The Pot Thief Who Studied Pythagoras (15 page)

“She didn’t want an Hispanic husband, Suze; she wanted a Mexican husband. The Hispanics of northern New Mexico are mostly descended from the Spaniards who came here in the sixteen hundreds. They have no more ties to Mexico than you have to England even though the people there speak the same language.”

“Sort of,” she said. “So she wanted to marry someone from Mexico.”

“Yeah, but don’t get me started on that because the whole idea is ridiculous. Maybe if more people studied anthropology, we would...”

“See that all cultures are basically the same.”

“Exactly.”

“Well, don’t try to tell my mom that. When I was growing up she never let a day go by without reminding me that my goal in life was to marry a nice Basque boy.”

“Maybe you will.”

“Oh, it doesn’t matter at this point. She gave up the idea of a Basque boy when I passed eighteen without being married, and she said she could settle for anyone who was Catholic. When I passed twenty-one, she opened it up to Christians of any denomination or nationality. When I passed twenty-five, she became panicky. I think she would settle at this point for a member of the human race.”

The sun had dropped below the buildings across the street and the dry desert air was suddenly cooler. I retrieved my windbreaker from the back of the chair and as I was putting it on, I saw Martin Seepu come through the door.

“Which one of you is buying?” he asked as he took a seat.

“I just gave you twenty-five hundred dollars on Friday,” I reminded him.

“That was for my Uncle.”

“Then let him buy,” I retorted.

“He don’t drink.”

“So I have to buy because your Uncle who isn’t even here doesn’t drink?”

“That makes sense to me,” said Susannah.

I threw up my hands and caught Angie’s attention. “Bring this Indian a beer, but keep a close watch on him; he can’t hold his liquor.” She rolled her eyes, shook her head and walked away. My ethnic humor is sometimes too subtle for her.

Martin asked me what I had done over the weekend, and instead of rehashing what I had already told Susannah, I told them both how I had spent most of the night before at Gran Quivera.

“So you just walked out into the middle of unmarked desert and dug up what you needed?” asked Susanna.

“You make it sound like a needle in a haystack,” I said. “The desert isn’t unmarked; you just have to know how to read the land.”

“Like feng shui,” said Martin.

“I suppose so,” I said. “What does that mean, anyway?”

“‘Feng’ means wind and ‘shui’ means water. The two forces that shape the desert.”

“But feng shui is an Asian idea,” I pointed out.

“I’m Asian,” said Martin. “You’re supposed to be an anthropologist. You never hear about the land bridge across the Bering Straight?”

Angie brought Martin his cold Tecate in a can; she knows what brand he likes. “What kind of shard you find,” he asked.

I pulled one out of my pocket and showed it to him. He turned it around in his hand, and then gave it back to me.

“Doesn’t this bother you?” Susannah asked him.

“You think there’s bad magic in that shard?”

“No, of course not, but it’s Native American. Isn’t it somehow, I don’t know, irreverent to dig it up and parade it around?”

Martin put some salsa on a chip, some salt on the salsa, and popped it in his mouth. Then he took a slow sip of beer. “The lady who runs the herbal shop two doors north of here calls herself an Africanist. I saw it on her business card. On the back of the card was a word I didn’t know, so I asked her what it meant, and she said it was the African word for friendship.”

We just stared at him waiting to see where this was going.

He took another slow sip of beer. “There’s no Native American word for friendship. There’s no European word for friendship. There’s no Asian word for friendship. I don’t know much about Africa, but I don’t think the whole continent speaks one language.”

More staring. Another slow sip of beer.

“I’m a Native American because my people were here before the Europeans arrived. The people of Grand Quivera were Native American for the same reason. What we have in common is that we were on the same continent in the same time frame. The Basque and the Estonians have as much in common as we do because they’re both on the same continent at the same time.” Then he turned to me and said with a gleam in his eyes, “You want to make that one of your Premises, you have my permission.”

“The Basque and the Estonians?” said Susannah, eyebrows raised..

“You’re Basque. I try to pick examples that hit home.”

“You think I’m Estonian?” I asked.

