The Pot Thief Who Studied Billy the Kid Read online

  “You gave me the wrong word when I asked you for the Spanish word for ‘ice’? I thought you spoke it like a native.”

  “It wasn’t my speaking that was the problem. It was my listening. I thought you asked for the Spanish word for ‘eyes’, so I told you ‘ojos’.”

  “Well, ‘eyes’ and ‘ice’ do sound alike, so I guess that’s understandable. No harm done except… Oh my God. That’s why she thought I was a witch. I ordered my Pepsi with eyes. Baltazar did give me a funny look, but I figured it was because my pronunciation was bad. He must think I’m an idiot.”

  “Or a witch,” I said.

  “So what did she tell you about The Dead Guy?”

  I took a deep breath. “She said he was a gentle young boy who was always quiet and polite. He loved God. He loved the church. He loved learning the catechism and making his first confession. She always imagined he would be a priest. But after he reached puberty, he became increasingly obsessed with sin. He went to confession so often that the old priest started limiting the days and hours he would take confessions because he didn’t have enough time to attend to his other duties. He eventually joined the Penitentes.”

  “The old priest joined the Penitentes?”

  “No, Carlos did. It was one of those village secrets everyone knew and no one talked about. After his parents died, he lived alone in their house. He became increasingly reclusive. No one ever saw him except at church. The house began to deteriorate. He didn’t have a job, didn’t want one. He would have starved but neighbors brought him food. He would thank them and tell them he would pray for them.”

  “This is a sad story, Hubie. I can picture him alone in a falling down house praying day and night. So what happened next?”

  “That’s all she told me.”

  “Shoot. It’s like a story without an ending. I hate that.”

  dth="19" align="justify">”I think I know the ending.” Her face sagged. “He’s dead, isn’t he?”

  “I think so. Remember what Whit told me about Carlos leaving town?” I didn’t want to call him The Dead Guy now that I feared he actually was. It seemed disrespectful.

  “Yeah,” she said. “His booby-trapped piece of firewood blew up in The Hunting Guide’s face, so he ran away to avoid revenge.”

  “I think that story is false.”

  “Why?”

  “Two reasons. First, Carlos doesn’t sound like the sort of person who would put gun powder in a piece of firewood. He was a gentle soul. Second, when The Hunting Guide reported the incident, he said he had started growing a beard to cover the scar the ember left on his face. But beards don’t grow on scar tissue.”

  “Really?”

  “Yep. I learned that from Cactus Truesdell who had a scar on his cheek where he shot out his tooth.”

  “Oh brother. You still believe that?”

  “That may not be how he got the scar, but it’s true there was no beard on it. I saw that with my own eyes.”

  “Or your own ice.”

  I chuckled at that and said, “Right. So The Hunting Guide lied. The truth is that he’s probably the one who booby-trapped the wood. And he grew the beard so that he could say there was a scar under there. He didn’t know beards don’t grow on scar tissue.”

  “So it was Carlos who took the wood.”

  “He had no electricity. He was probably on the verge of freezing to death. He takes a few pieces of wood. Then the wood blows up. What do you imagine he thought?”

  “That God was punishing him for taking the wood. And that The Hunting Guide would come after him. But he had no money. Where did he go?”

  “I don’t know. La Viuda de Zaragosa told me he had three sisters and three brothers, all of whom were quite a bit older than Carlos. He was evidently a late surprise child like me. The siblings had all moved away by the time Carlos took his first confession. But maybe one of them lives in a nearby village. Or maybe Carlos hitchhiked to Albuquerque. Or maybe he was eaten by a bear. After all, the story I’m telling you is ninety percent conjecture.”

  “Yeah, but it makes sense. Is there any way we can confirm it?”

  “Maybe someone could track down his siblings and find out what they know. But we don’t have the means to do that.”

  “The police could do it.”

  I sighed. “He’s been listed as missing for six months, and they haven’t looked for him. Why would they do it now?”

  “Because he’s been murdered.”

  “We’ve already been over that. There is no proof that he was murdered.”

  “What about the fact that The Hunting Guide lied to the police?”

  “I guess they could confront him with that, but what good would it do? He could just say it turned out to be a superficial wound, and it healed.”

  “Maybe they could use rubber hoses to make him confess.”

  I frowned at her and she laughed.

  We sat in silence for a while.

  “This is frustrating, Hubie. You finally come around to my view that there was a murder and you even know how it happened, but there’s no way to prove it.”

  “Luring someone into participating in a mock crucifixion is not murder.”

  “It isn’t mock when someone dies. If it isn’t murder, it should at least be negligent homicide or something.”

  “Either way, the police don’t have sufficient reason to act.”

  “So we just go home and forget it?”

  I shrugged.

  She started the engine.

  “Go to the church,” I said.

  She laughed. “Why? You want to make another confession?”

  “No, I want to ask Father Jerome how to contact the woman who gave him that pot. I’d like to get another one by her if she will let me have it on consignment. She does good work. I might make a few bucks retailing one of her pots.”

  “Too bad you can’t go back to that cliff dwelling and find a pot for frea pot foe.”

