1

It was a dark and stormy night. 

            I’m not joking; it really was.  Which was unusual because I live in the desert where rain storms are as rare as English ivy.  Of course the dark part wasn’t unusual; nights are dark everywhere except above the Artic Circle in summer.  And maybe below the Antarctic Circle in winter – I’m not certain about that.  But once upon a time, the night sky in Albuquerque was never truly dark.

That was in my youth.  The town was dark and the sky was afire, lit by a million stars twinkling in the clear dry air.  Then about half a million people moved here and now the town is afire and the skies are dark because there is too much light pollution to see them.

On this late spring night it didn’t matter.  It had been raining all evening, and Martin Seepu was standing in the rain staring up at the sky.  Susannah and I were more sensibly ensconced under the veranda of Dos Hermanas Tortilleria enjoying our second round of margaritas.

Martin once told me that standing under the stars makes him feel serene.  I don’t know how standing out in the rain made him feel.  Wet, I suppose.

“Why is he standing in the rain?” Susannah asked me.

“It’s an Indian thing,” I answered.

“It’s not an Indian thing,” he yelled over the drumbeat of the raindrops on the corrugated tin roof of the veranda, “anyone can learn to do it.”

“Do what?” Susannah asked.

“Tell how long it will rain,” I said.

Martin rejoined us at our table, shaking his head vigorously and spraying us like a dog.  “You stare up through the rain until your eyes focus on the drops farthest away from you, the ones that appear to be the smallest.  Then you gauge how far the smallest drops are above the largest ones.”

“And?” asked Susannah.

“If the small ones seem to be real high, it’s a passing storm.  If they’re low, they’re coming from low-level clouds, and the rain will last longer.”

 “You’re kidding, right?” said Susannah.

He took a sip of his beer.  “This one’s going to stop in about an hour.”

“You’re soaking wet,” she observed needlessly.

“Why do you white-eyes avoid rain?  Being in the rain is just as natural as being in the dry air.  It won’t shrink you.”

“Which is a good thing in your case,” I said.  Martin is 5’ 6”.

“You’re the same height as me, Kemo Sabe.”

“True, but I used to be six feet tall before I spent too much time in the rain.”

I own part of an old adobe in Albuquerque’s Old Town, two blocks from Dos Hermanas.  I live in the back and sell pottery in the front.  In between I have a workshop where I make copies of Native American pottery, some of which I sell and some of which I sign.  I also sell genuine Indian pots that I buy in New Mexico’s pueblos from real live potters, including Martin’s uncle whose works fetch from three to ten thousand dollars depending on their size.  And I sell works made by potters who have been dead for centuries and whose works I get wholesale by digging in the desert sand.

I’m a pot thief.  I stole my first pots about twenty years ago as a student on a summer dig with the anthropology program at the University of New Mexico, and I sold them for enough money to make a down payment on my building in Old Town. 

Except I didn’t really steal them.  In the first place, they didn’t come out of the dig site.  I knew the faculty leaders were digging in the wrong place as soon as I saw them drive the stakes and stretch the string.  After studying the ruins and the lay of the land for a week, I dug my own hole a hundred yards away and found three rare intact pots.

In the second place, digging up old pots wasn’t illegal back then.  But that didn’t stop the University from kicking me out of school.  They did hint that I might be reinstated if I returned the pots and apologized.  But I didn’t know who to apologize to.  The potter whose work I unearthed had been dead for a thousand years, and I’m confident she never gave much thought to what would happen to her pots a millennium after she made them.  I imagine she was the practical sort, and if I were to ask her whether I should trade her pots for the right to attend more classes or sell them to get money for a house, she would have advised me to take the money and run. 

She and I are alike in many ways.  We were born under the same desert sky and looked up at the same starscape.  We both enjoyed the feel of wet clay between our fingers.  We both experienced the disappointment of discovering a fissure in a pot when the firing temperature fluctuated too much.  Neither of us ever had much interest in living anywhere else. 

We are from different tribes from different continents.  But we are both human, and like all members of our species, we need shelter, food, drink, and companionship to live.  We laugh and cry.  We fail and feel pain and exasperation.  We overcome and experience triumph and joy. 

