The Pot Thief Who Studied Pythagoras (3 page)

“A less cynical person might say it proves I’m innocent. Isn’t there something in the constitution about that?”

“You’re a wise-ass, Schuze, but I don’t care about that, because I’m going to nail you on this one.”

I have already admitted to you that I unearth pots from the soil entrusted to the BLM and sell them to discerning collectors. But I had never at that point stolen anything from inside a building, and the idea of being ‘nailed’ for something I hadn’t done seemed at once grossly unfair and alarmingly possible.

“Look,” I said earnestly, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I’m talking about a stolen pot, and according to our files, you’re a pot thief.”

They call us pot thieves. We treasure hunters call them pot cops.

“I’ve been to Bandelier many times,” I said, “but only as a tourist. I don’t know anything about a missing pot from there.”

“O.K., play dumb. You already know, but I’ll tell you anyway. It’s a large water jug thought to be from the Mogollon. But you won’t be able to sell this one, Schuze, because it’s unique, it’s important, and it’s catalogued. If it shows up anywhere on the face of the earth, we’ll find it and trace it back to you. So play it smart this time and turn it over. If you voluntarily return the pot, maybe we can cut you some slack.” He wrote something on a card and handed it to me. “Think it over and call me. I’m at the Hyatt.”

He opened the door, and I watched him and his hair move unperturbed into the wind.

I knew the pot he was talking about. The Mogollon lived in what is now southeastern New Mexico until about a thousand years ago when they mysteriously disappeared. They were one of the three ancient peoples of the region, the other two being the Hohokan and the Anasazi. Except for archaeologists and a few treasure hunters, no one is aware the Hohokan or the Mogollon ever lived. The Anasazi, on the other hand, have somehow achieved celebrity status. If the map of prehistoric Native Americans were on the cover of the New Yorker, the Anasazi would be in Manhattan and the Mogollon in New Jersey.

First Wilkes asks me to steal the Mogollon water jug from the University and then Guvelly informs me that the only other extant Mogollon water jug is missing from Bandelier. You can probably figure out what my first thought was. Right—that Wilkes stole the Bandelier jug for his client. But why would Guvelly think I stole it? It’s true I was expelled from graduate school for selling pots I found during a summer dig, but that was before it was illegal.

I think the real reason the University kicked me out was because I showed up the faculty team leading the dig by finding three beautiful specimens all by myself a hundred yards away from the official site they had selected based on their archaeological expertise, a site that turned out to be a dry hole.

Being booted from college would hardly be a matter of federal concern, and I’ve never been arrested. At least I hadn’t been at that point; I would be a few days later, but not for theft. I had a clean record when Guvelly came calling, and I just couldn’t figure out why he would think I stole a pot from Bandelier.

I also couldn’t figure out if I should be worried about Guvelly and Wilkes both being at the Hyatt.

5

I walked over to Dos Hermanas feeling sheepish about having visited the Museum, so I didn’t say anything about it at first because I knew Susannah would taunt me about being a burglar.

“I was visited by a pot cop,” I said instead, picking up the drink she had ordered for me.

As I took my first sip, she replied, “A pot cop? Have you been growing marijuana, Hubert?”

“Not that sort of pot, Susannah—clay pots, the kind I sell in my shop.”

She raised her eyebrows. “They have police for those?”

“I’m afraid so. Agents of the Bureau of Land Management whose job is to enforce things like NAGPRA.”

“That sounds like medicine for men who can’t…”

“It’s a law, Susannah. The acronym stands for the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. There’s another one called ARPA, the Archaeological Resources Protection Act. They try to keep people from taking things created by Native Americans.”

“Why bother? Indians sell their stuff right here in Old Town every day.”

“Not those Indians. Ancient peoples who lived in this area a thousands of years ago.”

“That’s the stuff you steal, right Hubie?”

“You know I don’t think of it as stealing, Suze, because the things I dig up don’t belong to anyone,” I said. “But the pot Guvelly was interested in wasn’t dug up, at least not recently. It was stolen from a display case in the park headquarters building at Bandelier.”

“But it was dug up at some point, right? And some people think all those pots, including the ones that have already been dug up, belong to today’s Indians.”

