The Pot Thief Who Studied Billy the Kid (Pot Thief Mysteries)

by J. Michael Orenduff

  He stopped and took a sip of his fresh Tecate.

  “Sheesh,” said Susannah, “It’s always the same. The women traveled slower. As a penalty, they were made to bear children. Then a dumb animal told the men to take a woman, as if we were fish from a trout stream.”

  “Makes sense to me,” I said.

  She threw a tortilla chip at me.

  “I buy everything except the Great Spirit being called aeternitatis,” I said.

  “I changed that part. We are forbidden to translate our language.”

  “Really?” asked Susannah.

  “Yep. Afraid you palefaces would mess it up.”

  ”How did we get on this topic?” she asked

  “We were discussing how God looks at things sub specie aeternitatis,” said Martin.

  “Yeah,” I chimed in. “Which proves you’re right – there are no coincidences. Everything is part of a grand plan. But humans don’t know what the plan is. Things look like coincidences to us, but that’s only because we are ignorant.”

  “Some of us more than others,“ she said, looking at me with a sly smile. “I don’t understand why sub specie aeternitatis was in the English version of Spinoza’s work.”

  “I guess the person who translated the book thought it’s one of those Latin phrases we use, like quid pro quo and carpe diem.”

  Susannah shivered. “I’ve hated that phrase ever since I saw that film.”

  “I admit carpe diem is sort of corny,” I said, “but I loved Dead Poets Society.”

  “I’m not talking about carpe diem. I mean quid pro quo. That creepy Anthony Hopkins used it in The Silence of the Lambs.”

  “I don’t know why you watch scary movies,” I said.

  “Because they’re better than reading Latin or talking about theology,” she said, raising her glass.

  Martin and I clinked it.

  He started back to the Pueblo because he doesn’t like to drive after dark.

  “You think that’s true about them not letting their language be translated?”

  “I know it is. And it’s easy for them to protect their language because they are the only Pueblo who speak it.”

  She put her elbows on the table and clasped her hands together. “You remember a couple of years ago when the Santo Domingo Pueblo changed its name to Kewa Pueblo?”

  “Yeah. I thought there was a subtle unintended message in that change. They got rid of the Spanish name ‘Santo Domingo’ but kept the Spanish word ‘pueblo’.”

  She squinted. “The message is so subtle that I don’t see it.”

  “The message is you can’t change history. They have every right to take ‘Santo Domingo’ off their signage, change the tribal letterhead and rename the tribal businesses, all of which they did. But it remains true that they were cruelly subdued by the conquistadores and spent four hundred years being known by a name that was not of their choosing.”

  “Maybe the name change makes them feel better about that.”

  “I hope so. But it won’t change the facts.”

  “Because the facts are subspecies eternity,” she said, laughing.

  28

  There is something odd about a man in his late forties being driven to a date by his nephew.

  He offered to park and help me into the building, but that would have been even odder. It was only a few feet from the curb to the lobby then a short elevator ride to the 4th floor.

  She greeted me with a lingering kiss on the lips. Not as lingering and passionate as the goodbye kiss on our first date but a step up from the kiss on the cheek I got on her first arrival. I took that as a good sign.

  I reached into the cloth shopping bag I was carrying and handed her a bowl.

  “This is for you.”

  She beamed but said, “I can’t accept this.”

  “Sure you can. It’s a present.”

  She shook her head. “When I first saw it in your shop, I also saw the price tag. I can’t accept a five-hundred dollar gift from you.”

  “This is not the bowl you saw. It’s a copy.”

  She smiled. “So was that one.”

  “Yes. So this is a copy of a copy. Almost worthless.”

  “Nice try. It would bring the same price as the other one if you sold in your shop.”

  “Except I can’t sell it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Turn it over.”

  She did and read out loud the inscription I had carved before glazing and firing.

  “To Sharice.”

  That earned me an even longer kiss.

  “I should have brought a dozen more,” I said, and she giggled.

  She placed the bowl on the table and said, “I wish I had a stem of yucca.”

  Whereupon I reached into the bag and handed her one.

  “You are amazing.”

  “Another kiss?” I asked. I’m shameless.

  This was one longer still.

  I looked forlornly into the empty bag and then up at Sharice. “I’m out of presents.”

  “Too bad. I’m not out of kisses.”

  I hope I didn’t look like the lovestruck teenager I was feeling myself to be. I needed to look suave and debonair, if for no other reason than to fit in with the surroundings. Her apartment was in one of the new downtown condominium buildings and had floor to ceiling windows on the north wall overlooking Central a block away. The high ceilings had exposed steel beams with visible ductwork and electrical conduits. The floor was polished concrete, the counters black granite and the high-end appliances were stainless steel.

  Although it was a small one bedroom unit, the clean open design made it look larger. The furniture was simple and functional, a black leather love seat, two Barcelona chairs and a glass coffee table. A larger matching glass table served as the dining table. A white table cloth was set with Fiestaware in the color the company insists on calling ‘shamrock’ but which is, according to the color chart I use for glazes, olive drab. I suppose it’s a marketing thing.

