The Pot Thief Who Studied D. H. Lawrence

by J. Michael Orenduff

  When I make a $15,000 sale, I live off it until it is gone. When I make a really big sale, I give some of it away because I don’t like having a lot of money all at once. My father was fond of saying that money is like manure. It’s good to spread it around, but if you leave it in one big pile it stinks.

  I know what you’re thinking – how can you get in line for the money I give away? It’s a short line. I partially support my nephew Tristan, I pay the medical bills for my former nanny Consuela, and I donate to a scholarship fund for kids from the pueblo where I volunteered back in my undergraduate days.

  For the past few months, Tristan had been forced to live off his part-time earnings and the scholarship fund was depleted. Consuela Sanchez’ kidney problems were worsening and her medical bills soaring. Now a transplant loomed. I had done the paperwork to apply for assistance which Consuela and Emilio qualified for, but even with that, the “patient responsibility” portion came to $46,000, half of which they wanted in advance.

  Just one of the Dulcinea pots would cover that. The debate with my conscience was going well until it actually spoke. What it said was that if Consuela’s transplant expense justified stealing the Fidelio Duran pot, then it also justified robbing a bank.

  Don’t you just hate it when your conscience is right?

  I’m not a thief. I needed to know I would not be stealing the pot. Cyril said the pot belonged to his great-grandfather. Why not just take his word for it? But he also said white man law might call it stealing. Why worry about that? Surely he knew more about his great-grandfather than he did about the law.

  Mr. Conscience vetoed that one as too obviously a rationalization. He’s a smug little devil.

  I needed to think harder. I asked myself what was the real issue. Who owns the pot? Who deserves the pot? Who should decide? What time is it?

  The last question was the only one I could answer. It was well past five, and I was thirsty.

  5

  It was a dark and stormy night.

  I’m not kidding. It really was.

  Which was unusual. Not the dark part. Nights are always dark except above the Arctic Circle in summer. And maybe below the Antarctic Circle in summer; I’m not certain about that. But the rain part was unusual. Evening rain is as rare in Albuquerque as English ivy. Our rain is almost always in the form of afternoon showers.

  When I got to Dos Hermanas Tortilleria, Martin Seepu was standing in the rain staring up at the sky. I knew why because I had seen him do it before.

  Susannah was more sensibly ensconced under the veranda along with a margarita which she had obviously ordered for me, it having salt on the rim which she does not take. I greeted her and took my first sip. A few more and I could silence Mr. Conscience, at least for the evening.

  Susannah waits tables at La Placita in Old Town and takes evening classes at the University. There was a time when she was a full-time day student, but she began to feel guilty about taking her parents’ money and not making progress towards a degree, so she took up waitressing and switched to night classes. She’s majored in pre-vet, pre-dental, and pre-law. When she ran out of pre- majors, she did sociology, psychology, and maybe a few other ologies I’ve forgotten. Currently she’s in art history.

  Martin once told me that standing under the stars makes him feel serene. I don’t know how standing out in the rain made him feel. Wet, I suppose.

  “Why is he standing in the rain?” Susannah asked as I sat down.

  “It’s an Indian thing,” I answered.

  “It’s not an Indian thing,” he yelled over the drumbeat of raindrops on the corrugated tin roof of the veranda, “anyone can learn to do it.”

  “Do what?” Susannah asked.

  “Tell how long it will rain,” I said.

  Martin joined us at the table, shaking his head vigorously and spraying us like a dog. “You stare up through the rain until your eyes focus on the drops farthest away from you, the ones that appear to be the smallest. Then you gauge how far the smallest drops are above the largest ones.”

  “And?” asked Susannah.

  “If the small ones seem to be real high, it’s a passing storm. If they’re low, they’re coming from low-level clouds, and the rain will last longer.”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  He took a sip of his Tecate. “This one’s going to stop in about an hour.”

  “You’re soaking wet,” she observed needlessly.

  “Why do you pale-faces avoid rain? Being in the rain is just as natural as being in the dry air. It won’t shrink you.”

  “Which is a good thing in your case,” I said. Martin is 5’ 6”.

  “You’re the same height as me, Kemo Sabe.”

  “True, but I used to be six feet tall before I spent too much time in the rain.”

  I sipped my margarita and listened to Martin explain his tribe’s meteorological techniques. No mechanical wind gauges, no Doppler radar and no weather satellites, but he gets it right more often than the television weather man. I should have paid attention when he told me there was going to be one more big snow before summer, but I wasn’t worried about the weather.

  I was preoccupied with the Fidelio Duran pot. I didn’t tell them about that, but I did tell them about the invitation to the D. H. Lawrence Ranch.

  “D. H. Lawrence?” asked Susannah. “As in the painter?”

  “There’s a painter named D. H. Lawrence?”

  “Yeah. He’s not famous like Georgia O’Keeffe and some of the others who worked here. In fact, I’d never heard of him until we had a lecture on the painters of New Mexico earlier this semester. They included a few of his works in the lecture, so I guess he’s not a total unknown.”

  I was speculating on the odds of a painter and a writer both being named D. H. Lawrence and both working in New Mexico. I figured they were long. “You sure he isn’t the writer?”

