The Pot Thief Who Studied Pythagoras (5 page)

Her jeans were dirty and her hair disheveled. She stopped a few paces inside the door and gave me the sort of smile that indicated she was seeking approval to enter. She had full lips, a wide mouth, and a lot of makeup.

“Come in,” I said, trying to reassure her. She smiled again and looked around the shop.

“How much do these pots cost?”

“All different prices. Do you see one you like?”

She looked around some more, then she looked at me and back at the shelves again.

“That one’s pretty,” she said, pointing to a San Ildefonso olla done by Martina Vigil around 1900.

“That’s one of my favorites,” I said

She walked over and picked it up and my heart stopped beating. I walked over to her trying to appear casual so as not to provoke any sudden movement and gently took the pot out of her hands. I didn’t want to scold her, so I held it up and pointed out a few of the design features to her.

Then I put it back on the shelf and told her it was fifty thousand dollars.

“Wow! I guess I’ll have to buy two of them,” she said.

Standing close to her, I could tell she was younger than I had thought, college age maybe, except she didn’t look like a college student. recognized the aroma of the cheap perfume samplers from a gift shop down the street and, underneath that, another faint scent that hinted at the need for a shower. Part of her full bottom lip was swollen.

“I’m Kaylee,” she said.

“Hi, Kaylee. I’m Mr. Schuze.”

“Wow, what a cute name. Do you have a first name?”

“Hubert,” I answered.

She smiled again. “Do you, like, have anything to drink?”

“I have water, coffee—but it’s not very good coffee—and maybe a soft drink. I could check and see if I have any.”

“What about something stronger.”

I raised my eyebrows. “You mean alcohol?”

“Sure. You have any vodka?”

“No, I don’t. Are you old enough to drink?”

She put her hands on her hips and pushed them out to one side. “I’m old enough to know better, too,” she said.

“Well, you could have fooled me.” I hesitated for a moment and then said, “Listen, I have some work to do in the storeroom and I need to close up the store while I do it, so thanks for coming in to see the pots, but I…”

“I could watch it for you,” she said.

“Huh?”

“I could watch the store while you worked in the storeroom.”

“Um, it’s nice of you to offer, but I’m sort of particular about my pots. Well, you already know how expensive they are, right? So I don’t like to keep the store open when I can’t be here to personally keep an eye on them.”

“You wouldn’t have to pay me. I could be like a temporary salesgirl that you didn’t have to pay.”

I shook my head. “No, sorry.”

She stared at me for a moment. “You want me to leave now?”

“I do. I really need to close up now.”

“O.K.,” she said. “That’s cool. Thanks for letting me look at the pots, Hubert.”

She was almost to the door when I said, “Kaylee,” and she turned around. “Are you O.K.?”

“Sure,” she said and then just stood there. After a few seconds she turned back to the door and left. The wind had started to kick up and I watched her walk back toward the plaza with her hair fluttering behind.

I rotated the sign to ‘closed’ and was about to lock the door when Guvelly turned the corner and spotted me. If only Kaylee hadn’t hesitated at the door, I thought, I could have made a clean getaway.

He asked if I had thought about what he said to me yesterday. His lips were still rigid, and I noticed they were mismatched, the bottom one being wider. Without his upper lip being stretched, his mouth would have no corners.

I said, “I think you summed up the situation when you said I couldn’t sell such a recognizable pot. So why would I steal it?”

“Maybe you just wanted to add it to your collection.”

“You’re welcome to look around; I won’t even insist on a warrant.”

He glanced around the shop as if he might take me up on the offer, but then he said, “I don’t expect you to have it here. But if you do have it and are willing to return it, something might be worked out.”

I was curious where he was going with this. “What sort of something?”

“You might claim you didn’t steal the pot, just bought it from someone. I might be able to limit the charge to misdemeanor receiving stolen property. Since you have no record, it might be possible to get you out of this with no jail time.”

I shook my head. “This is not Monopoly where you can land in jail by the roll of the dice; I don’t need a ‘get out of jail free’ card.”

“You might change your mind once we arrest you.”

“That’s a bluff and not a good one. You can’t arrest me without evidence, and you don’t have any evidence against me because I didn’t steal the pot.”

