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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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…
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RADIO FREE FORT STOCKTON
If you were anywhere within a fifty-mile radius of Fort Stockton that week, you didn’t need a radio to know something had gone sideways. The air itself carried it. Not wind exactly, not dust either, but that peculiar hum that shows up when common sense packs a bag and heads for Odessa without leaving a…
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COMING HOME
Trey pulled up in front of his parent’s house the day after Rusty left, the gravel crunching under the tires in a way that sounded exactly like it had when he was sixteen and trying to sneak in past curfew. Some sounds don’t age. They just sit there and wait on you. Debra Lynn wasn’t…
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A FORK IN THE ROAD
Debra Lynn wasn’t surprised to see the 1962 Airstream Trade Wind 24′ Travel Trailer ease its way up in front of the house like it had every right in the world to be there. She had been standing at the kitchen sink, staring out the window without really seeing anything, when the afternoon sun hit…
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THE LAST CONTINENTAL
Out here, where the wind doesn’t so much blow as negotiate with loose dirt, Fort Stockton keeps its stories the way a good banker keeps his best accounts: quiet, protected, and just inconvenient enough to get to that only the serious bother. Some tales sit right out in the open on Dickinson Boulevard, waving neon…
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A HARD STORY TO TELL
Rex Hall didn’t usually take the floor at the big round table unless he had something worth the price of admission. Most mornings, he preferred to sit there like a pharmacist ought to—measured, observant, letting other folks overprescribe their opinions while he kept the dosage low. But this morning, he had that look. The one…
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SHIFTING ROMANCE
In the fall of 1958, Fort Stockton carried the kind of light that made everything look like it had already happened once before and was just now remembering itself. The sun came in low and amber through the plate glass windows of the public library, turning dust motes into something almost ceremonial. Lucy Latrell stood…
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THINKING ON THE FLY
The very first meeting inside the new World Headquarters should have been celebratory. Glass, steel, and ambition stacked twelve stories high in Dearborn like a monument to postwar confidence and unchecked optimism and ego. The kind of place where a man could see himself reflected in every direction and believe each version of him was…
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HALFWAY BETWEEN HELL AND HOOTERVILLE
If you stand on the courthouse square long enough these days, you’ll start to notice something that doesn’t quite belong to Fort Stockton. It ain’t the wind. That’s been here longer than memory and will still be here after we’ve all been folded up and filed away like unpaid invoices. It ain’t the dust either,…