Knee High by the 4th of July (3 page)

At least I was until I had received the letter from Dr. Lindstrom last month, asking me to return to Minneapolis to be his research assistant in the U of M’s Linguistics department. When I read that letter, I sort of felt like a failure, spinning my wheels in a small town while life and a real career passed me by. So I didn’t read that letter very often, though in the back of my brain I knew I’d need to make a decision about staying in Battle Lake or moving back to Minneapolis by the end of the month, as he had requested.

I dropped my unopened mail on the table inside the front door, changed Tiger Pop’s and Luna’s water, dropped some ice cubes into their bowls, refilled their food, coaxed them into the stifling house, and apologized for neglecting them all day. They both plopped down on the cool linoleum near the refrigerator, and I considered joining them. The ant creeping across the floor nixed that idea. I tossed my jean shorts and tank top over the back of the couch and crawled naked onto my bed, a fan pointing at my head. The air it was moving around was so scorching that I would have been better off rigging up a flamethrower.

I slept on top of the sheets, except for my feet, which I always covered in bed. Seeing a
Roots
rerun on TV as a child had affected me to the point where I couldn’t leave my feet vulnerable for fear of having them chopped off as I slept. I knew the sheets wouldn’t stop an ax, but they made me feel safer, and after two months in Battle Lake, I needed all the reassurance I could get.

___

I woke up seven hours later with a layer of sweat covering me like a salty wool blanket. An icy shower and a quick breakfast of whole- grain Total with organic raisins, and I was on my early way to meet another oppressively hot day. I knew my Wednesday “Mira’s Musings” column was going to be somehow related to the Wenonga Days planning meeting, so I needed to find out how it ended and get a draft of that out before I opened the library. Besides my regular filing, ordering, and organizing duties there, I wanted to take down the Fourth of July holiday decorations—the library would be closed on Saturday and Sunday—and replace them with generic summer ornamentation. Somewhere in there I also needed to find a recipe “representative of Battle Lake” (in Ron Sims’ words) for that column. My to-do list for the day was getting as stifling as the hazy July air.

The fertile smell of the swamp I passed by on the gravel tickled my nose, and I could hear frogs singing in the sloughs. The sun was scratching the horizon when I turned right onto County Road 78, just up the street from the Shoreline Restaurant and Chief Wenonga. I had chosen this route because driving past Chief Wenonga on my way to town seemed like a natural way to get my (mental) juices flowing.

I was just turning onto the tar when a red tank zoomed over the hill and aggressively hugged my Toyota’s bumper. Whoever it was had their brights on, unnecessary in the bright dawn and making it impossible for me to see their face in my rearview mirror. I was pretty sure it was a guy with a small penis, though. My feet twitched to tap my brakes, but it was too early in the morning to trade my safety for my pride. I pulled to the right to let the Humvee pass and glared at the silver-rimmed tires as they raced past me and my puddle jumper. Feeling cranky, I drove the last mile into town, cursing tourists and gas-guzzling army vehicles. I was moving on to getting mad at the color red when I crested the hill right before the Shoreline.

The restaurant’s parking lot was peppered with a sprinkling of early morning fishers in town for the excellent eggs Benedict and hash browns. My temper cooled a little as I thought of good food and the fact that I was just about to say a great good morning to my big fiberglass man. I leaned forward in my seat so I could spot him a millisecond sooner. Just beyond the brown roof of the Shoreline, I made out Chief Wenonga’s cement stand, with four bolts poured into it. I didn’t remember seeing the bolts before, and a beat later, I realized why. The bolts held Chief Wenonga up, one each in the front and back of his feet. Now that he was no longer there, the bolts were obvious. Someone had stolen Chief Wenonga.

I screeched into the
parking lot, threw myself out of the car, and ran to the Chief’s stand. I touched the four bolts, cool and wet with morning dew, and looked around frantically. Where were the police? Where was the ambulance? Why wasn’t anyone doing anything? I could see the fishers eating their eggs through the picture windows of the Shoreline, their eyes happy, their mouths talking, as if someone important to us hadn’t just disappeared. Cars drove past on 78. Waves lapped at the shore of Battle Lake, and the sun was rising steadily through the morning mist. How could the world go on as if nothing were wrong? I was struck with an image of me slapping the Chief’s photo on the back of milk cartons and attaching posters to interstate semis.

