The Pot Thief Who Studied Pythagoras

by J. Michael Orenduff

  An idea was forming in my brain, and I left it alone to crystallize while I prepared a lunch of a grilled chicken paillard smothered in a sauce of roasted ancho chiles, garlic, and cilantro. It was almost as delicious as the cold Cabaña that washed it down. When I discovered after lunch that my idea needed more incubation, I closed the shop, retreated to my patio, and took a nap in my hammock.

  43

  Miss Flossie Martin, the Latin teacher at Albuquerque High School taught us that Caesar said, “Omnia Gallia in tres partes divisa est.” We used to joke that she had heard him say it.

  He could have said the same thing about New Mexico. The plains east of the mountains are culturally and geographically akin to Texas. The rest of the state has an Hispanic culture and a western landscape.

  The third part is Los Alamos. I don’t know where it fits.

  Los Alamos sprang into existence overnight when Robert Oppenheimer chose it as the research site for the Manhattan Project. Oppenheimer was familiar with the site because he had gone to summer camp in the area as a youngster. The camp must have been a disappointment to him since he later turned the place into our first nuclear dump.

  Los Alamos is about as New Mexican as clam chowder. It’s mostly Anglo, mostly rich, and mostly well educated. Over eighty percent of the adults are college educated and about a third have graduate degrees, mostly science or engineering. It’s the only place I know of where you can still buy pocket protectors.

  People in Los Alamos who don’t work at the National Labs either serve the people who do or work at nearby Bandelier National Park. Hugo Berdal was in that second group, and he had occupied a studio apartment at Mesa View Apartments.

  The manager had skin like a camel and shiny yellow hair greased into an Elvis-style pompadour. He was enveloped in a haze of tobacco smoke and wheezed when he talked. His apartment was clean and neat, but the furniture had evidently been purchased with the goal in mind of having no two pieces in the same style. He was a friendly fellow who laughed at the end of each sentence, and he took a key from a set of hooks and said he would be glad to show me the vacancy.

  “The guy who had the apartment before passed away, so it’s still full of his stuff. Hope you’re not superstitious,” he said and gave a hearty laugh that led to a coughing spasm. Then he lit another cigarette.

  I propped open the front door to get some air. Despite the name of the apartment complex, there was no view of a mesa. Then I went to the back door and opened it. I couldn’t see a mesa from that side either, although I did spend a little more time at that door doing something the manager didn’t notice.

  It was a thoroughly depressing place.

  As a prospective tenant, I figured I had the right to check out the closet space. There were only a few clothes, including two uniforms. I wanted to look in the chest of drawers, but that seemed a little pushy. On one side of the room a recliner listed slightly to starboard, and on the other was an unmade bed and a side table with burn marks and a few girlie magazines.

  Two expired license plates were mounted on the wall. Next to them was a picture of a young man leaning against a pickup truck and wearing an uncertain smile and a red sweatshirt with “Badgers” in large white letters. He looked vaguely familiar.

  I stared at the photo for a few minutes, but he didn’t become any more familiar. He didn’t look any less uncertain either. From the description Whit Fletcher had given me, I was pretty certain I was looking at Hugo Berdal about ten or fifteen years ago. I wanted to ask him what he had done with the pot, but he wouldn’t have told me. It didn’t matter; I thought I knew where it was.

  44

  “You went without me, Hubie?”

  “I didn’t want you to miss your pay from the lunch shift; you’re buying the drinks tonight.”

  “It’s my turn?”

  “It is. On top of that, I only need you for the second trip.”

  Susannah’s eyes grew larger, quite a feat when you consider how large they are to begin with. “What do you need me to do?”

  “I need you to be my lookout.”

  “You’re going to break into Berdal’s apartment again?”

  “It won’t be ‘again’; I keep telling you I’m not a burglar.”

  “Yeah, and you’re not a renter either. You may not be a burglar, Hubie, but you do manage to get into places you aren’t supposed to be in.”

  “I suppose you’re right,” I admitted, “but I don’t need to break in because I can just open the back door and walk in.”

  “How can you do that?”

  “When I was there earlier I shoved a hunk of clay into the cavity in the rear door jam where the bolt goes in. If my guess is right, the bolt is probably sticking into the hole no more than an eighth of an inch, and even a non-burglar like me should be able to pry it back.”

  “Why didn’t you put in enough clay to stop the bolt altogether? That way you wouldn’t have to pry anything.”

  “Because I didn’t want to leave the door flapping in the wind. The manager could spot that even through his cloud of cigarette smoke.”

  “So why are we going back?”

  “I think I figured out where the pot is from something I saw when I was there today, but I need more information.”

  I told her what I had seen, what it led me to surmise, and what I wanted her to do.

  “This is even more exciting than the museum caper because we’ll actually be working together.”

  “Caper?”

  “Don’t spoil this for me, Hubie. Where’s the fun of being criminals if we can’t talk like they do in those gangsters movies on late night television?”

  “O.K. Just remember if anyone comes along while I’m trying to find the pot, you have to pretend to be my moll.”

  Angie came by to see if we needed a refill, and of course we did.

