The Pot Thief Who Studied Billy the Kid

by J. Michael Orenduff

  Yes, growled. They do not go “beep, beep” like the cartoon version. They have quite a vocal repertoire—cooing, clacking, growling, whirling, popping and barking. In this latter respect, they outshine Geronimo.

  This particular roadrunner was probably upset that we were in his territory. They mate in the spring, so he wasn’t protecting a nest, a task he shares with the female. They are good parents except for the fact that a chick who is sickly will be dismembered and fed to its siblings.

  Life can be harsh in the desert.

  Roadrunner cartoons are fun, but in real life, coyotes do not chase roadrunners. For one thing, they couldn’t catch them.

  Which is probably a good thing for the coyote. Roadrunners are fierce. The males draw night hunting duties when chicks are in the nest, so I’ve seen quite a few when I’m also on midnight hunts. I’ve witnessed a roadrunner catch a rattlesnake that was trying to strike him. He grabbed the snake’s head so he couldn’t bite and then whipped the poor reptile back and forth on the ground until the spinal column was shattered and the snake immobilized. I suppose he took it back to the nest, tore it into pieces and fed it to his young.

  After lecturing Geronimo about The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act and e"Palatino Linotype">xplaining to Wiley that he had to follow us out of the canyon even if his leg hurt, I was beginning to feel a bit like Dr. Doolittle. So I told the roadrunner (scientific name: Boulevardius burnupius) that he’d just have to put up with us because we were too tired to move on.

  Dinner was half a chorizo for Wiley and a quarter of one for Geronimo. I sprayed some more Bactine on Wiley’s leg.

  My own dinner was the Euell Gibbons special – some goosefoot seeds, juniper berries and a few piñon nuts. The BLM requires a permit to gather piñon nuts. I’d already committed two felonies by violating ARPA and NAGPRA, so I wasn’t much bothered by adding a misdemeanor to my rap sheet for gathering piñon nuts without a permit.

  What did bother me was the tooth I broke while splitting the tough outer shells of the piñons.

  I found a flat rock with a slight depression in it and tipped in a few tablespoons of water for Geronimo. Then I added a few for Wiley. When Geronimo and I moved away from the rock, Wiley lapped up the water.

  I took a sip from the canteen and then rattled it like they do in the old movies to judge how much water was in it. I’m not sure how to convert the sloshing sound to an amount, but it didn’t sound like much.

  A person can survive about three days without water. I wondered what ‘without’ meant in this case. Would a few tablespoons a day prolong survival?

  I cuddled up with Geronimo for warmth and tried to sleep. I knew my diet was working because my stomach was rumbling. I passed the time I should have been sleeping by wondering whether I could bake goosefoot seeds into griddle cakes as the Zuni traditionally did. I had the fire but lacked a pan. Not to mention enough seeds to make a cake bigger than a dime. I suppose you grind them and mix them with water. I didn’t have much of that either.

  I awoke shortly before sunup. Wiley was gone. I couldn’t blame him. I wasn’t providing enough food or water. His chances of survival were better on his own. Nature had equipped him for it.

  I was sort of fond of him. He had a bushy tail and a mouth that curved up at the sides so that he seemed to be smiling. I would miss him, but I was happy he was gone. I could give more food and water to Geronimo who, unlike Wiley, was n C Wilinot prepared for survival in the desert.

  Unless we found a big ant hill and he could feast on those.

  Wiley wasn’t the only thing that was gone. My hat was nowhere to be found. Even though it had two holes in it where I had forced the rebar through, I was sorry it was gone. I liked that hat, in part because the label claimed it was “handcrafted with Canadian persnicketiness.”

  We skipped breakfast and headed out.

  At the edge of the depression in which we had spent the night was a mound of damp sand. At the bottom of the hole from which the sand had been excavated was a tiny amount of water. I figured Wiley had dug for water before he left. It would be nice to think he left it for us, but it’s more likely that it seeped in after he left. But at least he knew where to dig. I let Geronimo drink it. It wasn’t much of a sacrifice – I hate gritty water.