I don’t know any of the details of her life, but I know she was a potter, and that’s enough.  She could distinguish a beautiful well-made pot from an ugly ill-formed one.  She took pride in her works.  I take pride in mine.  But I also take pride in the three pots of hers I found.  Though I didn’t make them, I’m proud to share membership with her in the potters’ clan of the human tribe.

When I lay me down to sleep, I sometimes look up at my viga ceiling and whisper a silent thanks to her.  Which is not the same as an apology; I don’t think she would want one.  I think she would be amazed that her pots survived and glad that I found them and appreciated her craftsmanship.

The University recently forgave me even though I never asked them to do so.  I was credited with recovering a rare Mogollon pot that had gone missing from their Valle del Rio Museum.  The recovered pot was auctioned off at a fund raiser with the understanding it would revert to the Museum, and my attorney matched the donation so that the University ended up with a hefty new scholarship fund.  The fact that I was the one who had extricated the pot from the Museum to begin with was kept tactfully secret by my attorney and the few other people who knew about it, including one Susannah Inchaustigui who helped me execute the clever scheme that resulted in my coming into possession of the Mogollon pot and the Museum coming into possession of an excellent fake.  And that’s as much as I think I should say about that.

Except that along the way, a second Mogollon pot was stolen from a display case at Bandelier National Park.  I didn’t steal that one.  You see, I’m not really a thief; I don’t break into buildings and steal things.  I’m a treasure hunter.  But treasure hunting, a fun and profitable hobby enjoyed by thousands, was criminalized by the passage of ARPA, the Archaeological Resources Protection Act. 

It’s a ridiculous law, and I have chosen to disregard it.  There are more archaeological resources in the ground than could be excavated in a million years, and only a few of them need protecting.  During the aforementioned summer dig, I spent one afternoon sifting through the sand at Gran Quivera.  I discovered nine perfect arrow heads, sixty-seven broken or chipped arrowheads, and about a thousand pieces of worked flint.  And that was just in a hundred-square-foot area being examined only to the depth of my fingers.  Yet according to ARPA, removing even one of those flint pieces would have been a crime.

A crime I didn’t commit in that case.  I admired the work and then left the arrowheads where I found them.  I could have sold them, but it’s hardly worth the effort.   Nine arrowheads at the going price back then of two dollars each is eighteen dollars for four hours work – not even minimum wage.

Pots are another matter.  The three I unearthed that summer brought me $25,000.  That was around twenty years ago, so in today’s dollars that would be ... I don’t know.  I don’t even know why we worry about it.  It was $25,000 then and I spent it then, so what difference does it make what it would be now?

But I digress.  I was explaining that a second Mogollon pot had been stolen and that I didn’t steal it because I’m a treasure hunter, not a thief.  There is another fact that proves I didn’t steal it; namely, that the person who did was murdered, and I’m alive and well.  In addition to recovering the pot from the University, I also recovered the pot from Bandelier and solved the murder.

I had to; I was a suspect.  Why am I telling you this?  Because an eerily similar thing happened a few months later when I recovered some pots that had been stolen from the San Roque Pueblo.  The person who had them was murdered, I was the prime suspect, and I had to finger the true murderer to save myself. 

I’m a low-key sort of fellow who goes to great lengths to avoid trouble.  I enjoy a calm and contemplative existence.  It was just an incredible and improbably stroke of bad luck that landed me in the middle of two murder cases.  Lightning striking twice.  Or so I thought as I sat there under the veranda of Dos Hermanas sipping my margarita and listening to Martin explain his tribe’s meteorological techniques.  No mechanical wind gauges, no Doppler radar, and no weather satellites, but he gets it right more often than the television weather man.  I should have paid attention when he told me there was going to be one more big snow before summer.  But I wasn’t interested in the weather since I had no way of knowing it would land me once again in the middle of murder.

2

What I was worried about instead was whether to accept the University’s invitation to go the D. H. Lawrence Ranch and give a presentation to a group of dignitaries they wanted to impress.  I don’t like traveling, and trying to impress dignitaries didn’t interest me, but the generous stipend being offered did.  It had been three months since I had sold a pot.

            “D. H. Lawrence?” asked Susannah.  “As in the painter?”

            “There’s a painter named D. H. Lawrence?”

