The Pot Thief Who Studied the Woman at Otowi Crossing

by J. Michael Orenduff

  “Why?”

  “Did I never tell you about his weird grandmother and mother?”

  “No.”

  “Well his grandmother was my mother’s sister, which is hard to believe because no two women have ever been more different from one another. My mother was contained and organized. Bea, on the other hand, was a flower child. Maybe it’s just all this talk about my family tree, which is actually more of a bush because it’s so small, but it dawns on me that maybe my aunt Beatrice was one of those babies that got switched in the hospital nursery.”

  “Being a flower child was common for women in her generation. Was she weird in some other way?”

  “She named her daughter after her.”

  “Men do that all the time with their sons. I think it’s cool that she did that with her daughter.”

  “Do you think it’s cool that she called her daughter ‘Junior’?”

  “Hey, if she wanted to co-opt that male naming system, why not go all the way?”

  “Okay, let’s move on to Junior. She eloped with a guitar player named Rhino who was playing a one-night gig in Tucumcari.”

  “Love at first sight is so romantic.”

  “He brought her back to Tucumcari eight months after they left, and they had Tristan exactly one month later.”

  “Her first night away from home must have been something special.”

  “Rhino was so happy about Tristan that he got drunk and died in a one-car crash.”

  “Poor Junior. And poor Tristan.”

  “I have to admit that although Junior’s weird, she did a great job raising Tristan.”

  “Yes, he is a son any mother would be proud of. But how does this relate to Floss Man?”

  I liked Gurney Guy better than Floss Man, but I didn’t tell her that. “It’s possible that Rhino was not Junior’s first rodeo.”

  “So you think Junior had Floss Man before she met Rhino?”

  “Exactly. But just because I managed to take the startling news and remain calm, doesn’t mean I might not begin to freak out.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the news that Floss Man is related to me explains why he looked familiar. But it unexplains somethings else.”

  “Unexplains is not a word.”

  “It should be because this is the perfect time to use it. Whit showed me the paper Floss Man had with my name and the address of my shop on it. The explanation was he was going to my shop to buy a pot. But now that theory has been unexplained. And I don’t much like the new theory.”

  She figured it out quickly. “He was coming to tell you he is a cousin you didn’t know about.”

  “Yeah. And the next question is why he wanted to tell me after all these years.”

  “Maybe he just found out about it himself?”

  “Possibly. And if that was the case, is his murder somehow related?”

  “You don’t know he was murdered.”

  So I repeated the story of the tourist’s video happening to show the dead guy fall over. She suggested he was shot, and I told her why that had been ruled out and the other various theories that had been put forward, including the icicle theory which she laughed at.

  “You going to be alright?”

  “Yeah. I’m hoping the wound was an accident that he didn’t realize was potentially fatal and just didn’t get it tended to properly.”

  But I was thinking a guy that fastidious wouldn’t have left a wound unattended.

  Sharice said, “I think there’s a problem with your theory that Floss Man is Tristan’s half-brother. Tristan looks nothing like you. He has a bigger frame and dark curly hair. None of his features—ears, eyes, nose—look like yours. But Floss Man looked so much like you that the facial recognition popped up photos of you.”

  “Phenotype and genotype,” I replied. “Tristan has genes from both Junior and Rhino, but the Rhino ones ended up dominant. But in her first son—Floss Man—her genes were dominant.”

  “Or Beatrice was in fact switched in the nursery, and the reason Tristan doesn’t look like you is he’s not related to you.”

  I had been joking, of course, but now I realized I might have accidentally hit a hidden truth. One I didn’t like.

  I felt a bit better when Sharice asked if Junior looks like me. I’d never thought about it. I hadn’t seen her in years, and I’d never had reason to examine her looks in comparison to mine.

  “I’ll let you be the judge of whether Junior looks like me. And I’m sure she has a picture of her mother, so you can see whether I look like my aunt Bea,” I said. “How would you like a short vacation in Tucumcari next weekend?”

  “Sounds good. I’ve never been there. But one final question about Floss Man. If he looks so much like you that facial recognition software popped up photos of you, why didn’t you notice the similarity?”

  “I did. Remember I told you he looked familiar?”

  “Familiar is one thing. Looking like a twin brother is another.”

  “Twin brother is too strong. But I thought about it while Charles was here, and I think I know the reason why I missed how strong the resemblance is. Three reasons actually. First, I looked at him for about five seconds. Second, my instruction from Whit was to see if I could ID him, not to see if he looked like me. And third—and most important—people look a lot different when they’re dead. The thing we notice most about people is their countenance, which is not their face. It’s their expression. When I look at you, I see your bright smile and intelligent eyes. When I look at Susannah, I see her naiveté and unbounded enthusiasm. Dead people don’t have expressions. So they don’t look much like themselves. Facial recognition software focuses on your face’s geometry. Humans focus on your countenance.”

  Chapter 14

  The Central New Mexico Correctional Facility is located in Los Lunas. It has a maximum capacity of 666 offenders.