  There was no way to know when Wiley had left. Maybe he dug the hole right after I went to sleep, found no water and left. In that case, the water Geronimo had lapped up had taken all night to accumulate. Not worth waiting for.

  Or maybe it had all seeped up in just a few minutes. I dug deeper and waited to see if more water would seep in. Cino see

  One symptom of dehydration is irrationality. Waiting too long for water that might not come could prevent us from reaching La Reina where there was water. But the small amount we had might not be enough to get us there. I tried to stay calm and rational. I decided to give it an hour. No water accumulated. We started walking.

  We were well above seven thousand feet. That meant the air was relatively cool. But it also meant the sunlight had less atmosphere to penetrate. Lacking a hat, I draped the gunny sack over my head to protect against the sun. As the day heated up I began to feel like I was under a broiler.

  Thirsty people panic and make bad decisions. Like not drinking enough water. Victims of dehydration are sometimes found next to half-full canteens. In their desperate attempt to save water, they dehydrate their brain. Better to take a quenching chug and keep moving than to take sips that only wet your whistle.

  We were making better time without Wiley. I wanted to maintain our brisk pace. I wanted to drink enough water to hydrate my brain. I tipped my head back to take a swig from the canteen. My foot caught between two rocks, and I fell on my face.

  The canteen clattered away, its precious contents washing over the rocks. At least Geronimo had the good sense to lap up what he could get to.

  7

  “Who is Euell Gibbons?“ Susannah asked.

  “He was before your time. I liked him because he and I both grew up in New Mexico. During the dust-bowl days when he was just a kid, his father left the family to try to find work. After he’d been gone a few days, the family had eaten everything in the house except some dried pinto beans. Euell went into the wild and came back with piñon nuts, prickly pear fruit and puffball mushrooms. His mother and three siblings survived for a month on the food Euell foraged.”

  “He told you that?”

  I laughed. “I didn’t know him. I just knew about him because he was famous for eating wild plants. When I was a kid, he was often a guest on Sonny and Cher or the Tonight Show.”

  “Eating wild plants got you on television in those days?”

  “The back to nature thing was just getting popular, and he had this sort of rustic persona. I remember when Sonny and Cher awarded him a wooden plaque, he took a bite of it.”

  “Is that how you broke your tooth, trying to eat wood?”

  “Nope. Piñon nuts, which are harder than wood.”

  “And the sunburn?”

  “My hat disappeared. Maybe it blew away“My size="+0" face="Palatino Linotype"> during the night. Or maybe Geronimo ate it. He was hungry enough to do so.”

  “And you got the black eye and skinned nose when you tried to walk and drink at the same time.”

  I admitted it.

  Susannah doesn’t have classes on Friday night, which was a good thing since my cliff dwelling narrative was taking longer than the 3182 alliterative lines of Beowulf.

  I waved Angie over and asked for a large glass of ice water. I still felt dehydrated. And I wanted to limit my alcohol intake. Two margaritas were enough for a man in my condition.

  Susannah asked for more salsa then turned to me. “Are you going to tell me what finally happened, or do you want me to piece together the story by your appearance? Your lips are scabs. Your nose is glowing like a stop light. You have a black eye and a broken tooth. You have a cast on your ankle, and you’ve been squinting all eveni
ng.”

  “And those are my best features.”

  I sipped some water while she laughed. “Oddly enough, the first thing I did after the fall was check the shard. I had it in my shirt pocket. It was so long that it stuck out, so I couldn’t button the pocket. I was relieved to see it wasn’t broken.”

  “I’m not surprised you checked the shard before you checked your ankle. You treat that stuff like it’s holy.”

  “May Kotyypebe it is. But this one is strange.”

  “How so?”

  “I’m not sure exactly. Something about the design.”

  “Like you think you’ve seen it before?”

  “No. What bothers me is that I haven’t seen it before. But I don’t know why that bothers me. It’s not like I know every design ever made by ancient potters.”

