The Pot Thief Who Studied Georgia O'Keeffe (2 page)

“And you think I'm bad about non sequencers?” she asked.

“That's
non sequiturs
.”

“Whatever. I only get one toothbrush from my hygienist.”

“So do I. But this time Sharice gave me two, a white one she said was mine and a black one she said I can keep for her at my place just in case.”

She smiled at me. “I think we can eliminate the becoming-a-nun theory.”

3

A
ngie showed up to ask if we were ready for a second round. Susannah said we were and ordered refills even though I didn't need one.

“My glass is half full,” I said.

“Always the optimist,” she replied.

“No, it really is.”

“Well, I'm not delaying my second one just because you were late.”

I gulped the last of my drink and took the opportunity to change the subject. “So how are things with Baltazar?”

“Fine, but I don't know if our romance will survive the commute.”

“Seems like you do most of the driving.”

“I work the lunch shift. He works the dinner shift. Easier for me than him.”

We met Baltazar Zaragoza in La Reina, a remote village in northern New Mexico where he tends bar at a place with the unlikely name El Eructo del Rey—the King's Belch. Although given the quirkiness of La Reina, maybe the name is appropriate. Susannah and I had gone there in order to find out if a corpse I accidentally dug up was a mummy or a modern person.

Don't ask.

Baltazar is tall, dark and handsome. Susannah used her feminine wiles to wrangle a date with him. I don't know what a
wile
is, but Susannah evidently has lots of them.

“Speaking of Baltazar,” she said, and pulled a ripped canvas out of her book bag. She unrolled it onto the table and asked me if I recognized the artist.

An impossibly blue sky shaded down to a cliff of brick-red Chinle sandstone. A rustic farmhouse—adobe walls and tin roof—sat next to a strange cistern.

“There's something odd about that cistern,” I said.

“Yeah. It's too large for watering horses and too small for irrigation.”

“You would know about that, rancher girl. But what I think is odd is my sense that I've seen it before.”

“Given your pot-hunting travels, there are very few things in New Mexico you haven't seen. But forget the cistern. What do you think of the painting?”

“Looks like some unskilled painter trying to imitate Georgia O'Keeffe.”

“No, the brushstrokes and the color blending are marks of an accomplished painter. This canvas isn't unskilled—it's merely unfinished.”

“I'll take your word for that—you're the art history graduate student. But am I at least right that it looks a bit like O'Keeffe?”

That mischievous grin slithered across her face. “It doesn't just
look
like her. It
is
her.”

I examined its frayed edges and dirty surface. “It's not signed. And it looks like it was pulled out of a Dumpster. Why would you think it's an O'Keeffe?”

“For the same reasons you think something is a Tompiro pot—it's what I study. I know her work when I see it.”

“Where did you get it?”

“From Baltazar.”

“A bartender in La Reina owns an O'Keeffe?”

“He found it a few years ago hiking in the wilderness.”

“No wonder it's all beat up. Canvases just aren't suited to wilderness hiking.”

“Ha-ha. Baltazar is a friend of the earth. Any trash he sees while hiking, he brings back. When he saw this canvas fluttering in a bush, he thought it was a sack or piece of clothing. He gave it to me after I told him I study art history.”

“So instead of a candy wrapper or a cigarette butt, some tourist littered the landscape with a Georgia O'Keeffe canvas?”

“It wasn't a tourist. And she didn't throw it away. It probably blew away, and she couldn't chase it down because she was too old.”

“She?”

“Yeah. Georgia O'Keeffe.”

“Georgia O'Keeffe was in La Reina?”

“No. Baltazar didn't find it in his village. He was hiking, remember? You have New Mexico's geography almost completely memorized. He found it west of Mogote Ridge. You know where that is?”

The familiar frisson of pot finding made my shoulders twitch. “Yeah. There's a primitive trail, largely unmarked and nearly impassable in places, that leads from Mogote Ridge down to Ghost Ranch.”

“Right. And O'Keeffe used to hike up that trail to do plein air painting.”

It sounded like her lips briefly stuck together as she pronounced
plain
.

“You mean plain air?”

“No,
plein air
. It's French for plain air.”

“So it's the same phrase with the same words and the same meaning except you have to do something weird with your lips to make
plain
sound like
plein
.”

“Exactly. We learn lots of important stuff in graduate school.”

“How far west was Baltazar from Mogote Ridge?”

“Near the mouth of an arroyo at the base of El Monte Rojo. And that's a place she used to paint.”

