The Pot Thief Who Studied Billy the Kid Read online

  He handed me my crutches and laughed as I struggled through the door.

  “You’re not exactly adept with those.”

  “I’ve never been athletic,” I said

  “Using crutches isn’t a sport.”

  “Sure it is. Haven’t you heard of the Special Olympics?”

  As we headed for the parking lot, he asked to see the tooth. I curled back my lips.

  “I liked your look better with the chipped tooth,” he said. “It sort of fit with the treasure hunter image.”

  “T So L"juhanks, I think. Sharice must like the toothpaste ad look. She agreed to have dinner with me Saturday night. And I noticed the receptionist had her eyes on you. I guess the dentist’s office is where the Schuze men go to meet chicks.”

  “Nobody says ‘chicks’ anymore, Uncle Hubert. And what about Dolly?”

  “She dumped me the morning I left for that ill-fated event at the D. H. Lawrence Ranch.”

  “Even though all your teeth were good at that point? Why did she dump you?”

  The truth is I had no idea. I met Dolly Madison Aguirre when I was going door to door pretending to be a volunteer at the animal shelter. What I was really trying to do was locate a house where I had appraised a collection of ancient pots. I had to see inside the house to identify it because seeing the exterior was no help. I had arrived and departed wearing a blindfold.

  Don’t ask.

  Geronimo played the role of the dog whose owner I was trying to find. I thought we made a convincing team, but the scam went sour when Dolly said she wanted to adopt Geronimo if his owner couldn’t be found.

  I should have just moved on to the next house and forgotten her. But I returned the next day for a reason just as bizarre as the first visit, and we ended up dating. Turns out her father had been my high school history teacher. She told me after a few months that she had been unlucky in marriage and didn’t want to try it again, thus fending off a proposal which I may or may not have made.

  I thought about this as we crossed the parking lot to Tristan’s car.

  “She said she dumped me because I was taking Susannah to the Lawrence Ranch as my girlfriend.”

  He turned to look at me. “But she knew you and Susannah are just friends.”

  “And when I reminded her of that, she said the real reason was I stole her dog.”

  “Geronimo was her dog?”

  So I had to tell him about the ruse I used with Geronimo as a lost dog. “When she came to my house the first time, she saw Geronimo was still there. She seemed to take it well. She said I had seen him first and therefore had first claim on him. The subject never came up again until she accused me of stealing him from her. But at that point her behavior had been erratic for weeks, so I don’t think that was the real reason.”

  “Erratic how?”

  “She seemed stable all through the first months of our relationship. Then she became moody and argumentative. She would blow up at the smallest thing. Then she would cool down and apologize. Then she would lose it again ten minutes later. Maybe she had allergies or a bad reaction to something. She was always complaining of being too hot.”

  He s Sinolways ctarted laughing. “And you never figured it out?”

  “Figured what out?”

  “Mood swings. Hot flashes. It’s called menopause, Uncle Hubert.”

  “And you know about this how?”

  “Everybody knows about it. There are even ads on television.”

  “Menopause advertises?”

  “Well, not menopause exactly, but medicines for it.”

  “So they found a cure?”

  He laughed again. “It’s not a disease. It’s a natural transition women go through. But there are medicines for the unpleasant symptoms like hot flashes and mood swings.”

  “And they talk about that on television?”

  “Sure. And constipation, warts and erectile dysfunction.”

  Another reason not to watch television, I thought to myself.

  “Where to now,” he asked, “a car dealer?”

  “I’ve decided I don’t need a car. Walking is good for me and good for the planet.”

  He glanced at me. “It’s Albuquerque, Uncle Hubert. Two hundred square miles of city and about a hundred yards of sidewalk.”

  “Most of them in my neighborhood.”

  “And how will you pick up Sharice Saturday night?”

  “I couldn’t pick her up in a car even if I had one. I can’t drive until the cast comes off.”

  “How long will that be?”