He took half a step forward and stared at me. I tried to hold his gaze without looking defiant. He was six inches taller than me. His head was huge, his face flat. His round eyes protruded so far from their sockets that I thought a hearty slap on his back might pop them out.

With no change in expression, he said, “There could be a finder’s fee.”

“If I find the pot, you’ll be the first person I call,” I said.

He left without saying goodbye. I noticed his hair was perfectly still as he stepped into the wind.

8

Miss Gladys Claiborne brought me lunch late that afternoon.

I told her I’d eaten an entire sack of breakfast burritos, but she was undeterred. “It’s just a little ol’ leftover casserole,” she said as she smoothed an embroidered placemat onto my counter and fussily arranged a matching napkin on top of it. As she lowered the plate, I peered down at the concoction and asked what it was.

“Back home we always called it Emma’s Tuna because everybody learned the recipe from Emma Higginbotham. It was always one of Mr. Claiborne’s favorites. I can’t remember a time when we sat down to Sunday dinner that my six-quart silver chaffing dish wasn’t full of Emma’s Tuna. Except of course when Father Rice came for dinner, and then Mr. Claiborne always insisted on a standing rib roast.”

“Father Rice? Are you Catholic, Miss Claiborne?”

There was a quick intake of breath. “Why, heavens no; my people have been Episcopalians ever since Henry divorced Catherine.”

I didn’t tumble to who she was talking about. “Was Henry one of your ancestors?”

She giggled. “I do love your sense of humor. I’m speaking of Henry VIII, and I’m afraid we don’t have a drop of royal blood. But if it hadn’t been for King Henry, there wouldn’t be any Episcopalians. Or Whiskeypalians as they called them in east Texas. The Baptists and the Methodists thought we were terrible sinners. Why, even some of the Presbyterians were teetotalers. I know this isn’t a very ladylike thing to say, but when we moved out here among all these Catholics, it was the first time I had ever been able to set foot in a liquor store without feeling guilty. Of course by then Mr. Claiborne had gone down so bad that he didn’t drink much.”

Mr. Claiborne was her tubercular husband who died twenty years ago leaving her with a fortune made in the cotton futures business. His wife has been called Miss Gladys all her adult life even when she was married to him. She runs Miss Gladys’ Gift Shop two doors to the west of me where she sells tea cozies, antimacassars, napkins, and tablecloths, many with embroidered pictures of the Old Town Plaza.

I looked down at the casserole and told her she shouldn’t have gone to all that trouble.

“It was no trouble at all. You start with canned tuna; I always use the solid albacore. Then you combine it with noodles, chopped green onions, a can of cream of mushroom soup, and a package of grated cheddar and bake it in the oven.” Her pale blue eyes sparkled as she added, “Since we moved out here, I sometimes put a can of green chile in it. But don’t worry, I always use the mild.”

I took forkful of it, and it wasn’t bad, but with every bite I kept thinking of all that mercury lodging in my brain.

“You don’t have to wait around here, Miss Gladys. I’ll bring your stuff back to you just as soon as I finish.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t want you to eat all alone.”

“But shouldn’t you be in your shop?”

“I just put up that little sign with the clock face on it saying when I’ll be back, but I swear business is so slow, I don’t even know why I bother.”

I nodded in agreement.

“It does my heart good to see you eat. I just hate cooking for nobody but myself. You know what you need? A wife.”

“I’d be honored to marry you.”

She pushed her hand through the air at me. “You are a handsome devil, but I’m old enough to be your mother. By the way, who was that attractive young lady who was in your shop earlier?”

“I think she’s a runaway.”

“Oh, dear.”

“I could be wrong.”

“There seem to be so many sad young people these days. When Sarah and Zachary were children, all their little friends seemed so happy. If there was a sad child in all of east Texas, I certainly didn’t know about it. Of course families were closer then...”

I finished the casserole and offered to wash the dishes and return them to her, but she wouldn’t hear of it, so I walked her back to her shop.

I felt bloated as I returned. I seldom eat lunch. I believe in starting the day with a hardy breakfast, hardy meaning loaded with carbohydrates, animal fats, and red or green chile. I may eat a fruit during the day, but I usually don’t have another meal until after the cocktail hour and often have both in the same chair.