“That would be Arroyo del Yeso.”

I closed my eyes and conjured up United States Geological Survey map 20131206. I didn't know the number—I looked that up later. I'm good, but I'm not
that
good.

The arroyo leads up to the trail that passes Dead End Tank on its way to Mogote Ridge. I let my mind zoom out to a view of north-central New Mexico and realized that if you continue due east and don't fall off the ledge or get attacked by a mountain lion, you'll eventually reach La Reina.

Made sense, except for the ranch house and cistern. Something didn't fit. And I couldn't shake the feeling I'd seen that cistern before.

She rolled the canvas up and returned it to her book bag. “I'm taking this to class tonight so I can ask Dr. Casgrail about it.”

4

T
ristan slid a surgical mask over his nose and mouth and handed one to me.

“Why are we wearing these?” I asked.

“To keep from breathing the plaster dust.”

He attached a saw blade the size of a quarter to his Dremel rotary tool. “You sure you want me to do this? It would be easier and safer just to crack it.”

“In which case you'd have to use a hammer. I think I'll take my chances with the little saw. Plus, I want to save all the signatures. So cut in between them.”

Geronimo trotted in, evidently attracted by the high-pitched whine of the rotary tool. It sounded like a dentist's drill, so I did what I always do when I hear that noise. I closed my eyes and clamped a death grip on the arm of my chair.

The saw buzzed on and off for a while in five-second bursts. When the noise stopped altogether, I opened my eyes and looked down.

“The cast is still on.”

“I didn't want to saw all the way through and run the risk of cutting you. So I stopped each time I saw the first hint of gauze.”

He removed his mask and took a deep breath. He put one hand on each side of the cast, gave a gentle tug, and it came away easily in two pieces.

“Impressive,” I said.

“Aawk,” he said, and put his mask back on.

When I took mine off, I understood why he'd replaced his.

Geronimo sniffed at my leg and growled.

I went to the shower and scrubbed all the way from my toes up to my knee just in case the jungle rot had spread beyond the confines of the cast. Then I doused the area with mouthwash.

Well, what did you expect? I didn't have any ankle wash.

I returned to the kitchen and said, “That was gross. You want some breakfast?”

He laughed. “Yeah, something aromatic to freshen the air.”

I whipped up a pan of my desayuno de arroz, a combination of Chinese fried rice and standard Mexican rice. I fried four strips of bacon until they were extra crispy then threw in diced yellow onion and garlic and stirred them until softened, breaking the crispy bacon into pieces in the process and being careful not to burn the garlic. I added leftover yellow rice that was already flavored with cumin and coriander. The last step was to crack in four eggs and scramble them all through the mixture.

I retrieved two chilled champagne flutes and an equally chilled bottle of Gruet Blanc de Noir from the fridge, poured two glasses and made a toast. “To being back on two feet.”

Tristan is the grandson of my aunt Beatrice. I call him my nephew, but he's more like a son to me. He attends the University of New Mexico, where his two main activities are majoring in computer science and fending off girls who find his olive complexion, bedroom eyes and unkempt curly hair irresistible. They also love his calm manner and easy smile.

He doesn't fend off
all
the girls, just enough of them to leave time for studying and for helping his uncle Hubert with things like removing my casts and abetting my excavations when technology is required.

After breakfast, I placed my atlas on the table and pointed to a spot just southwest of Oscura Peak.

“I want to go there.”

“That's the place you had me show you on Google Earth.”

I had a good reason for wanting to see that particular site. King Philip II granted permission to Juan de Oñate to explore Nuevo México and convert the native peoples to Christianity. Oñate entered New Mexico in 1598 and followed the Rio Grande, keeping a diary as he and his men traveled.

One diary entry describes the place I had in mind. Oñate lacked the technology to specify modern-day coordinates, but he gave accurate descriptions. The place in question—he called it
la cueva del clan topo
(the cave of the mole clan)—is in the Oscura Mountains, and his enumeration of the peaks to each side of it was all I needed.

I combined his description with my knowledge of the sort of terrain the cliff dwellers selected for practical and spiritual reasons and located a spot on the topographical map that fit the bill.

I was hoping that the coincidence of me using a topo map, as they are called informally, and
topo
being the Spanish word for “mole” was an omen.

Tristan looked up from the map. “I hadn't realized the place is inside the missile range.”

I nodded. “I've tried to think of ways to get in using human interaction. Maybe convincing a high-ranking official to issue me a visitor's pass or getting some sort of work that would get me in.”

