By this time in June 1968, I'd survived freshman year and made it home. I flew back from Boston to the 105-degree days of Laredo to work as a gofer, tire changer, shipping clerk, and janitor at my dad's auto parts store and garage. There was a brand-new employee uniform for me: blue pants and a lighter blue shirt with "Danny" stitched on a dark blue patch above the pocket. Work at Yeary Battery was a reunion with the mechanics out back in the garage, Nicho, Alberto, Pablo, Poncho, Leo, and Abraham, men I'd spent summers with ever since 8th grade. Nicho and Leo spoke English because they'd been in the Army, but the other guys lived in glorious monolingual Spanish. It was a relief to get back into cursing and joking in the Tejano demotic after 3 exhausting terms of classes in Dartmouth Hall trying —and judging by my grades, failing— , to master the imperfect subjunctive or opaque verses by Modernist poets from Spain. Those men were my father's a...