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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DON’T CRY FOR ME LEON MARINA
There are automobiles that become valuable because they are rare, automobiles that become valuable because somebody famous owned them, and automobiles that become valuable because somewhere along the way enough people told enough stories about them that separating history from nonsense would require subpoenas. The 1956 Continental Mark II that spent the better part of…
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THE LAST FAMILY IN FORT STOCKTON
Nobody in Fort Stockton realized the American family was in danger until the Chamber of Commerce received a magazine. This was in 1991, when magazines still possessed the authority to frighten people several weeks after events had actually occurred. The publication had been left on a conference table at the Chamber office by somebody who…
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THE PETERSEN WOULD LIKE ITS CAR BACK
There were several reasons nobody in Fort Stockton believed Earl when he announced that the Petersen Automotive Museum had entrusted him with one of its automobiles, but the most compelling was that the Petersen Automotive Museum had not entrusted Earl with one of its automobiles. Earl had bought it. This distinction mattered to everyone except…
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SECOND DATE
By ten-thirty Tuesday morning, Trixie had Lucinda under a cape at the Klip-N-Dye with enough foil in her hair to receive crop reports from the Panhandle. Lucinda had left Delgado in charge of the Grounds for Divorce, where he was probably already making the biscuit adjustment she had specifically forbidden. His experiments usually began with…
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RUNNING AND DRIVING PROJECT
Indigo Dreamweaver had not always been Indigo Dreamweaver. There had been a time when he was Robb Bigelow, which was a perfectly respectable name for a boy growing up in Grand Island, Nebraska, and considerably less useful for a tattoo artist operating three blocks off Dickinson Boulevard in Fort Stockton, Texas. Robb had become Indigo…
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THE LAST BUS OUT OF FORT STOCKTON
Nobody knew exactly when Greyhound stopped being an important part of life in Fort Stockton, because things like that rarely happened on a Tuesday afternoon at three o’clock with somebody standing nearby taking notes. They happened gradually. One year buses were still coming through town carrying soldiers, grandmothers, college students, oilfield hands, salesmen and people…
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BANNED OF BROTHERS
The first Cadillac Gage Ranger armored personnel carrier assigned to the Texas Education Agency had not yet rolled into Fort Stockton, and nobody at Jim Bowie High School, Home of the Fightin’ Knives, had actually heard the sound of military tires coming down Dickinson Boulevard. That was fortunate, because the faculty parking lot was already…
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THE SIX-WHEEL THEOLOGICAL CRISIS
New Guy arrived at the Grounds for Divorce at 7:18 on Tuesday morning driving a six-wheeled Ford EcoSport. This was unusual even by Fort Stockton standards. Not unprecedented, necessarily. Earl once registered a forklift because he wanted to drive it to lunch. Jimmy Don Ventura had spent the better part of one summer trying to…
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FRONTIER FORD BACK WHEN
There was a time when buying a new car was important enough to dress for. I don’t mean the salesman, because the salesman always dressed for it. I mean the customer. A man considering a new Ford might come home from work, wash his face, comb his hair, put on a clean shirt and sometimes…
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TOO BIG TO FAIL
In the spring of 1995, General Motors occupied the sort of executive boardroom where it was possible to spend an entire morning discussing the future of the automobile business without ever getting close enough to an actual automobile to smell one. The carpeting was thick, the table was mahogany, the chairs were leather, and coffee…