“Probably not; you’re too short. I just thought the contrast between the two words was nice, sort of a haiku ring to them.”

“Jeez,” said Susanna, “first feng shui and now haiku.”

“It must be the land bridge thing,” I offered.

“You guys think I should have a second round before class; there’s enough time.”

“What class is it,” Martin and I asked in unison.

“What difference does that make?”

Martin and I looked each other, and he pointed to me, so I said, “Some classes call for less sobriety than others.”

“It’s a seminar in surrealism.”

“Have another round,” we said, again in unison.

“Surrealism,” I said after Angie brought our drinks, “that’s like Dali’s painting of the limp clocks?”

“Yeah. That one’s called The Persistence of Memory.”

“I don’t get the title,” said Martin.

“I don’t either,” she said. “Seems like it should be called Loss of Memory because we don’t remember clocks as being soft. And that would also fit in with the philosophy of the surrealists.”

“They had a philosophy?” I asked.

She dropped her shoulders and looked at me like I should know better. “Of course they had a philosophy. We’re talking art history, Hube, not art appreciation.”

“Sorry. So what was their philosophy?”

“Something like wanting to escape reason and reality. They were fascinated with randomness, coincidence, the unexpected, the power of dreams, the marvelous and the irrational.”

“Sounds like a mental hospital,” said Martin.

She chuckled and said, “They might even agree with you. Dali claimed to use self-induced hallucinations when he painted.”

“So do some Indian artists,” said Martin.

“So the limp clocks are supposed to be an hallucination?” I asked.

“I don’t think so. He might even say they are more real than normal clocks. He called them ‘the camembert of time’; isn’t that a great phrase? Anyway, the surrealists wanted to blur the line between reality and fantasy, like in Magritte’s L'Empire des Lumières where the scene is night and day at the same time. Everything in front of a house is dark and there’s a porch light reflecting in a dark pond, but behind the scene the sky is light blue with scattered white clouds?”

“I’ve always liked that painting, I said, “I never looked at it as making a philosophical point; I just thought it was a neat piece of trick painting.”

“Don’t say that around any art historians, Hubie.”

“I won’t,” I promised. Then I thought for a moment and said, “The fact is, I’m going to engage in a little trickery myself, thanks to you.” Then I proceeded to tell them my plan for getting the pot from the Valle del Rio Museum and how Susannah’s illustration of an isomorphic drawing had inspired it. She was so excited that she volunteered to help.

“You want to be my accomplice?”.

“Accomplice before the fact to be precise,” she said.

I thought about it while I took another sip of my margarita. “O.K., you can go to the Museum and take some pictures of the pot and measure it.”

“That sounds sort of boring, Hubert, like you’re giving the safe part of the plan to the girl and keeping the exciting part yourself.”

“Not at all. The measuring part will be risky. You’ll have to take down one of the ropes, and actually put the tape snugly against the pot at several different places. If the staff catches you, you’ll be in trouble. Of course you won’t have damaged anything, so they can hardly charge you with a crime, but they won’t be very pleasant and they will almost certainly throw you out. And you should think carefully before you agree to do this, because if they find out who you are and report you to the University, you could join me as an ex-student in disgrace.”

“You think the art history department would kick me out just for touching a pot in the Museum?”

“Probably not. You could just say you needed the measurements for a paper you wanted to write on the pot, and any reasonable person would see your actions as a minor lapse of judgment. But people in the arts are not always reasonable.”

“Yeah, remember the surrealists,” said Martin.

“Good point. I just want you to go into this with your eyes wide open.”

“I understand, Hubie. You’re sweet to worry. But really, this is the most fun I can imagine, and we’ll be in on something together.” She hesitated, then said, “But do you really need me? I don’t want to spoil anything.”

“I need you for two reasons. First, there’s a security camera at the entrance. I was in the Museum a couple of days ago and I’ll have to go in one more time. Maybe it’s not a big deal, but when they review the pictures from the camera, I think it’s better if I’m not on their film three times. Second, the tape measure you’ll be using is the cloth type used in sewing. A steel tape like carpenters use would set off the metal alarm. They look in purses and they sometimes ask patrons to empty their pockets into a little dish before passing through the metal detector. You’re a girl, so if you just happen to have a cloth tape, they won’t think that’s unusual, and you can put it back in your pocket or purse.”

