The Pot Thief Who Studied Georgia O'Keeffe Read online

  “Really?”

  “That’s what she told me.”

  “Well, that’s not the answer. The reason she didn’t get a cat was because she wasn’t dating.”

  “That doesn’t make sense. Not dating is all the more reason to have a pet for companionship.”

  “I figured you wouldn’t understand. She wasn’t dating, but she was hoping to. Believe me, I know. I’ve been there too many times. So she didn’t get a cat for fear of becoming a cat lady.”

  “Cat Lady is one of those superheroes like Batman, right?”

  “Wrong. A cat lady is an unmarried woman who dotes on her cat. In severe cases they can lose interest in dating because they’re so wrapped up in the life of their cat. Or cats—usually they begin to collect them like stamps.”

  “Except you have to lick stamps, whereas cats take care of that themselves.”

  She just shook her head. “So now that she has a boyfriend, she doesn’t have to worry about being a cat lady, so that’s why she took Benz.”

  “No. She took Benz because Kathy had to give him up. It’s just a coincidence that it happened while she and I are dating.”

  “Men are clueless.”

  I didn’t dispute the point.

  “Tell me about Glad.”

  “He ordered a pink gin.”

  “What’s a pink gin?”

  “Gin with a dash of bitters.”

  “Yuck. Probably need a stiff upper lip to drink it. Why is he called Glad?”

  “It’s short for Gladwyn.”

  “I’ll bet he’s Welsh, and his last name is full of w’s and l’s, something like Llewellyn. He probably comes from a town with a name like Caerfyrddin or Llanymddyfri.”

  She pronounced them “Carmarthen” and “Landovery,” but how would I know if she got them right?

  “He came from Ludlow, and his last name is Farthing.”

  “It’s a good thing he didn’t shorten that one to the first four letters.”

  “You really are clever with words.”

  “You have to be to know how to pronounce Caerfyrddin and Llanymddyfri.”

  “It probably helps that your last name is Inchaustigui. Is Welsh related to Basque?”

  “Funny you should ask. The languages aren’t related but the people are. The Basque were the first people to arrive in the British Isles after the last Ice Age. Over eighty percent of the Welsh today still have DNA from those early Basque settlers.”

  “One of my Schuze Anthropological Premises is that culture is not genetic. DNA has nothing to do with language.”

  “I don’t need one of your SAPs to know that. The Basques in England were overrun by Celts and adopted their language. But maybe speaking Basque limbers up the tongue for weird Welsh words.”

  “At any rate, I don’t think Glad is Welsh. He looks nothing like Tom Jones.”

  “He probably doesn’t look like Catherine Zeta-Jones either.”

  “No. More like Porky Pig.”

  “I think having him mind your shop will increase your income.”

  “I doubt it. An Anasazi pot is not an impulse purchase. I figure if they really want one, they’ll come back when I’m there.”

  “And if you’re not there the second time, they might go somewhere else.”

  “There is no somewhere else. If they want genuine ancient pots, I’m almost the only game in town.”

  “But they might decide your shop being closed is the perfect excuse to buy that Porsche they’ve always wanted.”

  “People who appreciate ancient pottery have too much class to drive flashy cars.”

  “Let’s make a wager. Track your total sales for the next month and compare it to last month. If sales are higher, it will be because Glad is keeping the shop open for normal business hours.”

  Susannah loves wagers. Gambling is chancy, and you already know how I feel about taking risks. But wagering with Susannah is fun because the stakes are always wacky. In the most recent wager, the agreement was that she had to keep her car if she lost, and I had to take it if I lost.

  I said, “If he sells one pot, that would be higher than last month, so that’s not a fair test.”

  “Okay, you figure out how to test it. I’ll figure out what to bet. And we’ll have a small test this Thursday. You’ll be gone all day. We’ll see if Glad makes a sale in your absence.”

  “I’m not going anywhere Thursday.”