  “I tried that before I discovered the body was missing, remember?” I shook my head in disbelief. “In all my years of digging, I’ve never seen a place with absolutely nothing buried. Two trips there and all I got was one measly shard.”

  “I guess they were a tidy tribe, Hubie.”

  She drove to the church.

  I was deep in thought. Not about confession or the woman who made the pot, but about why the soil in the cliff dwelling contained almost no record of human habitation and why it was not compacted. Why it was so easy to push the rebar in when I searched the entire area with no results.

  “Are you going in?” she finally asked.

  “What? Oh, yeah. And after I find out about the potter, I’m going to ask Father Jerome where The Hunting Guide lives. I want to pay him a visit.”

  The potter was surprised and happy that I wanted one of her pots and didn’t hesitate to give it to me on consignment.

  The Hunting Guide’s house was set back off the road facing a trail against a hill. Susannah stopped about fifty yards from the house, and I used the crutches to circle around to the door.

  “I’ll be right back,” I said.

  I wasn’t.

  46

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  He was even meaner looking than I remembered. And there were no bald spots in his beard.

  “Yeah?” he said, blocking his front door.

  “Father Jerome told me you lived here,” I said, trying to put things on a friendly footing by mentioning the local priest. “I was hoping to hire you as a guide.”

  He looked me up and down with disdain. “You don’t look much like a hunter.”

  “I’ve never been hunting. That’s why I need a guide. I don’t know how to go about it.”

  “Then why do you want to do it?”

  “I like the taste of elk.”

  He stood there staring at me as if wondering whether he wanted to hire himself out to this tenderfoot at his door. It took him a long time to decide.

  He finally stepped back from the door and sa
id, “Come in.”

  He closed the door and said, “Wait here.”

  He went into another room and came back with a gun. It was then I realized I was in deep elk excrement. Because even a greenhorn like me knows you don’t hunt elk with a pistol.

  “This way,” he said, motioning me into the room where he’d gone to get the gun. There were a lot of other ones in there, all rifles. There were also shelves of artifacts.

  Try as I might, I couldn’t think of a reason why he would point a pistol at me if he didn’t intend to kill me. He was bigger and stronger than me by far and didn’t need a pistol to make me do whatever he wanted me to do.

  In fact, he didn’t even need a pistol to kill me. I was certain he could do it with his bare hands. But a pistol would be easier.

  The reason I was thinking about this was because if there with hiswas any possibility that his intent was to teach me how to shoot a pistol or scare me or do something other than kill me, I didn’t want to risk running and have him shoot me because I was running just as Billy the Kid shot Deputy James Bell because he was running. I know that’s not the sharpest reasoning I’ve ever done, but it’s what I was thinking.

  I thought of Billy the Kid’s letter to Lew Wallace in which he said, “I would not like to be killed like a dog unarmed.”

  If I decide, I thought to myself, that he’s definitely going to kill me, I don’t want to just stand here and be executed. I want to dash for the door or leap through a window.

  What I just told you might give you the impression I was a cool customer, calculating his intent and my options while staring down the barrel of a 45 or a 32 or a six-and-a-half. I don’t know one gun from another. I would say this one was definitely not a Saturday night special. This was a whole week’s worth of gun. say>

  So let me correct any misimpression that I was coolly reasoning. Because I wasn’t. I was reasoning, but not calmly. It was amazing I could think at all since my heart had stopped beating. I know your heart is supposed to race in the face of danger, and that’s what normally happens to me when I climb higher than the third rung on a ladder. But in this case, my heart just stopped beating. Which didn’t matter. Because if it had pumped a bunch of blood to my lungs, the blood couldn’t have taken in any oxygen because I also wasn’t breathing. All my organs seemed to have shut down. There was an eerie silence, a slowing down of time. It was like I was already dead.

  Of course he didn’t kill me. If he had, I wouldn’t be telling you about that bazooka in his hand and the bizarre physiological effects it had on me.

  Emerson said, “War educates the senses, calls into action the willnto actiowil"+0”

  It’s a good thing I’m not a soldier. Having a gun pointed at me neither educated my senses nor called me to action. It petrified me.

  “Out that way,” he said, motioning again with the gun towards a door at the back of the room. Since he was waving with his cannon/pointer for me to go first, I decided as soon as I exited the door, I would turn left and run for it.

  Unfortunately, I couldn’t do that because I was unconscious when I passed through that door. Or maybe it was a different door. All I know is the door was the last thing I saw before a sudden explosion of pain.

  I woke up as he was dragging me along a path that was all too familiar. I was hogged tied, and I thought my lips and nose were about to be ripped off by the rough basalt gravel on the path to the cliff dwelling.

  I spat the dirt out of my mouth when we got to the dwelling and said, “Why are you doing this?”

  His lips were as dark as his beard. “I saw you down here digging. I was standing on the ledge watching you.”

  So that was why the sand and gravel fell on me. “You drove my Bronco away.”

  “You left it running, puto. Because of you, I had to dig up Carlos. I had to worry about face=the cops finding out he was dead. And about them finding out about the stuff I took from here. So now I won’t have to worry, because you’ll be dead. Neat, huh? You’re the only outsider who knows about this place. And now you’ll be buried in it.”

