The Pot Thief Who Studied Billy the Kid (41 page)

The next words out of his mouth – not counting the disparaging
ones he leveled at the coffee
–
were ‘
Carlos Campos Castillo
’.

“You remember that name?” he asked.

“I remember all three of them, but I can’t swear that was the order they were in. I have them written down somewhere.”

“It was on the list you gave me.”

“If you say so. The only thing I can remember without consulting my list is that there were three individuals with a total of nine names, six of which were
apellidos
.”

He frowned
,
whether
at the word ‘
apellidos
’ or
at
the coffee
I can’t say
.

“I talked to the sheriff up there after your call. Turns out this Castillo is on their missing persons list, but they ain’t looking for him because they think
they know
the reason he left town.“

Whit was on the case. I got him on it by hinting there might be a valuable pot or two in the cliff dwelling. But I had gone over it with a fine-toothed rebar and knew full well there was not so much as a shard. I was worried about not being able to deliver the goods.

“Actually,
” I said, “
you should call him Campos.
“

He pulled
out his
pocket notebook and
looked
at it. “Says here
‘Carlos Campos Castillo
’, s
o Castillo is his last name.”

It wasn’t worth
explaining
. I
asked why
Carlos
had left town.

“Wait ‘til you hear this one. Someone had been stealing his firewood. So he carved a plug out of a piece on his woodpile, put some gunpowder in the hole and stuck the plug of wood back in the hole.”

He hesitated and looked at me. “You don’t seem too surprised.”

“I’ve heard of people doing that in remote parts of the state.”

“Yeah? Well this particular piece of booby-trapped wood ended up in the stove of a guy who lived in the same village.
It didn’t have much powder in it. I guess the idea was to discourage the thief, not to kill him. But a piece of the log shot into the guys face and left a scar
.
By the time he reported it, he had started growing a beard to cover it
”

I thought about it. “I don’t get it. Seems like the thief would be the one who would skip town because he might be arrested for stealing wood or just didn’t want to stay once the whole village knew he was a thief. Why would
Carlos
leave?
”

“It’s illegal to booby-trap anything, Hubert, but I wouldn’t go after him for that, and the Sheriff up there wouldn’t either. A man steals from a neighbor ain’t going to get much police cooperation. The problem for
our boy
Ca
rlos
is the guy the wood blew up on is the biggest
,
meanest
hombre
in town
,
and
you wouldn’t want him angry at you
.”

El Bastardo
, I immediately thought.
Then I remembered he didn’t have a beard.

“What was his name?
”
I asked
.

He looked down at his notebook
again
and said,
“
Alonso Castillo Maldonado
.”

43

I figured
if
Sharice show
ed
up with another
stem of y
ucca blossom
s
, that
would mark us as a couple. Ou
r
first tradition.

Maybe we’d the
n choose ‘our song’
although I don’t think people do that these days.

I had served trout and she had served fiddleheads
.
I didn’t want to risk serving meat in case she didn’t eat it. I took the bus to the co
-
op and bought the ingredients for my vegetarian
chiles rellenos
–
poblanos
, corn, summer squash, onions,
fresh
oregano,
cilantro
怅
, jalapeños
,
a fresh vanilla bean
and
crema Mexicana
.
I picked up some avocados and a pink grapefruit for the salad and some
heavy cream
for the dessert of
pastel de tres leches
.

Men are not the only one whose hearts can be reached via their stomach
s
, and I definitely wanted to reach Sharice’s heart. And maybe a few other areas as well.

The
rellenos
are simple but time consuming. Roast and peel the poblanos
.
Remove t
he stem
s
and seeds. Sauté the corn, squash and onions lightly – they will finish cooking in the oven. Add chopped oregano and a little
crema Mexicana
and stuff the mixture into the
poblanos
. Bake then drizzle with a sauce made with
cilantro
pureed
in
cream, cumin and the scrapings from a fresh vanilla bean
. T
op with bits of sweet caramelized jalape
ñ
os.

I had the
poblanos
ready for the oven and the sauce warm in a pan. The
pastel de tres leches
was on the counter. The Gruet
was in the fridge.
The grapefruit had been peeled, sectioned and seeded. Only the avocados remained as they had been at the store. I like to do them at the last minute.

The plain wood table had a vibrant green silk runner
and
plates with a
red and green
chile
design I had done for
the restaurant I mentioned earlier
that
was called
first
Schnitzel
then
later
Chile Schnitzel
. With those two names,
failure was the only possible outco
me.

She
arrived in
a
v
-neck dress of coarse-w
oven
linen, black with geometric patterns. No jewelry at all. He
r
signature violet lipstick and eye shadow
. The yucca stem was in one hand, a small
paper
bag in the other. She held th
e
m both behind my back as we kissed.

I stepped back to admire her and she twirled.

“Vera Wang?”

“
Adrianna Papel
.”

“I’ve never heard of her.”

She canted her head and gave me a sideways look. “
You’
d never heard of Vera Wang, either, had you?”

“I thought she was a local Chinese immigrant who worked as a seamstress.”

She laughed and twirled again, this time into my arms, and we kissed again.

I resisted the temptation to volunteer to shed my cast.

I put the
rellenos
in the oven and opened the Gruet.

Sharice stripped t
he yucca blossoms into the bowl.

“Do you have any sparkling water?” she asked.

I poured
Gruet into the bowl
instead
.

“You impe
tuous devil,”
she said.

Geronimo was making paw
prints on the French door
s
.
We joined him outside
, and
Sharice gave him a doggie treat from the paper bag. It had come from a bakery, not a pet store, and it disappeared before I got a good look at it.
I left G
eronimo with his new best friend to prepare the avocado and grapefruit drizzled with lemon
juice
and almond oil.

I told her about Cactus Truesdell’s tooth story and asked if she thought it could be true.

“Sure. We had an instructor who used to liven up her classes with
what she called ‘
tales from the dentistry
of old
’
. For most of history, the dentist’s only job was to pull teeth and make false ones. There was no such thing as a filling or a repair. And there
were no
anesthetic
s. The main
occupational
hazards were getting bitten or punched.”

“So dentists also made false teeth?”

“Sometimes they made them, usually carved from ivory taken from
hippopotamus teeth or elephant tusks.
But sometimes they used actual human teeth.”

I winced. “Ones they had pulled from a previous client?”

“No, those would be too rotten and broken. They nroken. Teeded undamaged teeth, so they paid
grave robbers
to remove teeth from
corpses
.”

“Jeez. And I thought contemporary grave robbers were bad. At least they don’t sell parts. Or maybe they do. Should we change the subject?”

She nodded
and then asked
what else I had learned down south. We discussed the Lincoln County War at length because
, being
Canadian, she knew nothing about it other than the name
s
of two of the principals,
Billy the Kid
and John Chisum
.