  “You are. You just don’t know it yet.” She flashed that mischievous smile she does so well, only one side of her lips curled up and the opposite eyebrow raised. “Thursday is the day they let visitors go to the Trinity Site.”

  “We already talked about that. There is no way I could leave the road and drive to the Oscura Mountains without being spotted.”

  “I agree. That’s why I’m going with you.”

  The mischievous smile gave way to the knowing grin.

  “What’s the plan?”

  “I drive. At some point, I pull over and you jump out. You scurry into an arroyo and make your way to the ancient ruin. I continue on to Trinity Site. I hang around there all day, then pick you and your new pots up on the way out.”

  “Would that give me enough time?”

  “If we enter when they open at eight, I can drop you off by eight fifteen at the latest. I’ll have to pick you up by one forty-five to make it back to the gate by two when they close it. That gives you five and a half hours. Let’s call it five because we don’t want to cut it too close. It’s four miles from the road to the place you showed me on the map. Your ankle seems to have regained most of its strength, so you should be able to cover that in less than three hours round-trip. That leaves you almost two hours to dig.”

  “Wow, you have it all planned out. But that’s a lot of driving for you, and I might come up empty.”

  “Not knowing is half the fun.”

  “Okay. When do we leave?”

  “Two a.m.”

  “Two a.m.?”

  “A line forms at the gate long before they open. We need to be at the front of it.”

  15

  Which is why we were cruising down Interstate 25 in total darkness Thursday morning.

  If you’re thinking this is when I encounter the black helicopter, you’re jumping ahead too far.

  Susannah had recharged the battery on my Bronco because she figured it was better suited to the rough White Sands roads than her old Crown Vic with its chronic oversteer.

  It would be Glad’s first day minding the shop. I’d given him a key the day before we left. I also left a note that read “Make coffee and sell pots. At the end of the day, turn off the coffee maker, empty the trash and wash the windows.”

  The last item was a joke. But if he didn’t realize that, I’d have clean windows.

  We left the interstate at San Antonio, famous as the birthplace of Conrad Hilton and the home of the Owl Bar and Café, whose green chili cheeseburgers are more popular with New Mexicans than any hotel chain can ever hope to be. Unfortunately, we passed through the sleepy village of 150 people at five in the morning, too early for a cheeseburger.

  We were the first vehicle to arrive at the Stallion Gate on the north side of the missile range on the day of the Trinity Site Open House. After we showed our driver’s licenses and car registration to the MP at the gate, I took a nap in the backseat.

  I’m not used to getting up at two in the morning.

  Susannah woke me when the gate was opened, waved goodbye to the MP and pulled away at normal tourist speed. Around the first curve and out of sight of the gate, she switched from tourist to NASCAR driver, explaining that she wanted to put some distance between us and the cars behind so that she could let me out while we had the road to ourselves and no witnesses to my leaving the Bronco.

  She skidded to a halt by a sh
allow draw. I jumped out at a dead run and was ten yards down the draw when she took off. I don’t know how far I had gone when the car behind us at the gate passed by because I had followed the draw through a couple of turns and could no longer see the road.

  More important, the road could no longer see me.

  So far, so good.

  I was dressed in brown hiking boots, khaki pants, a long-sleeve khaki shirt and a beige Tilley hat, an outfit that protected me both from the sun and—I hoped—from detection. The idea was to blend in to the desert terrain. My web belt held binoculars, a canvas canteen, a hunting knife, a compass and a piece of quarter-inch rebar.

  I scanned the area with the binoculars. There were some structures on the hills off to my right. I hoped they contained radar rather than one guy drinking coffee and another asking, “Who’s the short guy in the khaki outfit?”

  The United States Geological Survey created over fifty thousand maps that show landform details of the entire country. If you do the math and divide the number of maps into the total area of the Unites States, you’ll discover that each map covers a square area roughly seven miles on each side. An hour and a half after rolling out of the Bronco, I was standing under an outcrop of the Oscura Mountains studying USGS map number 193371.

