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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DEMOCRACY TAKES A NOSEDIVE
Fort Stockton, Texas – July 4, 1954 It was the kind of summer heat that puckered sidewalks and made cow patties sizzle like fajita platters. Fort Stockton, Texas, sat squarely under a sun that didn’t believe in moderation, but nothing—not blistered asphalt nor swooning livestock—was going to stop the town’s Annual 4th of July Parade.…
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THE GLASS, HALF FULL
Some mornings, I wake up feeling like Fort Stockton’s honorary town crier. If I had a bell and a pair of britches that still fit without a struggle, I’d stand right outside the courthouse and yell the news at passing pickups until someone brought me a sausage biscuit or a cease-and-desist order. Buttercup and I…
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DEMONS AND DIAMONDS
The Fort Stockton Mud Hens had won precisely three games that season, which was three more than anyone expected. Their star shortstop, Calvin “Dugout” Rawlings, had hands quicker than a Pentecostal usher with a rattlesnake under his pew and a backside sculpted by years of squatting into things he didn’t fully understand. He wasn’t known…
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THE BALD BOMBER: MAN OR MYTH?
No one knew his real name anymore, and those who once did had the decency to forget it. In Fort Stockton, he was just Hairless B29—a name earned, not given. The tattoo stretched across his upper back from shoulder blade to shoulder blade and lower than anyone cared to navigate: a B-29 Superfortress spiraling into…
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THE BLONDE IN ROOM 3, Part II – Painful Decisions
THE SECOND OF TWO PARTS. A HEAVY TWO PARTS. Leon watched the door to Room #3 like it owed him money. He expected it to open—maybe she’d step out for ice, or hit the vending machine again. Maybe even ease that Mercedes out onto the access road and vanish into Fort Stockton, or at least…
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THE BLONDE IN ROOM 3, Part I: A Tall Drink of Water
PART ONE OF A TWO PART STORY. A STORY THIS COMPLICATED CAN’T BE TOLD ALL AT ONCE. Leon sat behind the check-in counter at the Naughty Pine Motel, a place so faded even the vacancy sign gave up blinking most nights. Outside, the sun beat down on the west Texas dust, wrapping the world in…
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ANGUS HOPPER: A DUST DEVIL IN BOOTS
ANGUS HOPPER: A DUST DEVIL IN BOOTSBy Special Correspondent, name withheld by request The first time I met Angus Hopper, he was parked sideways across two spots in front of the Rex Hall Pharmacy. Said it was to keep the sun off his left fender, which, he explained, had started to “peel like a drunk…
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LUCINDA’S NEAR MISS
Half a lifetime ago, give or take a hot Tuesday, Lucinda wasn’t yet the Lucinda you know now. She still carried her keys on a beaded lanyard, still thought frozen margaritas were worth the headache, still believed you could change a man with a firm voice and a decent casserole. Bless her heart. That spring,…
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COMIN’ HOME, Chapter VI
This is the final chapter in a series of stories that have run all week. The whiskey drowned out the couple on the other side of the wall in Room 3 at the Naughty Pine, but it didn’t do much for the memories that were bouncing from his head to his heart and back again.…
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COMIN’ HOME, Chapter V
This is the fifth chapter is a series of six stories that will run all week. Eddie Ray turned the Cadillac back toward town, melancholy clinging to him like dust from the Bastrop road. The pecan tree, the fields, the ghosts—they stayed behind, but not out of mind. He rolled through the edge of Fort…