  Sharice put the bowl on the table, poured some water into it from a bottle of Pellegrino and stripped the yucca blossoms into the bowl. The fizz from the sparkling water made the blossoms dance around the bowl.

  She wore a silver strapless dress of crinkled chiffon with a slanting hemline. I don’t know much about fashion, but the part of the dress that was modestly just above the knee made the other side seem tantalizingly short.

  She had the same violet lipstick and eye shadow she had worn to my house. The lipstick was unfazed by the three kisses.

  “You are an elegant woman,” I said.

  She twirled around. “You like?”

  I thought she was referring to herself, but before I could frame a response, she said, “It’s a Vera Wang. I think it makes me look stylish.”

  “I think you make the dress look stylish.”

  She retrieved a bottle of Gruet rosé from the fridge and asked me to uncork and pour.

  “I thought the rosé would go well with the salad,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind having just a salad for dinner.”

  “I’m dieting, so a salad is perfect.”

  “You don’t need to diet, Hubie.”

  “I feel like I need to, especially since this cast prevents me from walking.”

  “And from doing other things, too,” she said mischievously.

  “I could take it off.”

  “Good to know,” she said. “Just in case.”

  The salad was frisee, cucumbers, tomatoes, avocados and fiddleheads with a dressing of balsamic vinegar and maple syrup.

  “I can taste something Canadian in the dressing,” I said.

  “And in the salad, too. Fiddleheads are popular in Canada.”

  “I’ve never seen them. I’ve never even heard of them.”

  “They’re fern leaves picked before they unroll. I don’t think ferns grow in the desert.”

  “Where do you buy them?”

  “Whole Foods, but they get them only in th
e spring. I froze these, so they aren’t quite as crisp as they should be,”

  When we finished the salad, she said, “Sorry about your diet, but I do have dessert, and you aren’t allowed to abstain.”

  I looked into her eyes and said, “Abstinence is the farthest thing from my mind.”

  She laughed and said, “Keep your cast on, cowboy.”

  When she told me it was Saskatoon pie, I assumed it was named after the city, but it turns out that saskatoons are berries, sort of like blueberries. In Sharice’s homemade crust – made, she assured me, with lots of butter – they were delicious.

  She cleared the table, rejecting my offer to help on the grounds that I was sporting a cast. When everything had been taken off the table cloth, she removed it to reveal a Scrabble game board.

  “Up for some fun and games?”

  I resisted a tempting reply and said, “I love Scrabble.”

  She beat me in three straight matches, a ‘hat trick’ as she called it.

  “Let’s sit on the love seat and finish the bubbly,” she suggested.

  I sat on the loveseat and somehow she ended up on my lap. There ensued several minutes of serious mouth to mouth contact.

  Then she said, “I’ll drive you home.”

  “No need,” I said. “After the last few minutes, I think I can fly.”

  She drove me home anyway and accepted my invitation to have dinner at my house again.

  29

  I awoke Sunday morning wrapped in warm memories of the evening with Sharice.

  And in a light blanket. Fall had arrived early. It’s always cool at night out here, but it had dipped into the fifties last night. Rather than close the door to the patio, I had opted for the blanket. I knew we would still have a few days in the eighties, maybe even in the low nineties, but there was color on the mountain and a nip in the air.

  I cracked three eggs into a buttered ramekin, stirred in some salt, pepper and chopped jalapeños and put the ramekin in the oven. While that baked, I heated some leftover mole in a saucepan. I removed the eggs when the whites were set and the yolks warm but runny and poured the mole over them. Warm tortillas and cold Gruet completed the breakfast.

  I opened the shop – all the merchants in Old Town open on Sunday. Except the ones who’ve gone out of business.

  Among my other neuroses, I am mildly paranoid. I think the media is hiding the truth from us. They keep saying the economy is recovering, adding little reservations like ‘slowly’ to make it seem more plausible. They report that unemployment is inching down.

  What they don’t mention is that unemployment statistics are based on the number of people registered at state employment offices as job seekers. When they give up and stop looking for work, they are no longer counted as unemployed. As Mark Twain said, “There are lies, damn lies and statistics.”

  The statistic in Old Town is that twenty shops have closed. La Hacienda, the competitor to La Placita where Susannah works, has shut its doors after more than sixty years in business. Remembering the many times I’ve stood on the east side of the Plaza looking across the street and trying to choose between La Hacienda and La Placita makes me sad. An era has ended.

  The Memories in Old Town Gallery is also going out of business. It will now be merely a memory itself.

  You can probably guess what I was wondering – will I be next?

  But my evening with Sharice had me in such a good mood that I decided to throw a pot based on the Rio Doloroso shard. I propped the shard on a shelf in the workshop and began forming a piece with the same height and circumference. That was the easy part. The difficulty was duplicating the compound curve. It took so long I had to wet the clay a dozen times before I was satisfied.

  I had the door to the shop open so I could see customers. I might as well have left it shut.

  I closed around six and sat with Geronimo in the patio. Being outside always cheers me up as does being with a dog. They live in the moment. They don’t worry about money or where their next meal will come from. Geronimo doesn’t understand the word ‘economics’.

