Pot Thief Who Studied Pythagoras Page 10

  “I gather you two know each other,” he said. “Is he a close friend?”

  “Our chance encounter here was the first time I’ve seen him in perhaps five years.”

  “Lucky you,” he said and then quickly added, “That was unkind. The fellow seems so committed. But also desperate. As you perhaps know, I contribute to a number of causes I deem worthy, but I never give based on desperation. I gave a small token when ARRIS was founded—call it seed money—and I was willing to give more had he convinced me that ARRIS was doing something worthwhile. But his pitch tonight was that they needed funding to avoid going under. Who gives money merely to keep an organization afloat?”

  I felt a twinge of sympathy for Sven. I can sell one small pot a month and clear fifty thousand a year, but poor Sven has to beg and scrape just to make ends meet. Given what an ass he is, I should have felt good, but I felt sad instead.

  As I walked among the adobe buildings on the way back to my shop, I felt better. In fact, I felt great. The moon was just rising above the bell tower of San Felipe, and the air was scented with piñon.

  And there in front of my shop was Kaylee.

  “Hi, Hubert.”

  I unlocked the door. “Come inside,” I said brusquely.

  “Hubert, I—”

  “Don’t say anything.”

  She followed me back to my living quarters where I picked up the phone and called Tristan.

  “Hi, Uncle Hubert.”

  It always unnerves me that he knows it’s me before I say anything.

  “I’ve got a young lady here who came to Albuquerque a week ago with just the clothes on her back. She needs a place to stay.”

  “Is she a runaway?”

  “Yes.”

  “How old is she?”

  “Right.”

  “She’s standing there and you can’t talk?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Is she younger or older than me?”

  “About the same.”

  “Is she messed up somehow?”

  “I think so.”

  “Drugs.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Abused?”

  “Possibly.”

  “Hold on a minute.”

  He came back on the line a few minutes later and said his neighbor, a graduate student at the University, was willing to put her up for a day or two if that would help.

  “Is your neighbor a man or a woman?”

  “A woman.”

  “Good.”

  “The girl’s afraid of men right now?”

  “Quite the opposite.”

  “That’s why you don’t want her there?”

  “Exactly.”

  “So will she make a pass at me?”

  “No doubt, but then most young women do.”

  He laughed. “I wouldn’t say most.”

  “This sort of goes beyond—”

  “She grabs at anything in pants?”

  “She was at the Church temporarily.”

  He hesitated at my apparent non-sequitor. “Is that important?”

  “It’s related to what we were just talking about.”

  He was silent for a moment. “Are you saying she made a pass at Father Groaz?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll come get her. And I’ll warn Emily.”

  I hung up and turned to Kaylee. “My nephew is coming to get you. He has a place where you can stay. If you run off again, I’m not going to have anything more to do with you. If you come back, I’ll just call the police and they can turn you over to social services. Do you understand that?”

  She frowned and nodded.

  25

  “I don’t know much about them, but from what I’ve heard, you don’t want to mess with these guys, round eyes.”

  Martin Seepu handed the firstNAtions card back to me.

  “Thank you, Tonto,” I said. “Can you be a little more specific?”

  “Are you going to buy the pot?” Martin asked.

  “You won’t answer my question unless I buy the pot?”

  “Right.”

  “That’s blackmail.”

  “Right.”

  “Fair enough. I’ll buy it.”

  “You want to know the price?” he asked.

  “I assume it’s the usual, twenty-four dollars’ worth of beads?”

  “You want Manhattan, that’s a fair price. But the pot is two thousand.”

  “I won’t pay more than twenty-five hundred.”

  “White devil drive-hard bargain. Two thousand for my uncle and five hundred for the scholarship fund?”

  I nodded and counted out twenty-five pictures of Ben Franklin. Martin rolled them up and stuffed them in his jeans.

  “I’ll ask around about firstNAtions,” he said.

  “Thanks. How old is the pot?”

  “I don’t know. Thirty, maybe fifty years. The old man can remember everything that ever happened in his life. He just can’t remember when.”

  Martin was wearing jeans that looked like they’d survived a few too many rodeos and a Western pearl-buttoned shirt with the sleeves rolled up above his elbows. He’s ten years younger than me. He’s no taller than me but outweighs me by thirty pounds, all of it muscle. The shirt fit him like a second skin.

  Martin’s pueblo is nine miles from town. His uncle is a gifted potter who would be wealthy if he sold more pots. But he only let’s Martin bring me one when he wants a little cash, which is usually only two or three times a year.

  “Same terms as always,” I said. “If he decides he wants this one back, let me know. If I haven’t sold it, you can have it back for what I paid for it.”

  Martin poured himself some coffee. He took a sip and shuddered. “Bad enough you had to steal our land.”

  “I can’t seem get the hang of it.”

  “It’s the water, Kemo Sabe. You draw this from the Rio Grande?”

  “No, right from the tap.”

