Pot Thief Who Studied Pythagoras Read online

  Okay, the solution didn’t really arise directly from trying to solve the spacing problem geometrically. It actually came about because of Susannah’s drawing, but that drawing was a new perspective, and that’s what’s needed to solve problems that look like they have no solution.

  27

  Saturday had broken clear and crisp, and the plan I had dis­covered for getting the pot from the Museum made the day seem even brighter.

  I drove south toward the Isleta Pueblo until I reached the unnamed dirt road that leads to the residence of Emilio and Consuela Sanchez.

  “Bienvenido, Señor Uberto.”

  “Buenos días, Señor Sanchez.”

  “Consuela, she is in the kitchen.”

  “That is good news for both of us, amigo.”

  I put a hand on his shoulder and stopped him before we went in. “How is she doing?”

  “She looks to me the same as always, but perhaps that is because we grow old together.”

  She was peeling freshly roasted chilies on a counter laden with enough vessels of food to supply a wagon train.

  “You’ve been roasting poblanos, Señora Sanchez.”

  “What do I say, Emilio? Uberto has the nose for every chili. But you must call me Consuela.”

  We chatted for an hour about what she was planning to grow in the garden that spring, and she asked if she could plant something for me. I told her chilies, preferably poblanos.

  “You always ask for chilies. What else would you like?”

  “Fresh oregano.”

  “Is always the same, chilies and oregano.”

  “The recipes are the same, so the ingredients must be the same.”

  “Those recipes I brought with me from Chihuahua as a girl. Now they are old and tired like me.”

  “They are not old. They are classic. And judging from this kitchen, you are not tired.”

  “It is messy, no?”

  “It is a place where a cook is working.” I had a brainstorm. “You should publish a cookbook with your recipes and traditional techniques of the Northern Mexican kitchen.”

  She laughed out loud.

  “Consuela, Uberto gives us a good idea. You are the best cook of traditional Mexican food. Such a book would be a good thing.”

  She picked up a large knife and playfully waved it at both of us. “You two are like small boys. Now sit down for the food and say no more about cookbooks.”

  She made her corn and poblano soup. In one pan, she sautés chopped onions, poblano peppers, garlic and cumin. In a separate pan she uses a big knife to slice the kernels off ears of fresh corn into hot lard and then stirs like crazy until the corn softens. Then she combines the contents of the two pans in a large stockpot, adds chicken broth and lime juice and lets it simmer. When all the flavors have combined, she takes the pot off the heat, throws in fresh oregano and crema Mexicana and lets it sit two or three minutes before ladling it into bowls. She serves it with warm corn tortillas and cucumbers slices sprinkled with chili powder and pilon sugar.

  Emilio and I both had four bowls of it and Consuela beamed with each refill.

  28

  “Get out of town.”

  That was me talking to myself. And I meant it. I wanted to escape prowlers, thugs, cops and zealots. Those would be, in order, the mystery intruders who crossed my threshold at 6:57, the two heavies from firstNAtions, Whit Fletcher and Sven Nordquist.

  But mainly what I had to do was dig. The plan Susannah had unknowingly inspired to spirit the pot away from the Museum required a special pottery shard, and you can’t pick those up at your local Ace Hardware. So I had to get out of town. Back to Gran Quivira. Back to the scene of the crime, so to speak.

  So after a relaxing Sunday in my workshop with my hands in clay, I had a delicious dinner of pollo en mole and went to bed at the crack of dark. I set the alarm for midnight.

  I hate alarm clocks. We would be healthier if we slept until nature woke us in a manner that is, well, natural. Schuze’s Anthropology Premise number eight is that schedules are incompatible with the evolutionary history of humans. Americans and northern Europeans love schedules. We’re dismayed by cultures that don’t follow them. We joke about Mexicans saying mañana and Jamaicans talking about “island time.” But we are the ones who’ve got it wrong. We spent most of our million-and-a-half-year history living like lions, sleeping when we were tired, hunting when we were hungry and running when we were threatened. These things don’t happen on a nine-to-five schedule. Pots weren’t made on an assembly line. We made one when we needed one.

  Although it is rarely set, I do own an alarm clock. A special one. When the wake-up time arrives, a chime sounds ever so softly. Moments later, it chimes again with only a slight surge in decibels. These incremental increases in volume continue until you become gradually aware of the chimes and wake up slowly as opposed to the rude awakening of a regular alarm. However, when the wake-up time is midnight, even the gentle chime “becomes as sounding brass.”

  It was bitter cold, so I dressed in a navy blue watch cap and black fleece workout suit over insulated long johns. I loaded the long piece of rebar I use for probing and the two shovels I use for digging and set off in the 1985 Bronco I refer to fondly as my rust bucket.