  A sinister smile crept across his face. “Buried. Yeah. I like the sound of that. Why waste a slug on a shrimp like you. I’ll just throw you in the hole and shovel dirt on your sorry ass.”

  The good news was my heart was now working, and it was racing like it should have been in light of what it had just heard.

  “You won’t get away with it,” I said, proving that when people are in tight spots, they do indeed say stupid things just like in the movies. “I’m not the only outsider who knows about this place.”

  He stopped to think for just a second. “Yeah? Who else knows?”

  “A friend of mine.”

  “What’s his name.”

  “I’m not going to tell you. But if you let me go, I promise not to tell the police what happened here.”

  He laughed. “You won’t be telling anyone anything. And before I’m through with you, I’ll have the name of that friend.”

  He turned the gun so that he was holding it by the barrel with the grip sticking out like a hammer.

  I decided my best chance – as rotten as it was – was to see if I could somehow roll myself off the ledge. Even if I didn’t survive the fall, it was better than being beaten and buried alive.

  But he had me tied too tight. He knelt down next to me and raised the pistol butt.

  I closed my eyes.

  A shot rang out, and he screamed in pain.

  Yes! I said to myself. The stupid bastard has accidentally shot himself because he was holding the gun backwards.

  He stood up and turned around. The gun was on the ground next to me where he had dropped it. I tried to nudge it over the cliff using my head since my arms were tied. I was not quite close enough to move it.

  I looked up at him. Blood was flowing from his right arm, but not fast enough to suit me. I wanted a waterfall of it. I wanted him unconscious. Actually, I wanted him dead.

  He reached down for the gun with his left hand, and a second shot rang out just as he touched the pistol.

  Yes! He’s shot himself again. Then I thought, How can a hunting guide be so incompetent with a gun?

  Then I heard a voice from above. An angelic voice. It was not telling me I had miraculously been spared. It wasn’t even speaking to me. It was coming from the ledge above and was speaking instead to Alonso Castillo Maldonado and saying, “You move a muscle and I’ll blow your balls off.”

  That Susannah is a hell of a shot with a coyote rifle.

  47

  “It was like one of Annie Oakley’s stunts in Buffalo Bill's Wild West show,” I said to Martin. “First she shot his right arm. Then when he tried to pick up the gun with his left hand, she shot that arm too.”

  “Two for two,” he said, tipping his Tecate can in her direction. “That’s good shooting.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “And that’s why he took what she said so seriously and stood there as immobile as a marble statue.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She said, ’You move a muscle and I’ll blow your balls off’.”

  Martin gave that little involuntary wince men experience when something of that nature is mentioned.

  I turned to Susannah. “I never knew you were such a crack shot.”

  “It was no big deal, Hubie. I was only thirty feet away. Matt, Mark and I practice with Coors beer cans at a hundred yards.”

  “You can hit a beer can at a hundred yards?”

  “Matt and Mark can hit the can. I hit the little picture of the waterfall on the label of the can.”

  “How did you know they’d be down in that cliff dwelling,” asked Martin.

  “I saw The Hunting… No, I don’t think I’ll call him The Hunting Guide any longer. I think I’ll call him El Raton. I need to practice my Spanish. I saw his jeep leave by the trail in front of his house with what I thought was someone lying down on the back seat. I figured it was Hubie, so I followed him, staying way back so as not to be
spotted. When he turned east off the road, I guessed he was headed to the cliff dwelling. I’d been there twice, so I took off across country in the general direction and got there in the nick of time. I saw the jeep and just hoped I wasn’t too late. I grabbed the coyote rifle and ran to the edge just as El Raton was lifting his arm to club Hubie with his gun butt.”

  Martin looked at my face then back at her. “Too bad you didn’t get there before he did it.”

  “She did,” I said. This happened when he dragged me over a basalt trail.”

  alatinotyp. This Ouch.”

  “What I don’t understand,” Susannah said, “is why you went to his house to begin with.”

  “Because I’m an idiot.”

  They looked at each other and nodded.

  “Thanks. What happened was I finally thought about the obvious. The second time I was there, I had gone over the entire surface of that dwelling with a rebar, inserting it every six inches. It slid in easily. The soil was not compacted. But I never hit a single artifact. There was one shard the first time, but none on the second visit. No animal skin, no arrowheads, no flint, no worked stone, no broken metates, nothing, zip, nada. In over twenty years of digging, I’ve never encountered a site so totally picked clean.”

  “But how did you know it was El Raton?”

  “I didn’t. I suspected him because, being a guide, he’s always exploring out in the wilds so he would know about it. More importantly, he had a connection with the guy I thought had been buried down there. And finally because he looked like a dangerous felon.”

  “I was with you until that last one,” Susannah said. ”You steal pots, and no one would say you look like a dangerous felon.”

  Then she took another look at me and said, “Well, they might say that the way you look now.”

  “So,” I continued, “I figured I would tip the BLM about him. Maybe they would arrest him for breaking ARPA and NAGPRA, and in the course of their investigation, they might find out something about Carlos.”

  “So why didn’t you just tip the BLM and let them handle it?” Susannah asked.