He laughed. “Like becoming a missile repairman?”

“Something more suited to my talents. Maybe they need an archaeologist to help them comply with the Archaeological Resources Protection Act by inventorying sites for artifacts before they blast them into a haze of subatomic particles.”

“I don't think the Defense Department has to play by ARPA rules.”

He was probably right, although I did relish the idea of using ARPA to violate ARPA. But even if they did need an archaeologist, they wouldn't choose me. I was kicked out of the University of New Mexico graduate program for selling ancient pots. That was before ARPA, so it was perfectly legal for me to sell them. The department head claimed it violated the ethical standards of the discipline. Given that he spent most of the summer dig trying to get into the tent of one of the coeds, I didn't consider him an expert on ethics.

I think what motivated him to expel me was professional embarrassment. The site he chose for the dig turned out to be a dry hole, while my entrepreneurial venture a mile or so away yielded three pots that I sold for $25,000.

Or maybe he wanted to eliminate the competition. I was interested in that same coed. Like Dr. Gerstner, I also never saw the inside of her tent.

“I'm looking for a technological solution.”

Tristan thought about it briefly. “You need to stay below the radar but above the rugged terrain. There is one ideal way to do that—a jet pack.”

“One of those things you strap to your back and then swoosh up into the air? You're talking to your uncle, not George Jetson.”

Tristan knows I have acrophobia. Not to mention aichmophobia, antlophobia and a number of others. If it has a Greek prefix, I probably have it.

“I could hike in at night with a flashlight, but a light could easily be spotted.”

“They wouldn't need a light to spot you. They would know the instant you cross the perimeter.”

“How?”

“They have a cool FiberPatrol FP2100-X perimeter intrusion detection system.”

“And in English?”

“It's buried motion-sensing optic fiber. The moment you cross the cable, they know you're there.”

“What if I jumped over it?”

“You can't jump over it because you don't know where it is. That's one of the beauties of the system.”

I was beginning to wish he would concentrate more on defeating the system and less on praising it.

“I see utility-company workers walking around with handheld devices that locate where their cables are buried and sticking little flags in the ground. Could you build me something like one of those that would detect where the perimeter-wire thing is so I'd know where to jump?”

He shook his head. “Because it's optic fiber, it's nonmetallic, produces no electric current and gives off no heat. So you can't locate it by detecting its magnetic field, electric energy or even by using infrared.”

“Terrific. So how do they find it if a mole chews it in two and they need to repair it?”

“It sends them a signal telling them the GPS coordinates of the break.”

I raised my hands in the surrender gesture.

5

A
fter Tristan left, I gazed longingly at the bottle of Gruet from which only two glasses had been poured.

Much of New Mexico's charm derives from its rugged environs and equally rugged people. Gruet adds an unlikely touch of elegance, a bubbly from grapes grown near Truth or Consequences, bottled in Albuquerque and exported to four-star restaurants like the 21 Club in New York, where the wine list boasts Krug Clos du Mesnil ($1,875), Louis Roederer Cristal ($1,375) and of course Gruet ($57).

Sounds like a bargain unless you know that I can get it in Albuquerque for twelve bucks.

Madame Lilly Bollinger captured my attitude about champagne when she said, “I drink it when I'm happy and when I'm sad. Sometimes I drink it when I'm alone. When I have company, I consider it obligatory. I trifle with it if I'm not hungry and drink it when I am. Otherwise I never touch it—unless I'm thirsty.”

I summoned up my meager willpower and stuck the Gruet back in the fridge. I had a date with Sharice that evening—my first sans cast—and wanted to be at my best in case … well, you know.

I opened the mail I had avoided for fear of what it contained. The mortgage notice was followed by a second notice for a hundred bucks from the doctor who spent five minutes with me to tell me it was okay to remove the latest cast. He offered to have his nurse do it, but I figured that was probably another hundred plus a fee for disposal of hazardous medical waste.

The mortgage was overdue, the electricity bill was overdue, the bill from the doctor was overdue, my MasterCard bill was overdue. The only bill not overdue was for my health insurance.

That's because I don't have any. Never have. Based on the figure the federal government claims is the average monthly cost of health coverage for someone like me who is self-employed, I've saved about $200,000 since opening Spirits in Clay.

I know, I know. One serious illness could wipe out that savings. It's a risk I'm willing to take. And one I will now be fined for taking. I don't mind paying the fine. It's a lot cheaper than buying insurance, and maybe the money I pay in will help someone.

