BEAST OF THE WOODS

Chapter 8

Carefully, as if the precision were important, he picked

up the stamp using the tweezers and placed it back in the envelope, in the same position, with the front facing inward. Then he walked over to the map of the world framed in his bedroom, and he looked for Sonoria. First, he tried Eastern Europe, then Central Asia, then random places, then systematically from left to right. No Sonoria in Asia, Europe, South America. No island named Sonoria. No isthmus. No province. No state. No city. Nothing. Unless it was so small it wouldn't show up on a map? Or it was one of those countries that had disappeared into the maw of another country?

Then he stood back, gazing at the map. It was probably a fake stamp someone had stuck in there as a joke. That's what Grace would've said. Just a joke. Why should he waste his time with it?

But that night, as Flocman tried to get to sleep, he recalled the weathered quality of the stamp, the yellowish stain on the back, the high quality of the image on the front, and something about it worried at him, made him restless. He felt hot and out of sorts. When he did finally get to sleep, he dreamed he stood in front of a huge rendering of the stamp that blotted out the sky. The image in the stamp was composed of huge dots, but the dots began to bleed together, and then swirled into a photograph that became a living, moving scene. On the plains, strange animals were moving. Over the wide and roiling river, kingfishers dove and reappeared, bills thick with fish. The mountains in the distance were wreathed with cloud. A smell came to him, of mint and chocolate and fresh air far from the exhaust and haze of cities. Then the stars came up in a sky of purest black and blotted it all out, and he woke gasping for breath, afraid, so afraid, that he might forget this glimpse, this door into the Republic of Sonoria.

Bolger had heard none of this from Flocman, of course, but had managed in his rough but uncanny way to intuit a narrow vein of madness in Flocman's words during their initial meeting. It hadn't hurt that he'd bugged Flocman's phone, though, and learned that Flocman continued to call the post office about "Sonoria" and to make other calls that suggested Bolger could've charged much more than fifty dollars an hour.

He had also talked to a few of Flocman's friends from the surveyor's department as well as the neighbors. Bolger had ruled out the stamp as a prank as a result. Everybody said Flocman was a straight arrow - so straight it was ridiculous.

Truth was, Bolger still thought the joke might be on him. Sonoria. Was Flocman in cahoots with the state senator, trying to make him look stupid? The whole story sounded like one of Bolger's mother's stories. He always knew the stories were bullshit, but at night, lying in bed with the sounds of his father knocking things over in the garage, he'd liked them anyway.

Bolger had a color photo of the stamp that he kept on the bed stand in his room at the Murat by-the-hour motel. It was the last thing he saw when he went to bed at night, and the first thing he saw when he woke up. When he had a hooker come by, they almost always noticed the damn stamp, maybe because it was the only thing in the place with any color to it.

At first, Bolger's own dreams focused on the councilman, and how this Sonoria assignment was all a big hoax to harass him. He saw a headline in his dreams: DISCOUNT DETECTIVE LOOKS FOR IMAGINARY COUNTRY.

But then the dreams began to change. The Republic of Sonoria. Where might that be? He didn't know, but he did know that in his dreams he had drawn his hand across the surface of a mighty river and felt the thick wet weight of it slap against his palm. He knew that his pants leg had been stained with the yellow-green of the grasses of the plains. His face had felt the breath of the place upon it. Jeez Louise, he'd smelled the f*****g dirt, for chrissakes! No dream had ever been so real, so true, and sometimes even when he woke to the warm body of a woman in his bed, he wished he was still in dream. Sometimes, too, when he woke, Bolger remembered Flocman's firm handshake and wondered if it had been a kind of trigger.

Bolger told none of this to Flocman. All Flocman got were the standard progress reports Bolger gave him over the phone. For reasons Bolger couldn't put into words, he didn't want to visit Flocman's house again if he could help it. Maybe because it reminded him too much of his old man's place, and getting the s**t kicked out of him every other week.

Bolger would open the bed stand drawer and take out the g*n given to him by his father, and an old color photo of his mother standing on a bridge in Prague.

Then he would call Flocman.

"Yeah, Flocman? I went to the post office. I asked the stupid questions you didn't have the balls to ask. They've never heard of Sonoria. It's not in their computers. You can't send a package there. I mean, you could try - you could address something to Bumfuck, Sonoria, and see if it came back - but it's not in the computers. And, listen, they don't have anything close to it, either. No `Slonoria,' `Shonoria,' `Snoria,' or whatever. Sonora's a f*****g desert, not a country, just a county, with no `i.' So much for misspellings. Over and out."

Flocman didn't know why Bolger said "over and out," and Bolger never told him it was left over from a brief stint driving a truck for his dad. Mostly they'd hauled timber out of Canada, and it had been the most boring work Bolger had ever done. Getting out of it had also meant getting the f**k away from his dad, so he'd split. But he still liked that phrase, "over and out." It had a way of shutting up whoever was on the other end.

