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 SLOWEST CHASE IN TEXAS
There are at least two reliable ways for an automobile to become famous. The first is to be genuinely extraordinary. Build enough horsepower into it, win enough races, appear in enough magazines, or carry someone sufficiently important, and history will eventually remember it. The second way is considerably less predictable. Simply be standing in the…
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THE OTHER SIDE OF THE FENCE
In the summer of 1956, General Motors was not particularly worried about the future. This was understandable. General Motors owned most of it. Nearly one out of every two new automobiles sold in the United States came from one of its five passenger-car divisions. Chevrolet was Chevrolet. Pontiac was moving upward. Oldsmobile had horsepower and…
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SECOND BANANA BECOMES APPEALING
Vice Principal Lutz had spent most of his life standing immediately to the right of somebody more important. It had begun with his older brother, Everett, who had been born three years earlier and apparently used the extra time to claim everything worth having. Everett had been the first to ride a bicycle, the first…
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THE AUTOMOTIVE MULLET
Here’s the thing about having a trunk that has been refurbished to the point that it actually looks better than it did when it left the Ford factory. Eventually, it makes the rest of the car look bad. I mean, imagine parking at the next Folgers and Fenders that Lucinda hosts, lifting the rear deck…
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LE BREAK DE LA DOUCE COLETTE
There was a brief period in the early 1990s when a person could become fabulously wealthy without anybody, including the person becoming fabulously wealthy, being entirely certain why. Computers were beginning to talk to one another. The Internet was still something most people in Fort Stockton vaguely associated with universities, the Pentagon and teenage boys…
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SIN WITH BUCKET SEATS, Part Three: The Backfire
THE FINAL INSTALLMENT OF A THREE PART SERIES The first vehicle to leave Second Baptist was Maybelle Watkins’s pale green Buick, although Maybelle would later insist she had gone directly home and had no idea why three separate people remembered seeing her arrive at the Cattle Baron Hotel before the benediction had finished echoing. Behind…
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SIN WITH BUCKET SEATS, Part Two: The Sermon
PART TWO OF A THREE PART STORY By nine-thirty Sunday morning, Second Baptist had more cars in its parking lot than it had members who could remember the last time Brother Bob had preached from Revelation without frightening himself. The church bulletin still listed the sermon as Walking With God in an Age of Distraction,…
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SIN WITH BUCKET SEATS, Part One: The Arrival
PART ONE OF A THREE PART STORY There are automobiles that arrive in Fort Stockton quietly, perform whatever modest duty brought them there, and leave without disturbing anything more consequential than the dust behind the Dairy Twin. A Plymouth carrying vacuum-cleaner salesmen might spend the night at the Cattle Baron Hotel and be forgotten before…
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“TAKE THE BOSS’S CAR”
The first cold breeze of autumn came off Nantucket Sound before sunrise on Tuesday, October 16, 1962, carrying the smell of salt water, wet rope, and the faint remains of yesterday’s fish. It moved through Hyannis Port with the confidence of something that had crossed the Atlantic without asking permission, rattling the windows of the…
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A STAR WAR IS BORN
By the time the house lights went down at Our Lady of Immeasurable Concern, three hundred respectable citizens of Fort Stockton were already packed into a parish auditorium rated for considerably fewer, two fire exits had been partially blocked by folding chairs, Delgado had sold enough Bantha Burgers to put the GFD Airstream food truck…