  He also doesn’t understand ‘stay’ or ‘fetch’, but that’s another issue.

  He does, however, understand the vet’s office, and he started moaning as we approached it the next morning in Tristan’s car.

  After I dragged him in – he seems to prefer being choked by his collar to being in the veterinarian’s office – the vet, Julie, examined him. In spite of his appearance, she pronounced him fit.

  Fit for what? I thought. But I kept silent because I didn’t want to question her professional judgment or hurt Geronimo’s feelings.

  Julie looked at me as if I were also a canine patient and said, “You’ve recently had a sunburn. You want me to give you something to speed your recovery?”

  “You can prescribe for humans?”

  “I have a non-prescription cream you can use. It eases itching and stinging and speeds healing by diminishing moisture loss through the skin. It works just as well on humans as it does on dogs.”

  “Dogs get sunburned?”

  She rubbed Geronimo behind the ears. “Not guys like this with full coats of long fur, but shorthaired breeds like Dalmatians and Greyhounds are susceptible. Of course the best treatment is prevention. You should always wear a hat.”

  “I know that. But mine disappeared.”

  She laughed and looked at Geronimo. “I’ll bet you know where it is, don’t you, boy?”

  Then she looked back at me. “If he has a place he likes to dig or an area in some bushes, you might want to look there for your hat. Even male dogs have a nesting instinct, and they like to take soft personal items into their nests. It’s a show of affection for their owners.”

  “I thought the phrase these days is ‘human companion’.”

  “Dogs make good companions. I’m not sure humans deserve the term.”

  Then she depressed me by telling me about an abused Terrier she had recently treated. I covered Geronimo’s ears so he wouldn’t have nightmares.

  30

  The rule of thumb is that greenware should dry for two days.

  But if your thumb is in high and dry Albuquerque, you can cut that in half. So the next afternoon I added the design to the pot. The pattern was beautiful in its simplicity. Bands of burnt sienna around the base and rim with a row of trapezoids around the belt that may well have represented corn kernels.

  After finishing the design, I headed for Dos Hermanas.

  “You smell weird.”

  Susannah is the only person I know who can be simultaneously blunt and charming.

  Now that I think about it, maybe the unselfconsciousness of her bluntness is part of her charm.

  “It’s some cream the vet gave me for my sunburn,” I explained.

  “You go to a vet for sunburn?”

  “You know I’m broke. A vet is cheaper than an M.D.”

  “That’s the most ridiculous—“

  “Just kidding. I took Geronimo to the vet. She noticed my sunburn and gave me the cream.”

  “She mistook you for a Dalmatian or a Greyhound?”

  “How did you know those breeds get sunburned?”

  “I was a pre-vet major.”

  She’s had more majors than the Army.

  She dipped a chip into the salsa and asked me to tell her about my date with Sharice. I was happy to do so.

  “She lives in one of those pristine glass and steel condos downtown, all angles and hard surfaces.”

  “I don’t get those places, Hubie. They seem so cold. Plus they don’t really fit with traditional New Mexico architecture.”

  “I like them better than the fake New Mexico architecture of the cookie-cutter suburbs. Sharice decorated hers to match the architecture, simple and clean. I guess it reflects her Canadian persnicketiness.”

  “Huh?”

  “The label of my hat says it was handcrafter with Canadian persnicketiness.”

  “The hat’s gone,” she reminded me.
“I’m not sure what persnickiness means,” she added.

  “Persnicketiness,” I corrected, but stumbled over the last three syllables. “Hmm. I think your version of the word is better.”

  “What was she wearing?”

  “A silver strapless dress made of crinkled chiffon. It probably fit her so well because it was hand-tailored for her by a Chinese dressmaker.”

  “A Chinese dressmaker?”

  “Yeah. Wong, Wee, something like that.”

  “Vera Wang?”

  “That’s it. You know her, too?”

  “I don’t know her and neither does Sharice. Vera Wang is a big-name haute couture fashion designer and a former ice skating champion. I’m surprised you haven’t heard of her.”

  “Ice skating is not a popular desert activity, and I’m not into haute couture, whatever that is. I assumed she was some local seamstress.”

  Her shoulders sagged. “I’m not into haute couture either, but I know a lot about Vera Wang because she’s the leading designer for wedding dresses. I think my mom has her on speed dial just in case I meet the right man.”

  Maybe she thinks you already have, I thought to myself.

  “Did you take her flowers?” she asked.

  “A stem of yucca blossoms.”

  “Did she strip them into a bowl like she did at your place?”

  “Yes, into a bowl I made for her.”

  “That’s a rather extravagant gift for a second date.”

  “She thought so too. She wanted me to take it back to the shop and sell it, but I told her she’d have to keep it because I couldn’t sell it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it was inscribed ‘To Sharice’.”

  “You really like her.”

  “So much so it’s scary.”

  “Be careful, Hubie.”

  “Thanks.”

  “What did she serve?”

  “A salad of frisee, cucumbers, tomatoes, avocados and fiddleheads.”

  “Fiddleheads are a food?”

  “It’s a fern that grows in Canada. It reminded me just slightly of artichokes. The dressing had maple syrup in it.”