  I did not make up that number, and I can’t help wondering if the designer picked it as a statement of some sort.

  I avoided Interstate 25 by driving south on Broadway. With its junkyards, cement plants, small refinery, welding shops, feedstores and rock piles, it’s hardly the scenic route, but anything beats the high-speed monotony of a freeway. Broadway becomes NM highway 47 and hugs the east bank of the Rio Grande, passing through the Isleta Pueblo, Bosque Farms and Heritage Park where I turned west onto NM 6 and crossed the river into Los Lunas.

  The prison is on the south end of the town nestled up against I-25. The entrance is on Morris Road. Except on this day, I suppose Frederick Blass saw it as the exit.

  He was already a free man, wearing a normal grey suit that looked to be two sizes too large, standing just outside the gate next to a corrections officer, the two of them chatting casually like old friends.

  When Freddie released me from the hug he’d greeted me with, he was crying.

  The corrections officer looked at me and said, “We’re going to miss this man. He did more good inside than any employee ever did.”

  I introduced myself to the officer—his name was Jaime Delatorre—and he asked me for my drivers license. I showed it to him and he handed me a clipboard and asked me to read the paper on it and sign it at the bottom.

  I did as he directed and asked, “Just out of curiosity, why did I have to read and sign that.”

  He smiled and said, “If you didn’t sign, we’d still let Freddie go, but we’d put you in his cell.”

  Good to know that some prison workers still have a sense of humor.

  “Actually, Freddie was free once he passed through that gate. He could have just walked away. But it sort of spooks the locals to see former prisoners strolling through town, so we prefer to have someone meet the discharged person. And we also care about our people, so we want a record of who they left with.”

  Delatorre gave Freddie a bear
hug and watched us drive away.

  As we drove down Morris Street, I asked Freddie where he wanted to go.

  “Frontier,” he said, referring to Albuquerque’s most popular eatery. It was established when I was two years old, so from my point of view, it’s always been there. Directly across the street from UNM, it serves about 4000 meals a day. My parents often ate there with me when I was a kid. It was cheap, good, and only about 600 yards from our house on Dartmouth. When I became a college student, I moved a few blocks into a dorm because my parents thought I should have a ‘true college experience’.

  Or maybe they just wanted me out of the house.

  Packed with noisy students, Frontier was more of a true college experience than the dorm, which was merely a place to sleep.

  I reversed my route to get to Albuquerque. When we reached Bosque Farms, Freddie asked me to pull over. He got out and walked into an apple orchard. Sensing he wanted to be alone, I stayed in the Bronco. It was in the fifties but there was no wind and the sun’s rays flooded through the dry desert air. After a few minutes walking between the trees, Freddie threw his jacket over a low limb, removed his shoes and socks, and began jogging between the trees. After ten minutes he dropped to the ground and rolled around in the yellowed dry grass. Then he stilled and stared up at the trees.

  After a few minutes, I suspected he may have fallen asleep, but he got up, walked back to the Bronco and said, “Home, James.”

  “Where is home?”

  “Good question. A real estate agent sold the condo at Rio Grande Lofts for me, so I am officially homeless. Which sounds good compared to my recent digs.”

  “I guess buying back your place in Rio Grande Lofts is out of the question?”

  “Definitely.” He smiled and added, “You broke into the place several times. I want something more secure.”

  I laughed and asked, ”Where will you stay during your house hunt?”

  “A cheap motel.”

  “I’ve got a better idea. You can stay for free in my little residence at the back of my shop while you look for a place of your own.”

  “As I recall, your place has one bed, and it’s a single.”

  “Yep, probably about like your cell. Except you can come and go as you please.”

  “Where will you sleep?”

  “I live in a condo on Silver.”

  He swiveled to look at me. “One of those glass and steel places?”

  “Yep.”

  “I had you pegged as an adobe guy.”

  “I am. But my girlfriend is not. She owns the condo.”

  The silence that followed was so awkward, it almost tripped on its shoelaces.

  He looked away from me out the passenger window and asked, “Anyone I know?”

  “It’s not Susannah.”

  “Sorry. You told me that when you visited last year. But I remembered the way you two were together. You were lovers and didn’t know it.”

  I didn’t want to ‘go there’ as they say these days, so I said, “Her name is Sharice. She was my dental hygienist. Now she’s my live-in girlfriend. More accurately, I’m her live-in boyfriend since it’s her condo.”

  “You still run Spirits in Clay?”

  “No. I still own it, but an Englishman named Gladwyn Farthing minds the store for me. He also rents the space which I own next to Spirits in Clay. He has a desert outdoor clothing and supply store there and minds both shops.”

  “He doesn’t use the residence in the back of yours?”

  “No. He lives in the third unit of the building, the one on the opposite end from Spirits in Clay.”

  “I thought Miss Gladys owned that one.”

  “She does. She and Gladwyn married last year so he lives in her place.”