  “I saw his paintings, Hubie. He’s a painter.”

  “What did they look like?”

  “Not that great to tell the truth. I could see why he isn’t that famous.”

  “But what did they look like?”

  “All the ones they showed were nudes in suggestive poses. He used broad brush strokes and curvy renderings like The Scream by Munch.”

  “Nudes in suggestive poses are probably what Lawrence would do. It has to be the same guy. I didn’t know he painted.”

  “I didn’t know he wrote. Did he write anything I would have heard of?”

  I stared at her. “Lady Chatterley’s Lover?”

  “I think I’ve heard of that,” she said casually.

  I was about to make a caustic remark about America’s public schools when it came to me that the court decision overturning the ban on Lady Chatterley's Lover was not only before Susannah was born, it was even before I was born.

  So I told her about the book’s lurid reputation and the Supreme Court’s extension of free speech to cover sexually explicit literature. She asked if I had ever read the book. I invoked my right against self-incrimination and refused to answer.

  “So they named a ranch after him?” she asked.

  “I’m not sure. Maybe it was his ranch. I think he and his wife had it back in the twenties or thirties. Lawrence died a long time ago, but his wife lived on the ranch for many years. She willed it to the University when she died.”

  “It must be swanky if they use it to entertain dignitaries.”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never been there. But now I have the chance, and I don’t know whether to take it.”

  “It sounds like fun to me. Probably a lot of good food and drink. And the Taos area is beautiful.”

  “They want me do something involving pots, and I’m not sure how that would entertain dignitaries.”

  “Everybody likes hearing about the Anasazi. Just take some of your old pots up there and do a show and tell.”

  “I don’t like taking pots out of my shop because they might get broken.”

  She shrug
ged. “Then just take some of your fakes.”

  “Maybe,” I replied and turned to Martin.

  He was one of the pueblo kids I tutored in my undergraduate days. His uncle is a potter. “Maybe your uncle could come with me.”

  “He doesn’t like white people.”

  “He likes me.”

  “No he doesn’t.”

  “What if I offered to pay him?”

  “Cash or beads?”

  “Cash. They’re offering me a big stipend, so I’d be in a sharing mood.”

  “What would he have to do?”

  “Maybe talk about the traditional designs on his pots?”

  “He’s not much of a talker.”

  “I’ve noticed. Maybe he could just dress up in a feathered headdress and look fierce.”

  “I look fiercer than he does. Maybe I could do it.”

  “You don’t know anything about pots.”

  “True, but the dignitaries wouldn’t know that.”

  Martin does look fierce if you don’t know him. He weighs about 170, all of it muscle, and he has a wide face with a strong chin and dark penetrating eyes. He’s actually a pussy cat, but the impassive expression he wears masks it as effectively as would an application of war paint.

  Susannah asked him why he hadn’t learned about pots growing up around his uncle.

  “My mother said it’s better to work with your mind than your hands.”

  “Mine, too,” said Susannah. “That’s why I’ve been in college so long.”

  “You told me you’re in college to meet a man,” I reminded her.

  “That’s working with your mind,” she said.

  Martin and I glanced at each other.

  “Don’t go there,” she warned, and we didn’t.

  “Can we get back to whether I should accept the offer to do something at the Ranch?”

  “Can we assume these dignitaries are rich?” asked Susannah.

  “Since the event is being sponsored by the fund-raising office, I think that’s a safe assumption.”

  “Maybe you could auction off a pot to them.”

  Martin and I just stared at her.

  “Well?” she said defensively, “it’s not such a dumb idea. Rich people like to buy expensive and exotic things. You should hear some of the stories we’re told in class about art collectors. You never see an Anasazi pot offered as a blue-light special, so why not give them the idea they’re getting the chance to buy something no ordinary working stiff can even see, much less buy?”

  Martin thought it would be tacky to convert my presentation to a live version of the Shopping Channel. I agreed, but I didn’t think it mattered whether Martin and I thought it was classless. What mattered was what the dignitaries thought. The more I considered it, the more I began to think Susannah might be right.

  “You’re forgetting one small detail,” said Martin. “Selling old pots is no longer legal.”

  “They probably wouldn’t know that,” said Susannah, “and even if they did, they probably wouldn’t care. In fact, it might make having the pot even more desirable.”

  “Huh?” said Martin.

  “She’s right,” I said. “Some rich collectors specialize in stolen art because it’s even rarer than regular art.”

  “White people are weird,” said Martin. I didn’t argue the point.

  “About ten years ago,” said Susannah, “thieves broke into the Gardner Museum in Boston and stole paintings worth three-hundred-million dollars. Not one of those paintings was ever recovered, and the thieves never sought a ransom, so you have to assume they’re in someone’s private collection.”

  “Three hundred million!” said Martin. “That’s a lot of wampum. Didn’t they have guards?”

  “It was a guard that let them in.”

  “Oh, an inside job.”

  “No,” said Susannah, laughing, “the guard wasn’t in on it. He admitted later that he was frequently stoned on the job.” She shook her head. “They took paintings by Degas, Manet, Vermeer, and Rembrandt. In fact, the Rembrandt they took was the only landscape he ever did.”

