Finding Casey (24 page)

I could have said a lot of things, such as “Be my guest” or “It's a free country” or “Your guess is as good as mine,” but I said, “All right.” I liked her sitting there beside me, eating.

I can't be mean to someone who brings me food when I'm hungry. That's what Seth did a lot of the time. He didn't make me have the kind of sex Abel did, all pushing and shoving and slapping if I cried, or cuts and hands tied or hands around the neck, squeezing. Seth used to comfort me after Abel was mean. He brought me water and he carried away the bucket I had to use because there was no bathroom. But it turned out he still wanted the same thing Abel did, only in a way where I didn't cry or fight. All I had to do was lie there, he said. Afterwards, when it was finally over, he would say, “There. That wasn't so bad, was it?”

“Laurel, are you crying because you're worried about Aspen's fever?” Mrs. Clemmons asked me. “The doctors are on top of this. The new drugs will help.”

If I looked at her I would make the sound, I just knew it. “That's part of why,” I said. “Sometimes the story is sad and it makes it hard to tell.”

“Isn't that true of most things in life?” she said. “If you leave out the sad parts, then the happy parts aren't quite as happy, are they?”

“I guess not.”

“You know, sometimes I think a person just has to have a good cry. And sometimes they just need to vent. Do you know what I mean by that?”

“Like a volcano has to steam or else it blows everything up?”

“Exactly. You're so insightful, Laurel. If you would ever like to vent, I'll be happy to listen and keep whatever you say between us. Otherwise, I won't press. Your life is your own, Laurel. You get to make the choices.”

I looked at her then. Was she making fun of me? The room was dim because all along it had been getting dark, and I couldn't see Mrs. Clemmons's face, just the outline of it, with her short hair and her big body and the pearls shining at her neck where I had a red scar. By the light of Aspen's machines and monitors, Mrs. Clemmons reminded me of this picture Frances had shown to me a long time ago, in one of her books about Gods and Goddesses. She said it was the oldest stone carving of a woman ever, as old as woolly mammoths and dinosaurs, which I didn't believe entirely. I couldn't remember the name. The Venus of Willingness?

Something like that.

The subject of Juniper's eight A.M. class was the last-minute details for the trip to the Pueblos, the capstone of their quarter's study of pottery. Dr. Carey was in Washington, D.C., for a conference, so they were stuck with his TA, Chico de la Rosas Villarreal. Chico was extra hard on Juniper because he didn't think she belonged in a 600-level class. He'd said so right to her face. “You should be in high school, not taking up a space that should go to a grad student.” He was such a freak. She was paying her own way. So what if she was younger than everyone else? She passed all the prereqs. She got A grades.

A year or so back, she'd met Chico for the first time. She went to Dr. Carey's office hours, eager to show him some blue-and-white pottery sherds. One of Daddy Joe's cousins was redoing the shower stall in the master bedroom. He had to dig down several feet to put in new plumbing. When his shovel uncovered something white, he stopped and called Daddy Joe to take a look. Juniper followed. She picked carefully through the soil and found nine white pottery sherds with a blue pattern on them. No way they were Indian—they looked like porcelain. Chico looked annoyed when she walked into the office.
“Dr. Carey's not here,” he said. “What do you want?” Then he looked back down at his pile of work papers.

She'd almost turned and gone, certain that Chico not only wouldn't be interested, but also that he wouldn't know the first thing about dating pottery. But he'd made her so mad. “Look,” she said. “I found these in Santa Fe one block from Acequia Madre. It's probably nothing, but I was hoping Dr. Carey could take a quick look at these, maybe give me a direction so I could date them.”

Chico sighed, set his papers down, and held out his hand. She carefully transferred the sherds, making certain not to touch Chico and catch his cooties. He pushed his glasses up his forehead and stared at the pieces, his brow furrowing. Then he set them down carefully and began pulling books from Dr. Carey's shelf. An hour went by, their heads together, flipping pages, consulting the computer, and in the end they had dated the pieces back to the year 1700 C.E. “They're Asian import, obviously,” Chico said. “They probably belonged to a wealthy family. May I keep them for a few days? I'd love a chance to photograph and catalogue them, but I don't have a camera with me.”