  If you want to visit Gran Quivira, and not many people do, you would normally take State Highway 55 south from the picturesque town of Mountainair. Or you could take Highway 55 north from the town of Claunch, which is about as picturesque as its name suggests. That’s what you would do because you wouldn’t mind driving in right through the main entrance and past the ranger quarters.

  I, on the other hand, desired to enter and leave undetected, so I took Interstate 40 east from Albuquerque to Moriarty where I turned south. I stopped in the middle of the road a few miles south of Willard, no problem at that time of the night, or at most times during the day for that matter.

  There is something regal about parking in the middle of a highway as if you owned the road. Of course it wasn’t the Via Romana or even Interstate 40. It was a small state road in the middle of nowhere.

  Actually, it was on the edge of nowhere. The middle would have been more crowded.

  I stood in the road and observed moonbeams bouncing off the reflective white strip between the two narrow lanes. Lean old ranchers in beat-up trucks drive this stretch of road, signaling the occasional colleague going the opposite direction with a nod or a lifting of two fingers off the steering wheel.

  I laid a strip of canvas in front of each wheel then drove the Bronco forward slightly. I got out and lifted the canvas strips around the tires, securing them by lacing a cord through the grommets installed for that purpose.

  With the tires covered, I turned off both the pavement and the headlights and sat silently until my eyes adjusted to the dark. Then I followed a rancher’s sandy road as it skirted the north end of a little portion of the Cibola National Forest, which is cut off from the larger forest of the same name across the Rio Grande. I headed south into the fringes of Gran Quivira.

  It was a beautiful still night, the cold, dry air so clear the sky looked like a sequined shawl and the moon like a polished ball of ice hovering just above the dunes. A coyote peered at me from behind a mesquite bush. Fifty yards ahead a jackrabbit stood alert, ready to bolt if the coyote came his direction. The land rose slightly to the north and the distant ridge was crenellated by black triangular pines.

  Gran Quivira was founded around AD 800 and had thousands of inhabitants. Unfortunately for those thousands, Coronado came calling in 1539 with diseases against which the natives had no immunity, and most of them died in a series of epidemics. A severe drought in the seventeenth century drove out the few remaining occupants.

  During our summer dig in Gran Quivira, we started at dawn and knocked off early because it got so hot. I didn’t mind the heat, so I walked for miles in every d
irection getting to know the land. Driving by, it looks like a dry, featureless plain. But when you explore it on foot, you discover subtle elevation changes, varying rock strata, patterns of plant growth and other aspects of a faceted landscape.

  I tried to imagine what life had been like for the last few stragglers desperate to stay in their ancestral home. Where would they go for water? The small arroyos directly around the sprawling pueblo would have turned to powder during the drought. I knew from growing up in the desert that after a rain, arroyos dry up in a pattern starting from the portions farthest from the mountains. The people of the Gran Quivira would have walked toward the mountains. And they would have followed the largest arroyo. I already knew where that one was, so I pulled up a few hundred yards from it and walked the rest of the way guided by a moon so bright I could see my shadow in the sand.

  In the early days of the AIDS epidemic, a legislator from some conservative state had attended a conference in San Francisco and later declared, evidently with some pride, that he wore shower caps over his shoes while he was in his hotel room out of fear of catching AIDS. The reason I remembered this bizarre story was that I was walking along with two disposable shower caps over my shoes.

  I know I looked like an idiot, but what would have looked even more idiotic would be me in a mug shot. Tracking is a difficult skill, and the sandy soil in the wash would probably be unreadable within hours after the usual New Mexico spring wind blew over it the next afternoon, but I did not wish to take any chances that either my tires or my shoes would be identified.

  The ruins of Gran Quivira are protected by the National Park Service, but not very well. They take seriously their mandate to make sure no kid from Iowa leaves the park with an arrowhead in his pocket, but the exposed adobes continue to erode. There are about eight million arrowheads and pieces of worked flint in the ground around Gran Quivira, so it’s not like they are scarce. Given the low visitor rate, every kid who wants one could take a piece of flint, and the supply would last until Gran Quivira melts back into the earth from neglect or the sun is extinguished, whichever happens first.

  By looking at plant growth patterns and rock strata, you can tell where the course of an arroyo has changed in recent years and where it is hundreds of years old. I found a promising site under an overhang on the inside curve of the arroyo. I began to find artifacts after digging only three feet into the packed sand. There were several V-shaped shards of the kind I needed.

  I love the high desert at night. The air is cool, clear, and dry, the only scents wafting from creosote bushes and blooming cactus. Because there is nothing in the air, not even moisture, moonbeams arrive unspoiled. On this particular night, they washed the sand in light because the moon was full. Thanks to that and good night vision, I could sort the shards with ease. I took one that looked just right for my purpose and a couple of spares just in case. Then I put the others back in the earth. Professional archaeologists would have been proud of me. I filled the hole I had made, smoothed the sand, and departed. Or to paraphrase Khalil Gibran, the digging hand digs and, having dug, moves on.

