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Legends Of My Grandfather
Each story is true enough
1. He was good with his hands — a talent I did not inherit. He just knew how things worked. Legend had it that he could talk to machines, which is how he could take things apart and put them together. They told him what to do.
I believed my grandfather could make anything from a pile of springs, pipes, gears. Junk. His pockets were always full of useful things. He’d reach into his work pants and sprinkle ballbearings into my palm.
He owned a modest shop on the desolate fringes of El Paso, Texas, a border town that stared affectionately across the ancient Rio Grande at Juarez, Mexico. In the late 1950s, those two cities were like siblings: an empire’s lonely outpost and a feral metropolis, one bustling, the other hungry. Beyond the fringes and the mountains, the Chihuahuan desert opened, endless, a place that is both dead and alive.
He fixed diesel engines at his shop, primarily for truckers and, now and again, for the U.S. government. My grandfather was handsome, with jet-black hair and skin like caramel. He enjoyed the solitude of his shop, but occasionally, something lost would emerge from the wide-open nothingness of the desert.