  “Maybe it will come to you when you try to make a copy based on the shard.”

  I suspected she was right. That often happens.

  “I finally managed to stand up. But when I put weight on the bad ankle, I collapsed again. The pain was severe. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to walk. I tried to convince Geronimo to go for help, but he didn’t understand.”

  “Why am I not surprised? Then what?”

  “I started thinking about dying.”

  “Wow,” she said slowly, drawing the word out into two syllables like she really meant it. “Were you scared?”

  “Not at first. I didn’t want to die, of course, but I figured I was luckier than most people. I had great parents and a happy childhood. I’ve had good health and good friends. And dying of thirst is not gruesome or painful. I told myself there are lots of worse ways to go. Then I looked up and thought I was headed for one of those worse ways. A guy was walking towards me with a hunting bow in his right hand and a bloody dead body thrown over his left shoulder.”

  “Let m Knotgn="juse guess. He also had war paint on his face and feathers in his hair. The dehydration was causing you to hallucinate.”

  “He wasn’t wearing a headdress, just a wide-brimmed hat. He knew better than to go out in the New Mexico sun without a hat because he was a doctor.”

  “And the bloody guy was one of his patients?”

  “No, when they got closer, I realized he was part of an elk. Or it was part of an elk. The doctor had killed it and was hauling it back to a Jeep. His name is Fred Koelher. He checked to make sure I didn’t need immediate attention then dropped the elk piece and jogged away. He returned a few minutes later in the Jeep with his guide, a hulking man with dark eyes whom he introduced as Alonso Castillo Maldonado.”

  “Koehler gave you the first, last and middle names of his guide? That’s sort of formal when you’re meeting out in the wild, isn’t it?”

  “He didn’t give me a middle name because the guide didn’t have one. ‘Castillo’ and ‘Maldonado’ are his two last names.”

  “Two things can’t both be last, Hubert.”

  I thought about that for a few seconds. “You’re right. In Spanish they’re called apellidos, what I guess we would call ‘appellations’ or ‘surnames’. It’s the way people have traditionally been named in Spain, and the tradition came here with the conquistadores. A person’s first apellido is his father’s name.”

  “Shouldn’t you say ‘his or hers’?”

  “I said ‘his’ because the person we happen to be discussing is a man. But women are actually more important in the Spanish naming system. The second surname comes from the mother, the third from the paternal grandmother, the fourth from the maternal grandmother, the fifth from the—“

  “Okay, I get it. All the names except the first one come from women. How many can they have?”

  “I guess since they expelled the Moslem invaders, they can have only one woman.”

  “Sheesh. How many names?”

  “So far as I k KSo +0" face=now, the sky’s the limit for apellidos. Most people these days just use two. So the doctor should have introduced the guide as Alonso Castillo. But he probably didn’t know that and was just trying to be polite.”

  “Shouldn’t he have introduced him as Alonso Maldonado?”

  “No, when you address someone, you always use the first last name.”

  “Nothing can be a first last name. If it’s really last, then it’s the only last name.”

  “Right again. I should have said the first apellido. Guess where Castillo lives?”

  “In Maldonado?”

  “That’s a good one. No, he lives in La Reina. Some coincidence, right?”

  “There are no coincidences, Hubert.”

  “So you always say.”

  “And even if there were coincidences, that wouldn’t be one.”

  I didn’t argue the point. I didn’t even understand it.

  “They lifted me inPalatinot size="+0" face="Palatino Linotype">to the Jeep and took me to Taos. Then Dr. Koehler took me from there to Albuquerque in his rental car.”

  “Rental car?”

  “Yeah, he lives back east, but he comes out here every year to hunt elk. That’s probably why he didn’t understand the Spanish naming custom.”

  “Hunting elk makes you misunderstand Spanish names?”

  I made no reply.

  “Anyway,” she said, “you were right about being luckier than most people. There you were in the middle of nowhere, miles from a road and on the verge of death, and a doctor comes along and takes you home. I guess he put that cast on your ankle, too.”

