1. He has good hands - I have no inherited talent. He just knows how things work. Legend has it that he can talk to machines, which is how he can take things apart and put them back together. They told him what to do.
I believe my grandfather could make anything from a bunch of springs, pipes and gears. Rubbish. His pockets are always full of useful things. He would reach down to his overalls and sprinkle cones.
He owns a modest store on the desolate edge of El Paso, Texas, a border town that lovingly gazes upon the ancient Rio Grande in Juarez, Mexico. In the late 1950s, the two cities were like siblings: a lonely outpost of an empire and a brutal metropolis, one bustling, the other hungry. Beyond its edges and mountains, the desert of Chihuahua opens up, endless, a place both dead and alive.
He restored diesel engines in his shop, mostly for truckers, and from time to time for the U.S. government. My grandfather was handsome, with caramel black hair and skin. He loved the solitude of his shop, but occasionally, something lost emerged from the vast nothingness of the desert.
One day a reddish-brown mongrel, the size of a Labrador retriever sniffed around and a few days later...