The Pot Thief Who Studied Edward Abbey

by Orenduff, J. Michael;

  Shortly thereafter, Junior decided that her true soul mate was the actor Dana Andrews, who died on the same day as Rhino.

  This epiphany came to her when she saw Strange Lady in Town, a film about a woman doctor from Boston who comes to New Mexico in 1880 to introduce modern medicine. The local doc, played by Andrews, doesn’t think women can be doctors and makes fun of her newfangled device, the stethoscope. But she eventually wins him over, and he even teaches her to ride a horse, telling her as she struggles to “sit up straight and try not to look like a sack of potatoes.”

  It was this line that brought Beatrice out of her combination of mourning and postpartum depression and made her fall in love with Dana Andrews.

  Tristan was probably seven years old before he finally came to understand that Dana Andrews, whose movie posters papered the walls of his home, was not his father.

  Despite this unorthodox upbringing, he is a remarkably stable young man.

  I found him in his kitchen with the guts of a computer strewn across the table. I knew it was a computer because it had a keyboard.

  Sort of.

  Diodes, LEDs, resistors, capacitors, circuit boards, chips.

  I have no idea what any of those things are, but I’ve heard him use the words, and I imagine most of the things on the table were also on that list.

  “Reverse-engineering an old PET,” he answered to my unspoken question.

  “I’ve heard of pet rocks, but I never knew people thought of computers as pets. Is that one you had as a toddler?”

  He gave the polite chuckle he humors me with. “PET stands for personal electronic transactor. It was made by a company called Commodore and was the first personal computer. Probably about when you were a student at UNM.”

  “Why would you want to reverse-engineer a computer that old?”

  “I found some old game programs that ran on the PET’s eight-bit system. I’d like to see them in action.” He looked up at me. “Sort of like the way you enjoy outdated music.”

  “Frank Sinatra and Count Basie are not outdated. They are classic.”

  “So is this thing. But I can’t use that Chiclets keyboard, so I’m creating an interface for … but you didn’t come here to talk about computers.”

  “No. I came for some advice about sexual harassment.”

  Before I left, he gave me a gadget and showed me how to use it.

  I asked if he needed money. He said he was okay, so I gave him fifty dollars.

  16

  The window in the studio door was covered the next afternoon, so I didn’t know if Mia had shown up until I stepped inside and saw her standing there in shorts and a halter top that was not doing much to halt anything.

  “I took some of the sketching paper and covered the window so no one can see us,” she said. “It wouldn’t bother me. I might even get turned on if I knew someone was watching us, but you’re sort of a fuddy-duddy, so I figured you’d want the window covered.”

  Any doubt I had about what she had in mind for extra credit vanished.

  “You might be surprised by what I want,” I said.

  “Something kinky?” she asked.

  “Something you’ve probably never done before,” I said.

  “Oooh. What is it?”

  “You said you would do anything, right?”

  “Anything,” she said slowly, grinning.

  “Okay. Here’s what I want you to do.” I handed her a tub of clay and an armature for a simple olla. “I want you to roll this clay into sheets and spread it over this armature. If it doesn’t come out right, I want you to wet the clay and try again. I want you to stay at it all afternoon, over and over, until you get it right.”

  Her lower lip was quivering.

  “I know you can do this,” I said, and walked to the door. “Good idea covering the window. That way you won’t be distracted by anyone.”

  I’d told Sharice about it, of course. But reporting it to anyone at the university seemed petty. Why get the girl in trouble? I was saddened by Mia’s offer of a sexual favor in return for a passing grade, but I wasn’t harmed by it.

  So far. But I had a hunch I could be. That’s why I had sought Tristan’s help. Which turned out to be one of the few good decisions I made during what turned into a hectic semester.

  17

  Another midlevel bureaucrat was waiting outside my closet/office before class the next afternoon to inform me that a student had filed a complaint charging me with sexual harassment.

  Unlike the EEO complaint filed by Aleesha, I accepted my copy and signed for it. As I feared, the complaint had been lodged by Mia.

  I was standing there wondering what else could go wrong when I saw six of my students coming toward me. The four missing ones were Alfred, Aleesha, Mia and Ximena.

  “Am I late for class?” I asked.

  Carly said, “We’re not having class, remember? This is the day we’re going to the gallery to see the body-cast thing.”

  I perked up. “Right. Okay, lead the way.”

  They were so enthusiastic. It felt good following them down the hall. Seeing such an unusual art event would take my mind off complaints about equal education opportunity, sexual harassment, unauthorized field trips and the deficit in the ceramics budget.

  As you already know, things did not get better.

  The crowd in the gallery was large. We stood in a circle around the model as we watched the artist remove the plaster cast in two large halves like a clamshell. I use the word artist only because that’s how Junior Prather was billed on the printed program they handed out.

  I knew one of his classes was canceled because no one signed up for it. I knew he thought we should force students to buy supplies they didn’t need. I knew he had a strange definition of not talking to me. But artists are frequently strange.

