1. His hands were good - I didn't inherit any talent. He just knew how things worked. It was said that he could talk to machines, which was how he could take things apart and put them back together. They told him what to do.
I believe my grandfather could make anything out of a pile of springs, pipes, and gears. Junk. His pockets were always full of useful things. He would reach into his work pants and then sprinkle out the cones.
He had a humble shop on the desolate edge of El Paso, Texas, a border town that looked kindly across the ancient Rio Grande at the old town of Juarez, Mexico. In the late 1950s, the two cities were like siblings: a lonely outpost of an empire and a savage metropolis, one thriving and the other starving. Beyond the edge and the mountains, the desert of Chihuahua opened up, endless, a place both dead and alive.
He repaired diesel engines in his shop, mainly for truck drivers, and occasionally for the U.S. government. My grandfather was handsome, with caramel-colored black hair and skin. He enjoyed the solitude of his shop, but occasionally, something lost would emerge from the vast void of the desert.
One day, a red-brown mutt, about the size of a Labrador, sneaked around sniffing, and a few days later…