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.
-
TWO OF A KIND
By the fall of 1958, Weldon Pike had reached the age where a man either settled down into the shape the world had made for him or else took one last wild swing at becoming the fool he’d always suspected he was capable of being. He was thirty-nine years old, owned a modest feed-and-seed concern…
-
LYING HIS ASS OFF
By the time Lucho rolled into Fort Stockton in that old 1950 Ford F-2, folks were already doing what folks in Fort Stockton do when something unfamiliar shows up on Dickinson Boulevard—squinting at it like it might explain itself if you stared long enough, like maybe if you gave it a minute it would confess…
-
THE LONG WAY HOME
On Friday afternoon, the Cadillac sat under showroom lights like it had already been forgiven for something. The men at Oil Patch John Deere-Cadillac kept a respectful distance from it, the way folks do around something expensive enough to change their posture. It wore its McKinley Gray Metallic paint like a promise, low and long,…
-
THE ROSE AND THE THORN
If you stood on Dickinson Boulevard in 1955 long enough, you could watch a man talk himself into debt. That’s what the showroom at Cactus CHEV-Olds was built for. Big glass, bigger promises, and salesmen who could turn chrome into a moral obligation. Whitewalls, two-tone paint, radios that pulled in stations from Amarillo like they…
-
THE MOTHER ROAD, CHAPTER VII — “Needles at Sunrise”
THE FINAL CHAPTER OF A SEVEN PART STORY Needles, California didn’t wake up so much as it arrived, like a train pulling into a station nobody remembered building but everybody depended on anyway. There was something ceremonial about the air, though nobody had hung bunting or bothered to make speeches. The desert light came on…
-
THE MOTHER ROAD, CHAPTER VI — “Flagstaff and the Edge of Things”
THE SIXTH CHAPTER IN A SEVEN PART STORY We left Gallup before the sun had the decency to announce itself. That kind of departure doesn’t feel like travel. It feels like retreat. Like you’ve overstayed somewhere you were never meant to understand in the first place, and you’re hoping the road forgets your name if…
-
THE MOTHER ROAD, CHAPTER V — “Gallup, Where the Dust Settles Differently”
THE FIFTH CHAPTER IN A SEVEN PART STORY We didn’t abandon the Expedition so much as we surrendered it. There’s a difference. Abandoning something implies you might come back. That you’ve got a plan, or at least the illusion of one. Surrendering it means you’ve accepted that whatever got you here isn’t getting you out.…
-
THE MOTHER ROAD, CHAPTER IV — Albuquerque Afternoon Delays
THE FOURTH CHAPTER OF A SEVEN PART STORY We hit Albuquerque like a watch that had been wound just a little too tight. Not broken. Not yet. But you could feel something inside it straining. The road widened before the city did. That’s the first thing I noticed. Route 66 didn’t so much enter Albuquerque…
-
THE MOTHER ROAD, CHAPTER III — Santa Rosa and the Blue Hole Truth
THE THIRD CHAPTER OF A SEVEN PART STORY We didn’t so much arrive in Santa Rosa as we slipped into it. One minute the road out of Tucumcari still carried that neon echo, that soft electric hum that clung to your bones like cigarette smoke in a closed car. The next minute—just like that—it was…
-
THE MOTHER ROAD, CHAPTER II — Tucumcari Tonight
THE SECOND CHAPTER OF A SEVEN PART STORY By the time Tucumcari rose up out of the New Mexico dark, it didn’t so much appear as it flickered into existence. One minute we were alone on a ribbon of highway that had more memory than maintenance, the Expedition humming along like it still believed in…