The Pot Thief Who Studied Billy the Kid (8 page)
Read The Pot Thief Who Studied Billy the Kid Online
Authors: J Michael Orenduff
“He did.”
I
gave her a sly smile
. “But I’m not all that lucky.
”
“Okay,” she said resignedly, “I’ll play the straight man. Why are
you
not all that lucky?”
“Because I had to ride
two
hours in a Jeep with
part of
a dead elk in my lap
. Then I couldn’t get into my house because my house key was on the
key
ring
in
the Bronco. And to top it all off,
Koehler charged me to set my ankle.”
“How did you get into your house?”
“
Koehler
used his cell phone to call Tristan. Remember he installed that electronic lock on my shop door? I have a remote that unlocks it. Of course th
e remote
was inside, but Tristan h
ad anticipated
I might misplace or break it, so he had a back-up.”
“But the door from the shop back to your studio and house has a dead bolt.”
“Once I got into the shop, I called a locksmith.
After he let me into my workshop,
the doc
did
the cast.”
“How much did he charge?”
“The locksmith charged two hundred.
Koehler
only charged one hundred.”
“That’s a bargain, Hubie. If you’d gone to the emergency room, it would probably have been five hundred.”
“Maybe, but he
didn’t even have to pay for materials
. He
used
gauze from my first aid kit to wrap the ankle and my potting
clay to form the cast.”
“I wondered why it was brown. You want me to sign it?”
8
“What are you doing for your sunburn,” Sha Nype>
“
Nu
ffing. I
em
ty
ing
u
ma
a
mah shin looh lie y
u
z,” I replied.
“Why would you wan
t your skin to look like mine?”
I’
m always amazed she
understand
s
what I’m saying even when I’m shot full of Novocain and have cotton wads between
m
y gums and cheek
s
.
Maybe it’
s a skill
hygienists acquire from years of listening to dental chair babble.
I wanted to tell her it’s because her skin is beautiful and exotic.
It reminds me of a number 3 pencil
lead
, smooth and so matte that nothing reflect
s
from it. But that’s the sort of thing you say over candlelight in a restaurant. It loses
most
of
its
magic when the person you’re saying it to is wiping drool off your face.
Dr. Batres
returned to remove the clamp from my repaired tooth. After a little
polishing
, he pronounced it both functionally and cosmetically perfect. Sharice held a mirror
in front of my face
, but I was enjoying looking at her, so I passed
up
the opportunity to admire the doc’s handwork. He was a little too self-satisfied in my opinion
.
He lists himself as Dr. B Sselfied in matres, D.M.D
, p
utting
one form of
‘doctor’ before
his name and
an
other form after it. Seems like
overkill
to me
.
I was already dreading the bill.
Sharice removed my bib and gave me a plastic bag with a travel-sized
tube of
toothpaste, a spool of floss and a bright orange toothbrush. Four hundred dollars for twenty minutes work, and they think a dollar bag of dental supplies makes the
expen
se
easier to swallow.
“Do you have a toothbrush that doesn’t
glow in the dark?” I asked her.
I did want a tamer color, but the real reason I asked was to see if removing the clip and the cotton had improved my enunciation.
It had, so I asked Sharice if she would have dinner with me
,
and she
said yes
.
Sharice and I have been casually flirting
with each other
for
two or three
years.
Actually, she does most of the flirting. It’s hard to
reciprocate with her fingers in my mouth
, although
I suppose
under
other circumstances that could be a form of flirting
.
We had lunch together
once, not really a date
. It turned out to be fun
, so I asked her out. But she said her boyfriend wouldn’t
approve
. After
my next
appointment
,
she said she didn’t have her
boyfriend anymore
. I
was seeing
Dolly
then, so nothing came of it.
Not counting the few time
s
a year I have to crawl because I
’ve
had too much to drink
, I have two means of getting around. I walk and I drive my Bronco. Since those options were no longer available, I
had
enlisted
Tristan to drive me to
the dentist.
The receptionist was flirting with him when I returned to the waiting room. He has olive skin, thick dark hair that hangs down in ringlets and what most girls seem to think of as bedroom eyes.
He’s also a considerate person, which is even rarer among men than being handsome
.
He’s not really my nephew. He’s the grandson of my great aunt Beatrice. I don’t know what that makes him kinship-wise, but he seems like a nephew, so that’s what I call him.
He handed me my crutches and laughed as I struggled
through the door.
“You’re not exactly adept with those.”
“I’ve never been athletic,” I said
“Using crutches isn’t a sport.”
“Sure it is. Haven’t you heard of the Special Olympics?”
As we headed for the parking lot, he as
ked to see the tooth. I curled back my lips
.
“I liked
your look better with
the chipped tooth,” he said. “It sort of fit with the treasure hunter image.”
“
T So L"juhanks, I think.
Sharice must like
the
toothpaste ad look.
She agreed to have dinner with me Saturday night.
And I noticed the recept
ionist had her eyes on you.
I guess the dentist’s office is where the Schuze men
go
to meet chicks.
”
“
Nobody says ‘chicks’ anymore, Uncle Hubert. And w
hat about Dolly?”
“She dumped me
the morning I left for that ill-fated event at the
D. H.
Lawrence Ranch.”
“
Even though all your teeth were good
at that point
? Why
did she dump you
?
”
The truth is
I had no idea.
I met Dolly Madison Aguirre when I
was going door to door pretending to be a volunteer at the animal shelter. What I was
really
trying to do was
locate a house where I had appraised a collection of ancient pots. I had to see inside the house to identify it because
seeing the exterior was no help.
I had arrived an
d departed wearing a blindfold.
Don’t ask.
Geronimo played the role of the dog whose owner I was trying to find. I thought we made a convincing team, but the scam went sour when Dolly said she wanted to adopt Geronimo if his owner couldn’t be found.
I should have just moved on to the next house and forgotten her. But I returned
the next day
for a reason
just
as bizarre as the first visit, and we ended up dating.
Turns out her father had been my high school history teacher.
She told me after a few months that she had been unlucky in marriage and didn’t want to try it again, thus fending off a proposal
which
I may or may not have made.
I thought about this as we crossed the parking lot
to Tristan’s car.
“She said
she dumped me
because
I was taking Susannah to the Lawr
ence
Ranch as my girlfriend.”
He turned to look at me. “But she knew you and
Su
sannah are just friends.”
“
And when I reminded her of that, she said the real reason was I stole her dog.”
“Geronimo was her dog?”
So I had to tell him about the ruse I used with Geronimo as a lost dog. “When she came to my hou
se the first time, she saw
Geronimo was still there. She seemed to take it well. She said I had seen him first and
therefore
had first claim on him.
T
he subject never came up again until she accused me of s
t
ealing him from her. But at that point her behavior had been erratic for weeks, so I don’t think
that was the real reason
.”
“Erratic how?”