“Some people do think that, but their opinion is ridiculous,” I said, waving their opinion away symbolically with the hand that wasn’t grasping my margarita. “A thousand years from now some anthropologist will probably dig up our nonstick pans and treat them as ancient artifacts, and probably most of what they surmise about the people who made them will be wrong. They’ll probably say the coated pans were used only for ceremonial occasions and that their manufacture is a lost art when in fact we will probably discover the coating causes cancer or hives or something and just stop making them.”

I have formulated over the years a set of anthropological theses that I call Schuze’s Anthropological Premises, or SAP’s, which is also what some people think I am for believing them, but I think they are insightful. SAP number two says that evolution is not over. The first humans were short little hairy creatures who ate raw meat and shat on the ground. But they could talk and that makes them humans. It took about a million-and-a-half years for those first hunter gatherers to evolve into modern humans who now eat raw fish and shit in toilets, and you can call that progress if you want to. The Mogollon didn’t make the evolutionary cut, and we have no idea whether they have any descendants. In fact, the concept of a Mogollon people is a white anthropologist’s creation based on a few artifacts. For all we know, there may have been a number of people in that area who were ethnically distinct.

I never dig on reservations. God knows we left them small enough territories; the least we can do is respect what little land they still own. But artifacts with no direct connection to today’s Indians belong to whoever digs it up, and I explained that to Susannah.

“I think of my trade as harvesting the riches of the earth,” I told her. “Sort of like mining. Anyone resourceful enough to dig things up ought to be able to keep them.”

She gave me her mischievous smile. “What about someone resourceful enough to steal them out of a display case at Bandelier?”

“I think we just established that I mine the earth for its riches. I don’t break into buildings and steal things. I’m not a burglar.”

She ran her finger around the saltless rim of her glass and gave me another mischievous smile. “You will be if you do what Wilkes wants you to do.”

“Maybe,” I muttered.

Susannah asked me to tell her what Guvelly had said, so I recounted the entire conversation.

“‘Play it smart?’” she asked. “‘Nail you?’ He actually talked like that?”

“Probably calls himself a G-man, too,” I said.

“How did he look when he said it?”

“He stared right at me; his eyes never moved.”

“Geez, Hubie, you said his lips didn’t move either.”

“That’s right.”

“And his skin was chalky white?”

“I believe I said ‘pasty,’ but right again.”

“That’s creepy. Maybe he was from a wax museum.”

I pictured Guvelly in wax; it wasn’t hard to do. Then I asked Susannah about the lecture on Remington.

“It was awful, Hubie. Guns, spurs, horses, fires, wagons, ropes, lanterns—not a single thing a girl would like.”

“Most girls like horses,” I pointed out.

“Not these horses; they had flared nostrils and wild eyes.”

“I don’t think Remington did any My Little Pony paintings,” I said.

“If he had, he would probably have shown them being spooked by a rattlesnake. He’s like the official artist for Marlboro.”

My glass had salt around its rim; hers did not. Other than that one difference, we agree on all others aspects of the perfect margarita: never from a mix, always with silver tequila made from one hundred percent blue agave, never frothed or frozen, and never with strawberries, raspberries, peach liqueur, peppermint swizzle sticks, crumbled Hershey bars or any of the other countless adulterations which the noble Nuestra Señora de Agave has suffered in recent years.

Tequila is now the most popular distilled spirit in the United States, but I often wonder why people in Boston or Birmingham like it. It’s prime appeal to me is that it tastes like the desert— saline, organic, and slightly viscous like the juice from the cactus it’s distilled from.

I don’t understand why anyone would drink añejo, the aged tequila whose amber color comes from being aged in wood casks like scotch or bourbon. If you want woody liquor, order those two. Don’t adulterate good tequila. Pour it in a shot glass and hold it up to the light. Try to discern the ever so slight tincture of green. Hold it on your tongue and feel its volatile vapors chase the fog from your sinuses. Then let it roll down your throat like warm silver.

Why do I drink it in margaritas? Because pure shots send me straight to Margaritaville.

