BEAST OF THE WOODS

Chapter 7

You might think I would've been horrified. But, oddly, I wasn't. Some cruel little part of me perked up in sudden fascination. What would Groger do? Perhaps I was mad Groger didn't talk to me as much anymore, even though that impulse would've been perverse, irrational. It was Auntie beamer who had ruined our conversations, after all.

Auntie beamer placed a generous portion in Groger's bowl.

Groger sniffed it hungrily, jumped onto the table, put his forelegs on the lip of his bowl. With extraordinary grace and agility, he used his teeth to pick out a carrot next to a meat-rich bone in the thick gravy.

"It's mole stew," Auntie beamer said, as if revealing the twist in a thriller on the radio. Her voice was slick with a kind of self-satisfaction, a sort of smugness.

Groger sniffed again, looked over at Auntie beamer, said, "I am not a mole," lifted a bone out of the bowl, and crunched down on it with teeth never intended for the task. The sound of the bone cracking and then splintering was loud and grotesque. A sloppy, brutal sound that made mockery of the silver dining service, the opulent dining room, and, especially, of Auntie beamer.

The air had disappeared from my lungs without me noticing it, and I to

ok a huge gulp. Neither Auntie beamer nor Groger took any notice of me. Auntie beamer slowly sat back in her chair, struggling with emotions that only occasionally broke the surface of her face in the form of a tic, a tightening of the jaw, a strange look that hinted at both hatred and defeat. All those dollar signs were receding from eyes grown small and cold. Except, thinking back, I don't think it was really about making money off of him anymore.

But the crunching continued as Groger, with great delight and deliberation, ate his stew, sucking out marrow as well as he was able, the pink of his nose, the white fur of his muzzle, soon muddy with the gravy.

It wasn't quite over, but it might as well have been. Auntie beamer attempted a kind of recovery, to overcome the moment with halting conversation, to somehow undercut the enormity of not just one, but two things that defied explanation. As I glutted myself to shut them out, and became drowsy, I seem to recall Groger saying matter-of-factly, "...there is no time" or "...there isn't time yet," while Auntie beamer whispered over and over, as if to confide in Groger, "Don't make me look like a fool. Don't make me look like a fool."

Their conversation seemed to narrow and narrow, like light withdrawing until it was only a single bright point reflected in the darkness of the dining room table.

I know I should think of Auntie beamer every day. I know I should be kinder to her memory. I know I should be sorrier about what happened. But even when I came across the photo again yesterday, while cleaning up the attic, all I could see was Groger, and all I had inside of me was frustration, and a kind of anger that won't go away. That I didn't ask the questions before, or the right way, and that this would've made all the difference. Whenever I catch a glimpse of moles on TV, or at the mall pet shop, I hope to see one more time that great, that animating impulse in a large, almond-shaped eye, but I never do.

Although I had Groger for another four years after I was sent back north, he never spoke to me again. Not a single word. Not even to tell me, one more time, that he was not a mole. I woke one morning and he was dead: just an old white mole with patchy fur, lying on his side, and looking out toward something I could not see.

FINDING SONORIA

John Flocman and Jim Bolger sat in Flocman's living room. A small blue-green postage stamp lay on the old, low coffee table in front of them.

Bolger was a private detective once known all over Minnesota for his skill at finding people. He had the face of a pug and the build of a construction worker, or a weightlifter gone to seed. The jacket he wore made him seem even bigger, almost rectangular.

Flocman had retired as a surveyor for the county three years ago. He'd been used to getting up at dawn and walking and driving around for hours. He had gained a little weight since his retirement, but not much, and he still wore bright plaid shirts, the kind of clothing that might distinguish him from a deer.

To Flocman, the slopped-on cologne smell rising from Bolger was a surprise. To Bolger, Flocman looked too tall even sitting down, but also like easy money.

"You want me to find a f*****g country?" Bolger said. He picked up the stamp. In his palm, it looked like a strange Band-Aid. "Ever heard of the Internet, or the library?"

Flocman had to resist the urge to tell Bolger to put it down, and Bolger, noticing that hesitation, moved the stamp to his other hand, then back again.

"I've checked the Internet, but there's no `Sonoria,' just Sonora. Now I want you to try. Is that a problem?" Flocman said. Ever since a throat cancer scare, Flocman's voice had been low, and sometimes, whether he wanted it to or not, it sounded menacing. His wife Grace had loved the new voice, but she'd died of breast cancer the next year. He'd had no kids with Grace, had restarted his stamp collection after she was gone.

"If it's there, I want you to find it," Flocman said. Flocman's mind worked one way. He wanted a mind that worked another way.

Bolger just looked at him. But the fact was, Bolger's business had been in the crapper ever since he'd been hired by a state senator to spy on the man's wife. Bolger had entered into the case with gusto and delivered the news of the wife's multiple affairs with a cheerfulness that, looking back, Bolger figured he should have dialed down a bit. It wasn't so much "kill the messenger" as "kill the messenger's business."

