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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MOVIE REVIEW: DEATH PROOF
By Jimmy Don Ventura Movie Critic, Stockton Telegram-DispatchGuest Reviewer — CMC Blog There are movies where cars are props.There are movies where cars are characters. And then there’s Death Proof, where the cars are both executioners and confession booths, rolling down the asphalt like they’ve got something to settle with God and the guardrail. Now…
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PRESIDENTIAL COURTESY
It arrived just past noon, when the sun in Fort Stockton doesn’t shine so much as it presses down—flat-palmed and patient, like it’s waiting for something to admit what it’s done. The first thing folks noticed wasn’t the car. It was what the car refused to do. It didn’t rattle.Didn’t tick.Didn’t drag a tail of…
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SMELLS LIKE GOLD
Klaus Wolfenschmidt had seen war, collapse, and the kind of silence that follows both. What he had not seen—what stopped him mid-step in the gravel lot outside The Facility one wind-scraped morning—was a car the color of a grapefruit sunset wearing chrome like jewelry. The ’57 Dodge Coronet Lancer convertible belonged to a man named…
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FINS IN THE CORAL
Brax Barberry didn’t trust a man who sold a car without shining his own boots. That was the first thing he noticed when he stepped into the Dodge–DeSoto showroom on Congress Avenue in Austin. Not the cars. Not the polished chrome or the banners strung like patriotic laundry across the ceiling. No, sir. It was…
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LEGOS AND LINCOLNS
There are two kinds of men who shape Texas. The first kind draws lines on paper so straight they might as well have been pulled tight with barbed wire between two mesquite trees. The second kind takes those lines and wrestles them into existence with steel, sweat, and a vocabulary not fit for church but…
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IN THE BAG
There are men who go to war and come back with stories. And then there are men like Hairless B29, who come back with a story tattooed across their entire back so nobody has to ask. It wasn’t subtle work either. No tasteful outline, no artistic restraint. This was a full cinematic production rendered in…
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THREE KIDS, ONE TANK OF GAS
By the summer of 1982, Rusty Hammer had already told half of Fort Stockton he was going to get the hell out of this place. He said it leaning against the Coke machine at Rex Hall Drug. He said it in the parking lot at Jim Bowie High. He said it behind the Rusty Hammer…
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TRAX AT THE PROVING GROUNDS
Trax Travis was already at the Proving Grounds when the sky was still arguing with itself about whether it wanted to be morning yet. That pale West Texas gray hung low over the flats, the kind that makes a man question his life choices right up until the sun burns it off like it never…
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A GOOD TIME FOR A BAD DECISION
“Dad bought Mom a 1980 Oldsmobile Cutlass Brougham Sedan Diesel right after he retired.” Rex Hall dropped that line into the middle of breakfast at Grounds for Divorce like a lug nut rolling off a workbench. No warning. No context. Just clattered out there between a plate of huevos rancheros and Lucinda’s second round of…
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A MARATHON, NOT A SPRINT
On September 13, 1971, a Hawker Siddeley Trident 1E fell out of the sky over Mongolia and came to rest in the Gobi Desert like a secret too heavy to carry any farther. All nine people aboard were killed, among them Lin Biao, vice chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, defense minister, marshal of the…