“A man could carry a sewing tape, too, Hubie.”

“Only if he were an art historian.”

“Hubie! I…”

“Just kidding,” I added quickly. “I’m just trying to cover every detail no matter how minor.”

“So we’re planning a heist! This is so exciting. Show me exactly what I have to do.”

“In case anyone asks,” said Martin, “I was never here.”

30

“This one won’t make you drowsy,” he said to me.

Usually you can’t find anyone to help you, which in this case would have suited me fine, but instead I had the world’s most attentive pharmacist. He had on a white lab coat with a nametag identifying him as Brian. There were no other customers and I guess he was bored. I had told him I wanted to browse, but he insisted on assisting.

“That’s not the one I’m looking for,” I said.

“Oh,” he beamed, “you have a specific brand in mind; why didn’t you say so? I can find it in a jiffy.”

“I don’t remember the brand name,” I told him.

“Do you remember if it made you drowsy? Because there are two general classes of allergy medicines, drowsy and non-drowsy.”

“All I remember is it was a spray.”

“We have a few of those down this way,” he said as he moved along the aisle. “Not as many as we used to have; most people prefer tablets.” He seemed disappointed I didn’t want tablets.

“Do they? Well, I want a spray.”

“How about this one? It’s particularly good against the sorts of pollens we get this time of year.”

“No, that’s not what it looked like. It was in a plastic bottle.” Actually, I had no idea what sort of allergy spray I was seeking because I’ve never bought one in my life, but I did know I wanted a plastic spray bottle and one with an allergy spray label on it would suit my purposes well.

I was about to give up and try another store.

“This one?” the clerk said, holding up a spray bottle of the sort I wanted.

“That’s the one,” I said.

“You know, I can’t recommend this brand; it’s really just a saline nasal spray to moisten the sinus membranes. That helps, of course, but it’s not really going to fight antigens.”

“That’s O.K.; I’m a pacifist.”

He looked at me warily. “What I’m saying is this one is not very effective.”

“Well it worked for me when I used it before, so I’ll just take it.” I reached for the bottle, but he held it away from me.

“It also has benzalkonium as an additive, and there is some evidence to suggest it may cause birth defects.”

“It’s O.K.,” I said, “I’ve taken a vow of chastity.”

“You’re a priest?”

“No.”

He hesitated for just a moment and then said, “Oh.”

He didn’t make any move to hand me the bottle, and I wondered how rude it would be if I just picked another one off the shelf. Maybe it would anger him and he would refuse to ring up the sale. Since he was the only employee in the store, that would leave me with no option other than shoplifting, and I really had in mind starting my criminal career in a more spectacular fashion; i.e., by getting a pot from a museum.

Finally he said, “Do you want the small bottle or the large one?”

“The large one, please.”

He seemed even more disappointed that I was buying the large one.

After the drugstore, I went to a tattoo parlor. I expected a bunch of hirsute Harley jockeys, but what I found was a skinny kid with moist eyes and floppy ears. He was eating peanut brittle, and from the look of his teeth, it was not the first time. I let him show me some tattoos because I felt sorry for him, and he seemed pleased to practice his sales pitch. I wasn’t surprised by the array of designs on offer: eagles, hearts, barbed wire fencing, Marine Corps symbols, Confederate flags, and busty women. What did surprise me were his suggestions about which parts of my anatomy might be the venue for those designs. The only place off limits was my nose.

I finally told him there were so many choices that I’d need to think about it, and I convinced him to sell me a jar of the herbal pigments used for temporary tattoos. They have a color and patina that was just right for my purposes.

My final stop was at the grocery store where I bought a box of the cellophane gloves servers use in delicatessens.

When I got home I dumped the saline solution down the sink along with the benzalkonium and any other chemicals that might have been in there. I washed the bottle out with water and dried it by the simple expedient of leaving it in the dry Albuquerque air for five minutes, then I poured the herbal pigments into the spray bottle.