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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EVERYONE LOVES A PARADE
By six o’clock on the morning of the Fourth of July, Fort Stockton had already committed itself to the day. The sun had barely cleared the horizon, yet folding chairs were appearing along Dickinson Boulevard as if planted overnight. Flags hung from storefronts. Pickup trucks rolled through town with coolers in the beds and lawn…
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RESIDUAL REWARDS
In the fall of 1976, before he became one of the wealthiest men in Pecos County, before people started referring to him as “that McCullough fellow” with equal parts admiration and suspicion, Mason McCullough worked wherever somebody was willing to hand him a paycheck. At various times he had been a stock boy, a gas…
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THE GOOD OLD DAYS
There are towns where people gather to discuss the future. Fort Stockton was not always one of them. Most mornings, the big round table at Grounds for Divorce looked less like a summit meeting and more like the waiting room outside Judgment Day. Coffee cups. Creamers. Opinions nobody requested but everybody received anyway. The old…
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FIND YOUR AIRNADO
By the time Rusty Hammer reached northern Minnesota, he had become suspicious of abundance. Particularly abundance of water. The state had entirely too much of it. Water sat everywhere a man looked. Lakes appeared between the trees every few miles. Creeks crossed beneath roads. Marshes occupied low spots. Even the ditches seemed damp. Rusty had…
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TRUE MILEAGE UNKNOWN
The sign hanging from the rearview mirror bothered Manny, though not for the reason most people might assume. In the used-car business, a man develops a certain tolerance for creative storytelling. Every third pickup on the market supposedly belonged to an elderly rancher who only drove it to church. Every ten-year-old sedan somehow spent its…
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TREY TRYS TO PACE HIMSELF
Trey Hammer had come back to Fort Stockton with a wife on the way, children soon to follow, and the sort of energy that made older men suspicious and younger men tired just watching him. The Rusty Hammer Hardware Store had not merely continued under him. It had been attacked. Trey modernized the place like…
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LIKE A ROCK
Tim Bob Tatum always said there were two kinds of overgrowth in Fort Stockton. The first kind was natural. Mesquite trees. Goatheads. Russian thistle. Johnson grass tall enough to conceal unpaid child support and the occasional Chrysler product. The second kind came from committees. That was the sort currently strangling the twenty-acre stretch beside the…
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MEN OF A CERTAIN MILEAGE
Rusty Hammer first noticed something was wrong somewhere north of Rawlins, Wyoming, where the world looked less like America and more like God’s unfinished drywall project. The old 1962 Ford F-100 droned westward against a crosswind strong enough to move livestock emotionally. Behind it, the silver Airstream Trade Wind wandered gently inside its lane like…
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THE PIGGLY WIGGLY TAKES A BULLITT
There are towns that embrace culture naturally. Austin thinks it invented culture. Marfa charges admission for it. Alpine hangs it on a wall beside abstract paintings of horses that look emotionally exhausted. Fort Stockton, meanwhile, generally prefers culture fried, covered in gravy, or mounted above a television playing regional high school football. Which is precisely…
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TEMPERATURES RISING
By the second week of June, Fort Stockton was already hot enough to make folks question their morals and their Freon levels. Heat shimmered above Dickinson Boulevard in silver waves. The courthouse bricks sweated through the afternoons. The Dairy Twin ice cream machine had already quit twice, and Chad over at the Piggly Wiggly swore…