  I sat there wondering if the Archaeological Resources Protection Act covered a three-hundred-year-old Rembrandt landscape. Probably not.

  6

  Susannah drove to class and Martin returned to his pueblo. I pulled my windbreaker up over my head to keep dry and went home.

  Almost. I stopped short of my door, looked around to be certain no one was watching, lowered the windbreaker, and stared up into the rain. I couldn’t see anything because I blinked every time a raindrop hit my eye. But I kept at it and eventually overcame the blink reaction by telling myself it was no different from getting water in your eyes when you go swimming.

  Which makes sense except for the fact that I don’t know how to swim. Living in the desert, swimming never seemed a useful skill to acquire.

  Even with my eyes wide open, I could scarcely pick out individual drops, much less tell what size they were. Then it stopped raining. I looked at my watch. It was fifty-five minutes after Martin had said the rain would stop in an hour. I wondered if I could learn to do that. Then realized it was like swimming, a skill rarely needed in New Mexico. Then I wondered why I was standing outside, cold and wet.

  I stepped inside and turned to close the door only to see Miss Gladys Claiborne’s fringed yellow umbrella coming down the street, presumably with Miss Gladys beneath it. She is, I believe, the only person in Albuquerque who owns an umbrella. In the hand not grasping the umbrella, she held a bag I suspected was full of food.

  “Mr. Claiborne always used to talk about people who didn’t come in out of the rain,” she said, laughing, “but until I saw you tonight, I thought that was just an expression.”

  “It is an expression, Miss Gladys, and I believe the proper phrasing is ‘people who don’t have sense enough to come in out of the rain’.”

  She blushed. “I didn’t want to say that because it didn’t sound polite. Besides, I know for a fact that you are a sensible young man. Now, you go change out of those wet clothes and come back in here and have some of this beef consommé.”

  Miss Gladys bears the titles of Episcopal Stalwart, Casserole Queen, and proprietor of the eponymous Miss Gladys’s Gift Shop located in the west end of my building. Actually, it isn’t my building. I own only the east third of it.

  I also rent, with an option to buy, the middle third where I sell replicas of Native American pottery. What, you may be wondering, is the difference between a fake and a replica? Simple – a replica is a fake the customer knows is a fake.

  Before I took over the middle portion of the building, it housed a gelato parlor. It came onto the market when its proprietor went to prison for murder. I don’t want to give you the wrong impression about Old Town. It’s actually a safe and pleasant neighborhood. Hundreds of thousands of tourists enjoy visiting here every year, and the only crime they are subjected to is the prices in some of the shops.

  I don’t think Miss Gladys depends on the income from her shop. How much money can you make in New Mexico selling things like antimacassars? She and her tubercular husband moved to Albuquerque from east Texas many years ago, and he left her well off when he died.

  Two things seem higher on her priority list than making money. One is keeping me well fed, and the other is getting me married. In my darker moments I fantasize about buying her out and owning the entire building, but I always feel guilty about that scheme. And don’t have enough money to do it.

  I’m an only child born late to my parents, a father who was a professor and a mother whose goal in life was to bring gentility to what she considered a rough territory, not an entirely inappropriate characterization when you consider that New Mexico had been a state for only twenty-five years when she moved here as a twenty-year-old bride. Her efforts left no time for cooking and cleaning, so when I was born to her in her early forties, my father hired a criada. Consuela Saenz raised me on Mexican food and later taught me to cook it. Her
efforts molded my palate to chiles, cilantro, cumin, and lime, and I’ve never developed a taste for other flavors.

  Miss Gladys’ cooking normally involves the use of prepared food as ingredients. Campbell’s soup and processed cheeses are her staples. But the beef consommé was delicious and I told her so.

  “It’s the fresh juniper berries,” she confided. “Mr. Claiborne always liked my beef consommé, but after we moved out here and were able to get fresh juniper berries, he wanted it every day. I think maybe it soothed the ravages of his disease.”

  I didn’t doubt it. Juniper is one of the commonest plants in New Mexico. Native Americans used its dark blue berries not only as a spice, but as a basic food and also as a medicine for respiratory diseases.

  “Miss Gladys,” I said between spoonfuls, “what do you know about D. H. Lawrence?”

  She blushed again. “My heavens, I barely know what to say. His books were banned by our board of education in Texas.”

  “Did you ever read anything by him?”

  She stared down at her shoes. “I don’t believe that’s a proper question to ask a lady.”

  I continued to consume the consommé.

  “There was a copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover at the public library,” she finally said, looking down at the floor. “The library was run by a Yankee lady who simply would not countenance censorship. People in town considered her a free thinker, but I have to admit that I liked her independent spirit.”

  She looked up, but when my light brown eyes met her sparkling blue ones, she glanced back down. “I tried to read the thing,” she said hesitatingly. “I hope you won’t think ill of me. I was curious.”

  “And what did you think of it,” I asked.

  “I didn’t get very far. I couldn’t understand a word of it. I suppose I was too simple to understand why it was so nasty.”

  She took a deep breath as if a weight had been lifted. I finished the soup and placed the spoon in the bowl.