            “Yeah.  He’s not famous like Georgia O’Keeffe and some of the others who worked here.  In fact, I’d never heard of him until we had a lecture on the painters of New Mexico earlier this semester.  But they included a few of his works in the lecture, so I guess he’s not a total unknown..”

            I was speculating on the odds of  a painter and a writer both being named D. H. Lawrence and both working in New Mexico.  I figured they were long.  “You sure he isn’t the writer?”

            “I saw his paintings, Hubie; he’s a painter.”

            “What did they look like?”

            “Not that great to tell the truth.  I could see why he isn’t that famous.”

            “But what did they look like?”

            “All the ones they showed were nudes in suggestive poses.  He used broad brush strokes and sort of curvy renderings like Munch.”

            “Nudes in suggestive poses is just what Lawrence would do.  It’s the same guy; I didn’t know he painted.”

            “I didn’t know he wrote.  Did he write anything I would have heard of?”

            I stared at her.  “Lady Chatterley’s Lover”?

            “I think I’ve heard of that,” she said casually.

            I was about to make a caustic remark about America’s public schools when it came to me that the first court decision overturning the ban on books like Lady Chatterley's Lover, Tropic of Cancer, and Fanny Hill was not only before Susannah was born, it was slightly before I was born.

            So I told her about that case and the Supreme Court’s later extension of free speech to cover sexually explicit literature, and she asked me if I had ever read any of those books, and I invoked my right against self-incrimination and refused to answer.

            “So they named a ranch after him?” she asked.

            “Actually, it was his ranch.  I think he and his wife bought it back in the twenties or thirties.  Lawrence died a long time ago, but his wife lived on the ranch for many years.  I think she willed it to the University when she died.”

            “It must be swanky if they use it to entertain dignitaries.”

            “I don’t know; I’ve never been there.  But now I have the chance, and I don’t know whether to take it.”

            “It sounds like fun to me, Hubie.  Probably a lot of good food and drink, beautiful scenery...where is the ranch?”

            “Somewhere around Taos.”

            “As I said, beautiful scenery.  And you said they’re offering to pay you.”

            “Handsomely.  But they want me do something involving pots, and I’m not sure how that would entertain dignitaries.”

            “Everybody likes hearing about the Anasazi, Hubie.  Just take some of your old pots up there and do a show and tell.”

            “I don’t like taking pots out of my shop because they might get broken.”

            She shrugged.  “Then just take some of your fakes.”

            “Maybe,” I replied and turned to Martin.  “Maybe your uncle could come with me.”

            “He doesn’t like white people.”

            “He likes me,” I ventured.

            “No he doesn’t.”

            “What if I offered to pay him?”

            “Cash or beads?”

            “Cash.  Like I said, it’s a big stipend, so I’d be in a sharing mood.”

            “What would he have to do?”

            “Maybe talk about the traditional designs on his pots?”

            “He’s not much of a talker.”

            “I’ve noticed.  Maybe he could just dress up in a feathered headdress and look fierce.”

            “I look fiercer than he does; maybe I could do it.”

            “You don’t know anything about pots.”

            “True, but the dignitaries wouldn’t know that.”

            Martin does look fierce if you don’t know him.  He weighs about 170, all of it muscle, and he has a wide face with a strong chin and dark penetrating eyes.  He’s actually a pussy cat, but the impassive expression he wears masks it as effectively as would a full application of war paint.

            Susannah asked him why he hadn’t learned about pots growing up around his uncle.

            “My mother said it’s better to work with your mind than your hands.”

            “Mine, too,” said Susannah.  “That’s why I’ve been in college so long.”

            Susannah waits tables at La Placita in Old Town and takes evening classes several nights a week at the University.  There was a time when she was a full-time day student, but she began to feel guilty about taking her parent’s money and not making progress towards a degree, so she took up waitressing and switched to night classes.  She’s majored in pre-vet, pre-dental, and pre-law.  When she ran out of pre- majors, she did sociology, psychology, and maybe a few others I’ve forgotten.  I hope English wasn’t one of them; even at public universities the English majors should have heard of D. H. Lawrence.  Right now she’s in art history.

            “You told me you’re in college to meet a man,” I reminded her.

            “That’s working with your mind,” she said.

