be the first man in the room to say what everyone already knew. The conference room on the upper floors of Ford World Headquarters smelled of cigarette smoke, coffee,…
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THE GREEN GRENADE
Every June, shortly after school let out and before my mother had completely recovered from nine months of having me underfoot only after three o’clock, my parents loaded a suitcase into the car and drove me two hours out of the city to my grandmother’s house. They carried my things inside, drank something cold at…
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BUZZ KILL
The mosquito had been in Fort Stockton considerably longer than Lyle David Goodhue, and if seniority counted for anything, it intended to remain. It had survived drought, flash flood, cattle, sheep, screen doors, rolled newspapers, kerosene, profanity, and generations of West Texans who believed anything small enough to be killed with one hand did not…
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I’LL GET TO IT NEXT SATURDAY
There are automobiles that are preserved deliberately. They are washed with special soap, dried with towels softer than anything in the bathroom, parked beneath fitted covers, and occasionally awakened on Sunday mornings when the humidity is low and there is no chance whatsoever that a bird has recently eaten berries. Then there are automobiles preserved…
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THE LAST TEXACO MAN
There are certain vehicles that arrive in Fort Stockton already carrying a story, whether the story belongs to them or not. A red 1957 Chevrolet 3800 panel truck with TEXACO painted across both sides in letters large enough to be read from the courthouse is one of those vehicles. You don’t park something like that…
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THE MISTRESS
They met at Pecos Baptist College, which was neither in Pecos nor large enough to justify the confidence with which it used the word College, but it had accreditation, a respectable baseball team, and a chapel requirement that ensured every graduate could locate Habakkuk under moderate pressure. Daniel Mercer first noticed Emily Carter during an…