  “He did.”

  I gave her a sly smile. “But I’m not all that lucky.”

  “Okay,” she said resignedly, “I’ll play the straight man. Why are you not all that lucky?”

  “Because I had to ride two hours in a Jeep with part of a dead elk in my lap. Then I couldn’t get into my house because my house key was on the key ring in the Bronco. And to top it all off, Koehler charged me to set my ankle.”

  “How did you get into your house?”

  “Koehler used his cell phone to call Tristan. Remember he installed that electronic lock on my shop door? I have a remote that unlocks it. Of course the remote was inside, but Tristan had anticipated I might misplace or break it, so he had a back-up.”

  “But the door from the shop back to your studio and house has a dead bolt.”

  “Once I got into the shop, I called a locksmith. After he let me into my workshop, the doc did the cast.”

  “How much did he charge?”

  “The locksmith charged two hundred. Koehler only charged one hundred.”

  “That’s a bargain, Hubie. If you’d gone to the emergency room, it would probably have been five hundred.”

  “Maybe, but he didn’t even have to pay for materials. He used gauze from my first aid kit to wrap the ankle and my potting clay to form the cast.”

  “I wondered why it was brown. You want me to sign it?”

  8

  “What are you doing for your sunburn,” Sha Nype>

  “Nuffing. I em tying u maa mah shin looh lie yuz,” I replied.

  “Why would you want your skin to look like mine?”

  I’m always amazed she understands what I’m saying even when I’m shot full of Novocain and have cotton wads between my gums and cheeks. Maybe it’s a skill hygienists acquire from years of listening to dental chair babble.

  I wanted to tell her it’s because her skin is beautiful and exotic. It reminds me of a number 3 pencil lead, smooth and so matte that nothing reflects from it. But that’s the sort of thing you say over candlelight in a restaurant. It loses most of its magic when the person you’re saying it to is wiping drool off your face.

  Dr. Batres returned to remove the clamp from my repaired tooth. After a little polishing, he pronounced it both functionally and cosmetically perfect. Sharice held a mirror in front of my face, but I was enjoying looking at her, so I passed up the opportunity to admire the doc’s handwork. He was a little too self-satisfied in my opinion. He lists himself as Dr. B Sselfied in matres, D.M.D, putting one form o
f ‘doctor’ before his name and another form after it. Seems like overkill to me.

  I was already dreading the bill.

  Sharice removed my bib and gave me a plastic bag with a travel-sized tube of toothpaste, a spool of floss and a bright orange toothbrush. Four hundred dollars for twenty minutes work, and they think a dollar bag of dental supplies makes the expense easier to swallow.

  “Do you have a toothbrush that doesn’t glow in the dark?” I asked her.

  I did want a tamer color, but the real reason I asked was to see if removing the clip and the cotton had improved my enunciation. It had, so I asked Sharice if she would have dinner with me, and she said yes.

  Sharice and I have been casually flirting with each other for two or three years. Actually, she does most of the flirting. It’s hard to reciprocate with her fingers in my mouth, although I suppose under other circumstances that could be a form of flirting. We had lunch together once, not really a date. It turned out to be fun, so I asked her out. But she said her boyfriend wouldn’t approve. After my next appointment, she said she didn’t have her boyfriend anymore. I was seeing Dolly then, so nothing came of it.

  Not counting the few times a year I have to crawl because I’ve had too much to drink, I have two means of getting around. I walk and I drive my Bronco. Since those options were no longer available, I had enlisted Tristan to drive me to the dentist.

  The receptionist was flirting with him when I returned to the waiting room. He has olive skin, thick dark hair that hangs down in ringlets and what most girls seem to think of as bedroom eyes. He’s also a considerate person, which is even rarer among men than being handsome.

  He’s not really my nephew. He’s the grandson of my great aunt Beatrice. I don’t know what that makes him kinship-wise, but he seems like a nephew, so that’s what I call him.