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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THE END OF THE JOURNEY
Rusty Hammer was awake before sunrise at Horse Thief Reservoir, moving around the campsite with the quiet efficiency of a man who had become tired of his own wandering. The water hose was drained, the electrical cord coiled, the leveling blocks stowed, the inside of the Airstream secured against motion, and the old blue Ford…
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PINTO FANTASIES
In June of 1976 I’d graduated from high school and decided it was time to improve my station in life. This seemed entirely reasonable at eighteen. I had plans. Big plans. I was headed off to college in the fall where I intended to get a degree, become a writer, make a pile of money,…
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MOVIE REVIEW: GOODFELLAS
By Jimmy Don Ventura Movie Critic, Stockton Telegram-DispatchGuest Reviewer — CMC Blog Now I know what some of y’all are thinking. “Jimmy Don, Goodfellas is one of the greatest gangster movies ever made.” Wrong. Goodfellas is one of the greatest automobile documentaries ever made that accidentally got overrun by murderers. I watched the whole thing…
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THE TROP, THE GP, AND THE LEFT ARM OF GOD
Nobody in Fort Stockton ever accused Leon of aiming too low. The accusation was usually the opposite. People thought he aimed at things that couldn’t be done. The kind of things sensible men learned to avoid sometime around their thirtieth birthday. The trouble was, Leon had spent twenty years living in a place where impossible…
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RUSTY, RED & OLIVE
By the time Rusty Hammer crossed into Kansas, he had developed the uneasy suspicion that the road had finished with him before he had finished with the road. That was not a complaint. The road had been generous, in its own sideways fashion. It had given him lakes in Minnesota, trout water in Wyoming, hard…
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A FURY OF FOLGERS
Nobody ever accused Gus Godley of being a visionary, though there was a period of roughly six months in 1960 when several vice presidents at Chrysler unknowingly credited him with being one. Gus never learned about that part. He was too busy emptying wastebaskets. Like many stories worth telling in Fort Stockton, this one began…
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THE LAST LAUGH
In the summer of 1969, when Fort Stockton was still small enough for a man’s reputation to beat him to the barbershop but large enough for him to pretend it had not, Hollis Ray Briscoe discovered that there were only so many times a wife could be expected to hear the words “that is not…
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THE REALIZATION
By the time Rusty Hammer found himself rolling into Hayward, Wisconsin, he had stopped pretending he knew exactly where he was going. That wasn’t to say he’d become irresponsible. Rusty had never been irresponsible a day in his life. Men who spent forty years running hardware stores, paying mortgages, raising children, and attending church committee…
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FAKING IT
The slow days at Grounds for Divorce had their own kind of weather. They settled over the café after lunch, somewhere between the last chicken-fried steak and the first old man who wandered in pretending he had not already had four cups of coffee at home. The ceiling fans turned with that lazy confidence only…
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THAT EXPLAINS IT
The bell over the door at Grounds for Divorce jingled at precisely 7:12 on a Tuesday morning, which was about the time Fort Stockton’s regular population stopped pretending it was going to accomplish anything productive before lunch. The big round table in the middle of the café was already occupied. Rex Hall had the morning…