Susannah had a date with Mr. West Coast, but I walked over to Dos Hermanas Tortilleria at five anyway. As the name implies, it started out as a tortilla factory. In New Mexico, that means they sell mainly tamales and posole. And you probably thought they sold tortillas. Well, they do sell a few, but the ones in the grocery stores are cheap and good, so most people don’t buy tortillas at a tortilla factory any more. Tamales, on the other hand, are a pain in la cola to cook, so most people buy them at their local tortilla factory. The ones at Dos Hermanas are to die for, and considering how much lard goes into the masa, that may be literally true. The masa in a Dos Hermanas tamale is like a Mexican Rolaids; it will absorb up to forty-seven times its weight in stomach acid. Or Drāno for that matter.

Posole is another matter. Even people in New Hampshire know what a tamale is, but posole has not yet caught on outside of New Mexico, perhaps for good cause. It’s a stew made with hominy, chile, oregano, and tripe. Now tripe, contrary to what the mere sound of the word conjures up in your mind, is almost fat free, so it’s healthier than lard. But I usually chose the tamales anyway; better to die happy than thin.

Of course after the breakfast burritos and Emma’s Tuna, another meal was out of the question for the rest of the day and maybe even tomorrow, so I just ordered a Corona Light. The bubbles settled my stomach and it tasted a lot better than an Alka Seltzer. I left Dos Hermanas feeling light on my feet.

9

Which was a good thing because I had decided to walk to the Hyatt.

Kids always think their mothers are beautiful. When maturity and experience disabuse us of that notion, we still think they look terrific, maybe not like the movie star we saw at age five, but with a certain character of face just as compelling.

It’s the same with hometowns. I thought Albuquerque was the most beautiful city in the world. Then I saw pictures of Venice and Kyoto and realized that my hometown was not a classic beauty. But I love its character and wouldn’t trade its high desert and mountains for canals or cherry blossoms.

I love the thin dry air at a mile above sea level. I can stand on the banks of the Rio Grande and look up at the Sandias, rising another mile above the city, reaching over ten thousand feet into space. White capped in the winter, verdant in the spring with dark green pines and light green aspens, yellow and gold in the crisp autumn, the mountains shelter Albuquerque from the east, from its geography and from its history.

Albuquerque is not about pilgrims and turkeys; it’s about Spaniards and chiles.

I played as a child in the trackless expanse of the west mesa across the Rio Grande, hunting imaginary bad guys through the sage, creosote, mesquite, and chamisa around the dunes and the cottonwoods and willows along the arroyos.

Then Intel built a chip factory across the river and my wilderness playground became a synthetic quilt of faux adobe suburbs. The Chamber of Commerce says it provides jobs, but most of them were filled by people who moved here, so we got more people, more traffic, more bad architecture, and more chips. Nothing against Intel, but I liked the west mesa better when the only chips out there were produced by cows.

Like most major cities, Albuquerque owes its existence to geography. Tijeras Canyon is the northernmost snowfree pass through the Rockies and the road that snaked through it for centuries eventually became Route 66 and then Interstate 40. The change from Route to Interstate was false progress. The old road is the main east/west thoroughfare and is called Central Avenue, a name that makes up in accuracy what it lacks in imagination. Central runs from the mouth of the canyon west past the University, through downtown, past the south edge of Old Town, across the Rio Grande, and up onto the west mesa.

I turned east on Central and headed to the Hyatt.

Downtown has been reinvented again, but they still don’t have it quite right. It was Friday night and the action was heating up, teenagers and college students strolling the street and packing the bars and cafes. Albuquerque’s latest campaign to revitalize downtown has focused on the “Route 66” theme, but no one downtown looked old enough to remember the highway or the show, much less Kookie Burns. But as the theme song said, they were all trying to “get your kicks on route sixty-six.”

As in every other American city, suburbs and shopping centers put an end to downtown as a place to shop. The fair city of Albuquerque decided that downtown could be revitalized with an arts focus. There are markers on the sidewalks explaining the original architecture of buildings, many of which had already been torn down or irretrievably altered for the worst. There are also large outdoors sculptures, murals, and performing arts in the old KiMo theater with its ornate façade in a weird Egyptian/southwestern motif.