I'm happy for people who benefit from the new law. I just don't want to spend money for something I hope never to use. It would be like owning a gun to protect my business. I'd rather take the risk than own the gun.

Perhaps this explains why I quit the first job I ever had in order to pursue an interest in pottery. Who wants an accountant who doesn't believe in protecting against risks?

The next bill I opened was also from a doctor, a nephrologist who treats Consuela Sánchez, the housekeeper, cook and nanny with whom I spent most of the first eighteen years of my life. The accumulated charges for various procedures I couldn't pronounce—much less understand—totaled $13,000, making my ankle doc seem like the Walmart of medicine.

Nephrologist
sounds like someone who studies Queen Nefertiti of ancient Egypt. I guess if he called himself a kidney doctor, he couldn't charge such high fees.

Fortunately for the Sánchezes, they do have health insurance.

Unfortunately for me, I am that insurance. Knowing they would not accept money from me, I told them after my parents died that their estate provided health insurance for them. I don't feel comfortable with that lie, no matter how white it may be, but life is seldom perfect. I thought about trying to get them covered under the new law, but I couldn't figure out how to do that without them figuring out that I had been footing the bills all these years.

Which was never a problem for me until Consuela's kidney problems led to a transplant, which depleted my savings. I hadn't realized that the after-surgery care would continue to be so expensive.

One good Tompiro pot would banish my money woes.

Carl had a buyer. I didn't have the pot, but I had a hunch where I could find one.

I opened the shop and spent the day answering questions from a steady stream of customers, all of whom enjoyed their tour of the merchandise.

But not enough to actually buy any of it. Maybe I would make more money if I converted Spirits in Clay from a pottery shop to a pottery museum and charged an admission fee.

I closed at five and took Geronimo for a walk. Although he usually walks on my right, he insisted on staying to my left, away from the aromatic ankle, his keen sense of smell reassuring me that he is indeed a dog. I sometimes wonder about that because he has the physique of an anteater with his long neck and swaying gate.

I took a long shower, giving the stinky ankle a vigorous scrubbing. Cleaning it didn't improve its appearance—puffy and unnaturally white.

I hadn't driven in months. My Bronco was stolen just hours before I sprained my ankle. In fact, it was during the wilderness trek imposed on me by the loss of the vehicle that I sustained that injury.

Geronimo was supposed to be guarding the Bronco. His being a poor guard dog didn't surprise me. What surprised me was that he didn't go along with the thief for the ride. I managed to recover the Bronco without his help, but I hadn't driven it because of the cast.

When I turned the ignition switch, the only sound I heard was the tune I was singing, Gershwin's “Bidin' My Time,” because that's what I'd been doing.

The battery was dead. I sang another two lines:

But I'm bidin' my time,

That's the kinda guy I'm

Time
and
I'm
. They don't rhyme 'em like that anymore.

A dead battery was almost a blessing now that I could walk. I exited the Bronco and headed to Sharice's downtown loft, buoyed by the mere fact that I could do so on my own two feet. At the roundabout the city installed on Central—evidently thinking it makes Albuquerque a sort of United Kingdom with adobe—I sat down to rest.

After not being able to walk for months, I was out of shape.

A homeless woman emerged from Robinson Park and asked if I had any spare change so she could get something to eat. I pulled a handful of change from my pocket and gave her the four quarters it contained.

“If I had five dollars, I could get a full meal.”

I don't consider five dollars to be
change
, but she evidently needed it more than I did, so I fished a five out with my left hand and held out my empty right one.

“Give me my quarters back.”

She eyed my empty hand suspiciously. “Why?”

“So I can give you this five instead.”

“How do I know you won't just take back the quarters and not give me the five?”

“Oh, for heaven's sake,” I said and handed her the five.

“You don't really need these quarters, do you?” she asked once the fiver was safely in her possession.

“Yes, I do. I need them for bus fare.”

She stared down at the change in her hand, evidently engaged in a moral debate.

In addition to the four quarters I gave her, I also had three dimes and a nickel, enough to pay the fare for Honored Citizens, the strange title the city has bestowed on the elderly, the young and the handicapped.

I once was young, I will be officially elderly in a little over a decade and I had been handicapped that very morning. There is no shame in these categories, but neither is there anything especially honorable about them. You don't
earn
them. They just happen to you.

The woman finally said, “I'll split it with you,” and returned fifty cents to me.

Great. Now I was still fifteen cents short of full fare and had to use the Honored Citizens card even though I no longer had a cast.