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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FIRST A FISH, THEN A PONY
The first time Edwin Rasmussen proposed building the Plymouth Barracuda, he was standing ankle-deep in the cold edge of Walloon Lake with a fishing rod in one hand, a half-eaten ham sandwich in the other, and five Chrysler executives behind him explaining why there could not possibly be any fish where he was fishing. It…
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RADIOS AND ROCKETS
The first thing Nolan Haskell learned about Fort Stockton was that nobody there was in a hurry to be impressed. That wasn’t criticism. It was survival. People who lived in places where the nearest major city was measured in hours instead of minutes had developed a healthy skepticism toward promises. The desert itself encouraged such…
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SPARTAN, BUT RICH
Godfrey “Mac” McAllen graduated from Jim Bowie High School in 1950, back when the sign out front still looked freshly painted and “Home of the Fightin’ Knives” sounded less like a lawsuit waiting to stretch its legs. He was not the sort of student teachers described with words like promising, scholarly, or likely to keep…
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MISCALCULATIONS
By the summer of 1978, nearly everyone in Fort Stockton knew what fifteen thousand dollars ought to be used for, particularly if it belonged to someone else. That was one of the town’s more dependable civic services. A man could walk into Dot’s Café with a check in his shirt pocket and by the time…
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IT’S ALL PINK ON THE OUTSIDE
Fort Stockton, Texas Spring, 1976 There are years people remember because something extraordinary happened, and then there are years people remember because something extraordinary happened to someone they already knew. The latter was always more dangerous. Nobody in Fort Stockton ever expected Shania, wife of Brother Bob of Second Baptist Church, to become one of…
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TOMORROW AFTER ALL
Rusty’s recovery bordered on the miraculous, though the explanations varied depending on who was telling the story. Dr. Pierce Cordis never missed an opportunity to remind anyone within earshot that open-heart surgery remained a delicate business and that patients in Rusty’s condition didn’t always leave the hospital under their own power. Men who drove half-million-dollar…
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THE DADDY THAT ZIGS
Fort Stockton Memorial Hospital and Animal Testing Facility sat under the afternoon sun with the uneasy dignity of a place that wanted to heal people but also had a wing nobody liked to discuss after lunch. The building had started life as a normal hospital, or at least as normal as any hospital could be…
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THE LONG DRIVE HOME
Fort Stockton had a way of reaching out and grabbing hold of people who thought they had escaped it, though escape was probably too dramatic a word for what most of them actually managed. Nobody escaped Fort Stockton. They simply moved away, changed addresses, learned the traffic patterns of other cities, bought furniture from stores…
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THE DeVILLE IS IN THE DETAILS
Rusty Hammer was in and out of consciousness in the back of the ambulance, slipping back and forth between coherent thought and a gray fog that seemed to exist somewhere between a dream and a memory. Every few seconds he would drift up toward awareness and hear fragments of conversation before sinking back down again.…