  “Six weeks. In the meantime, Dr Koehler recommended RICE, but I don’t see how I can do that.”

  “Why not, you like rice.”

  “Not the grain. It’s an acronym for rest, ice, compression and elevation. But I can’t rest because I can’t get comfortable with this thing on my leg. I can’t ice it either. When I stuck my foot in a tub of ice, my toes got cold but my ankle didn’t. I think the cast insulates too well. I can’t compress my ankle with the cast on it, so the only one I can really use is elevation.”

  “Lucky for you Albuquerque is over five thousand feet.”

  I laughed.

  He looked down at the cast and said, “You want me to sign it?”

  9

  After Tristan dropped me off in the alley, I hobbled into my living quarters looking for something to read before opening for the afternoon rush, an event that lives more in hope than in V" fwiino L reality.

  The only thing on hand was Ben-Hur which I had checked out from the library along with The Wooing of Malkatoon. I went to the shop, rotated the sign to ‘Open’ and started reading in the hope that the Ben-Hur would be better than Malkatoon.

  It was a reasonable prospect. According to the dust jacket, Ben-Hur was the best-selling novel of the nineteenth century, surpassing Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. And it remained the best-selling book until it was topped by Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind in the 1930s. When the film version of Ben-Hur won eleven Academy Awards in 1959, sales of the book soared, and it went back in front of Gone with the Wind.

  I guess people liked the movie so much that they ran out and bought the book. But I wonder how many people actually read the entire thing.

  In my case, I made it only to the end of the first paragraph. There Wallace describes the mountain named Jebel es Zubleh:

  Its feet are well covered by sands tossed from the Euphrates, there to lie, for the mountain is a wall to the pasture-lands of Moab and Ammon on the west – lands which else had been of the desert a part.

  “Tossed from the Euphrates, there to lie”?

  “Of the desert a part”?

  Who knew that Lew Wallace was the inspiration for Yoda?

  Finish Ben-Hur I could not.

  But while the book was dreadful, the publisher’s introduction was fascinating. Wallace completed the novel at what he called “my rough pine-table” in his room in the Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe. He said in his memoir [in fon that he wrote the final scenes by lantern light after returning from a clandestine meeting with Henry McCarty, also known as Henry Antrim and William H. Bonney.

  But best known as Billy the Kid.

  I wondered why Wallace and Billy the Kid met. I wondered how Wallace could segue from a meeting with a notorious outlaw to putting the finishing touches on a book subtitled A Tale of the Christ.

  My wonderings were interrupted by the bong sound that indicates someone passing through my door. I looked up hoping to see the beginning of the afternoon rush. I was badly in need of money. The thousand I’d paid to Alvar had depleted my stash. I’d paid two hundred to the locksmith and a hundred to Dr. Koehler. The crutches were fifteen a week. I had a four-hundred-dollar dental bill and despite what I’d told Tristan, I knew I’d eventually have to buy a car.

  But it was not a rush. It wasn’t even a customer. It was Miss Gladys Claiborne, proprietor of the eponymous Miss Gladys’ Gift Shop, an emporium two doors from my own.


  You’re not supposed to eat before going to the dentist, and hobbling burns more energy than you might expect. So I was hungry enough to eat one of Miss Gladys’ casseroles of doom.

  Which was a good thing because that’s what she had brought.

  Before serving the casserole, she asked about my ankle.

  She knows about my pot hunting, but I didn’t want to distress her by talking about the body I’d found so I just said I was out looking for pots and strained my ankle when it caught between two rocks.

  “I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a beige cast,” she said.

  “The doctor used my potting clay. I like to think of it as one of my pots on my foot.”

  “That’s very clever of you. Can I sign it?”

  Miss Gladys is a good friend and good neighbor. Her dedication to keeping me well fed has made me an expert on her casseroles which fall into two categories, savory and sweet. The savory ones have five ingredients – a meat, a starch, veggies, cheese and the glue that hold everything together. The glue is usually Campbell’s Cream of Fill-In-The-Blank.