  The spot I wanted was close to a contour line that marked 6,800 feet of elevation. The road to the Trinity Site is just below 5,000 feet. So the four-mile hike had taken me up almost 2,000 feet.

  I scoped the face of the outcrop. Tristan had shown me a satellite picture of it on Google Earth. Now I was seeing it from a much better perspective—that of Mother Earth. Most people would not have known what to look for. I did.

  It was the sort of location the ancients built in. Finding the path up to it took half an hour. I was a bit behind schedule but feeling confident because the return hike would be downhill. Perfect for that gunnysack full of pots I imagined myself carrying.

  I probed the soil in front of and inside the rooms for almost an hour and was rewarded with nothing more than rocks and animal bones.

  I was about to give up. I sat down in one of the rooms and studied it. The walls were stone and mud, the roof formed by the natural overhang so that the room height sloped from six feet at the front to four feet at the back. The opening in the rear wall was too small even for me. I removed a portion of it and crawled into a triangular space. The air was cool and still. The soil was loose. I returned the rebar to my belt and dug out a perfect Tompiro pot with my hands.

  And measured it with them. It was three hands tall and two wide.

  I smoothed the dirt over the hole. I went to the ledge and gathered some soil, less sandy and with more clay than the soil in the space behind the room and therefore more suited to making mortar. I mixed the soil with water from my canteen and replaced the stones I had dislodged, mortaring them to match the rest of the wall.

  As the Park Service likes to say: “Take nothing but memories—Leave nothing but footprints.”

  I modified the saying a bit: “Take only pots—Don’t leave even footprints.”

  I ran my hands over the smooth surface of the pot and closed my eyes. I saw a woman crush limonite and ochre in a metate. Saw her mix the powder with water and willow sap and combine the mixture with wet clay to form a pigmented slip. Saw a yucca leaf slit to the width of the line she wanted and dipped into the slurry. Watched the yucca go limp in the liquid. After chanting a prayer, she began painting the geometric pattern.

  I opened my eyes and looked at her design, rectangles of varying sizes, some overlapping, each filled with hatching. Bold vertical stripes. Lines, nothing more. Monochromatic. But organic in a way Mondrian’s paintings could never be.

  Metaphysical.

  There are those who would say what I did is reprehensible. I disturbed a holy place. Stole a pot. Prevented it from being studied in situ by professional archaeologists.

  I don’t care what those people think. I’ve made my peace with what I do. The woman who made that pot has been dead for four hundred years. I can’t tell you her name, but I can show you who she was by bringing her creation back into history.

  Because she couldn’t read or write, the Spaniards labeled her uncivilized. But her ability to make and read petroglyphs is the same skill exercised in a different way. The markings on her pot had as much meaning for her as the words in a book do for us. The lines and angles didn’t make her pots stronger or improve their capacity to store seeds. They are there because the potter was answering Whitman’s question, “What good amid these, O me, O life?”

  The powerful play does indeed go on, and she contributed a verse.

  The Tompiro were a peaceful people, skilled masons who quarried stone and built beautiful multistory dwellings. Most of these were on the open plains to the north, close to the dry lake beds where the Tompiro gathered the salt they traded to nomadic tribes for animal skins. They used this place when the seasons changed or they wanted to hide from the Apache.

  After two Spaniards were allegedly killed by some Tompiro, Juan de Oñate destroyed three of their pueblos, killing nine hundred men, women and children in the process.

  During a winter when many Tompiro froze to death for lack of firewood, the Franciscan priests forced Tompiro slaves to make six hundred wooden crosses.

  Less than a hundred years after the arrival of the Spaniards, the Tompiro ceased to exist. An entire people wiped off the face of the Earth. A million pots will not bring them back. But the one pot I recovered reminds us that they lived, and that one woman among them created a thing of beauty that can still stir the hearts of men.