            Martin and I glanced at each other.

            “Don’t go there,” she warned, and we didn’t.

            “Can we get back to whether I should accept the offer to do something at the Ranch?”

            “Can we assume these dignitaries are rich?” asked Susannah.

            “Since the event is being sponsored by the fund-raising office, I think that’s a safe assumption.”

            “Maybe you could auction off a pot to them.”

            Martin and I just stared at her.

            “Well?” she said defensively.  “It’s not such a dumb idea.  Rich people like to buy expensive and exotic things.  You should hear some of the stories we hear in class about art collectors.  You never see an Anasazi pot offered as a blue-light special, so why not give them the idea they’re getting the chance to buy something that no ordinary working stiff can even see, much less buy?”

            Martin thought it would look classless if I turned my invited presentation into a live version of the Shopping Channel.  I agreed, but I didn’t think it mattered whether Martin and I thought it was classless.  What mattered was what the dignitaries thought, and the more I considered it, the more I began to think Susannah might be right.

            “You’re forgetting one small detail,” said Martin.  “Selling old pots is no longer legal.”

            “They probably wouldn’t know that,” said Susannah, “and even if they did, they probably wouldn’t care.  In fact, it might make having the pot even more desirable.”

            “Huh?” said Martin.

            “She’s right,” I said.  “Some rich collectors specialize in stolen art because it’s even rarer than regular art.”

            “White people are weird,” said Martin.  I didn’t argue the point.

            “About ten years ago,” said Susannah, “thieves broke into the Gardner Museum in Boston and stole paintings worth three hundred million dollars.  Not one of those paintings was ever recovered, and the thieves never sought a ransom, so you have to assume they’re in someone’s private collection.”

            “Three hundred million!” said Martin.  “That’s a lot of wampum.  Didn’t they have guards?”

            “It was a guard that let them in.”

            “Oh, an inside job.”

            “No,” said Susannah, laughing, “the guard wasn’t in on it.  He admitted later that he was frequently stoned on the job.”  She shook her head.  “They took paintings by Degas, Manet, Vermeer, and Rembrandt.  In fact, the Rembrandt was the only landscape he ever did.”

            I sat there wondering if the Archaeological Resources Protection Act covered  a three-hundred-year-old Rembrandt landscape.  Probably not.

3

Susannah drove to class and Martin walked back to his pueblo.  He enjoys walking even more than I do, so I didn’t even offer to drive him.  I pulled my windbreaker up over my head to keep dry and went home.

            Almost.  I stopped about twenty feet short of my door, looked around to be certain no one was watching, lowered the windbreaker, and stared up into the rain.  I couldn’t see anything because I blinked every time a raindrop hit my eye.  But I kept at it and eventually overcame the blink reaction by telling myself it was no different from getting water in your eyes when you go swimming.  Which makes sense except for the fact that I don’t know how to swim.  But even with my eyes wide open, I could scarcely pick out individual drops, much less tell what size they were.

            Then it stopped raining.  I looked at my watch.  It was fifty-five minutes after Martin had said the rain would stop in an hour.  I wondered if I could learn to do that.  Then I wondered whether it was a skill I really wanted.  Then I wondered why I was standing outside, cold and wet.

            I stepped inside and turned to close the door only to see Miss Gladys Claiborne’s fringed yellow umbrella coming down the street, presumably with Miss Gladys underneath it.  She is, I believe, the only person in Albuquerque who owns an umbrella. 

            “Mr. Claiborne always used to talk about people who didn’t come in out of the rain,” she said, laughing, “but until I saw you tonight, I thought that was just an expression.”

            “It is an expression, Miss Gladys, and I believe the proper phrasing is ‘people who don’t have sense enough to come in out of the rain’.”

            She blushed.  “I didn’t want to say that because it didn’t sound polite.  Besides, I know for a fact that you are a sensible young man.  Now, you go change out of those wet clothes and come back in here and have some of this beef consommé.”

            I own the east third of my building where I sell genuine Indian pottery and some fakes I make.  I also rent, with an option to buy, the middle third where I display and sell replicas of Native American pottery.  What, you may be wondering, is the difference between a fake and a replica?  Simple – a replica is a fake the customer knows is a fake.