  “I’ve decided to go international,” she announced as she spread a placemat on my counter and positioned a plate, silverware and tall glass on it. She approves of neither paper plates nor plastic utensils. The embroidered bags she uses to transport these meals are made of sturdy canvas, and I marvel that she can lift them.

  “I got the recipe for this dolmades casserole from Prissy Papas. Her real first name is Aphrodite, but she didn’t like the way people in Texas shorten [typpaned her Greek name to the first two syllables, so she insisted we call her Prissy.”

  She paused for a moment and put her pointing finger against the dimple in her cheek. “Now that I think on it, ‘Prissy’ fit her better than ‘Aphrodite’. Anyway, she is a genuine Greek. Her grandfather’s name was Papadimitropoulos. She and two of her brothers, Peter and Andrew, shortened it to Papas.”

  “Who could blame them?”

  “Another brother, Harry, used Tropolos. Nicholas refused to shorten it, so the family gave him the nickname ‘Enchilada’ which was short for ‘the whole enchilada’ because the name was so long.”

  “So Nicholas was the only one with a nick name,” I quipped, but she didn’t get it.

  “So far as I know. The grandfather came straight from Athens to Port Arthur and worked in the refineries until he had enough money to start a restaurant.”

  Miss Gladys’ explanations of her casseroles often include more information about the person who invented them than about the ingredients. I’ve found that asking questions merely delays the inevitable, so I usually just nod and smile.

  It turned out that the meat, starch, veggies, cheese and glue in this case were, respectively, ground beef, rice, grape leaves, feta and Campbell’s Cream of Chicken Soup.

  I didn’t know grape leaves were a veggie. The feta made the dish a bit salty, but it was otherwise tasty, and I told her so. I was thinking if I dropped the feta, added some chopped jalapeños and used cilantro instead of parsley, it might be worth making. Casseroles create leftovers, but Tristan will eat anything, so…

  “I see you’re reading Ben-Hur,” she said, snapping me out of my speculations on casseroles. “My church group studied that last year. What do you think of it?”

  “I haven’t finished it.”

  “Then you have a treat in store for you.”

  “How so?”

  She looked up at me with those twinkly blue eyes. “I don’t want to spoil it for you.”

  “That’s okay. I think a summary would help.” Especially since I’m not going to read the thing, I thought to myself.

  She poured me some sweet tea.

  “It’s a story of two boys living in Jerusalem during the time of Jesus, a Jewish one named Ben-Hur and a Roman one named Messala. I know this makes me seem simple, but I found it helpful to think of them as Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.”

  “So it reminded you of Mark Twain?”

  “Only the two boys. The writing was much more serious.”

  That’s one word for it, I thought.

  “Despite their differences, they were fast friends. Messala eventually becomes a bigwig in the Roman army and is sent back to Jerusalem to make sure the Jews don’t revolt against Roman rule. They try to keep politics out of their friendship, but when Messala asks Ben-Hur to help him keep the Jews in line, Ben-Hur says he wants freedom for his people. Messala trumps up some charge against his former friend and sends him off to be one of those poor souls who is chained to an oar and made to row a Roman warship. Did you ever see the movie?”

  “I did.”

  “Then you surely remember the scene where the ship’s commander unchains Ben-Hur before the big battle. When the ship is rammed and water floods the compartment where the rowers are, Ben-Hur is able to escape since he is not chained to the ship. He sees the commander drowning because his heavy armor is pulling him down. But Ben-Hur [ype0" facesaves him. Isn’t that just about the most heartwarming story you ever heard?”

  “In what way?”

  “Don’t you see? Because the commander saved a life, his is saved in return.”

  I wondered how much moral credit someone who chains a person deserves for later releasing him, but I kept that question to myself.

  10

  “You’ve barely touched your margarita.”

  “I had two helpings of a dolmades casserole.”

  “Miss Gladys?”

  “Yeah. She’s going international.”

  “And the source of this dish?”

