The Pot Thief Who Studied Billy the Kid (4 page)

The
earnest
young man
entered my shop on
July
1
4
th.
I
n="remember the exact date
because I’
d finally finished reading
The Wooing of Malkatoon
by Lew Wallace and was cal
culating how long it had taken.

Four months to the day.

I’m not a slow reader. I just couldn’t take more than a page or two a day. I probably
completed
sixty
books during those four months, doing a
few pages of
Malkatoon
in the lull between
other
books.

I stuck with it only because the centennial of New Mexico’s statehood was coming up, and I’d decided to focus my readin
g on my native state
.
I
selected
Wallace
because he was New
M
exico’s
Territorial Governor
from
1878 to 1881
during
which time
he
published his most famous work,
Ben-
Hur
. I was fascinated that someone who gove
rned New Mexico during
its
Wild W
est days was also writing the book that
eventually
became the blockbuster
movie starring Charlton Heston.

But a
ll I was thinking about when
the h>Teotype">andsome young man passed over my threshold
was how happy I was to be
finished with
Malkatoon
. I felt like I deserved something for my persistence, and
he
delivered it,
placing
a small Anasazi bowl
on my counter
.

Or, m
ore accurately, two pieces of a small Anasazi bowl.
Joining them at their edges produced about two thirds of the original. Among serious collectors, anything over half is a bowl. Anything less is a sh
a
rd.

I looked up at his honest face.
“You want to sell this?”

“Make me an offer,” he said.

I shook my head. “It doesn’t work that way. Sellers set the price. If I like your price, I’ll take it. If not, we can haggle. But you’ve got to start.”

“You have me at a disadvantage. You’re in the business. You know how much the pot is worth.”

“
Where did you get it?”

He hesitated.
He
looked to be around thirty
. In addition to
his honest face, he had
a pleasant smile
,
intelligent eyes
and a strong chin.
“I
got
it from a teenager who said
he found it in a cliff dwelling,
”
he said.

“Where?”

“At my
office
.”

“I meant where
did he find it, not where did you
get it
.
”

“Let’s talk price,” he said.

I decided to
ask about
the location of the cliff dwelling
later
.

He glanced around the shop. “You have anything like this?”

I led him to
a shelf on the west wall
and pointed to an ancient pot
. “This one is
about the same size
but in better shape. You can see I have it priced at
three
thousand.”

“I’ll take
two
for mine,
”
he said.

“I’ll give you
five hundred
.”

“How about this?” he offered. “You give me
a thousand for
the pot, and I’ll tell you where it was found.”

I ran through the possibilities
before I replied
. “That won’t do me
any
good if
i
t
was found
in the middle of nowhere. Just because the original owner dropped it doesn’t mean there will be other pots there.
And it won’t help me if it was found on a reservation.
I don’t dig on
Indian lands
.
”

“It was found
on B
ureau of Land Management
land
. But
the
small
cliff dwelling
it came from is so remote and well-hidden that I don’t think
even they
know it’s there.”

He had just described
my ideal pot-
digging location.
“What’s your name and where do you live?”

“Alvar
Nuñez
,” he said.
He’d been speaking perfect
unaccented English
, but his name rolled off his tongue as if we were in Jerez. “I live in a place you’ve never heard of.”

“Try me.”

“
La Re
i
na
.”

“Near the Taos County line with a great view of
Cerro Roto
?
”

“You’ve been there? We’re not even on state maps.”

“I haven’t been there. But my work requires study
of
the
USGS topographic maps, so I’ve seen every place name in the state no matter how small.”

I had him wait while I went to my residence in the back
of the building and withdrew $
1
,
0
00 from my secret hiding place
. I also brought
my
topo map
s
back to the shop.
He
found the right map and
marked the location of the ruin
about
twenty
miles
from
the village
.

Before I handed him
the money
, I asked to see his drivers license.
It
said Alvar
Nuñez
.
And
in a break with tradition, the picture
on the license
actually looked
like him.

After I handed
him the money,
he counted it. On the trust scale, we were even.

And that’s how I ended up
a few weeks later
stranded on
the cliff dwelling above the Rio Doloros
o
.

5

I raised two fingers to signal
our favorite server,
Angie
,
that Susannah and I both needed refills.

“So what happened after the coyote woke up?”
Susannah asked.

“Why don’t you call him
Wile
y
?”

“
We don’t give names to coyote
s
on our ranch.”

“Do you shoot them from aircraft?”

“No. And we don’t set traps or poison. The only time we ever shoot a coyote is when one approaches our sheep.
We protect our flocks the old-fashioned way with
Euskal artzain txakurra
.
”

“That’s easy for you to say.”

“Basque sheep dogs.”

Susanna
h’s family name is
Inchaustigui
. Her family
doesn’t speak
Basque at home, but she learned
some
from her grandfather. She says she’s not fluent, but how would anyone know?

Basque, or
Euskara
as they call it, is the only remaining language
in Europe that predates the
Indo-European languages
.
Some people have speculated that the Basque language evolved from an earlier version spoken by the Neanderthals. I advise you not to mention this theory in the presence of Susannah’s brothers if you value your health
.

We do know that Basque
was being spoken
when the Romans invaded, but the people were illiterate, so there is no history of the language. Linguists assume there were other languages spoken in prehistoric Europe, but they died out long before they could be written down. The same thing probably happened to the language of the people of the cliff dwelling above the Rio Doloroso
.

I told
her
Wiley
slept
for about an hour. H
e seemed better when he woke up. So I sent Geronimo ahead as scout and followed him. This ti
me
Wiley
hobbled along behind.

“What about your fear of heights?”

“I
forced the
rebar through the back of my hat and hung the gunny sack
from it like
blinders. The only thing I saw until we reached the switchbacks was basalt.”