The Pot Thief Who Studied Edward Abbey

by Orenduff, J. Michael;

  After they had done that, I scooped up some sand from the bank of the river. “Feel this.”

  “It’s sand,” said Marlon.

  “Yes. Easy to identify, right? And obviously useless for making pottery. The grains are too large. Now feel this.”

  I dredged up some silt.

  They handled it for a few moments then all agreed it was clay.

  “Wrong. It’s silt. Its mineral particles are smaller than sand. They stick together but not strongly. Your assignment is to find a bucketful of clay.”

  “We have to wade into the river and get all yucky?” asked Aleesha.

  “Not if you don’t want to. There is clay along the banks in certain spots and even out in the bosque we passed through. I don’t care where you get it. But you have to make sure it’s really clay.”

  “How can we do that?” asked Nathan.

  “Find something that feels a bit like melted chocolate. Form it into a ball. Then roll it between your hands until it’s like a short rope. Wrap the rope around your finger. If it stays there, it’s clay.”

  Bruce took off his boots and socks and waded in. Marlon shrugged and did the same. Carly followed them in.

  Mia took off her jeans and waded in wearing just panties and a T-shirt.

  I wondered about the propriety of a coed in class with nothing below the waist except panties, but no one seemed concerned and we weren’t on campus, so I decided to ignore it.

  “I haven’t had this much fun since my son was little,” said Carly.

  Everyone got into the spirit, even Aleesha. First they just slapped the water. Then they cupped their hands and tried to splash one another. I didn’t notice who threw the first mud, but they were soon all covered with it. They made halfhearted attempts to wash it off as they emerged from the river.

  Thanks to Albuquerque’s low humidity, we were all dry by the time we reached the parking lot.

  “Someone else want to risk riding with me?” asked Bruce.

  Mia looked rejected.

  “I’ll do it,” said Alfred.

  “Hop on, honey,” said Bruce, and everyone laughed, even Alfred.

  Once the rest of us were in the Bronco, Aleesha said, “It’s hot in here. Turn on the AC.”

  “It doesn’t work,” I said. “Roll down the windows.”

  She said … well, you probably know what she said.

  Carly’s suggestion to get ice cream garnered a chorus of endorsements.

  “Gelato is even better,” said Nathan. “Let’s go to Itsa Italian Ice.”

  They liked that idea, and since it’s on the corner of Phoenix and Second, it was on the way back to campus.

  I returned their cell phones, and Nathan used his to call Bruce and tell him to meet us there.

  To keep things simple, I volunteered to pay.

  Who knew a small cup of gelato was $2.50?

  I didn’t like shelling out $29.43 (including tax) for eleven paper cups of ice and flavoring, but the green chile gelato I ordered was good enough to justify the price.

  Yes, green chile. Hey, it’s New Mexico.

  My charges were comparing flavors, telling embarrassing stories (at least they should have been embarrassed by them) and laughing. They glanced at their cell phones when they heard a ring tone, but they just pushed buttons instead of talking.

  They were bonding.

  9

  I plopped down my margarita. “Ten thousand dollars?”

  “Yep,” said Susannah. “Of course, he doesn’t get the whole ten thousand. His agent gets ten percent and the gallery gets maybe forty percent, so he only gets five thousand for each painting.”

  “Only?” said Martin, who had joined us for the cocktail hour. He was having his usual Tecate. Martin’s uncle is a skilled potter, whose work is rooted in their pueblo’s ancient traditions.

  “White people are weird,” he said.

  “We are?” asked Sharice.

  Everyone stared at her.

  “It’s your fault,” she said, evidently meaning Susannah, Martin and me as representatives of New Mexico.

  We continued looking at her, waiting for an explanation.

  “Well,” she said, “maybe not totally your fault. It started at home. Montreal is less than ten percent black. Most of them are from Haiti and speak Creole, so I didn’t identify with them.”

  “Were they your neighbors?”

  “No. All our neighbors were white. I was the black kid in the white neighborhood. Then I moved to New Mexico, where you have three cultures—Native American, Hispanic and Anglo. I know very little about Hispanic culture and even less about Native Americans. So in New Mexico, I’m culturally white.”

  “So that makes you sort of the black counterpart to that white woman, Rachel Dolezal, who identifies as black,” said Susannah.

  Sharice smiled and said, “Yeah. But I have a mirror in my house. I may fit in with the white majority, but I know what I look like, and I’m happy with it.”

  “Me too,” I said.

  “New Mexico has blacks,” said Susannah.

  “Yeah, about two percent,” I noted. “The three-culture thing is official. New Mexico State University’s triangle logo represents the Native American, Hispanic and Anglo cultures that define the state.”

  “So in New Mexico, I’m white,” Sharice said, and flashed her searchlight smile.

  “Makes sense,” said Martin. “If Jews can be gentiles in Utah, I guess blacks can be white in New Mexico.”

  Sharice frowned. “Jews can be gentiles in Utah?”

  Susannah said, “Mormons call anyone who isn’t one of them a gentile.”

  “Hmm,” said Sharice. “So why are we whites weird?”

