Page 42 of It Takes a Thief

Yes. We’d seen a guy with massive gastroenteritis after eating what he thought were magical mushrooms. His severe dehydration and electrolyte imbalances led to total circulatory collapse. He would’ve had permanent liver failure if he’d lived. That was not the kind of shroom we were after. Ellis wanted to teach us how to identify edible and safe shrooms.

“Let’s rest here,” Ellis said, indicating the first semi-flat area I’d seen in a thousand years. I fell to my ass with a thud and an exhalation of breath. Galileo seemed to float to a sitting position, like one of those mountain goats that can jump from rock to rock. He may have been a stick figure, but he could clamber with the best of them without so much as a panting breath.

“Can I keep going?” asked Desiree. Show off.

“Sure.” Ellis waved. “Just go straight up through the middle of those pines. There’s an overhanging ledge that makes a sort of cave. Wait there.”

Ellis took off his much larger backpack, grinning slyly.

Galileo picked up on it. “And what might you have in your backpack? Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches? What? Don’t people bring peanut butter and jelly sandwiches when they go on a hike?”

I smiled wryly. “I think that’s a kid’s first day of kindergarten.”

Ellis laughed too. “Nah, I’ve got something much better.” He withdrew a plastic baggie holding something mushy.

“A mushroom,” I said, wide-eyed.

“Yes,” said Ellis, “but this is one of the bad ones. I want you to identify this, Madison.” He handed me the bag, and I squished the rustic yellow cap between my fingers. The stem was almost fluorescent orange.

“This is Satan’s bolete,” Ellis said. “I found it about seventy meters down the cliff.”

“I’ve seen those,” said Galileo. “I’ve just always known not to eat them, but I don’t remember why. Sheep won’t touch them when they appear lower down.”

I handed the baggie to Galileo and swiped at a bee buzzing around me. “Go away!”

Ellis tilted his head philosophically. I adored his little interjections about nature, science, the world around us. I’d never been around anyone so fucking educated. “The law of natural selection can never result in total perfection. This honeybee demonstrates this.” The bee had come to rest on a strikingly purple flower arising from a foot-long stem. “His stinger was flawed, but it was good enough for it to anchor its place in the natural world. Once species equilibrium was reached, it lacked any challenger. There was no more stimulation and refinement of its evolution. So its progress was basically stopped.

“William Blake said, ‘Without contraries, is no progress.’ We’re all made of the same stuff as Darwin’s bee. We require continuing spiritual friction of strife and opposition, hardship and conflict, or we’ll suffer the same fate as the bee.”

I was still soaking in and admiring what Ellis had just said. He was saying that suffering conflict and hardship, such as I was with Ford, would make me a more highly evolved person. I liked that.

But Galileo also tilted his head. “Then I must be the most highly evolved human of all. I used to use a clothespin to brush my teeth, and our toothpaste was Velveeta.”

“I’ve seen your teeth,” said Ellis with confidence. “You came through just fine.”

I blurted, “Then Adam and Eve had no transgression! It’s a reason to celebrate their fall. If God said they’d ‘become like one of us,’ then they really ascended instead of falling. They lost paradise, but now they can evolve and reach divinity.”

Ellis seemed to smile at me, and Galileo said, “Are you a Catholic? Ellis here believes our birth is a choice and not some cosmic twist of fate. I like that. There is no Fall or Damnation in our world. Guilt over some fictitious fall isn’t the main problem for us.”

“Right,” said Ellis. “It’s inadequacy, weakness, and incompetence. Spiritual childishness—those describe a soul in the early stages of development. That’s all. Don’t worry, Madison. You’re not a spiritual child. Not after what you went through as a kid. But you’ve got a lot to learn.”

Ellis knew about my fucked childhood, sleeping in those slot canyons, sharing overhangs with gila monsters and geckos. I said, “I’m glad I have a lot to learn. Because you’re an excellent teacher.”

“He is,” said Galileo with pride. “Madison, at the policeman’s ball I met a friend of yours who deals with birds of prey.”

“Yes! Fox Isherwood.”

“I was wondering if he could get me some hawk urine. The scent of a predator keeps rodents away in my hogan.”

I slapped him playfully on his arm. “Galileo, you’re not supposed to be sleeping in that freezing, wet mud house anyway. You’re with us, on our nice warm couch. And you’re supposed to move into Pippa’s old apartment across from the Bum Steer.”

Galileo looked at his boots. “You’ve done so much for me. I don’t know if I can accept it all. It’s all so much!”

Ellis said, “You just find some cousin who isn’t arrested for dragging a broken dishwasher around town from the back of his minivan.”

“Did that really happen?” asked Galileo.

“You tell me,” teased Ellis.