  Everyone knows Van Gogh cut off his ear. But that act of self-mutilation pales in comparison to the Russian artist Petr Pavlensky, who nailed his scrotum to the cobblestones in Moscow’s Red Square.

  Sorry, guys. I know the sickening queasiness just hearing that causes in the pit of your stomach. But Petr said it was art.

  Another artist, Tehching Hsieh, punched a time clock every hour on the hour for an entire year. I guess the idea was to illustrate ennui.

  Jana Sterbak creates sculptures made of meat.

  Francis Alÿs enlisted the help of five hundred volunteers with shovels to move a sand dune ten centimeters to the left. In response to people who asked the obvious question—why?—he said, “Sometimes making something leads to nothing, sometimes making nothing leads to something.”

  Who can argue with that?

  In comparison to these nutty activities, covering a person in alginate, gauze and plaster seems as normal as painting a bowl of fruit.

  I chose to stand behind the model to avoid seeing frontal nudity in the company of my students. So call me old-fashioned.

  I had a good hunch why Aleesha and Mia were not in the group of students who walked me to the gallery.

  When we arrived at the gallery, I discovered why Alfred was not with my other students. He was assisting Junior Prather.

  After the cast was removed and the model fell backward with a thump, I could see her face. And that was when I realized why Ximena was the fourth student missing from the class.

  It was also when I realized calling 911 was pointless. Ximena’s failure to move was not from her remaining in the same position for hours. It was from rigor mortis.

  I remember screams, gasps, shouted orders, running, crying.

  I don’t remember sitting down, but I must have done so because I was on the floor with my back against a wall. Or maybe I fell down and then righted myself against the wall. Carly was holding my hand and crying. Alfred was dabbing his eyes with a handkerchief. Nathan looked catatonic. Bruce and Mar
lon were standing guard over Ximena’s body, which had been covered with a canvas from the supply room. Apache was whispering to a student I didn’t know. Raúl was staring at the ceiling. I looked up there and saw a security camera. I wondered what the tape would reveal.

  Then I wondered if it was a tape. Probably not.

  I closed my eyes and thought about Sharice. Because of her, I’m reluctantly weaning myself from red meat. I’m haltingly learning French. I’m trying to enjoy opera. The title of an aria from Smetana’s The Bartered Bride came to mind—“How dark the day that dawned so bright.”

  18

  The police officers took down the names of everyone in the gallery. They herded us into a classroom and told us we were not to talk among ourselves about what we had seen. We could leave the room only to use the restroom and only one at a time.

  It was over two hours before a policeman called my name and led me to a room, where one of the detectives was questioning the witnesses.

  The detective was Whit Fletcher. He should have been more surprised to see me than I was to see him. After all, he’s a homicide detective. There are only nine of them in the Albuquerque Police Department, so my chances of drawing him were better than 1 in 10.

  But there are half a million people in the city, so the chance of him drawing me was a lot slimmer.

  He wasn’t as surprised as the odds would dictate. “I mighta known you’d be here. What is it about you and dead bodies?”

  I shrugged. “Bad luck.”

  “Nobody has that much bad luck.”

  “Oh yeah? A park ranger named Roy Sullivan was hit by lightning seven times. And he was attacked by a bear twenty-three times. One of the bear attacks happened right after he was hit by lightning.”

  “Where do you get this stuff?”

  “I read a lot.”

  Whit and I have known each other for almost as long as I’ve been in the pottery trade. He doesn’t care about my digging up pots.

  “So why were you here?” he asked.

  “I’m teaching a class this semester.”

  He gave me a crooked smile. “Teaching them how to steal pots?”

  “Teaching them how to make them.”

  “They must be hard up for teachers. Weren’t you kicked outta this place?”

  “That was a long time ago.”

  “So you brought your class to see how to cover a naked girl with clay?”

  “It was plaster of Paris, not clay.”

  “Same difference. So you and your students were just spectators?”

  My mind flashed back to the image of Ximena on the gallery floor. I took a deep breath. “My class had ten students. Six of them were spectators. Two were absent. One was helping the artist. The other one is the dead girl.”

  “I’m sorry, Hubert. You know her well?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know any of them well. She was the one I probably knew least well.” I thought about her. “She seemed shy and sensitive.” Then I thought about Whit being a homicide detective. “You think she was murdered?”

  “Don’t know. The FDMI said he couldn’t tell by looking, but the OMI will figure it out.”

  “FDMI?”

  “Field deputy medical investigator. Every county in the state has at least one. They investigate any death that’s sudden, violent, untimely, unexpected, or where there’s no known cause of death. After the FDMI finishes his work, the body is transported to the OMI—Office of the Medical Investigator—right here at the med school, where they determine the cause and manner of death.” He was silent for a moment. “One of the other homicides you were involved with was a guy who died of a poison you were using to paint your pots.”

  “I wasn’t involved with that homicide. I just happened to be making plates for the restaurant where the dead guy worked.”

