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 NEXT ASSIGNMENT, Chapter IV
Gunter walked back into the motel room an hour later. He looked frayed. Trixie was still awake, laying on top of the bed naked in anticipation of his return. Gunter was still suffering from the effects of the Salad Wagon at K-Bob’s. The 32 pages he’d eaten from the file as he read it did nothing to help…
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THE NEXT ASSIGNMENT, Chapter III
The Salad Wagon at K-Bob’s was like something from a foreign movie that Thad Gunter had never seen before. The contents looked like nothing Sung-Li had ever prepared for him. In a previous assignment, in a far flung Tongan village years back, Gunter had taken a bullet from a guerrilla leader firing his Smitts & Westen .357…
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THE NEXT ASSIGNMENT, Chapter II
Gunter pulled the woman up off the floor and pointed to a chair in the corner. “This call is important. I have to take it,” he said. Picking up the red Ericphone, he held it to his ear but didn’t say a word. Just waited. “Yes,” he replied. “Fort Stockton again? Are you serious?” There was a longer silence. The voice on the…
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THE NEXT ASSIGNMENT, Chapter I
The morning light shone through the windows of Thad Gunter’s master suite window with an intensity matched only by the desires of the naked woman lying next to him. He thought he’d pushed the button beside the bed that closed the blinds before drifting off to sleep when it was still dark. And he may have. It was…
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FROM THE BACK OF THE BERMUDA, 9/29/2024
It’s actually starting to feel like fall here in Fort Stockton. Well, a little, anyway. There’s been a morning or two that it was in the high 60s when Buttercup and I woke up, and one day it didn’t get out of the 70s all day because we had a little rain. It gives everyone hope, until we…
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BONNEVILLE-A-GO-GO
Love makes a person crazy. Young love can make a person downright stupid. Callie’s father developed his world view looking through the bottom of an endless bevy of bourbon bottles. Her home life was nearly nonexistent, making her attraction to Patrick all that much stronger. Patrick sat behind her in English Lit and next to her in Chemistry…
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LIVING HER BEST LIFE
Tilda, or Charlie Underwood as she was known to her legion of dedicated readers, grew in popularity with each novel she published. On the heels of Turquoise and Tombstones came Sharpened Arrows, Shattered Dreams about a woman who lost her husband in the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. Captured by his killers, she eventually became integrated into the tribe. Her marriage to the…
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TILDA SPREADS HER WINGS
Tilda stayed at Palo Duro Canyon long enough for all three children to come in for her husband’’s funeral service. A minister from Amarillo said words that were kind, if generic. They scattered his ashes on the edge of the canyon at sunset, not sure of the legality, and well after the minister was on his way…
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ANYTHING BUT SPARTAN
“Maybe it’s time to leave Fort Stockton,” Tilda said while she poured him a cup of coffee from the chrome Westinghouse electric percolator. Her words hung in the air. He was deep into page three of the Stockton Telegram-Dispatch, not really listening. When they finally did sink in, he dropped the paper on top of the Formica kitchen table. “What…
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BACK IN THE DAY
Letting my fingers do the swiping through the daily offerings of Bring a Trailer it dawned on me that two of the listings seemed to conspire to present a picture of two vehicles most likely to be found in John Q. Public’s driveway in the first half of the 1950s. I tend to let my mind wander…