Juniper said, “That's okay. I have my camera with me,” and brought out her old 35mm Pentax.

It should have been a bonding moment, but after that Chico seemed to avoid her in the lab. When he subbed for Dr. Carey and saw her name on the roll, he seemed to give her a much harder time than anyone else. The sherds had their own shelf in her desk in her room in Santa Fe and were among her most treasured possessions. She'd gotten an A last quarter, and she was currently getting an A. If there had been a higher grade than A, she would have gone after that, too. Maybe Dr. Carey
had
made an exception allowing her to take the upper-division course, but she deserved to be there, and that was what mattered in the end. Didn't she always make sure she was in her seat fifteen minutes early? Didn't she know the material frontwards and backwards? Whenever Chico asked a question, wasn't hers the first hand up?

“Where's Anna?” Chico asked as he took roll and students began pairing up. Anna Decker was forty, a mother of two kids, back in school to finish her degree, and she was Juniper's lab partner. They made a kind of odd couple, but Anna didn't make a big deal of Juniper's being the same age as Anna's oldest daughter, and Juniper didn't say anything about Anna being old enough to be her mother.

“I have no idea,” Juniper said. Most likely Anna was sleeping in, or one of her kids was sick. It was freezing cold out and Juniper wished she were in her own bed at home in Santa Fe, with Cadillac keeping her feet warm and a fire in the kiva.

After finishing roll, Chico said once he'd checked everyone's reports they were free to head on out to the assigned Pueblos. Juniper opened her project folder for him to check and waited. She took out her cell phone and checked her text messages. Nine from Topher. She sighed. Her going to the Pueblo for three days and two nights did not sit well with him.
I'm playing a gig at the college pub, and everyone knows that a real girlfriend always shows up to support the band
.

She'd tried to explain to him.
This field trip counts for half my grade. I knew it was coming up long before you got your gig.

Apparently he was pouting because the text messages were stacked up and whiny:
You better come home tonight! Drive back!
She didn't want to read any more texts for fear that he was breaking up with her. She shut her phone and set it on her desk.

Juniper and Anna had been assigned the Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo the first week of the quarter. Until 2005, when the tribe took back their original name, it had been called the San Juan. She remembered when Governor Richardson had announced the name change and ordered it to be put into use immediately, and Daddy Joe had said, Wow, that's going to keep some sign maker busy. All Juniper could think was that anthro texts would have to update their editions, and then they'd cost even more than they already did, which was a fortune. She spent far too much time already trying to find used textbooks online so her parents wouldn't go broke.

Juniper was bummed that the pottery she and Anna would be studying was so plain. She wished she'd gotten the Hopi or San Ildefonso, but then so did everyone else in the class. Dr. Carey always said, If you do your research, there's something astonishing to discover in the plainest pot. Juniper put on a brave face, figuring she'd never get anywhere without paying her dues.

Instead of the usual conversations and kidding around, today there were only murmurs in the anthro lab. Everyone took this assignment seriously because it was the culmination of the entire quarter's work, and prep for next quarter's seminar. Chico made his way around the room like the stork he was, and Juniper studied him as clinically as an artifact. He had this dorky way of walking, and even skinny-leg jeans were baggy on him. Topher was rock-star thin, but Chico looked like he was starving. He wore hiking boots that made his feet look huge, but to be fair, they were Danner Mountain Lights, awesome boots, much superior to her Big Five clearance specials. And he always showed up in a herringbone-tweed sport jacket so unfortunately ill-fitting that she couldn't believe anyone could look in the mirror and not see how ridiculous it looked. The sleeves
were too short, but he did fold them back. It was a sort of umber color that reminded her of picking up after the dogs. All he needed was a safari hat and people would start calling him Dr. Livingston.

