The Pot Thief Who Studied Ptolemy [02] (7 page)
Read The Pot Thief Who Studied Ptolemy [02] Online
Authors: J Michael Orenduff
It sounded like the worst idea I’d ever heard, but I tried not to change my expression, and I told myself to keep an open mind. After all, this was the first time I’d ever heard there were online dating services, so I figured I should at least hear more about them before writing them off as one more piece of evidence that civilization as we know it is crumbling.
I selected the largest tortilla chip in the bowl, loaded it up with salsa and started chewing.
Susannah looked at me expectantly, but I kept on chewing.
“Well, are you going to say anything?”
“Anthropologists don’t ‘stumble across’ primitive peoples. We search them out deliberately.”
“I knew you’d hate the idea. I don’t know why I told you.”
“I don’t hate it. I just don’t understand it.”
“What’s not to understand? It’s just a blind date, except it’s arranged by an online dating service instead of a well-meaning aunt fixing you up with her next door neighbor’s son who’s a brilliant doctor. Except he turns out to be a pathologist with bad teeth and a comb-over, and the only people he deals with all day are dead. At least an online service screens people and you get to see a picture of them.”
“I understand the blind date part, Suze. What I don’t understand is why you need to do that. You’re attractive, intelligent, and have a good sense of humor. Men should be lining up to date you.”
“They are, Hubie, but the line-up looks like one you’d see down at the police station. Of the last three guys I’ve dated, one turned out to be married, one had a third-grade vocabulary, and the last one’s idea of an aftershave was something that smelled like Pine-Sol.”
“Maybe if you didn’t spend so much time with me—”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she snapped. “What sort of a date would I meet at five o’clock? If I don’t have a date by five, I’m not likely to meet one during the rush hour.”
“Well, I guess that makes—”
“And have I ever hesitated to skip our cocktail hour if I did have a date?”
“No, but—”
“And anyway, Hubert, people don’t have to give up friends in order to date. I actually know girls who have lots of friends and lots of dates. I just don’t happen to be one of those girls.”
“Can I say something?”
“Sure. Nothing’s stopping you.”
“I think you will have lots of dates. In fact, I know you will. You’re just in a bit of a slump. Things will change, and soon your only problem will be deciding which guy to go out with. But if you think an online dating service may get you over this temporary drought, then why not give it a try?”
I felt a little nicer, but I put some more food in my mouth so I wouldn’t say anything further on the topic of computer dating.
12
“Your shop next door is closed,” said Martin.
“The white man’s way,” I said, “is to greet people with a salutation.”
“Like, ‘Hello, we’ve come from Europe to steal your land’?”
“You’re a quick study.”
“But you aren’t. Your shop next door is still closed.”
“This one is open.”
“This one is full of fakes.”
“I prefer to call them ‘replicas’.”
“If you can only open one shop at a time, wouldn’t it be better to open the one with the expensive stuff?”
“I’m gonna take business advice from someone whose people sold Manhattan for twenty-four dollars worth of beads?”
“Those were the smart ones. The rest of us didn’t get a dime, and we gave up the whole damn continent.”
Martin Seepu is my height but thirty pounds heavier, all of it muscle. He’s clean-shaven, a practical fashion choice since he has only about ten whiskers that need shaving. He has plenty of coarse hair on his head and he wears it in a ponytail.
I first met him when, as an idealistic college freshman, I signed up for a mentoring program the University had created to bring together college kids and children on the reservations. How this was supposed to help the kids on the reservation was never clear to me, but I liked working with Martin. I introduced him to math and he surprised me by liking it.
I started as a math major, but I couldn’t see a career path there, and everyone told me I should be an accountant, so I studied that for lack of a better idea. I worked briefly as an accountant after graduating, found it even duller than it sounds, and returned to UNM to study archaeology and anthropology.
Martin dropped out of school when he was thirteen, but I’m confident it wasn’t a result of my mentoring. He just got tired of condescending teachers covering boring material. Plus, there was less social pressure in his pueblo to finish school than there is outside the reservation. The politically correct opinion is that the dropout rate among Native Americans is a national disgrace. I’m not certain about that. Education is great, but education and schooling are not always the same thing. Martin is a voracious reader and is better educated than most people who have college degrees. He made a decision early on to remain on the reservation, and the life he leads there wouldn’t be any different if he had a diploma. It wouldn’t enhance his self-esteem, which I always tell him is overdeveloped anyway, and it wouldn’t help him get a job because he doesn’t want one. He and his extended family raise horses, tend their orchard and garden, and work as artisans. His uncle is a potter. Martin works in metal. He works part time in a wrought iron shop in Albuquerque when he feels the need to be in the cash economy for a while.
The Seepus are a close-knit, happy and successful family. Their pueblo, unfortunately, has its share of alcoholism, domestic violence, depression, and suicide. Those are the true national disgraces. I don’t think more education is the answer, but I don’t know what the answer is.
Martin is the only person I know who walks more than I do. His pueblo is nine miles from the edge of town, but he often walks in and back if he has reason to come to Albuquerque. I figured he didn’t come in just to tell me my shop was closed. Martin often comes to sell me a pot when his uncle decides to part with one. Sometimes he comes just to visit.
He took the carafe off my coffee maker and poured the coffee in the street. Then he reached in a canvas sack, pulled out a milk jug of water from his pueblo’s secret spring, and used it to brew a fresh pot. When the gurgling stopped, he poured us both a cup. It was good coffee.
He pulled a pot from the bag and handed it to me.
