“I’m not going to decide that. The artists are going to decide that.”
The second thing she said was directed at Sharice. “You his girlfriend?”
Sharice smiled. “I am.”
“I need to talk to you.”
“No,” said Sharice as the smile disappeared. “I need to talk to you.”
Sharice went out the front door and Aleesha followed.
“You gonna go after them?” asked Marlon.
“No way.”
“Smart man.”
“I’m going to the back. Let me know when the show is mounted.”
I brewed some coffee and sat at my kitchen chair. I wondered what Sharice was saying to Aleesha.
I wondered if I wanted to know.
Since her decision not to undergo any further medical tests, she had demonstrated the sort of resolve that she must have exercised after the mastectomy. She was more sure of herself, more focused. I suspected Aleesha was on the receiving end of a stern lecture.
I picked up Abbey’s The Road Home and eventually came to a passage that read:
Gaunt and ganted, lean and bony deer, how will they ever get through the coming winter? A tough life. Always hard times for deer. The struggle for existence. All their energy goes into survival—and reproduction. The only point of it all—to go on. On and on and on. What else is there? Sometimes I’m appalled by the brutality, the horror of this planetary spawning and scheming and striving and dying. One no longer searches for any ulterior significance in all this; as in the finest music, the meaning is in the music itself, not in anything beyond it. All we have, it seems to me, is the beauty of art and nature and life, and the love which that beauty inspires.
It struck me that Sharice had that same philosophy. She was living in that dank apartment off San Mateo, recovering from chemotherapy and living like a nun because she was saving all her money for reconstructive surgery. Then—as I imagined it—she woke up one morning and said, “The meaning is in the music itself, not in anything beyond it.”
Probably not those words. Maybe no words. Just a decision. She used her savings to buy the condo and change her wardrobe, which is really just a manifestation of a change in attitude. And now she had done it again. She was going to live life on her own terms instead of the dictates of medical fate.
Carly came back to tell me they had all their work on display.
“You like it?” she asked after leading me back to the store.
“Yes. Now I’ll do my part.”
I pulled the tented cards up from below the counter and began to write prices on them. As I do with my own merchandise, I wrote out the numbers instead of using the numerals. Under Carly’s piece I wrote, “Two thousand five hundred.”
Luke looked at it and said, “Wow, Mom.”
It was an unusual piece and well executed. It may not have been worth the price I set, but the sale was for a good cause, and the buyers wouldn’t mind paying a bit more than retail.
After I’d priced all the pieces, Aleesha said, “How come you get to set the prices?”
“Because I own this place and I’m the lead dog in this pack of mongrels.”
“Okay,” she said, and laughed.
The crowd was large. Most were just curious because of the newspaper coverage. Some were buyers, including my best customers. Mariela Kent bought three pieces. Faye Po bought one. Donald and Dotty Edwards bought two. Elaine Chew from the Alumni Office bought one. Dr. Batres bought one. I bought the piece by Mia. It wasn’t pottery per se, but I thought it would look good as part of a plaque that was planned in the art department. We made almost ten thousand dollars. Not bad for a small collection.
Only nine pieces when it should have been ten. Like her life, Ximena’s pottery work was incomplete. I abandoned my plan to stay out of the investigation. I’d met her parents. I’d read her poetry. Things changed. So I changed.
55
The sale ended at four. The students left. Sharice helped me tidy up.
I thought about Abbey as we walked back to the condo. When he was a park ranger in a remote spot in the Canyonlands, a tourist from back east remarked, “The problem out here is there’s not enough water.”
Abbey smiled at him and said, “No, sir. There’s exactly the right amount of water. The problem out here is that there are too many people.”
And that’s when I realized I might have a clue about Ximena’s murder.
Not a real clue like a fingerprint or a smoking gun. What I had was a question that, if pursued, might lead somewhere.
The problem in the art program was not that there were too few students. It was that there were too many teachers. Freddie Blass had been surprised when I told him they hired me as an adjunct. There weren’t enough students to fill up a normal teaching load for Armstrong and Prather.
So why offer ART 2330? Ximena and the other nine students could have been put in the existing courses taught by Armstrong and Prather with room left over. And it’s not as though anyone needed Anasazi Pottery Methods to graduate. The course was new and had never before been offered.
So why was the course offered?
I thought of three possibilities.
First, maybe Shorter was so impressed by the noncredit course I taught in the spring that he wanted to bring me to the campus in the fall for a real course. After all, Olga brought me tamales.
Who was I kidding? Uncredentialed instructors of noncredit courses aren’t offered real courses. It’s like a guy in a slow pitch league being called up by the Dodgers.
Second, maybe Shorter thought Anasazi Pottery Methods needed to be included in the curriculum to demonstrate the department’s commitment to multiculturalism. But hiring a white guy who’s a pot thief to teach it doesn’t fit with that scenario.
