The Pot Thief Who Studied Ptolemy

(Oak Tree Press, January, 2010)

 

Winner, Public Safety Writers, Fiction Book of the Year

 

If you’re looking for a hero, you’ve come to the wrong place.  I lack the iron will and steel nerves the job requires.

I lead a calm contemplative life, pushing pots by day and digging them up by the light of the moon.  I excavated in broad daylight back when it was called treasure hunting.  Then Congress passed the Archaeological Resources Protection Act, turning me into a pot thief and my day job into my night job.

My shop is in Albuquerque’s Old Town where I get about as much human contact as I do out in the dunes.  The price tags on my merchandise have at least four digits to the left of the decimal and cause long dry spells between buyers.  Few opportunities to chat with customers, even fewer to process their master cards.

Technically, I’m a criminal, but I don’t think what I do is wrong.  I have scruples.  I never dig on reservations or private land.  Let the Indians and the landowners do what they please with their patches of earth.  I stick to public land. I figure I’m part of the public, so why shouldn’t I have the right to prospect on our land?

I love being alone under the bright desert stars with only the spirits of ancient potters for company.  I’m a sucker for the lure of buried treasure, the thrill of the hunt, the satisfaction of the find.  It’s hard to describe the pleasure I feel when I find a long-buried pot, overwhelmed by knowing I’m the first person to touch it in a thousand years.  Sometimes I think it might be better than sex.

But how would I know that? I’d been living like a monk.  It’s not easy meeting women when you’re on the wrong side of forty five, only five foot six inches tall, and live in the back of your shop.

I’m not abstemious in other matters.  I enjoy margaritas at Dos Hermanas Tortilleria most every weekday with Susannah Inchaustigui.  Don’t worry about pronouncing her last name – it’s Basque.  Our watering hole is romantic in a rustic way, but it doesn’t help my chastity thing.  Susannah and I are just friends.  But it sure puts an end to my silence.  She’s quite the talker.  Although we discuss anything that comes to mind, the conversation frequently turns to her love life and my illegal adventures, both of which fate delights in contorting.

On this particular evening, the chartreuse emulsion in our glasses had sunk perilously low as I told Susannah about some pots I wanted.  They were not on public land.  They were stashed in Rio Grande Lofts.  With my constitution, just the thought of skulking around a building full of people sets my stomach churning.  Which makes it all the more difficult to understand why I broke in there seven times, got trapped in its basement, and seduced in its elevator.

I jiggled the ice around in my glass hoping to generate another sip and said, “The longer I looked at the place, the more it resembled Fort Knox.”

“What’s Fort Knox look like, Hubie?”

I  shrugged.  “I have no idea.”

“Then how do you know Rio Grande Lofts looks like it?”

“It’s just an expression, Suze, like ‘solid as the Rock of Gibraltar’.”

“I don’t suppose you know what that looks like either, do you?”

She knew I didn’t because I don’t travel.  “I’ve seen pictures of it in insurance ads.”

“But you’ve never seen a picture of Fort Knox?”

“They don’t advertise.  Can we get back to the point I was trying to make?”

“You had a point?”

I turned up my palms in mock exasperation. “I’ve forgotten.”

“Maybe a second round would jog your memory.” She waved to the willowy Angie, who brought us fresh margaritas quicker than you can say Quetzalcoatl.  We lounged under the west veranda enjoying the last warm rays of a dry October evening.  I dipped a chip in the salsa and washed it down with the first swallow of my new drink.  Like Albuquerque in autumn, the salsa and drinks at Dos Hermanas are unfailingly refreshing.

“The point I was trying to make is that getting in to Rio Grande Lofts is going to be difficult.  I don’t think I can do it.”

“I have confidence in you,” she said.  And then she gave me that enigmatic smile, eyes narrowed, only the left side of her lips bowed. “You’ve broken in to better places than that.”

“I’ve never broken in to anything,” I protested.

“You broke in to that apartment in Los Alamos.”

“I didn’t break in. You kicked in the door.”

“You tried to get in by stuffing some of your potting clay in the bolt hole, remember?  But it didn’t work.”

“That’s because I only put the clay in a little ways.”

“You know what the Church says about that, Hubert: Penetration, however slight, constitutes the offense.”

I smirked. “The Church may have lost a little of its moral authority on sexual matters.”

“Good point.” She scrolled an imaginary one in the air. “But there was that house in California.”