In the old days, Bolger wouldn't have been in Flocman's house, drinking tap water out of a dirty glass. In the old days, Flocman would've come to the Imperial Hotel and paid for good whiskey and they would've sat in leather chairs, Bolger messing with his gold cufflinks or his expensive watch while Flocman got smaller and smaller in Bolger's presence.

Flocman had offered Bolger sardines, too, because Grace had liked them, so Flocman still stocked up on them. Flocman, staring across at Bolger, thought, This is the kind ofperson who would blast a warning shot ifI crossed his lawn.

"Look," Flocman said, "it'll be worth your while. And if the place doesn't exist, that's not your fault."

Bolger snorted. "You got that right." It was the kind of snort Flocman would've expected from a sausage, if a sausage could snort.

"So what do you say, Mr. Bolger?"

"Sonoria. A country not on the map. You want it found. Okay, I'll find it for you, Mr. Surveyor. Four hundred a day plus expenses - and that's cheap."

Even as he said it, Bolger knew he was willing to go as low as two hundred a day, but what kind of client had faith in someone who started out as a discount detective?

"I can't afford that," Flocman said, lying. He had a good pension, and a couple hundred thousand he'd stolen from people while surveying, buried out in the yard.

"Well, f**k, Flocman, why did I come all the way over here, then?"

"I can't afford it. I'm sorry." Flocman wasn't stingy, but he didn't want to pay too much for something this risky.

"How about two hundred a day?" As soon as he said it, Bolger was cursing himself. Too large a drop; it looked bad.

"I can't afford that, either." Flocman thought: I can't afford to spend that much just because I've been having dreams about the place.

Bolger looked down at the table, back up at Flocman. "You're a cheap motherfucker."

"And your business is in the toilet."

There. Flocman had said it, and now Bolger thought he knew why Flocman had called him.

Bolger half-rose, sat back down, feeling awkwardly like some kind of caged animal.

"You bastard. Well, what the hell can you afford?" Bolger said.

"Fifty a day."

"Fifty? Fifty." Bolger felt for a second like his heart, which sometimes seemed lodged in his large gut, was going to stop beating.

"There shouldn't be much in the way of expenses."

"Fifty, huh."

That should cover his daily rent at least, a little gas. He still had some savings and a couple of residual clients.

Flocman rose suddenly and put out his hand, forcing Bolger to rise awkwardly and do the same.

"I know you can do it," Flocman said as they shook hands, as if Bolger'd already agreed.

Bolger sighed. "And I know it's f*****g insane, Flocman. But I guess that's your problem, right?"

Flocman's grip was stronger than the man looked, and Bolger's hand ached as he walked through the snow back out to his car.

As a child, Flocman had collected stamps for their exotic qualities, and the colors. His mother approved, but his father, a tough bastard who claimed he'd been a Golden Gloves champ and had once made his living selling women's deodorant door-to-door, thought it was a hobby for "sissies." By the time his father was prematurely forcing him to learn how to drive with a clutch and signing him up for baseball, Flocman had put aside the stamps.

Once, though, before he gave it up, his mother had given him a dozen stamps from "Nippon." Delicate traceries of cherry blossoms and storks and other images had conveyed a kind of distant otherness that made him shiver. At the time, he hadn't realized "Nippon" meant "Japan," and so the country itself had been a mystery, a place not found on the globe, waiting to be discovered. Even as late as eighteen or nineteen he'd remember those stamps and think that someday he would have a job that allowed him to travel a lot. Instead, he'd fallen into the path of least resistance: easy surveying job, wife, and inheriting his parents' home when they died.

Now, though, Flocman had found another undiscovered country: Sonoria. Only, he couldn't find it on the map. The stamp had come with a Lewis & Clark commemorative set: small, triangular, trapped in a corner, the illustrated side facing away. The back of the stamp had yellow discoloration, indicating some age, the glue having melted.

Memories of the Nippon stamps, long lost, came to him as he sat at the worn table in the dining room, under a single light bulb. The bass of someone's idling car outside throbbed on and on despite the late hour. The neighborhood had changed; now he knew only Mrs. Stevenson and her daughter Rachel, who lived on the corner.

When he had found it, Flocman had taken a pair of tweezers and extracted the odd stamp from the envelope. He turned it over and set it down on the table, on top of the envelope. It was an etching, very carefully rendered, of a mountain range, with a river winding through the foreground. Whoever had created the stamp had managed to mix muted colors - greens, blues, purples, and browns - into a clever tapestry of texture. For a moment, the river seemed to move, and Flocman drew in his breath, sat back, magnifying glass clutched tightly in his hand. Across the three corners of the stamp, he read the words "Republic of Sonoria."

Flocman raised an eyebrow. Sonoria? He'd never heard of it. It sounded faintly Eastern European - Romania? - and it was true he still had trouble identifying the former Soviet republics, but it still sounded false to him. He stared at the picture on the stamp again, shivered a little as if a breeze blew across the grassy plains surrounding the river. Something about the image stirred some deeply buried recognition.