  It’s difficult to describe the thrill of finding something a fellow human being made a thousand years ago. Suddenly you are in contact with the ancient past. Yet it remains a mystery. The artifact is the tip of the iceberg. Howard Carter put it more poetically when he explained what it was like to dig up Tut and his treasures: “The shadows move, but the dark is never quite dispersed.”

  The unearthed pot connects me to its maker, one potter to another. It has nothing to do with ethnicity, an accident of birth we use as an excuse to treat different people differently. For some reason I don’t understand, we seem obsessed by our minor differences and blind to our vast commonality.

  One of the commonest bonds is clay. Every civilization on every continent since the day we first started using our hands for something other than walking has made things of clay. And even though we have passed out of the agricultural age, through the industrial age, and into the information age, clay remains a staple in human life. From the tiles on our floors to the plates on our tables, we use clay every day. Some of us even make a good living selling clay pots.

  In 1996, a nine-thousand-year-old skeleton was discovered along the banks of the Columbia River in Washington. It is a striking find for two reasons. It is among the oldest ever found in North America, and it appears to be Caucasian.

  I’m Caucasian, but I feel no kinship with those ancient bones. As an archaeologist, however, I am fascinated by them. What was a Caucasian doing along the Columbia River almost nine thousand years before the Voyage of Columbus? Did the prehistoric Vikings sail to America and trek across the continent? Did Caucasian-like people, perhaps the Ainu of Japan, come across the land bridge that is now under the Bering Strait? Are the Mormons correct that there was a white race in America in prehistoric times?

  We may never find out because the Umatilla Tribe sued to have the bones interred on their reservation under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. Their view is that any human remains on their land must be of their ancestors.

  One of the few certainties in the uncertain world of archaeology is that peoples in all places and all times have moved and migrated—SAP number three. The skeletal remains from Washington are absolutely not the ancestors of the Umatilla. The ancient peoples we call the Mogollon are not the ancestors of today’s Pueblo Indians. And if a skeleton is dug up under my adobe in Old Town, it will certainly not be my ancestor.

  I walked back to my Bronco, took off my shower caps, took the canvas off my tires when I reached the pavement and retraced my route to Albuquerque. I arrived just as the sun peeked over the Sandia Mountains. I ate three eggs with green chili, four chorizos and two corn tortillas. Wielding a shovel works up the appetite. After washing the dishes, I went out to my patio and climbed into the hammock strung between two cottonwood trees over ground, which I am fairly confident is skeleton-free. I fell instantly and deeply asleep.

  I awoke without the aid of any mechanical contrivance. It was late afternoon, just in time to shower, shave, don a pair of chinos and a blue oxford cloth shirt and arrive at Dos Hermanas by five sharp.

  29

  “How was your weekend?” Susannah asked after we settled in to our little corner of Dos Hermanas.

  “Thursday night after you left, Kaylee showed up.”

  “Let me guess. She was huddled on the ground in front of your door again, and you took her in.”

  I shrugged and said, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

  “I told you she’d be back. You can’t keep taking her in.”

  “I didn’t. I turned her over to Tristan.”

  “Oh, great. Even normal girls can’t keep their hands off him.”

  “He can take care of himself. Anyway, he got a neighbor of his, a girl, to take her in temporarily.”

  “So now what?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Can’t the police handle it?”

  “I’ve threatened her with the police, and it works because she doesn’t want them involved. But I doubt there’s anything they could do. She’s twenty-one. It’s not against the law to travel around with no possessions and make passes at men.”

  “Hmm. You don’t think she’s a criminal, do you? Maybe that’s why she’s afraid of the police.”

  “If she’s a criminal, she’s very bad at it. She had a little over twelve dollars in her wallet. Can you try to think of something?”

  “I’ll give it some thought, but I’m not very optimistic.”

  I told her I’d spent most of Saturday with Consuela and Emilio.

  “How is she?”

  “I don’t know how she is physically, but her spirits are high.”

  “And Emilio?”

  “He’s a rock.”

  “That’s probably why
her spirits are high. I know she wasn’t married when you were growing up. She lived with your parents, so how did she meet Emilio?”

  “It was a semi-arranged marriage.”

  “Meaning their families arranged for them to meet but left it to them to decide?”

  “How did you guess?”

  “A lot of Basque families do that. When I was growing up, my mom 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. When I passed eighteen without being married, she gave up the idea of a Basque son-in-law and said she could settle for anyone who was Catholic. When I passed twenty-one, she opened it up to Christians of any denomination. When I passed twenty-five, she became panicky. I think she would settle at this point for any 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. As I was putting it on, Martin Seepu came 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.”

  “He don’t drink.”

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

  “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’d already told Susannah, I told them both how I had spent most of a night at Gran Quivira.