            Before I took it over, the middle third used to house a gelato parlor, but it came onto the market when its proprietor went to prison for murder.  He had dumped his victim in my shop in an attempt to frame me, so I didn’t feel too bad about proving he had done it.  I don’t want to give you the wrong impression about Old Town; it’s actually a safe and pleasant neighborhood.  Hundreds of thousands of tourists enjoy visiting there every year, and the only crime they are subjected to is the prices in some of the shops.

            Miss Gladys bears the titles of Episcopal Stalwart, Casserole Queen, and eponymous proprietor of  ­Miss Gladys’s Gift Shop which occupies the final third of the building.  I don’t think she depends on the income from her shop; how much money can you make in New Mexico selling things like antimacassars?  Her tubercular husband moved them to Albuquerque from east Texas many years ago and left her well off when he died.

            Two things seem to be higher on her priority list than making money.  One is keeping me well fed, and the other is getting me married.  In my darker moments I fantasize about buying her out and owning the entire building, but I always feel guilty about that scheme.  And don’t have enough money to do it.

            I’m an only child born late to my parents, a father who was a professor and a mother whose goal in life was to bring gentility to what she considered a rough territory, not an entirely inappropriate characterization when you consider that New Mexico had been a state for only twenty-five years when she moved here as a twenty-year-old bride.  Her efforts left no time for cooking and cleaning, so when I was born to her in her early forties, my father hired a cook/maid.  Consuela Saenz raised me on Mexican food and later taught me to cook it.  Her efforts molded my palate to chiles, cilantro, cumin, and lime, and I’ve never developed a taste for other flavors.

            Miss Gladys’ cooking normally involves the use of prepared food as ingredients; Campbell’s soup and processed cheeses are her staples.  But the beef consommé was delicious and I told her so.

            “It’s the fresh juniper berries,” she confided.  “Mr. Claiborne always liked my beef consommé, but after we moved out here and were able to get fresh juniper berries, he wanted it three times a day.  I think maybe it soothed the ravages of his disease.”

            I didn’t doubt it.  Juniper is one of the commonest plants in New Mexico and Native Americans used its dark blue berries not only as a spice, but as a basic food and also as a medicine for respiratory diseases. 

            I had three bowls of it.

            “Miss Gladys,” I said between spoonfuls, “what do you know about D. H. Lawrence?”

            She blushed again.  “My heavens, I barely know what to say.  His books were banned by our board of education in Texas.”

            “Did you ever read anything by him?”

            She stared down at her shoes.  “I don’t believe that’s a proper question to ask a lady.”

            I continued to consume the consommé without comment.

            “There was a copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover at the public library,” she finally said, looking down at the floor.  “The library was run by a Yankee lady who simply would not countenance censorship.  People in town considered her a free thinker, but I have to admit that I liked her independent spirit.”

            She looked up, but when my light brown eyes met her sparkling blue ones, she glanced back down.  “I tried to read the thing,” she said hesitatingly.  “I hope you won’t think ill of me.  I was curious.”

            “And what did you think of it,” I asked.

            “I didn’t get very far.  I couldn’t understand a word of it.  I suppose I was too simple to understand why it was so nasty.”

            She took a deep breath as if a weight had been lifted.  I finished the soup and placed the spoon in the bowl.

            “When I was a boy,” I said to her, “I found a copy of that book at Duran’s Central Café.  I hid behind the bookrack and read the pages that were dog-eared.  I was hoping for something prurient, but I didn’t understand it either.”

            “It must have been some café to sell books like that.”

            “It wasn’t just a café; it was also a pharmacy.  Still is, but the Duran who runs it now isn’t related to the one who ran it when I was growing up.  Maybe the new guy bought it because he wouldn’t have to change the sign.  Anyway, it used to have one of those lazy-Susan bookracks.  But I didn’t go there to read; I went there to eat.  I’d sit at the lunch counter on one of those pedestal seats and eat their chile cheeseburgers smothered with homemade green sauce.”

            I drifted in my reverie for a moment and then looked up at Miss Gladys.  “Their red and green sauces were wonderful, but I’d wager they never made anything as good as this consommé.”

            She looked at me with a twinkle in her eyes.  “Would you care for some cobbler for dessert, Mr. Schuze?”