  “In Albuquerque, that’s almost the same thing. In the Pueblo, we get our water from a spring. It’s pure and sweet.”

  “Makes good coffee?”

  He looked at me over the rim of his cup. “I’ll bring you some.”

  26

  After Martin left, I polished his uncle’s pot with a soft rag and granted it pride of place on a display shelf close to the counter where I could look at it. It had the cloud and lightning motif peculiar to Martin’s pueblo. Each stylized cloud had a zigzag bolt descending at an angle toward the ground.

  I wondered how Martin’s uncle spaced the patterns. It’s easy for me because I have something to copy. But Native American potters do not create standard-sized pots. Their wares are made at home by hand, not in a factory by machines. If they make ten pots like the one I was looking at, there might be ten different circumferences varying by half an inch or so. And yet the background space between each design motif is invariably uniform.

  The more I thought about it, the more it puzzled me. I took the pot back to my workshop and sat down where thinking about pot-making comes naturally—at my wheel.

  If I wanted to copy the pot, I’d just measure the circumference and the distance between the symbols and copy them. But what if I weren’t making a copy? What if I were starting from scratch?

  I removed the plastic wrap from some clay I’d dug from the bed of the Rio Puerco and kneaded it into a ball. I started the wheel and pushed my thumbs into the ball, gradually exerting pressure until I had a simple pot. Then I used the parentheses formed by my thumbs and pointing fingers to make the pot symmetrical as it turned, my hand exerting gentle pressure until there were no high or low spots. You develop a feel for that over the years.

  I turned off the wheel and watched it spin to a stop. I liked the form I’d created
and wondered briefly if I should try to make pots of my own design. I’d tried it in the past and never liked the result, so I let the thought slip and stared at the pot.

  How would I place a series of designs around it? I picked up a clay knife and laid it gently across the top of my glistening new pot. The knife made indentions on opposite sides of the rim. I rotated the wheel ninety degrees and repeated the process so that I now had four evenly spaced indentions.

  Big deal. It’s easy to get even spacing if the number of designs is a power of two. But the pot from Martin’s uncle had seventeen clouds around its perimeter. How do you get equal spacing in that case?

  You could measure the circumference and divide by seventeen. Martin’s uncle could do that. I could do that. But a Mogollon potter could not have done that. They had no measuring tapes. They had no system of exact measurement. Their counting system very likely had no numbers higher than ten. Yet they managed to get perfect spacing on their pots.

  I decided to see if I could work out some way of achieving that spacing using only things the Mogollon had at their disposal. They didn’t have measuring tapes, but they could have had a straightedge and a compass. Pythagoras demonstrated that you can do a lot of geometry with just those two implements. I had a straightedge in the form of my clay knife. I rifled around my toolbox until I found a compass. No, not the thing that points north. This was the hinged thing with a point on one leg and a pencil on the other. It’s the thing people forget about after their geometry class right after they forget about hypotenuses. Or are they hypoteni?

  The Mogollon could have had both. Their compass wouldn’t have looked like ours, of course. It might have been a forked stick with one end dipped in the ashes of last night’s fire so it could make a mark on the clay.

  You can create a right angle using only a straightedge and a compass. If you can create a right angle, you can create a right triangle, and you can use Pythagoras’ theorem to find the lengths of the sides. Of course Mogollon teenagers were spared learning the famous formula, so they wouldn’t have done it that way.

  However, they did know about triangles. They decorated their pots with them, and they might have used another Pythagorean method involving isomorphic triangles. The idea is to lay out the number of … Well, I’m probably telling you more than you want to know, and it doesn’t matter because at this point I looked out on the street and saw Susannah with a paper cup in each hand. I was surprised because I usually don’t see her during the day. She walked up to my shop and kicked the door. I opened it.

  “This is an intervention,” she said. She placed the coffees on a shelf full of clay and then walked back and locked the door. When she came back to the workshop, she frowned at my new pot with slits in the rim and the straightedge and compass.

  I explained what I was trying to do.

  “Suppose you figure out how they did it,” she asked. “What good will it do?”

  “It will satisfy my curiosity.”

  “No offense, Hubie, but does it ever occur to you that you might spend the same amount of energy and solve a practical problem?”

  “I don’t think you can always distinguish between practical and impractical. Some of the world’s most important practical problems were solved using discoveries made by people who were just following their curiosity with no particular application in mind.”

  “Yeah? Like what?”

  “Well, about seventy years ago, a scientist was tinkering with high-frequency radar waves just out of curiosity and he noticed a candy bar in his pocket had softened. And that’s how he discovered the microwave oven.”

  She shrugged. “Have you gotten anywhere?”

  “I don’t know. I was hoping I could use isomorphic triangles to divide the circumference of a pot into equal segments.”

  “I don’t know what isomorphic means in triangles, but in drawing it’s a way of representing three-dimensional objects without using normal perspective,” she said.

