The Pot Thief Who Studied Billy the Kid (9 page)

“She seemed stable all through the first
months
of our
relationship. Then she became
moody and
argumentative
. She would blow up at the smallest thing. Then she would cool down and apologize. Then she would lose it again ten minutes later. Maybe she had allergies or a bad reaction to something. She was always complaining of being too hot.”

He s Sinolways ctarted laughing. “And you never figured it out?”

“Figured what out?”

“Mood swings. Hot flashes. It’s called menopause, Uncle Hubert.”

“And you know about this how?”

“Everybody knows about it. Ther
e are even ads on television
.”

“Menopause advertises?”

“Well, not menopause exactly, but medicines for it.”

“So the
y found a cure
?”

He laughed
again
. “It’s not a disease. It’s a natural transition women go through. But there are medicines for the unpleasant symptoms like hot flashes and mood swings.”

“And they talk about that on television?”

“Sure. And constipation, warts and erectile dysfunction.”

Another reason not to watch television, I thought to myself.

“Where to now,” he asked, “
a
car dealer?”

“I’ve decided I don’t need a car. Walking is good for me and good for the planet.”

He glanced at me. “It’s Albuquerque, Uncle Hubert.
Two hundred square miles
of city and
about a hundred yards of sidewalk.”

“
Most of them
in my neighborhood.”

“
And how will you pick up Sharice Saturday night?”

“I couldn’t pick her
up in a car even if I had one. I can’t drive until
the cast comes off
.”

“How long will that be?”

“
Six weeks
.
In the meantime,
Dr Koehler recommended RICE, but I don’t see how I can do that.”

“Why not, you like rice.”

“Not the
grain. It’s an acronym
for
rest, ice, compression and elevation
. But I can’t rest because I can’t get comfortable with this thing on my leg. I
can’t ice it either. When I
stuck my foot in a tub of ice
, my toes got cold
but
my ankle didn’t. I think the cast insulates too well. I can’t com
press my ankle with the cast on
it, so the only one I can really use is elevation.”

“Lucky for you Albuquerque is over five thousand feet.”

I laughed
.

He looked down at the cast and said,
“You want me to sign
it
?”

9

After Tristan
dropped
me off in the alley, I
hobbled into my living quarters
looking for something to read
before opening for the afternoon rush
, an event that
lives
more
in
hope than
in V" fwiino L
reality.

The only thing on hand was
Ben-
Hur
which I had checked out from the library
along with
The Wooing of Malkatoon
.
I
went to the shop, rotated the sign to ‘Open’ and
started reading in
the
hope that
the
Ben-Hur
would be better than
Malkatoon
.

It was a reasonable prospect
.
According to the dust jacket,
Ben-Hur
was the best-selling novel
of the nineteenth century, surpassing
Harriet Beecher Stowe's
Uncle Tom's Cabin
. And it remained the best-selling book until it was topped by
Margaret Mitchell's
Gone with the Wind
in the 1930s
.
When the film version of
Ben-Hur
won eleven
Academy Awards
in
1959
,
sales of the book soared
,
and it went back in front of
Gone with the Wind
.

I guess p
eople liked the movie so much that they ran out and bought the book.
But I w
onder how many people actually
read the entire
thing
.

In my case, I made
it
only to the end of the first paragraph.
There Wallace
describ
es the mountain named
Jebel es Zubleh
:

Its
feet are well co
v
ered by sands tossed from the Eu
p
hrates, there to lie, for the mountain is a wall to the pasture-lands of Moab and Ammon on the west – lands which else had been of the desert a part
.

“
T
ossed from the Euphrates, there to lie
”?

“
Of the desert a part
”
?

Who knew that
Lew
Wallace was
the inspiration for Yoda?

Finish
Ben-Hur
I could not.

But
while the book was dreadful,
the publisher’s introduction was fascinating.
Wallace
completed the novel
at
what he called “
my rough pine-table
”
in
h
is room in the Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe
.
He said in his memoir [in fon that
he
wrote
the
final
scenes
by lantern light
after returning from a
clandestine meeting
with Henry McCarty
, also known as Henr
y Antrim and William H. Bonney.

But best known as Billy the Kid.

I wondered why Wallace and Billy the Kid met. I wondered how Wallace could segue from a meeting with a notorious outlaw to putting the finishing touches on a book subtitled
A Tale of the Christ
.

My wonderings were interrupted by the bong sound that indicates someone passing through my door.
I looked up hoping to
see the beginning of the afternoon rush.
I was badly in need of money.
The
thousand
I’d paid to
Alvar
had depleted my stash. I
’d paid two hundred to the locksmith
and a hundred to Dr. Koehler
. The crutches were fifteen a week. I
had a four-hundred-dollar dental bill
and
despite what I’
d told Tristan, I knew I’
d eventually have to buy a car.

But it was not
a rush. It wasn’t even a customer
. It was Miss Gladys Claiborne,
proprietor of the eponymous Miss Gladys’
Gift Shop, an emporium
two doors from
my own.

You’re not supposed to eat before going to the dentist, and hobbling burns more energy than you might expect.
So
I was hungry enough to eat one of Miss Gladys’ casseroles of doom.

Which was a good thing because that’s what she had brought.

B
efore serving the casserole, she asked about my ankle.

She knows about my pot hunting, but
I didn’t want to distress her b
y talking about the body I’d found so I just said I was out looking for pots and strained my ankle when it caught between two rocks.

“I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a beige cast,” she said.

“The doctor used my potting clay.
I like to think of it as one of my pots on my foot.”

“That’s very clever of you. Can I sign it?”

Miss Gladys
is a good friend and good neighbor. Her dedication to keeping me well fed has made me an expert o
n
her cass
eroles which fall into two
categories, savory and sweet. The savory
ones
have five ingredients – a meat, a starch, veggies,
cheese and the glue that hold everything together. The glue is usually
Campbell’s
Cream of Fill-In-The-Blank.

“I’ve decided to go international,” she announced as she sp
r
ea
d
a placemat on my counter and positioned a plate
,
silverware
and
tall glass
on it. She approves of neither paper plates nor plastic utensils.
The embroidered bags she uses to transport these meals are made of sturdy canvas, and I marvel that she can lift them.

“I got the recipe for this dolmades casserole from
Prissy
Papas
. Her real first name is Aphrodite, but she didn’t like
the way
people
in Texas
shorten [typpane
d
her Greek name to the first two syllables
, so sh
e insisted we call her Prissy.”