  He was silent for a few minutes. “Nothing much changes inside. Same cell, same meals, same guards. And mostly the same fellow inmates since it’s not exactly short-term lodging. And you figure out quickly that keeping up with the outside world only reinforces the reality that you aren’t in it. So you stop thinking of anything except day-to-day routine and whatever habit or hobby you can engage in or invent. Like the birdman of Alcatraz who tamed wild birds that came to the ledge of his cell window.”

  “In your case it was teaching painting.”

  “Best thing I ever did. Like I told you when you visited, some of the students I taught at UNM had talent, but they hadn’t lived enough to put any soul into their work. In prison, I taught guys who had always been losers, always done the wrong thing. And they found out by painting that they could do something creative rather than destructive.”

  “And did you also paint?”

  “I did. If I had eight students, I’d set up nine easels, and we’d all paint. Of course I started them out making copies. I’d make periodic rounds to give them pointers and encouragement. After a while, they started doing the same for me, laughing as they tried to critique my work and happy when I sometimes took their advice.”

  “What artists did you select to copy?”

  “Renoir, Cezanne, Manet, anyone who paints with feeling. The guys wanted to make up their own compositions, but I told them you start by copying. Once you get the hang of it, you can do your own thing.”

  “Harte Hockley told me that when his students ask why he requires them to make precise copies of paintings by artists like Cezanne, he tells them, ‘If you can’t copy, you can’t paint. Copying is how we develop the eye’.”

  “He’s a huge talent. I’ll never be that good a painter. But I also know I can teach it.”

  I had turned right from Broadway onto Central and we were at the western edge of the campus when Freddie said, “We’ll never get a parking space.”

  I turned into the campus and parked in my private space.

  “You can’t park here.” he said, “This spot is reserved.”

  I smiled and said, “You sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure. I parked in this spot for years. It’s reserved for the head of the art department.”

  I pointed to the sticker on my windshield and said, “That would be me.”

  Chapter 15

  I convinced Freddie to hold his barrage of questions until after we ordered and were seated, which at Frontier are two distinct operations.

  He spotted a couple leaving a table and grabbed it while telling me he wanted the Frontier burrito—beef, beans, and green chile inside with green chile stew & cheese on top. I chose the chicken enchiladas. The ordering line moved fast because there were several cashiers taking orders. I was back at the table in under five minutes, but that was long enough for Freddie to have calmed down a bit.

  I don’t like the term ‘bus boy’ and wouldn’t have applied it to the guy cleaning our table even if I did because he looked to be in his seventies. But by whatever title, I admired his speed and dedication. The look on his face said, I am proud to do my job well. He chatted with us as he worked and wished us a good day when he left.

  In addition to feeding thousands of people a day and being a landmark of Albuquerque, this crazy eating establishment in a barn employs scores of semi-skilled workers who might otherwise be forced to be on public assistance. And the cooks, cashiers, table cleaners and all the other workers have the hustle and good cheer of a team.

  I suppose it is possible to eat a Frontier burrito with your hands, but it is not advisable. Freddie cut off a bite with his knife, lifted it to his mouth with his fork, and closed his eyes as he chewed.

  “Better than where you’ve been eating?” I asked. I almost said better than prison food but caught myself in time.

  He was still chewing, so he just nodded. After he swallowed, he said, “The food there wasn’t bad. Just monotonous. So if you’re now the department head, obviously Milton Shorter is back to teaching metals or art therapy or whatever he happens to be into at this point.
How did they finally remove him as department head? He had already set a record as the longest serving interim in history.”

  The question brought home to me full force the degree to which prison yanks people out of the normal world. There were newspapers in the prison library and a television in a rec room, but Freddie never read the former or watched the latter. It made me realize his statement that he didn’t keep up with the outside world while in prison was true. He didn’t even know Shorter was dead.

  “Milton was murdered last month.”

  “Oh my god. How did that happen?”

  So here it goes again, me having to recount the murder of Milton Shorter. Freddie was finally free. But I was still captive. And unlike Freddie when he’d been inside, I had no scheduled release date. I told myself to stop this self-pity, but my self was only paying partial attention to me.

  “He was shot to death in his office as a result of a family dispute.”

  He shook his head slowly. “Unbelievable. So how did you become head? When you visited me, you told me you were an adjunct teaching one course.”

  I sighed. “It’s a long story.”

  He smiled and said, “I learned patience during my long vacation at taxpayer expense.”

  I told him about my students deciding they would each enter a pot in the student/faculty art show. Told him how diligently they’d worked on their projects, and that even though some of their pieces were excellent, they were all rejected.

  “Departmental politics,” he said.

  “Right. So they decided to stage their own show in the hall outside the gallery.”

  “A salon des refusés. Brilliant!”

  “And successful. So much so that Junior Prather went bonkers and attacked me. He was convicted of felony assault and dismissed from the university. So the department was lacking a ceramicist, and Dean Gangji made me a full-time temp. Which made me technically eligible to serve as interim head. The faculty elected me because the only other person who was willing to take the job was Melvin Armstrong.”