  There was probably more loot, but it was time to go. I pulled up a clump of grama grass and used it as a broom, sweeping the sand behind me until I hit the rocky part of the trail.

  I placed the pot in the gunnysack and hung it on my back with a rope. I didn’t want the pot in my hands or in front of me if I fell. An unnecessary precaution, as it turned out. I didn’t fall or even stumble. The downhill walk was as easy as I had hoped. Or maybe I just felt light on my feet because I’d found an ancient pot. Touched the past.

  I neared the point where Susannah had dropped me off. She was standing on the shoulder of the road talking to an MP. His jeep was next to the Bronco.

  I buried the pot behind a dune, sticking the rebar next to it with some of it protruding as a marker. I used my compass to note the degree readings of two peaks to the east and a small hill to the west. I dribbled a bit of water from the canteen onto my pants. I walked to the road.

  To Susannah I said, “Thanks for stopping,” and to the MP, “Good afternoon.”

  He looked so lean and hungry in his camouflage uniform that I fancied his name was Cassius. His military bearing and courtesy seemed forced.

  “Good afternoon, sir. You are not supposed to leave the road.”

  “Sorry. I just couldn’t hold it any longer.”

  He looked at my pants. “That’s what Miss Inchaustigui was just telling me. May I see your ID, please?”

  I handed him my driver’s license. He checked it against a list and gave it back to me.

  “You should have no trouble reaching the gate before two.”

  He stared at me as I climbed into the Bronco and was still staring when we rounded a corner and he slid out of the rearview mirror.

  16

  Well, you warned me you might come up empty.”

  We were bumping along toward Stallion Gate.

  “I didn’t come up empty. I found a perfect Tompiro pot. It’s buried back there about fifty yards from where you were waiting for me.”

  “Why did you bury it?”

  “I didn’t want to. My first thought was to keep it in the gunnysack and hope the MP wouldn’t ask about it. Then I remembered our cover story. If I left the road because I had to pee, why would I have taken along a gunnysack with a big pot in it?”
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  “Because you wanted a pot to pee in?”

  I started to reply but realized she was joking.

  “I see your point,” she said. “He probably would have asked about it. He looked you over pretty good.”

  “Yeah, he was staring at the wet spot on my pants.”

  “Did you really have to embellish the act by dribbling water on your pants? It was water, right?”

  I didn’t dignify that with an answer. I asked instead if it was the same MP who was at the gate that morning. It had been dark and I was sleepy. I didn’t get a look at him.

  “No, he was at the site all day and shooed everyone out when it was time to leave. I was one of the last to go. I let people pass until there was no one behind me. I didn’t want anyone to see me pick you up. What I didn’t realize was that after everyone left, the MP at the site would come along behind us. He must have had to tidy up a bit because he was not in sight when I stopped to wait for you. So how do we retrieve our pot?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Maybe we just wait until the next time they open the Trinity Site.”

  I shook my head. “That’s a year from now. I need the money now.” I looked over at her. “Must be lonely being an MP inside the missile range. Maybe he’d let a pretty young lady sneak in to recover our pot.”

  “I must have left my feminine mystique at home. He didn’t even tell me his name. What do you mean, our pot?”

  “The wheelman shares in the loot.”

  “Excellent. What’s the pot worth?”

  “Wilkes offered thirty thousand for it.”

  “He offered you twenty-five for that Mogollon jug, and you never saw a penny of it.”

  “He says the buyer this time is more reliable—a big-time collector with deep pockets.”

  I told her about my mental video of the woman who made the pot.

  “I know why you’re not married. You’re in love with the ancient potter women.”

  For all I know, she may be right. But I think the reason I’m not married is because all through high school and college I was the bookish type of kid girls weren’t interested in. I never had a serious girlfriend until I was in my late twenties. By then I was running a pottery store and living behind the shop.