  “I’ve never even been to Los Alamos, Hubie.”

  “That’s not surprising. It’s not on the way to anywhere, and there’s not any reason to go there… except there might be for you; the place has a lot more men than women.”

  “I’m not in the market right now.”

  “You probably wouldn’t like them anyway. Tristan says—let me see if I can remember this—Los Alamos is full of guys who, when the waiter says to them ‘I’ll be your server,’ think it’s funny to reply ‘I’ll be your client’.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Me either. Tristan said it’s a joke; I thought you might understand it.”

  “Is that some kind of an insult because I’m a waitress, Hubert?”

  “No. It’s just that Tristan said it has something to do with computers. You’re younger than I am and you grew up with computers.”

  “I grew up on a ranch near Willard. There wasn’t a computer in the county so far as I know. What do all these geeks do?”

  “They work at Los Alamos National Labs.”

  “Doing what?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it’s classified. They used to make atomic bombs, but I don’t think they do that anymore.”

  “Geez, that’s scary, Hubie. We aren’t going to glow in the dark when we get back, are we?”

  “I’ve never heard of any problems in the town itself, but there are some off limits sites that are pretty dangerous. Back when they were building the first atomic bomb, no one knew exactly how much enriched uranium it would take to make a bomb, so they ran a lot of experiments to determine critical mass.”

  “Critical mass? That sounds like when the priest uses the homily to complain about sinners in the Church.”

  “It’s a term from physics. I don’t understand the details, but apparently if you get enough radioactive material in one spot, the atoms start splitting apart and a chain reaction begins, and that’s what we call an atomic explosion. So making an atomic bomb was just a matter of having two pieces of radioactive material that were below critical mass and then jamming them together somehow. So they ran these experiments called ‘tickling the tail of the
dragon.’ They would pile up a stack of uranium ingots and then they would slowly slide another piece close to it to see if it started to go critical.” I eased my margarita carefully towards hers to illustrate.

  “Wouldn’t it explode if it went critical?”

  “You would think so, but apparently they could detect the start of a chain reaction using a Geiger counter or something and they would jerk back the little piece of uranium they had added to the pile, and they had to do that before the reaction got to the point of no return. Moving the little piece in and out was the ‘tickling the tail of the dragon’.”

  She shuddered. “They must have been fearless.”

  “I guess they were. Sort of like pioneers. They were young scientists about to unlock the mysteries of the forces that hold atoms together.”

  “Maybe we’d have been better off to leave it a mystery.”

  “Probably. But the human will to learn is inexorable. Someone was going to create atomic fission. I’m just glad we got there ahead of the Nazis.”

  “So what happened to them, Hubie? Were they sorry they let the nuclear genie out of the bottle?”

  “Some of them didn’t live to see it happen. The dragon killed them.”

  “That’s terrible. Did they know that could happen?”

  “Oh, they knew. The first person to die has achieved a sort of macabre fame as the first victim of the atomic age. Ironically, his father was an x-ray technician.”

  “You’re making this up.”

  I shook my head. “The son was named Harry Daghlian. He was some kind of boy genius and had an engineering degree from Purdue, so I expect he knew full well the dangers of radiation.”

  “Daghlian. Could he have been Basque?”

  “I don’t know. It sounds Armenian to me. But he did have something in common with you.”

  “What’s that?”

  “He put himself through college by waiting tables.”

  45

  Martin took the carafe from my coffee maker, walked outside and emptied it on the street

  He came back in with a milk jug full of water and filled the reservoir. I gave him a fresh filter and he added coffee and hit the brew button. In a few minutes we were drinking coffee and he was telling me what he had found out about firstNAtions.

  “It ain’t no nation and it sure as hell ain’t first. The two guys who run it are extortionists. They run a protection racket. Indians set up to sell their wares, and these two show up to collect what they call an ‘all tribes franchise fee’.”

  “Also known as protection money.”

  “Right. Pay the fee and you get protection.”

  “From the guys collecting the fee.”

  “You pretty swift for a pale face.”

  “But we have Indians selling here every day, and I haven’t seen any signs of this scam.”

  “They only do it on federal land. Like at four corners which is a good sales site. The talk is that they have some tie to an official. Maybe they’re paying a bribe for the privilege of running the scam.”

  “Hmm. What tribe are they from?”

  “I don’t think they’re from around here at all. My guess is they’re what I call Professional Indians, probably from the west coast. On the other hand, they may be Sicilian for all I know.”

  “Speaking of the west coast, you remember that skeleton of a white guy they dug up in Washington a few years back?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What do you think about that?”

  “I call him Eric the White.”

  “You think he’s a Viking?”

  “Our oral tradition says we’ve been here a hundred hundred generations, so he might have showed up about the same time we did, but I’d put my money on the Viking theory. I can’t speak for the Indians in Washington.”

  “You believe your oral tradition?”

  “I believe it’s important to honor our traditions and keep them alive.”

  “But do you believe your people have been here a hundred hundred generations?

  “You believe the Garden of Eden was an actual place?” he asked.

  “No.”

  He pointed a finger at me. “Bingo.”

  I took a sip of the coffee. It was good and I told him so.

