The Third Bear (11 page)

Bolger had heard none of this from Crake, of course, but had managed in his rough but uncanny way to intuit a narrow vein of madness in Crake's words during their initial meeting. It hadn't hurt that he'd bugged Crake's phone, though, and learned that Crake 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 Crake'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 Crake was a straight arrow - so straight it was ridiculous.

Truth was, Bolger still thought the joke might be on him. Sonoria. Was Crake 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 fucking 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 Crake's firm handshake and wondered if it had been a kind of trigger.

Bolger told none of this to Crake. All Crake 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 Crake's house again if he could help it. Maybe because it reminded him too much of his old man's place, and getting the shit kicked out of him every other week.

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

Then he would call Crake.

"Yeah, Crake? 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 fucking desert, not a country, just a county, with no `i.' So much for misspellings. Over and out."

Crake 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 fuck 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.

Crake appreciated "over and out," because he'd been about to make a big mistake. If Bolger hadn't cut him off, Crake 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."

Crake, 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 Crake in six-day increments. Bolger didn't know why Crake insisted on six-day increments, and it pissed him off because it seemed arbitrary and yet organized. Crake 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 Crake 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.

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

"What, Crake? 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 Crake in his little rotting house.

And Sonoria - out there, somewhere.

Crake 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. Crake had always figured Grace knew his secrets whether he told her or not.

When he got tired of digging, Crake 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, Crake'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. Crake 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."

Crake laughed. "It sure does."

"And I don't like sardines."

"Nobody does," Crake 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.

"Hey, kid. Do you think Crake is crazy?"

The kid thought for a second, said, "Nope. Just hasn't got anything else to do."

True enough, Bolger thought. Wonder what a surveyor's salary is these days?

That's when he realized he'd begun to split his time between finding Sonoria and investigating Crake, as if investigating Crake might lead him to Sonoria.

When he got back to the motel, he called up Crake.

"Hey, Crake. I've got an update. I need more money per day for this wild goose chase."

"I don't have more money."

"Yeah, yeah, I know. It's like a mantra with you. Listen, I checked with a few relics from the Old Country. I found out they can't remember for shit, and especially nothing sounding like Sonoria. I've been to three old folks' homes and found out nothing except I hate the smell. I've checked the libraries. I've rechecked the Internet. I've checked with foreign embassies. I've read through some goddamn boring history books. Nothing."

"Nothing?"

"Not a damn thing. You got any suggestions?"

"You're the detective."

"Yeah, and I'm working on it," Bolger said, scowling. "I still got some more old people to visit. And other stuff I can do. But, really, why don't you just give me a map or something, Crake. Make it easier."

"Let me send you some photocopies."

"What?" Bolger asked.

But Crake had hung up.

Crake knew it was crazy as he said it. He knew it was like starting out on the surface, seeing a hole in the Earth, and after climbing down into it and seeing the light above begin to fade, to just keep traveling down rather than climbing back up.