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.
-
MARCHING ORDERS
They filed in the way men do when hierarchy has already decided the order of their footsteps. Not by name. Not by title. By gravity. The senior vice presidents entered first, carrying with them the quiet authority of men who had survived more product cycles than marriages. Then the mid-tier operators, the ones who still…
-
TESTIGO DEL ASESINATO, Part II
Rusty walked back over to the bar and lowered himself onto the same stool he’d been sitting on when he realized the bartender was Parker McHale. The jukebox still glowed softly in the corner like it had been waiting years for this exact conversation. Outside, somewhere beyond the dark windows, the Arkansas River kept sliding…
-
TESTIGO DEL ASESINATO, Part I
In the middle of Kansas, Rusty took a left. There was no ceremony to it. No sign from heaven. No sudden realization. Just a highway making a suggestion, and Rusty Hammer, being in the mental condition of a man traveling alone with too much road and too much unresolved marriage behind him, accepted. Maybe Nebraska…
-
THE HAPPIEST PASSENGER
Master Strokes came into Grounds for Divorce carrying a cardboard box, a folded title, and the sort of face a man gets when history has climbed out from under the seat springs and tapped him on the shoulder. He set the box on the big round table. Lucinda stopped pouring coffee. Rex Hall lowered his…
-
LINCOLN DODGES A BULLET
Dan Donley was held in a whole lot higher regard back in his hometown of Fort Stockton than he was inside the World Headquarters of the Ford Motor Company in late 1950s. At least by the other executives. As far as The Deuce was concerned, Donley’s last name may as well have been Ford. He…
-
SIGN LANGUAGE
By the end of the first week back at the hardware store Trey Hammer and his mother had fallen into a routine. Get up. Have coffee. Take a quick look through the Stockton Telegram-Dispatch to make sure the apocalypse hadn’t started, and then climb into Trey’s truck for the short drive to the store. It…
-
PARTS IS PARTS
They don’t call Earl over at Earl’s Salvage Yard & Formalwear the Jeff Bezos of the Wrecking World for nothing. And Earl, being somewhat less than the sharpest screwdriver in the Harbor Freight bargain bin, takes that as a mighty fine compliment. Far as Earl is concerned, Jeff Bezos is just a bald fella who…
-
A GATHERING AT THE GFD
The conversation started, as many conversations at Grounds for Divorce do, with something nobody had planned to talk about. I slid my phone across the table. “Tell me that ain’t the most Fort Stockton car you’ve ever seen.” The picture of the blue 1964 Ford Galaxie 500 convertible made a slow lap around the breakfast…
-
RIDING SHOTGUN
Rusty Hammer wasn’t sure if it was the smell of breakfast drifting through the campground or Debra Lynn’s ringtone buzzing across the narrow countertop of the Airstream that woke him up first. Either way meant trouble, one just smelled like a better version of it. He stared at the ceiling for half a second trying…
-
SMALL WORLD
The first day of Rusty Hammer’s journey toward rediscovering himself went about like a screen door on a submarine. That’s usually how these things start. A man wakes up convinced he needs “space,” “clarity,” or “a fresh perspective,” and before long he’s standing beside a smoking radiator somewhere north of civilization wondering why his lower…