  “It’s the water. A coffee bean is a coffee bean. Don’t matter if it’s grown by Juan Valdez in the highlands of Columbia or by Bob Marley in the lowlands of Jamaica. The only thing determines the taste is how long you roast it and the water you brew it in. You probably took chemistry in college. Think about the big difference small amounts of a chemical can make in a compound. The water in Albuquerque has pesticides, fertilizers, phosphates, and God knows what else. This water I brought you has nothing but H2 and O. Coffee is just something to flavor water. Good water—good coffee.”

  “So just tell me where the spring is, and I’ll drive up and get a few gallons each month.”

  “You took our land. Now you want our water?”

  “We didn’t take all your land; we left you a little bit.”

  He snapped his fingers. “And to think we never thanked you.”

  “You’re all a bunch of ingrates.”

  “Anyway,” Martin continued, “If I took an outsider to our spring, I’d probably be scalped.”

  “Might be an improvement over the pony tail.”

  He affected his Jay Silverheels voice, “Women with straw hair love pony tail.”

  “The pony tail has nothing to do with it,” I replied. “Women like you because you’re exotic and have the physique of a dwarf Schwarzenegger.”

  “And I make good coffee.”

  “Yeah, there’s that. How’s your uncle?”

  “Happy to have the two thousand.”

  “And I suppose he doesn’t know about the five hundred for the scholarship fund?”

  “No. He doesn’t like kids from the pueblo going off to college.”

  “Afraid they won’t come back?”

  “Even if they do, they aren’t the same person who left.”

  “Same for everybody, Martin. You send young people off to college, and they come back different. Some of them turn into pot thieves.”

  “It’s different with Indians.”

  “You don’t think a Jewish family has the same sort of fear if their son goes off to Notre Dame? Or a Basque family if their daughter goes to BYU?”

  “I don’t know. I just know that a lot of my people don’t like the scholarship fund.”

  “So why do you support it?”

  “Because the white man is not going away. I’m tired of all the reservation doctors and teachers being Anglos. I’m tired of having all our cultural centers designed by white architects and built by white engineers. I think we can get the white man’s knowledge and still save our culture.”

  “Russell Means say the written word is a tool Europeans use to subjugate Indians,” I told him.

  “Yeah, and he wrote it down, so what does that tell you? I don’t give a damn about politics, Native American or otherwise. I just want a better life for my people, and I think we have to figure out how to get the white man’s education and retain our identity.”

  “It seems to be working for the Asians and Hispanics.”

  “True,” he noted, “but they don’t live on reservations.”

  46

  “Hurry up, Hubie; I’m freezing my ass off.”

  “I told you to bring a heavier jacket; we’re at seventy-five hundred feet, Susannah. Of course it’s cold.”

  “Well, I didn’t know we were going to be outside this long; you told me you had jammed the lock.”

  “I did, but the bolt must have slipped further into the clay than I anticipated. I can move the bolt a little bit with this knife, but not quite enough.”

  I had a thin knife blade against the bolt, and I could pry it almost out of the jamb, but every time I thought I had it, it would slip and spring back in. I heard it snap back for about the tenth time.

  “Why don’t
you just pick the lock?”

  “How am I supposed to do that?”

  “I don’t know. Bernie Rhodenbarr can do it.”

  “He’s a fictional character, Suze. Give me some real life advice I can use.”

  “O.K., dammit. Pry the bolt back as far as you can manage.”

  I did so and she stepped back and delivered a karate kick to the door, and I’ll be damned if it didn’t fly open.

  “I finally got it,” I said.

  She gave me a withering look. “Close the door and turn on the heat.”

  “We better not; it might attract attention.”

  I took off my coat and gave it to her while I started going through the drawers.

  She was shining the flashlight on the walls looking at the pictures.

  “Aim it where I’m searching,” I requested in a stage whisper.

  She did and I got a good look at rubber bands, receipts, broken pencils, cough drops, business cards, an empty Scotch Tape dispenser, utility bills, paper clips, buttons, a broken nail clipper, loose matches, and a condom.

  “God, there’s no wrapper on that. Is it used?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said, “it’s still rolled up.”

  “That’s gross. Why would anyone have an unwrapped condom?”

  “Maybe she changed her mind and he was too cheap to throw it away.”

  “Oh, yuk.”

  “Let’s try the kitchen.”

  We turned towards the sound of the dripping sink when I suddenly flashed back on something I had just seen.

  “Wait. Shine the light back on the chest of drawers.”

  I had been looking in the drawers, but what I wanted was on top of the chest where the lamp had been used to weight it down. Only an edge was showing. I unfolded it, looked at it, and stuffed it in my pocket.

  “Let’s go,” I whispered, but too softly to be heard over the coughing of the manager.

  He came through the front door and turned on the lights.

  “You want to tell me what you’re doing here?” he demanded.

  “Well,” I said sheepishly, “I was out with my girlfriend and we had a powerful urge to... well, you know, but it’s too cold for the back seat of a car. Then I remembered that this apartment was vacant, so I figured…” I sort of let my voice trail off to make the story seem authentic and also because I had no idea what to say next.