I swallowed a deep breath and squeezed my hands into fists. There must be a rational explanation for this. People don’t kidnap ginormous fiberglass statues. Probably at the meeting yesterday it had been decided that the Chief needed a cleaning, and workers had quickly driven him to some fiberglass statue detailing shop. Or maybe they had decided to add a “Find the Chief” contest to Wenonga Days. Or maybe … an icy finger traced a shiver down my spine. Maybe, just maybe, Les had decided to do his own part to promote White Man Days, or PEAS was pulling a stunt of PETA proportions.

My horror turned to anger, and then, thank God, to embarrassment. My Chief Wenonga obsession had clearly gotten out of hand. I made a mental note to find a new, more reliable fixation, and in the meanwhile, to visit the local coffee shop, the Fortune Café, to see what I could find out about the Chief’s new location. I wiped my dew-covered hands on my shorts and marched back toward my car. When I reached for the door latch, a swath of red caught my eye. It was on my faded cut-offs, and it was the smear I had just left with my hand. Since when was dew red?

For a moment, I entertained the notion that the Chief had bled when he was removed from his posts. It made sense, in Crazyland—the posts were the only thing I had touched. It was the fiberglass stigmata. Then, good sense crept into my head, followed immediately by fear, and they both slid down my neck and back like cold oil. I had real blood on my hands.

My legs propelled me
back to the cement stand, and bending down on shaky knees, I examined the bloody post more closely in the hazy, early-morning sunlight. I saw what my eyes had missed earlier in my Chief grief. At the base of the post was a gory patch of dark hair the size of a silver dollar, still adhering to the chunk of scalp it had sprouted from. Where, I wondered, was the rest of the person? It was time for the law. I climbed into my car and screeched the mile to the police station.

It was a Friday morning on a major holiday weekend, and I was sure the local police department would be open for business. I was wrong. There were no Crown Vics parked out front, and Wohnt’s customized blue and white Jeep was nowhere in sight. A quick peek in the door confirmed that the place was empty. Hmmm. I could always call 911, but I needed to figure out how to report a chunk of a scalp next to a missing fiberglass Indian without sounding loony.

A quick review of the facts verified this was impossible, but I drove to the public phone outside Battle Lake Gas anyway. I had never dialed 911 before, and I was nervous, like I was auditioning.

“911. What is your emergency?”

“Umm. I’m in Battle Lake, and we have a big statue here, Chief Wenonga? Well, he’s missing, and there’s blood on the posts that held him up, and it looks like there is some hair and skin there, too.”

“Human hair?”

Am I Quincy now? “Looked like.”

“What is the location of the blood and hair?”

“Right off of Lake Street in Battle Lake, on the other side of town if you’re coming in from the south. Next to the Shoreline restaurant in Halvorson Park.”

“Are you there right now?”

I suddenly felt like I was being watched. I looked around and saw a handful of cars driving past on 78, and on the other side of that, Timmy Christianson shaking out the rugs inside the door of Larry’s supermarket. Immediately behind me and on the other side of the front glass window, the Battle Lake Gas clerk was reading
The
National Enquirer
and smoking Pall Malls. “No.”

“Your name?”

“Linda Luckerman.” The lie came quickly. If I had learned anything from my stint in Battle Lake, it’s that you don’t look for trouble because it’ll find you just fine on its own, thank you.

“We’ll send a car right out. Can you be waiting for us at the site?”

“Yup.” Lie number two.

“Thank you, Ms. Luckerman.” Click.

When I replaced the phone, I was revolted to see a line of blood crusting on my hand. Now that I was removed from the visual horror of the scalp, I was convinced that it was human. The hair attached to it had been thinning, about two inches long, and even though the edges were crusty with blood, I could see it had been recently trimmed.

I stepped inside the air-conditioned gas station to wash my hands, scrub the front of my shorts, and buy a Nut Goodie. I needed to clear my head. I started to feel better immediately after paying for and palming the candy, and I slipped around the side of the building to chow it while sitting on my haunches, out of sight. As the creamy chocolate and nuts slid down my throat, it became immediately apparent that I needed to hightail it out of the Battle Lake Gas parking lot because my 911 call could be traced. When I bit into the hummingbird-food-sweet maple center, it occurred to me that it wouldn’t hurt to wipe my bloody prints off the phone on my way out.

