The junkyard.

July 23, El Cerrito.

Don Sandro's house: the yard crowded with a hapless mess of junk cars, tools and parts, everything from discarded car batteries to a broken lawn-mower.
My trailer is parked behind the house, a hundred feet at the most; to get to the house is not unlike hiking in a jungle (or so I imagine,) you have to carefully pick your way, here it is around cars in various stages of dismemberment, and the landscape has a life of its own, it evolves every day as work progresses and the cars change. It gets more treacherous at night; once I tripped on the kind of rolling benches used in shops to slide under cars as I was walking to the house, carrying Dylan on my hip, nine month pregnant with Nicolas; as I got up it occurred to me the incident would have been funny.
"New" cars appear almost every day, each one more of a disaster than the other. This one has no lights, that one's rear door is stuck, another's front window doesn't get back up once you lower it, another's whole transmission is out of whack.
The cars are don Sandro's business now that he's too old to work in the circus; he buys and sells used cars - very used cars. A Colombian mechanic called Castro arrived one day to help fix them, Wonder Castro with the magic touch, because nothing less would do. He used to work in circuses too, as a mechanic, the place to learn how to do wonders fast and mean, because you have to be on the road tomorrow no matter what.
The circus family has a way to find itself back together - like a benevolent mafia family extending its reach away from home, its grip just as tight, its loyalty just as strong.