There was another explanation. It was the weirdest one. The first two were based on Shorter having a positive reason to offer the course—wanting to reward me or wanting to make the course selection reflect more diversity.
The third possibility was something negative. Maybe he wanted to punish me.
We were almost home when I told Sharice my theory.
She laughed. Actually, I think it may have been a guffaw, but I’m not certain how a guffaw sounds.
“Oh, come on.” she said. “I know you had challenges with the class this semester, but you can’t honestly call it punishment.”
“Think about it. I had a deaf student. What are the odds of that? I had Apache, who thinks I’m insensitive to Indians. Shorter knows the majors. He advises them. Why would he put a student with Apache’s outlook in my class? He must know about Aleesha’s attitude and Nathan’s immaturity. He probably knew Carly was going through a divorce. Even Raúl was a challenge, intimidating me with his intellect. And to top it off, I had Mia the temptress. He filled the class with kooks to get back at me.”
“Get back at you for what?”
“I don’t know.”
She unlocked the door to the condo. “Does the word paranoia seem appropriate?”
“What about being charged with both an EEO and a sexual harassment violation?”
“Shorter didn’t do that.”
“He stuck me with the students who did. He may have put them up to it.”
She just stared at me.
“I know. Paranoia. But what about the unauthorized field trip issue? Why would the safety guy even know about it if Shorter didn’t report it?”
“Better question: How would Shorter know about it?”
That hissing sound you just heard was the air going out of my argument.
“One of my students would have told him.” I sighed. “And I did have Bruce and Marlon, who were more or less normal. And the class had a great ending.”
“Exactly.”
“But don’t you think it’s a strange coincidence that I was kicked out of a
session on deafness and had a deaf girl in my class?”
“It’s also a coincidence that you had a deaf student and Susannah has a deaf brother.”
She was right, of course. Coincidences don’t prove anything.
But still.
56
Jack Wiezga’s studio in the Fine Arts Building looked exactly as it did when I saw it five years earlier, except for the floor.
The old splatters of paint had reminded me of a Jackson Pollock painting. The current ones reminded me of a different Pollock. One with more red drops.
Wiezga spoke with his unlit pipe clinched between his teeth. “I wondered how long it would be before you showed up.”
In fact, a couple of weeks had passed between my wondering if I should talk to him and my doing so. Among my other faults, I’m a procrastinator.
“Is Wiezga the word for ‘wind’ in some eastern European language?”
“It’s a surname. Usually spelled W-y-z-g-a.”
“So how did you get nicknamed ‘The Wind’?”
“Ask Helga Ólafsdóttir. She’s the one gave it to me. But you didn’t come here to ask about my nickname.”
Same old Wiezga. His tone as blunt as his forehead
I asked him if he knew why Milton Shorter scheduled ART 2330.
“The question you want to ask is how did the course get approved.”
I frowned.
“A course can’t be offered until it’s approved. A faculty member proposes it to the departmental curriculum committee. If they approve it, it goes to the department head. If he approves, it goes to the curriculum committee of the College of Arts. If they approve, it goes to the dean of the College of Art. If he approves, it goes to the provost and the faculty senate. Only after they approve it can it be scheduled. That’s the normal procedure.”
“But not in this case?”
“No. ART 2330 was created by Shorter. He sent it directly to the dean. No one in the art department knew about it until it showed up in the fall schedule.”
“Is that why Prather and Armstrong aren’t talking to me?”
“Yes. They objected to the course because it reduced their already anemic class sizes.”
“So why didn’t they teach it?”
“It wasn’t offered to them.”
“I don’t know much about academic politics, but isn’t it unusual for a department head to create a course without faculty input?”
“I taught for forty years. Never heard of it happening.”
He dug a tobacco pouch out of his pocket, filled his pipe and lit it. It smelled like fresh asphalt.
“Is Milton still just acting department head because of lack of faculty support?”
“Yes, but not because of failure to seek faculty input. Aside from this one incident, he never makes a move without getting everyone’s opinion.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
“It’s his field. Or, more accurately, fields. He seems like a dabbler. He started off as a studio artist.”
“Was he good?”
“You’ve seen his work.”
“I don’t think so.”
“You probably didn’t recognize it as art. It’s the silver coffee table in his office.”
“Oops. That explains why he put a coaster under my tea when I put it on the table. I thought it was just a coffee table. I didn’t know it was a work of art.”
“Some of the faculty would question whether it’s a work of art.”
“The fossil designs are interesting,” I said.
“They are. But he didn’t design them. God did. Or nature. Take your pick. Shorter places the fossils on the metal surface and pours on some chemicals. Then he removes the fossils and you have a design. Not quite paint by the numbers. More like etch by the numbers.”
“One could say the same thing about Prather’s ill-fated attempt to cast from life,” I said.
“Yes. The form would have been from the poor girl’s body, not from Prather’s artistic imagination.”
“He has one?”
“No. His only interest in art seems to be money. He spends more time hawking his wares than teaching.”
