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.
-
SALT WATER & SINS, CHAPTER 3: Jump seats
By the third week, the air itself had softened. Even the shadows seemed slow. Galveston in July didn’t rush anything—not the heat, not the water, not the way your mind wandered. Topher found himself drifting, not in a bad way, but the kind of drift that made you forget where the days went. The beach…
-
SALT WATER & SINS, CHAPTER 2: A Shore Thing
The Gulf hit him in the face before he ever saw it. It wasn’t the way it looked—though that would come—it was how it felt. The air turned syrupy as soon as the Dodge crossed the causeway, thick with salt and engine heat and fried shrimp. The sun wasn’t just shining; it was pressing its…
-
SALT WATER & SINS, CHAPTER 1: Graduation Drive
Topher Thompson walked out of Jim Bowie High School for the last time with a rolled-up diploma in one hand and his whole damn life in the other. The summer heat hit him like a punishment. The kind that didn’t need to say much—just pressed its fingers to your neck and waited. The ceremony had…
-
VELVET MAROON MAYHEM
If there’s one thing folks in Fort Stockton can agree on, it’s that Chester Ray Donnigan’s luck comes in threes—and two of those are usually flat tires. That third one, though? That one came the day he won a 1959 Edsel Villager Six-Passenger Station Wagon in a “Name That Soda Flavor” contest at the Rex…
-
MOVIE REVIEW: GRAN TORINO
By Jimmy-Don Ventura, Special Contributor to the CMC Blog“GRAN TORINO” (2008) Runtime: Just long enough to finish a six-pack and remember you don’t like your neighbors. Rating: R (for Righteous Rust, Racial Reckonings, and Raw Horsepower) Now I don’t usually review what the Hollywood folks call “foreign films,” mostly because I don’t speak French and…
-
THE RED MENACE AT THE REX HALL
Old Man Crenshaw came back to Fort Stockton in 1967 the same way a tornado rolls across the plains: loud, uninvited, and hauling parts from somewhere else. He’d left a decade earlier under murky circumstances involving an argument over a misspelled tattoo, a runaway circus llama, and an overdue meatloaf tab at the Lucky Lady…
-
FORT STOCKTON SMITH AND THE CAMSHAFT OF CORONADO
Some men dig for gold. Others dig for glory. But Fort Stockton Smith—known to most as “Forty,” and to a few as “Farty”—digs for things best left buried under courthouse records, bootlegging tunnels, and one suspicious outhouse just off Highway 285. His hat was too wide. His boots were too loud. And the black 1953…
-
SPECTATOR SEAT, Chapter 3
A CHANGE IN PLANS Eleanor had never considered herself the type, but here she was, smoothing the collar of her housecoat while checking the streetlight through a slat in the living room blinds. The lamp above the cul-de-sac buzzed faintly, illuminating the driveway of the split-level ranch she and Stanley had picked from the RoadRunner…
-
SPECTATOR SEAT, Chapter 2
FALL BREEZES AND CROSS RAM CONFESSIONS Eleanor Brewster had made three separate trips to Tumbleweed Dodge-Chrysler-Plymouth in as many days, each time hoping to catch Marvin Langley before he slipped out to lunch or back from one of his extended test drives. She’d timed her third attempt just right, parking behind the service bay in…
-
SPECTATOR SEAT, Chapter 1
WHO KNEW BUYING A NEW CAR COULD BE SO EXCITING? The sky over Fort Stockton looked like a brushed nickel coin, all scuffed and gray, with the scent of creosote rising up from the wet streets. It was the kind of Saturday where things got done—errands, haircuts, groceries, and car shopping, if you had the…