I spent a long time looking at it and enjoying its heft in my hands. The cloud and lightning motif peculiar to Martin’s pueblo ran round its perimeter, but the ratios were different somehow. The base was thicker than normal. The design had a three-dimensional quality I’d never seen before. Potters use several techniques to achieve depth. They can show some objects smaller so they appear to be further away. They can place one object overlapping another so the one overlapped appears to be behind the other. They can achieve depth with color by rendering distant mountains lighter than those in the foreground.
The objects depicted on traditional Native American pottery are flat. They’re represented as being on a plane even though the surface of the pot is curved. I can testify that’s difficult to do. I can achieve it only by copying their work very carefully. I’m certain I couldn’t do it if I were to create a design of my own. The pot Martin brought demonstrated perfectly how a flat plane can be represented on a curved surface, but it still had an elusive, almost invisible sense of depth. I finally decided the glaze where the lightning coincided with the clouds must have been altered ever so slightly. You sensed the jagged lightning behind the cloud even though when you covered everything up except one cloud, it seemed to be of uniform color value.
Finally, I looked up at Martin. “This is the best work your uncle ever did. Don’t tell me he wants to sell it.”
“He didn’t make it.”
“Who did?”
“I was hoping you could tell me.”
I held it up to catch the sunlight from the window. The glaze was the key. “I was assuming it was your uncle’s because you brought it. But now I see it couldn’t be. It was made before he was born. It’s not the work of the ancient ones – it’s too precise – but it is very old.”
“How old?”
“My best guess would be a hundred years, but I could be way off.”
“I doubt it. You know your pots pretty good for a yellow hair.”
“My hair is brown.”
“You all look the same to me.”
“Then how come you always recognize me?”
“You’re the short one.”
“I could point out that you’re the same height as me.”
“Yeah, but in my tribe, I’m tall.”
“Where did you get the pot?”
“The trading post west of Bernalillo.”
“Did you ask where they got it?”
He shrugged. “Same old story. Said they bought it off an Indian who needed money.”
“Why would someone from another tribe have an ancient pot from your people?”
Martin just shrugged.
“Your uncle ever see anything like this before?”
He shrugged again.
I sat the pot down on the corner, suddenly nervous about holding it. “You know what this is worth?”
“Me guess much wampum.”
“You guess right, Tonto. At least fifty thousand, maybe twice that much. What do you want me to do with it?”
“Keep it safe for now. And maybe study it.”
13
Martin calls the pots in my new shop fakes because they are.
I own the east third of a north-facing adobe a block off the square in Old Town. The proceeds from the sale of the pots that got me expelled provided the down payment, and the mortgage has only five years to run.
The middle third of the building became vacant last spring when the former tenant was arrested for murder. If he ever gets out of prison, I’m a good candidate for his next victim. I’m the one who proved he did it.
I was in one of those dry spells between customers when Reggie West was carted off to prison, so the owner of his part of the building agreed to let me rent the space with a five-year option to buy. Maybe I’ll accumulate a down payment during the next five years. If not, I can wait until my current mortgage is paid off and take a new one. Meanwhile, I have both a mortgage payment and a rental payment.
My landlord now enjoys not only my rental payments but also depreciation he can take off his taxes. Which just shows you how ridiculous the tax laws are, because the building is definitely not depreciating. It is
appreciating
and has been doing so steadily for three hundred years. According to the original title, the house was built by Don Fernando Maria Arajuez Aragon when the Spaniards returned after being driven out by the pueblo revolt of 1680. He sold it three years later to Don Pablo Benedicion Verahuenza
Orozco for 15 pesetas. I don’t know how much 15 pesetas were worth in the late 1600’s, but it took a lot of appreciation for the price to climb to the outrageous level I’ll have to pay if I decide to exercise my option to buy.
My shop faces north and fronts the street. My living area faces south and fronts the alley. Or should that be ‘backs the alley’? My workshop is between the two. Since renting the new space, I had spent most of my time there making copies of the genuine pots in my inventory.
I have a gift. I can reproduce any piece of Southwestern Native American pottery. I couldn’t duplicate Japanese Raku or the ring vases of ancient Scotland, but if any of my faux Anasazi pots are excavated a hundred years from now, I’m confident they will end up displayed in a museum as the genuine article. I’m not an artist, but I am a skilled craftsman. My feel for the local pottery results from growing up with it, studying it, digging it up, and making it.
The genuine pots I dig up share shelf space with my clever copies. The ancients didn’t sign their pots so I follow their example. I never claim my copies are genuine. I remain silent.
Caveat emptor
.
I once had a buyer who paid with a bad check. Then he had the pot appraised by an expert who told him it was a fake. The appraiser was guessing, but I couldn’t argue, could I? I had invested a good deal of time and effort in that pot, but I never got any money for it.
Caveat venditor
.
Despite all my experience, it had never occurred to me until recently that I could sell fakes
as fakes
! It turns out there’s a market for things people know are not the real deal. The $50 Mexican Rolex probably outsells the Swiss model.
So I started making copies of the real pots in my inventory. Some of the older genuine ones are worth anywhere from $10,000 to $50,000. A replica will fetch ten to twenty percent of the price of the original. So people who admire my genuine 1940 Santo Domingo pot but don’t want to shell out $25,000 for it, can buy a high quality replica for $3,000. The pot they get is just as beautiful as the original and indistinguishable even down to the brand new patina. You might think ‘new patina’ is an oxymoron, but if you saw one of my replicas, you would change your mind. I’m sorry I can’t tell you how I do it – it’s a trade secret.