  “The body was found in your vehicle.”

  “I didn’t put it there.”

  “Just more of that bad luck?”

  “Exactly. And I don’t paint pots. I glaze them.”

  “Kinda like that homicide at the restaurant glazed you without involving you.”

  I resisted the temptation to comment.

  “You know anything about the plaster they covered that girl with?”

  “Looked like ordinary plaster.”

  “Could there have been chemicals in it?”

  “Anything is possible.”

  19

  A dentist’s worst nightmare is having a patient die in the chair.”

  “That actually happens?” I asked. Now I had yet another thing to obsess about.

  “Infrequently,” Sharice answered. “Only about one in every half million people who have general anesthesia in a dentist’s office die from it. But the odds of one of your students dying must be even higher.”

  I had come home late because of the investigation. After telling Sharice about Ximena’s death, she was consoling me.

  I shook my head slowly. “I still can’t believe it.”

  She held my hand a bit tighter. “Ximena’s death hit you hard.”

  “It did. My parents always kissed and said goodbye even if it was just my dad going to teach or my mom going to her bridge game. They said it was in case anything happened. Eventually, it did.”

  “But at least he got to say goodbye.”

  “Yes.”

  The desert air was dry, but my eyes were keeping themselves moisturized. A bit of the excess lubricant trickled down my cheek.

  “It’s a silly comparison, of course. I hardly knew Ximena. But that somehow makes it worse. I should have talked to her. Maybe gently pressed her to tell me about herself. Shouldn’t a teacher make an effort to know his students?”

  “They’re not children, Hubie. They’re college students. They ask questions if they’re unsure or confused. Since she never asked you anything, that means she was comfortable in your class. You should feel happy about that.”

  “I remember her hugging Carly when I unthinkingly asked about her husband. I remember her hugging Martin when he gave her that shard. She smiled at everyone. Even when I told her she was in the wrong restroom, she smiled.”

  “What happens next?”

  “I don’t know. I’m dreading the next class. We should have some sort of …”

  “Memorial?”

  “Yeah. But I don’t know what to say.”

  “Maybe you should just ask any of the students who feel so inclined to say something about Ximena.”

  “That sounds right.”

  20

  I saw him in an old movie where he played Sam Spade.” I said. “The original movie with Bogart was classic noir, but the remake with George Segal was a comedy. I knew he played the banjo, but I didn’t know he’s also an artist.”

  “He isn’t,” Susannah said. “The artist is a different guy with the same name.”

  She had just told me that George Segal was the first artist to wrap people with gauze and plaster. It was the day after Ximena’s death. I was willing to lay part of the blame on the idiot who first came up with the idea of wrapping people in plaster.

  I sipped my margarita and said, “I guess it didn’t occur to him that there might be a reason why no artists had done that in the fifty thousand years since the first cave paintings.”

  “That just shows his genius,” she said. “Rodin was almost run out of Paris because his statues were so lifelike that people thought he was doing what is called ‘casting from life.’”

  “Which is what Prather was doing, right?”

  “Exactly. But the tradition is for artists to create statues by carving. They might ultimately use casting if the statue was to be in bronze, because you can’t carve bronze. But they had to be great artists to carve a likeness of someone in wax.”

  “Why wax?”

  “Be
cause it melts. After they finish the figure, they encase it with plaster. After the plaster is dry, they pour in molten metal. The wax melts and runs out the bottom, replaced by the metal. Then you remove the plaster and walla.”

  “That’s pronounced vwä-’lä.”

  “Learning French is making you stuffy.”

  “Sorry. So Segal wasn’t a good carver and resorted to cheating by just making molds from real life?”

  “They weren’t technically molds because he never filled them with anything.”

  “His art was just the gauze and plaster?”

  “Yes, but he manipulated it. He would smooth it out, add more plaster afterward, paint it, things like that.”

  “And he became rich and famous for this?”

  “He did. He was given a Lifetime Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award by the International Sculpture Center. We saw a documentary film about him in my class on controversial art.”

  “So casting from life is still controversial?”

  She shook her head. “What was controversial was a casting he did of two lesbians on a bench.”

  “Were they doing something lewd?”

  “No. One has her hand resting lightly on the top of the other’s thigh, but the pose could just as easily be two heterosexual friends. You only realize they’re lesbians when you see the other statue nearby with two guys holding hands. Or if you read the plaque that identifies the work as the Gay Liberation Monument.”

  “So Segal was gay?”

  “No. He was married to Helen Segal for over fifty years. She was frequently his model.”

  “I can understand a wife being willing to have her husband cover her in plaster—”

  “Or whipped cream,” she said, and laughed.

  “Exactly. I mean, they’re a couple. So anything goes. But why would Ximena let Prather do that to her?”

  “Maybe they were a couple.”

  “That’s a disgusting thought. He’s a wrinkly old guy with a scraggly beard, and she was a shy young woman.”

  “There are lots of couples you would never expect to be together.”