  I began, “Isomorphic triangles are—”

  “I came here to intervene. I’m not interested in geometry right now.”

  “Oh.”

  “Is that true about the microwave?”

  I told her it was and she handed me my coffee. “Look at the logo on that cup,” she said after I took a sip.

  I looked. Then she handed me a card from her employer, La Placita.

  “Look at that logo.”

  I looked again.

  “What you need,” she said, “is a logo.”

  “I don’t know, Suze. I’ve operated all these years without—”

  “A name,” she interjected. She shook her head in exasperation. “You’ve operated all these years without even a name. So before we get you a logo, you have to choose a name.”

  “I can’t choose. That’s why I don’t have one. I tried to find one for about a month when I first opened. I spent hours on it, but nothing I could think of was ever quite right. Then at the end of the first month, I was doing my bookkeeping and realized I had done surprisingly well. The problem was my shrinking inventory. So if I was going to stay in business, I had to start replacing the pots I was selling. I spent some time digging, some scouting the pueblos and some placing and answering ads offering to buy old Indian pots. Between inventory building and shop tending, I didn’t have time to think up a name, so I just let it slide. My business grew steadily. After a few months I realized that not having an official name wasn’t keeping me from making money. So I just stopped thinking about it.”

  “But how do you advertise?”

  “I’m in the yellow pages under several categories—Pottery, Native American Merchandise, Curios, Antiques and Specialty Shops.”

  “But what do the ads say?”

  “They all say the same thing: ‘Classic Native American pottery bought, sold, and traded.’ Then they give my phone number and address.”

  “An ad without a business name?”

  I shrugged.

  “How do they know where to put you in the list of stores in each category?”

  “The list me alphabetically under C.”

  “C?”

  “Right. C for ‘Classic Native American pottery bought, sold—’”

  “Geez, this is hopeless. Look, Hubie, I have some fellow students in one of my art history courses. They’re studio students, but they take art history as a related minor. In one of their studio courses, a design seminar, they have to do a group project, and they want to design a logo.”

  “They don’t need my help to do that.”

  “They do. They could make one up for an imaginary business. But if the project is real life, if a business actually uses their logo, they’ll almost certainly get a better grade. And it will look great on their résumés that they had a real live client and produced satisfactory work.”

  “What if the work isn’t satisfactory?”

  “Then you won’t have to use it.”

  “Hmm.”

  “You’ll do it, won’t you?”

  “I guess so,” I mumbled.

  “This is so great. They’re very talented. You won’t be dis­appointed. Now we need the name you want to use.”

  “I’ve already told you I couldn’t pick a name. Let’s just leave it at the logo.”

  “How can you design a logo without knowing the name of the business?”

  “Okay, how about ‘Pot Thieves Я Us’?”

  “Very funny.”

  “Pilfered Pottery?”

  She just shook her head.

  “Okay, I’ll make you a deal. You have them design a logo. They know what I do. Well, some of what I do. You can even bring them by to see the shop and the pots. When I see their design, I’ll try to pick a name that fits the design.”

  “That’s a great idea. I can see it on their résumés: ‘Designed a logo for a client who
was so pleased that he named his business based on it.’ It’s almost like what we were talking about earlier, isomorphic drawing.”

  I felt my brow furrow. “How is it like isomorphic drawing?”

  “Because you’re moving from the logo to the name instead of the other way around.”

  Now I was even more confused. “You mean isomorphic drawings are backwards?”

  “Not backwards, exactly. They go from something with perspective to the same thing without perspective, so it’s sort of the reverse of the normal 3-D drawing.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Look, suppose you draw a cube. If you look straight at it and draw what you see, the drawing will be a square, right?”

  “Right, because you see only one side.”

  “But if you want to show it’s a cube instead of just a square, you could draw it from an angle, say above and to the left. Then you could see three sides, or maybe I should say two sides and the top.”

  I nodded in understanding.

  “But when you look at a cube from that angle, you have to add perspective. The three surfaces you draw will not be squares like the side you drew when you were looking straight at the cube. The front will still be a square, but the side and the top will be parallelo­grams.”

  She made a sketch to illustrate.

  “If you want to show a 3-D image without the distortion of normal perspective, that is, without using a vanishing point, then you can make an isometric drawing.” She drew a big rectangle on one side of the paper. “Say this is your frame. You draw the perspective cube outside the frame. Then you connect the corner points back inside like this.” And she drew some lines.

  And I sat there staring at a design outside of the frame connected to a similar but still different one inside. And I stared at it some more.

  “Susannah, you’re a genius!”

  “Because I can explain isomorphic drawing?”

  “That, too. But mainly because you just gave me the perfect example of how idle curiosity can lead to the solution of a very practical problem.”

  Although I didn’t tell Susannah at that point, the practical problem solved in this case was how to get the pot out of the Valle del Rio Museum. And just as I had expected, it came about while I was thinking about math and trying to see things from a fresh perspective.