The agave is Mexico’s national treasure, their answer to Canada’s maple trees or our waves of amber grain. Mexican art is replete with images of the agave, a source of native pride, something not brought by the conquistadores. And New Mexico is part and parcel of Old Mexico, a stretch of the high Senoran desert stolen by the USA.

“You’re not giving up on art history, are you Suze?”

“No, you’ve got to take the bad along with the good.”

“And what is the good?” I inquired.

“You sound like Socrates, Hube. I think he said the good is some kind of form.”

“Is philosophy another of your former majors?”

“No, but I had to take it for general education. It was supposed to be an introduction to philosophy, and I was excited. I thought we’d be discussing how the universe began and what happens when you die, but all the instructor ever talked about was Socrates living in a cave.”

“I think that was an allegory, Suze.”

“No, I’m pretty sure it was a cave. There were prisoners chained to a wall and people would cross in front of them with cut-out figures of animals and houses and stuff, and a fire from behind would throw shadows on the cave wall, and the prisoners thought the shadows were the real animal shapes because that’s all they had ever seen. Or maybe they thought the shadows were real animals. I’m not too clear on that part, but the idea was that the prisoners are like us; we think what we see is real, but … oh, I get it—allegory. I wasn’t paying attention. You don’t think I’m stupid, do you, Hubert? I mean ‘allegory’ isn’t a word you hear everyday, and when you said it I thought…”

“No, Suze, I know you’re not stupid, but I may be.” It was time to own up to sort of planning a theft from the Valle del Rio Museum. “Guess what I did today.”

“Hubie! You stole that pot from the Museum?”

“No, but I did go there to look around.”

She laughed and said, “You cased the joint!”

“I guess you could call it that,” I admitted. “That’s why Guvelly’s visit unnerved me. I went to the Museum and looked at the pot just to see if I might be able to do it. I even picked it up. But I left it right where I found it and went home. Then right after I got home, he showed up and said they were investigating the theft of a Mogollon pot.”

“And you thought he meant the one you had just looked at.”

“Exactly. It was like an episode from Twilight Zone.”

“I love that show.”

“Yeah, I used to enjoy it, too. But this wasn’t like watching it; it was like being in it. I felt like I’d been under surveillance and the people watching knew I’d gone to the Museum. But they didn’t just know what I did; they knew what I was thinking. I thought he was going to arrest me.”

“What could he arrest you for? You hadn’t done anything.”

“I had committed larceny in my heart.”

“Who said that…wait, I know; it was Jimmy Carter. Except it wasn’t larceny. It was lust.”

“Lust is better,” I said, “and also not illegal.”

“Neither is stealing if all you do is think about it.”

“I’m not so sure. I think planning to commit a burglary is a felony even if you don’t actually go through with it.”

“Hey, I think you’re right. I remember Bernie Rhodenbarr mentioning that you can be arrested just for having burgling tools on you even if you don’t use them.”

I stared at her blankly. “Who is Bernie Rhodenbarr?”

“He’s the burglar in those books I told you about.”

“Oh, right,” I said. Susannah has the endearing habit of talking about fictional characters as if they lived down the street from her.

“You didn’t have any burglar tools on you, did you, Hubert?”

“I had a couple of napkins that I used to lift the pot.”

The way Susannah holds her wide shoulders back could almost seem military except she looks so relaxed and natural doing it. But when she’s perplexed, she does this thing where she lets her shoulders fall forward and her long neck tilt back. She was doing that now and staring at me. “You didn’t want to leave fingerprints?”

“No, I didn’t want to damage the pot. Oil from your hands can stain pottery.”

“That was considerate of you, Hubie. So you didn’t use the napkins as burglar tools. And anyway, I don’t think napkins would count no matter how you used them.”

“It doesn’t matter if I had burgling tools. I was there trying to figure out how to steal the pot, and that has to be as much intent as merely carrying around a crowbar.”

“But they didn’t know you were planning to steal it.”

“I know that. But when Guvelly showed up like he had trailed me from the Museum and asked me about the pot, I couldn’t think straight. It was like when you were a kid thinking about some mischief and then you see your mother looking at you, and you’re positive she knows what you’re thinking.”