She straightened her pages and listened as he told Betsy and Eduardo they needed to go back to the library and get more background before they headed out. He fawned all over Hugo and Ricardo about how they had done such a spectacular job, and Juniper thought, Duh, they got San Ildefonso—of course, it's freaking amazing pottery. It wasn't her fault the Ohkay Owingeh favored simpler designs. At least they used micaceous clay. It photographed like it was filled with ground-up stars, and she had taken total advantage of that, using her 35mm camera to take the pictures. Digital was great, but the camera she wanted was out of her reach, financially. Daddy Joe had helped her with the f-stops and had even come all the way down to Albuquerque to introduce her to the curator at the museum, another relative on his banyan of a family tree. She'd put her photos and scans up against Hugo and Ricardo's any day of the week. Her mom had proofread the essay for her, and not one comma was out of place. It was a slam dunk, except for Anna being absent.

When Chico arrived at her table, he sat down in Anna's chair and clicked his ballpoint pen so he could jot notes on his grade book or whatever. Why he didn't just use a laptop, standard use for TAs as well as profs, she couldn't imagine. A lock of greasy black hair fell over his eyebrow and the sides were shaggy, covering the tops of his ears. Juniper wanted to tell him to get a decent haircut, for crying out loud; they were only thirteen dollars at Supercuts. Or grow it out. The in-between thing made him look like a vagrant. From time to time, she
imagined him with a long black braid. That would work, so long as he ditched the tweed jacket. Skinny guys like him should wear long-sleeved T-shirts, earth tones, and a beaded belt. If he gained forty pounds, he could pass for Benicio del Toro, because he had the forehead-wrinkling frown down pat. His eyebrows were bushy, his eyes black and piercing.

Chico cleared his throat and said, “I suppose you're stuck with me as your partner today. Bring me up to date on your project.”

Juniper separated the parts of the report, laying them out in stacks. “This is our factual background and research. These are the interview questions. And these are the photos.”

“Nice pictures,” Chico said, flipping pages of her report until he came to her bibliography. “But come on, Juniper? Failure to cite your sources is an automatic fail. That's something every lower-division college student is expected to know.”

She was
not
a lower-division student; she was a year from graduating with her B.S., but she let him finish, ignoring the ire that rose inside her chest and made her whole body heat up. She planned out everything she was going to say. Daddy Joe had taught her that speaking respectfully and calmly went a long way in cases like this. When Chico was all done trashing her bib, she took a breath and then began. “Thank you for reminding me about that essential information, Chico. You're absolutely right. Ordinarily, no one without a bachelor's degree should be sitting in a 600-level class, but then again, I'm not your ordinary student. I'm here by Dr. Carey's invitation, and I think we both agree he's brilliant and hasn't made any mistakes to make us think otherwise. Nevertheless, a mistake like not citing sources does deserve to fail. It's vital to get the details right. I actually learned that before I even went to college, and what a valuable lesson it was. The reason I didn't cite the photographic images
or attain permission to use them is because it just so happens that the photos are mine. I took them. I thought I'd wait and ask you how to properly cite them so that I didn't make a mistake before I turned the project in to be graded.”

He was Spanish, dark-skinned like Daddy Joe, but she could see a definite color change in his face as he realized he was the one who had stepped in the pile of manure, not her. Then he said, “Really,” as if he could not believe she knew how to use a camera. Had he forgotten the sherds? He looked through the photos and back up at her. “Some of these older pots look like museum pieces.”

“That's because they are.”

“I hope you didn't use a flash.”

“I didn't.”

“So how did you get them? Take them when the guard was out of the room?”

Oh, wait for it, she thought. “Actually, I asked the curator's permission.”

He had absolutely no reaction to that comment. He flipped through each photo, matching the text in the report to the pot as if he were looking for mistakes now. “They're quality,” he said, as if it were C work.

When he set down the photos she picked up one he'd missed. “This pot happens to belong to my parents. It won a blue ribbon at the Taos County Fair. I bought it at Indian Market and the potter is Louella Cata, one of the best in the Ohkay Owingeh nation. I made an appointment to talk to her at her studio. If it's all right with her, I thought I'd make a podcast of our interview. Post it on the school's website. And I plan to seek print publication of my interview, with the potter's permission, of course.”