Flocman appreciated "over and out," because he'd been about to make a big mistake. If Bolger hadn't cut him off, Flocman would've blurted out, "But I know it's real! I've been there. I've walked along the riverbank. I've run through the plains. I've walked toward the mountains."

Flocman, in his house by himself, no longer got any satisfaction from his stamps. Instead, he thought about Sonoria a lot, and Bolger. He wondered what Bolger's life must be like, solving mysteries for a living. As a surveyor, he'd spent a lot of time outside, measuring - a lot of time in the spring and summer hammering little stakes with red flags into the ground so people could sell properties or rezone them. This seemed so far from Bolger's experience of life. And yet now their worlds were the same world, all because of a stamp.

Bolger, meanwhile, kept looking, needing that fifty dollars a day, dutifully mailed to him by Flocman in six-day increments. Bolger didn't know why Flocman insisted on six-day increments, and it pissed him off because it seemed arbitrary and yet organized. Flocman did it because he had a thing about threes, and because it fit the increments in which he'd buried the stolen money, but Bolger never figured that out.

The Internet and the library came next on Bolger's list, simultaneously because he no longer had a computer. In a particle-board stall at the library, he found out that "Sonora" was also a music company, a snake, and a kind of thunderstorm in California. "Sonoria" was nothing. Wondering, in a purely theoretical way, if a piece of information had fallen through the cracks, he spent hours huddled over remaining archives of decaying microfiche, focusing on obscure newspapers and old travel magazines. Maybe it had been a place, a long time ago. Over time, Bolger's vivid dreams of the place had begun to infiltrate his days. He had them idling in the car at a stop light, in line at the mini-mart to buy some beer. But the closer he got, the farther away he got, too, in some strange way. And he knew it.

One night, drunk, Bolger called Flocman up.

"It's getting away from us, my friend," Bolger said, taking a swig of vodka. Everyone was his friend when he was drunk, in that cozy, soft light way particular to some television interview shows.

Flocman's voice was so low that Bolger couldn't understand him over the crappy connection.

"What, Flocman? What did you say, my friend?"

"I said I'm paying you to do a job, not be my friend. Do you have anything new to report?"

"Well, all right, then, my friend. Tough love. I get it." Bolger hung up.

It was just him in the Murat Motel.

It was just Flocman in his little rotting house.

And Sonoria - out there, somewhere.

Flocman couldn't stand waiting around for Bolger to call. It got to him mostly because he was smart enough to know it meant he didn't have enough to do. So he took to plotting out and measuring and

marking the limits of his backyard, which, being on the last row in the neighborhood, opened up onto a new-growth forest of pines, all planted in straight lines. He dug up parts of the backyard, took the packets he found and put them somewhere else in the yard. Even Grace hadn't known about the money; or, rather, he'd never told her. Flocman had always figured Grace knew his secrets whether he told her or not.

When he got tired of digging, Flocman pored over old surveying maps, looked up the owners of the house from before his parents' time. This got stale fast, and because he was bored and because he couldn't help himself, he started writing about Sonoria. He did this chiefly because no matter how often he took the stamp out now, fixing it in his imagination, the stamp gradually lost its intensity for him. After a time, so did the dreams. The dreams became as faded as the stamp. The stamp became as faded as the dreams. Finally, Flocman's vision of Sonoria faded to a single pixel.

So he wrote. He got out an old oversized blank book full of graph paper and he began with a small map. It didn't have much detail, because he had no idea what the real names for things like the river might be, but it was a start. Then he described the river, the plains, and before he knew it he had the beginnings of a fake history for the place. Fake because when Bolger finally found Sonoria almost everything detailed in his book would turn out to be untrue. An oligarchy for a government, exports mostly agricultural, but also gold reserves. In the mountains, there lived a species of mountain goat with curved horns much prized for its meat. Aware also, with irritation, that his imagination might not be up to the task.

Sometimes he babysat for Mrs. Sanderson, and the Sanderson kid Rachel, a quiet, brown-haired, big-eyed ten-year-old, would sit on a stool next to him while he wrote. Flocman had no kids of his own, and how to engage Rachel was sometimes a puzzle to him.

"What are you writing?" Rachel would ask him after he'd gotten her some canned sardines and some water, which was all he really had in the house most of the time.

"A novel."

"What about?"

"About an imaginary country."

"What's it called?"

"The country?"

"No, the book."

'A History of Sonoria."

"Sounds boring."

Flocman laughed. "It sure does."

"And I don't like sardines."

"Nobody does," Flocman told her.

Bolger knew about A History ofSonoria because the Sanderson kid told him about it for a dollar and a jawbreaker.

After the interrogation, he was walking to the car when he turned back to her.