“O.K., I committed one break-in.  But I didn’t steal anything.  I’m not a burglar, Suze.”

“So you keep saying.  But you steal old pots.”

“They don’t belong to anyone, so it’s not stealing.”

Here came that smile again.  “What is it?  Finders, keepers?”

“Exactly.”

“No offense, Hubie, but if you dug in my grandmother’s grave to get her wedding ring, I’d consider that stealing.”

“So would I.  But I don’t rob graves.  And the stuff I dig up is a thousand years old.  Surely there should be some statute of limitation.”

“But that stuff belonged to somebody’s ancestors,” she persisted.

“We don’t know that. For all we know, the ancient peoples of this area died out and the current tribes moved in from elsewhere.”

“You don’t know that.”

“True,” I said, warming to my subject, “but here’s what I do know.  All of us – black, brown, red, yellow, and white – are descended from a woman we anthropologists call the African Eve who lived in Africa about two hundred thousand years ago.”

“In the Garden of Eden?”

“I don’t know if it was Eden, but it was where humans first appeared on the scene, an area called the Rift Valley, and every human being alive today is decended from that woman.”

“Come on, that’s just a myth.”

“Maybe she didn’t chomp on an apple, but she’s no myth.  The genetic evidence proves it.  There’s a genetic marker in our mitochondria.”

“I think there’s a vaccine for that now.”

“Joke if you want to, but genetics proves we’re all one family, so I have as much claim to the loot in the ground as anyone else.”

“So at the end of the day, Hubie, you and I are both African Americans?”

“All of us are.”

“I’ll drink to that.”

We clinked our glasses together.

Susannah left for class.  She’s in her late twenties and brings youthful enthusiasm to my occasional illegal capers.  When she’s not drinking margaritas or kicking in doors, she waits tables two blocks from my shop at La Placita during the lunch shift and attends classes three nights a week.  She studies art history but changes majors the way most people change socks.  She may be working her way through the University of New Mexico catalog.

I graduated from UNM with a business degree in the eighties and returned a couple of years later to study anthropology and archaeology.  I unearthed some valuable pots during a summer dig.  They weren’t from the official excavation site.  I figured out a better place to dig and hit pay dirt.

Literally.  I sold the pots to a wealthy collector for more than I earned during my two-year hiatus from school.  I viewed the money as a reward for having a better sense of where to dig than the professors who supervised the project.  Digging up old pots wasn’t illegal back then, but the university didn’t care about legal quibbles.  They expelled me.

“Can I get you another one, Mr. Schuze?”  Angie’s dark eyes peered at me from under those long lashes.  How could I say no?

I sipped a fresh margarita as my mind drifted back to those coveted pots.  I’ve been hooked on digging up old pots ever since that fateful summer, and it isn’t just the money.  It’s the lure of buried treasure, the thrill of the hunt, and the satisfaction of the find.  Sometimes, I think it’s better than sex.

It’s hard to describe the pleasure I feel when I find a long-buried pot, overwhelmed by knowing I’m the first person to touch it in a thousand years.  I feel a strong connection with the potter who made it. I suspect she might be proud it lasted so long.  I even fancy she’s happy I’ve found it.

I use the pronoun ‘she” because anthropologists such as Margaret Ehrenberg have argued convincingly that women invented agriculture and created the first pots to carry the seeds and store the grains. My sense of connection is one potter to another, two fellow humans who walked the same earth and put our hands in the same clay.

Because of the reverence I feel for ancient potters, it pains me somewhat to sell their works.  I always make sure the buyer appreciates the piece.  The best thing I can do for the ancient potter is find a good home for her work.  Of course, if a few thousand dollars find a good home in my pocket, then the pain of parting is sweet sorrow indeed.

Although passage of the Archaeological Resources Protection Act made it illegal to dig up old pots, doing so still carries little risk.  After all, the places one digs for ancient pots are deserted.  The same cannot be said of buildings, especially residential ones.  Well, their basement parking areas are deserted in the middle of the night, but I discovered that only later.

So I should have been worrying.  But the margarita was frosty and the sun warm, and my worries evaporated in the dry desert air.  And why not?  Worrying is a waste of emotional energy.  The things we worry about often never happen, and the things we should fret about we seldom see coming.  So not worrying turned out to be a good thing because if I had let myself worry, it would have been about being arrested for breaking and entering, not for murder.  Which was the thing that happened that I didn’t see coming.