  “Prissy Papas.”

  She giggled. “That sounds like a name for a fancy Mexican potato dish.”

  “There were no potatoes in it.”

  “Let me guess what it did have – ground lamb, rice, grape leaves, feta and r ^ype0"ins.”

  Susannah knows Miss Gladys’ cooking almost as well as I do.

  “Close. It didn’t have raisins, and it had ground beef instead of lamb. Which is a good thing because I hate lamb.”

  “You’ve never even tasted lamb,” she retorted.

  “I’ve never tasted bear either, but I know I hate it.”

  “But you like goat.”

  “That’s different.”

  “The only difference is that you grew up around people who eat goat. If you’d grown up in a Basque family like me, you’d like lamb.”

  I had to admit she was right. I’ve formulated over the years a set of theses, each of which I call a Schuze Anthropological Premise or SAP, which is also what some people think I am for believing them. SAP number 1 is that any human being can practice any culture.

  Culture is not biological. It is learned. The dead guy in the cliff dwelling above the Rio Doloroso ate coyote and gophers. If he had been born near the Bering Sea, he would have eaten whale and seal.

  Susannah ordered another margarita. I declined.

  “Are you really not drinking because of the casserole or is the real reason that your new tooth is sensitive to the cold?”

  0" > “It’s not a new tooth, just a repair to the chipped one.”

  “I liked your snaggletoothed look. It worked well with the sunburn, the skinned nose and the cast.”

  “Tristan said it fit my pot thief image.”

  “Maybe you should have left it that way.”

  “Especially since I don’t have the money to pay for it. But I don’t think it would be acceptable for a dental hygienist to be seen with a snaggletoothed man.”

  She gave me one of her big rancher-girl smiles. “You finally have a date with Sharice?”

  I returned her smile. “This Saturday.”

  “That’s great, Hubie. You haven’t had a date since Dolly dumped you.”

  “That was your fault, remember? She was jealous of you.”

  “No, it was because you stole her dog.”

  Our laughing made me feel better.

  I took a sip of my margarita, but it was watered down from sitting there so long.


  “The truth is,” I said, suddenly in a serious mood, “It was neither you nor Geronimo. It was me. I was too dense to realize she was going through menopause. I should have tried harder to be understanding.”

  “How do you know she was going through menopause?”

  “Tristan told me.”

  She looked astonished. “Dolly told Tristan she was going through the change?”

  “No. He figured it out when I told him this morning about her moodiness and her complaining about being hot. But I told you about her strange behavior months ago. You didn’t get it, and you’re a woman.”

  “I’m not a woman, Hubie. I’m a neskato. That’s what my grandfather always called me. It means ‘maiden’. You know – inexperienced.”

  I knew better than to comment on that, so I told her about my money woes.

  “You could go back to that cliff dwelling above the Rio Doloroso. All it would take is one good pot to balance your budget.”

  “I’m not a grave robber.”

  “You wouldn’t be robbing a grave. You marked the grave with that stone, so just dig somewhere else. Surely there’s not another body at that site.”

  “Hmm. You don’t think it would be wrong to dig close to a grave?”

  “You told me it wasn’t a grave. And it makes sense that they wouldn’t bury their dead where they lived.”

  “Okay, it’s not a formal grave. But his body is there, and it seems… maybe not ghoulish, because I wouldn’t be digging him up, but maybe… I don’t know, disrespectful?”

  We sat in silence while we thought about it.

  “Maybe you should move him,” she finally said.

  “No way. It was bad enough to find him in the first place. And to actually touch his hand with the hole in it.”

  I shuddered at the memory.

  “Maybe digging there is not disrespectful,” she said. “But leaving him there might be. Maybe he should have a proper burial.”

  I shook my head. The whole idea was crazy.

  “I already thought of that when I pushed the dirt back and placed the rock over him. I was going to make a cross from two sticks and jam it into the soil behind the rock. Then it dawned on me that he was obviously not a Christian.”