  Martin said, “Because you pay ten thousand dollars for paintings by a guy using a style invented last week doing paintings that don’t look like anything, and my uncle who incorporates a thousand years of tradition into his pots gets one fourth that much.”

  He looked at me accusingly. Spirits in Clay is the only outlet for Octavius Seepu’s work.

  “You should be grateful I don’t charge forty percent, Tonto.”

  He laughed. “Thanks for that. And for the Tecate.”

  “I’m buying again?”

  He nodded.

  Martin Seepu is my height but thicker. His hundred and seventy pounds is mostly muscle. He was a fourteen-year-old dropout when I met him through a program in which UNM students were paired with reservation youth. There was probably an official reason for the pairings. Mentoring? Tutoring? Counseling?

  Neither of us knew, so we jokingly refer to it as the “put a white kid from the city with an Indian kid from the rez and see what happens” program.

  What happened was I taught him math and he taught me how to draw horses. He started out like a kid brother and ended up a friend. When I was booted from graduate school, he helped me refurbish my dilapidated building into a shop and residence.

  During over twenty years in the pottery business, I’ve met hundreds of Native American artisans. Like Martin’s uncle, most are quiet. All are scrupulously honest, which makes transacting business a pleasure. But I rarely feel I truly know them.

  One exception was a young lady. I think the normal expression is smitten, but that sounds like it just sort of happened. She was much more proactive. So instead of smitten, I’d have to say she smote me.

  But that sounds like what David did to Goliath. The verb to smite is difficult to conjugate. Must be from Old English. Maybe she smited me?

  She had a round face and a small mouth with a slight overbite. Her coarse hair was clipped short. Her clear eyes peered out over prominent cheekbones and seemed to be looking into my mind.

  Which made me blush because of what I was thinking.

  Like most of my encounters with women, no
thing much came of our flirtation, but I remember her fondly. Maria moved comfortably in both her tribal world and the larger society.

  So does Martin. He and Maria have somehow mastered the ability to be equally at home on the rez and in the middle of Albuquerque.

  Or the middle of nowhere. Now that I think more about it, where Maria and Martin are most at home is in their own skins. Something that transcends specific cultures. I guess that’s why Sharice joked about being white. Her sense of self transcends artificial boundaries.

  I’d told Susannah about meeting Harte Hockley, and she’d told me his paintings are on display at major galleries in SoHo, Santa Fe and Los Angeles. He sells about twenty paintings a year. So what if he gets only half the money? That’s a hundred thousand, much more than he makes as a professor.

  “Two of his paintings are on the wall across from my closet. Isn’t it risky to have twenty thousand dollars’ worth of art just hanging in an unguarded hallway?”

  She smiled. “You thinking about stealing them?”

  “I steal only pots.”

  “Who else did you meet?”

  “Helga Ólafsdóttir, the 3-D person. She was a bit peeved when I asked her if she used those glasses with one red lens and one green one.”

  “I don’t doubt it. She does terrific weavings based on the traditional patterns used in Iceland, where she’s from.”

  “She told me her family is from Iceland, but she actually grew up in the Faroe Islands.”

  “They’re in the Nile, right?”

  Sometimes I can’t tell if she’s kidding.

  “Helga once explained the Icelandic naming system to me,” Susannah said. “The family name is the given name of one of the parents combined with the word for son or daughter. So I would be Susannah Hilargisdaughter.”

  “Or Susannah Hilargisdóttir.”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “I added the mark over the ó.”

  “I thought you had a chip caught in your throat. If we used that system in Euskara, I would be Sorne Hilargisalaba.”

  “Alaba is the Basque word for ‘daughter’?”

  She nodded.

  Sorne (the Basque word for ‘conception’) is the first name on Susannah’s birth certificate. Her mother’s Basque name is Hilargi, but she goes by Hillary.

  I said, “I’ve been telling everyone I don’t know art—”

  “But you know what you like.”

  “No. Although I did say that to the Gnome just to irritate her.”

  Martin frowned. “The Gnome?”

  “Her real name is Jollo Bakkie.”

  “With a name like that, I can’t blame her for adopting a nickname,” he said. “But I don’t think I’d pick the Gnome.”

  “She didn’t pick it. Helga hung it on her.”

  “That’s an insult to gnomes,” said Susannah. “They’re cheerful little fellows. Jollo’s an insect.”

  “What I was about to say is that I don’t know art terminology. Jollo told me a simple line on a canvas is a landscape. But how can a weaving be 3-D?”

  Susannah said, “Helga pours sand on the floor and mounds it into interesting contours. Then she lays the weaving over the sand and coats it with spray-on starch. When she hangs the weaving on the wall, it keeps that shape, so it’s a 3-D work.”

  “All work is 3-D,” said Martin.

  We stared at him.

  He looked at me. “Remember that book Flatland you made me read?”

  “I didn’t make you read it.”

  “When a white college student visits a fourteen-year-old dropout on the rez and suggests a book, that’s the same as making me read it.”

  “But you liked it, right?”

  “Yeah, because it made me feel smarter than the guy who wrote it.”

  “How so?” asked Sharice.