I had noticed he was always selling coffee cups. “Is there money to be made from casting from life?”
“Perhaps if the person you make a cast of is famous. Or if the cast itself is artistically posed. Which it wasn’t. He just stood her there like a person waiting in line to buy a coffee cup.”
“Why would he cast someone from life if there’s no money in it?”
He shrugged. “He’s still an associate professor. Maybe he thought doing something more creative than cups would get him promoted to full professor.”
“Hockley told me Shorter is into art therapy. Is that why the faculty think he’s a dabbler?”
He nodded. “Before that, he toyed with being an art historian. Studied Jonson.”
“Who in New Mexico doesn’t?”
He laughed.
Although Raymond Jonson is a revered figure in New Mexico, I rarely think about him. In the first place, I’m a traditionalist. He spent his career pushing modern art in a state rich with traditional art. I view him as partly responsible for the weird fusion art displayed in so many galleries here that blend Native American themes with odd materials and colors never seen among the native peoples.
In addition to rarely thinking about him, I also rarely talk about him. Mainly because I don’t know how to pronounce his name. Some say Jones-son. Others say Yown-son. Still others say Yoon-son. I think he should have left the h in his name and been just plain Johnson.
Jonson taught at UNM for twenty years, retiring just after Edward Abbey graduated. Abbey’s lifelong best friend was the painter John De Puy, who studied under Jonson. Abbey himself dabbled in painting. UNM was a small school back then and the curriculum less varied. Most students took the same general education courses. It wouldn’t surprise me to discover that Abbey took an art course from Jonson.
57
So I was not paranoid.
Shorter hadn’t offered the course to his regular faculty. For some reason I couldn’t fathom, he gave it to me.
I went from Wiezga’s studio to Shorter’s office, where I intended to ask him why he chose me to offer ART 2330.
I got as far as the hall, where I saw Shorter through the window in his door. He was talking to a woman seated to the side of the desk. They were both in profile and didn’t see me.
I returned to the condo and paced around the glass table until Benz bared his teeth at me and hissed.
Geronimo and I went out on the balcony and tried patience. He was good at it. I wasn’t. At least Benz was able to relax with me and my mutt out of the way.
I wanted to call Susannah and tell her about the woman I’d seen in Shorter’s office. But the condo doesn’t have a landline, and I don’t have a cell phone. So I sat on the balcony and thought.
It was good place to think. The urban clatter below emphasized the feeling of being isolated, alone in the crowd. In this case, above the crowd.
The December sky was clear, nothing between the sun and the balcony but clean cold air.
A light breeze drifted over me. I sneezed.
And realized Harte Hockley had not killed Ximena.
I left the balcony at half past four and walked to Spirits in Clay to pick up my mail. There was a letter from the penitentiary. I took it with me to Dos Hermanas.
When Susannah arrived, I told her I’d gone to Shorter’s office to ask why he scheduled ART 2330 and why he chose me to teach it.
“What did he say?”
“I didn’t ask him. There was a woman in his office.”
“Why didn’t you just wait till she left?”
“Because the woman in his office was Ms. Nose.”
�
��And you were afraid she would kick you out of the Art Building?”
“I don’t know what I was afraid of. Anyway, I didn’t want to see her, so I quietly left the building.”
Susannah tapped the screen of her cell phone. Her large brown eyes grew even larger. “Oh. My. God.”
She turned the phone for me to see. Under a photograph of Ms. Nose was her name—Helen Shorter.
“She’s his wife! How did you do that?”
“Deaf and Hard of Hearing Services is housed under the Accessibility Resource Center. Their website has picture of the signers. You cold?”
I was shivering. “No. Scared. I angered his wife. He assigned me a course with a deaf girl in it. Then …”
“Then what?”
“I don’t know. But my weird theory that the course was punishment looks a lot less weird.”
“Why does that scare you?”
“What if it’s related somehow to Ximena’s death?”
“How?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he enlisted Prather to kill her and frame me?”
She just shook her head.
“Someone killed her, and it wasn’t Harte Hockley.”
“I know that. They only thought he did because of the straws. Now that they know she was poisoned, the straw theory is dead.”
“No. The pinching-the-straws-to-cut-off-her-air theory is dead. The spraying-poison-up-the-straws theory is alive and well.”
“Of course! Do you think they tested all those straws for cyanide?”
“I don’t know. But what I do know is that someone tried to frame him just like they tried to frame me. And I think I know how they did it.”
“You’ve learned from the master,” she said, pointing her thumb at herself. “Or maybe the mistress, but that word’s been corrupted. Give it your best shot.”
“They got the straws with his prints on them the same way they got a straw with my print on it. They took them from the tea he drank at the departmental meeting.”
“You weaseled out of the suspect list using that lame explanation about there being only one straw with your fingerprints on one end and Ximena’s nasal gunk on the other. But in Hockley’s case, they had two.”
The Pot Thief Who Studied Edward Abbey Page 22