Read Online The Third Bear by Jeff VanderMeer - Free Book Online Page A

yard.
    "Well, fuck, Crake, why did I come all the way over here, then?"
    "I can't afford it. I'm sorry." Crake 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." Crake 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 Crake. "You're a cheap motherfucker."

    "And your business is in the toilet."
    There. Crake had said it, and now Bolger thought he knew why Crake 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.
    Crake rose suddenly and put out his hand, forcing Bolger to rise awkwardly and do the same.
    "I know you can do it," Crake said as they shook hands, as if Bolger'd already agreed.
    Bolger sighed. "And I know it's fucking insane, Crake. But I guess that's your problem, right?"
    Crake'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, Crake 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, Crake 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, Crake 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, Crake 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 Crake 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."
    Crake raised an eyebrow. Sonoria? He'd never heard of it. It sounded faintly Eastern