Out of the Canyon
He reported that at noon he found a most pleasing specimen and sat down with his back against a boulder to nibble on it. Its meat is soft and sweet like chewy confection, he said of the mushroom. When he was finished, he swallowed half the contents of his canteen, and, immediately, brilliant colors shot across the sky. A crow on the other side of the canyon called to him something about the ancient man’s bones. Then, from out of thin air, ten feet past the rim, he was approached by a figure with horns. It came out of a cloud, playing my jaw harp. The rest was vague, but I remember the creature whispering in my ear, and it sounded like wind in the canyon. Then I nodded in agreement. With this the entry ended.
Tooms again picked up his pen three days later in order to record the afternoon on which he revealed the sculpture to Thilliada. We stood out behind my work shack beneath an overcast sky. The weather was exceptionally cool for the canyon at that time of day. She wore a loose blowing dress with a colorful pattern of daisies, and her green eyes appeared lit from within with excitement. The work stood before us draped in an old sheet, and I told Miss Thilliada, “I call it Ogatai—a name the vultures screamed to me when I journeyed along the rim.” She clapped her hands like a child.
The sculpture Tooms referred to is still in existence to this day. It stands alongside the old boardwalk at precisely the halfway point to the springs. The cow skull is tilted back slightly as if the thing is watching the movement of the clouds, and its left hand is thrust out, palm up, proffering payment. The workmen who replaced some of the timbers and planks back in ‘45 testified to being haunted for many years by the statue’s diabolical grin. Some members of the ‘68 commune recall that the thing was known as ‘Thief,’ because occasionally they would wake in the morning and find it draped with their jewelry and holding in its right hand the straight razor that was passed around by the men for shaving.
Thilliada was so impressed, she threw her arms around Elijah and kissed him. When she touched me, he wrote, I could hear the canyon groan and the lizards leaping out of the water pail next to the well. She led him back to the house, and, as he put it: We had a feverish assignation on the kitchen floor. Later, in the parlor, she showed me something new. They eventually fell asleep and Tooms had a nightmare of Ogatai creeping through the darkened house.
She was still sleeping soundly when Tooms woke late in the night. He got up and immediately got dressed. The moon was in the open window, he wrote. It was so cold there was frost. He went downstairs and got his rifle from over the fireplace. As quietly as possible, he slipped out the front door and headed for the canyon. I trembled, and though it was cold, the sweat ran into my eyes and poured down my back. My very heart was chilled.
I came across him exactly where I had been told he would be, standing in the dried out streambed a hundred feet South of Fat Rock. He was clutching a leather satchel of some kind and wearing a brown suit that shone sickly in the moonlight. A heavy man, not likeable at first glance.
Upon seeing Tooms, the man called out, “Where are we?”
“The Canyon,” Tooms told him.
The man spluttered nervously, telling Tooms, “I know this much—it has something to do with the intersection of Fate and Desire.”
“Stop talking nonsense,” said Tooms as he brought the rifle up to aim.