  “He says the men who live in Flatland are polygons. The fewer sides a man has, the lower he is on the social scale. So triangles are the lowest level, squares are higher, pentagons higher and so on. But he also says they can see each other and interact, which is impossible. Because if they were truly two-dimensional, they would have no sides, so there would be nothing to see.”

  “You could see them from the top,” said Susannah, “and from that vantage point, you could also see how many sides they have.”

  “No. To see them from on top, you’d have to be above them. But there is no up in Flatland. And there is no down. There is only north, south, east and west. So they wouldn’t even know other men existed.”

  “They would when they bumped into them,” she said.

  He shook his head and placed two pennies on the table, sliding them until they touched. “These pennies can bump into each other because they have sides. But imagine them without sides. I don’t mean just really flat. I mean no side dimension at all. The men in Flatland can’t bump into each other because they have no sides.”

  “Why do you keep calling them men? Aren’t there women in Flatland?”

  “Sure. The author says they are straight lines.”

  She shook her head. “Sheesh. I might have guessed. The women are the lowest life-forms because they have only one dimension.”

  “Right. And he makes the same sort of mistake in describing them, saying that seen from straight-on they look like a point. But you can’t see the end of a line because that would require that it have some height. Lines have only length. You could see them from below or above but not in a world that has only two dimensions.”

  “He says something else about women,” I noted. “Because of their lack of intelligence, they accidentally pierce and kill people without even knowing it. But ten minutes later they can’t remember it happening.”

  Sharice stared at me. “And you made him read that?”

  “For the math part. I knew he was smart enough not to believe the stuff about women.”

  “He was also smart enough not to believe the stuff about math. A guy who thinks you can see something that doesn’t have sides … wait, they can’t see anything anyway. If they had eyes, they would have to be on their surface, because they have no sides. So the only direction their eyes could look would be up. But there is no up.”

  “See,” I said, trying to move beyond my having forced a misogynist book on Martin, “You’re also smarter than the author.”

  10

  This is the second lecture.”

  It was our next session after the field trip.

  They brought their clay. I collected their cell phones.

  At which point Aleesha announced that she was attending the class under protest.

  I didn’t know what that meant and didn’t want to inquire, so I said, “Okay.”

  “You can’t count this against me,” she said.

  “The thought hadn’t even occurred to me.”

  She started to say something else, but I cut her off by directing my attention to the class. “You found the clay. Now you have to get it ready to use. First, you need to press it through a fine screen to remove twigs, rocks and other impurities. We saw out at the river that clay can be molded and manipulated by hand. We call that plasticity. The second important characteristic of clay is that if you heat it to around twelve hundred degrees, it becomes more vitreous.”

  “Heating me to twelve hundred makes me less virtuous,” said Mia, and everyone laughed.

  Except me. I blushed. “It’s vitreous—V-I-T-R-E-O-U-S.”

  “What does ‘vitreous’ mean?” asked Nathan.

  “Basically, it means glasslike. But what it means in practical terms is it will hold water. The heat fuses the clay into a surface with no pores to absorb water. So it’s important that you find your clay’s exact maturing temperature. A pot that absorbs liquids obviously has limited uses.”

  “Why not just fire it a lot hig
her than twelve hundred? You could be sure it was fused and wouldn’t have to waste time finding the exact temperature.”

  “Sounds like a good plan. But firing clay too high can cause it to deform. I’ve given each of you a set of pyrometric cones. With this brand, the size indicates the temperature. The smallest will slump at about eleven hundred and fifty degrees, the others at progressively higher temperatures. When the first cone slumps, start paying attention.”

  “This could take longer than the class time,” said Marlon.

  “I’ve ordered pizzas.”

  “How about beer?” asked Bruce.

  “Sorry, not in the studio. Maybe after the semester is over and we can leave the campus for an end-of-the-course party.”

  “I can’t stay after class,” said Carly. “I have to pick up my son from day care.”

  “Could your husband pick him up today?” I asked.

  She swallowed hard. Then she started crying. “Sorry to be emotional. The divorce isn’t even final, so I’m struggling …”

  Ximena walked over and hugged her.

  What an idiot I am, I thought. I wished I had remembered my pompous lawyer telling me he never asks a question until he has laid a foundation for it.

  “How old is he?” asked Bruce.

  “Eleven.”

  “Would you let him ride on a motorcycle? I’d be real careful, and I have an extra helmet.”

  “He would love that.” She turned to me. “Is it okay?”

  “Sure. Maybe he’d like seeing the pottery studio in action.”

  I gave Carly her cell phone. She called the day-care center and talked to her son, then to the staff to tell them Bruce would be picking up Luke.

  “Does he like pizza?” I asked.

  They all stared at me.

  “I retract the question.”

  It took longer than anticipated for them to screen the clay and make test pieces to the dimensions I specified.

  I set up Bruce’s kiln for him so that the time it took him to pick up Luke wouldn’t prevent him from completing the test firing.

  The back of the ceramics studio had a glass and aluminum accordion wall facing a courtyard surrounded by a fence made from concrete blocks with a lattice pattern. I slid the accordion wall open to let the heat escape. Some of the students passing by stopped to peer through the openings. Maybe they wondered where the heat was coming from. Or maybe it was the smell of the pizzas.