I snuck back around to the gas pumps, eyed the clerk who was still reading
The
Enquirer
with his back to me, yanked some paper towels from the dispenser, and surreptitiously wiped the pay phone’s handset and number pad. I chucked the last piece of chocolate into my mouth and the green, red, and white wrapper into the garbage and decided to amble down to the Fortune Café and drink some coffee as if nothing was amiss so as best to gather clues. It was still entirely possible that the Chief’s disappearance was unrelated to the bloody scalp at his base, and if I kept my mouth shut, I might overhear some relevant gossip.

The Fortune was across the street and a block and a half down from the library. Sid and Nancy, the owners, had moved here from the Cities and bought and renovated the charming, Victorian-style dwelling a few years earlier. The downstairs housed a full-service bakery and coffee shop made up of four rooms—the large, flour-dusted kitchen; the main sitting room where you placed your orders and could sit at one of the five tables; the bathroom with a hand-lettered wooden “shit or get off the pot” sign inside; and a smaller all-purpose room off the main one with couches, bookshelves filled with mystery and romance paperbacks and some nonfiction, two desktop computers with Internet access, and board games like Scrabble and Monopoly. The sprawling upstairs was Sid and Nancy’s home.

The welcoming jingle of the door and the aromatic wash of fresh-roasted coffee and candied-ginger scones woven into the cooled air called up a Pavlovian response in me. I found myself relaxing, even downgrading the Chief and the human scalp from scary urgent to important as I glided to the front counter, nodding at the handful of patrons I knew.

“Green tea or decaf mocha, Mira?”

Sid had foregone her usual flannel shirt in favor of a camo-green tank top, and she was growing out her mullet into a softer, feathered bob. I didn’t know what was at the source of her outward feminization, but I thought it might have something to do with all the issues of
Maxim
she had been reading at the library lately.

“Today’s a straight mocha kinda morning, Sid. Do you have any bagels left?”

“For you, we have bagels. Onion or honey oat?”

“Honey oat with olive cream cheese, please.” It was feeling like a two-breakfast day. I fiddled casually with the plastic-flower-topped pencils at the front counter, all seven of them stabbed deeply into a flowerpot of French-roast coffee beans. “So, any news in town?”

Sid smirked. “Do you mean the hullabaloo at the planning meeting yesterday? Nancy and I are thinking of naming a new drink after Les. We’ll call it The White Man.”

“What’s in it?”

Sid laughed. “Milk, with a side of fish-shaped sugar wafers. Or whatever you want. It’s Battle Lake.”

“You hear any other buzz in town?”

“Just the hum of your thighs as tomorrow’s Community Ed class looms large. When are you going to ask that Johnny Leeson out, anyhow?”

That set me back a step. I realized that rumors traveled fast as greased ice in a small town, but I had only confided in my friend Gina about my crush on Johnny, Battle Lake’s resident hot, hot, hottie. If everyone knew I had a crush on him, did that also mean they knew about my fixation on Chief Wenonga? I shook my head in lieu of an answer, traded Sid a five for the bagel and coffee, and headed to a computer. I set myself up at the Dell that had a direct sight line to the front door.

My plan was to fake researching my next recipe while keeping one ear on the talk. All the important news came through the Fortune, and I’d soon be able to find out what was up at Halvorson Park, former residence of one Chief Wenonga. My favorite pretend work was recipe hunting for my column, so I dug in, hoping the clicking of the keyboard would soothe me. Mostly, I relied on Internet searches using the keywords “weird recipes.” I fired up the computer and sipped my chocolate coffee, cinnamon-laced whipped cream sticking to my upper lip.

Today, I varied the keywords in Google by entering “weird Midwest recipes.” The first hit was for French-fried skunk. What got me about this so-called recipe was all its assumptions—that a person could get their hands on two dead skunks, know how to skin and debone them, and successfully remove the scent glands before cutting the carnivores into “French-fry shaped” pieces. After that, it was a pretty straightforward fried food recipe, except that you needed to boil the skunk for forty minutes and ladle off the scum before plopping the pieces in an egg, milk, and flour shake. Then, voila! You were ready to fry.

It occurred to me that quite a few people in town, Les Pastner among them, might already know this recipe, so I kept searching. Then, just like that, the magic instructions splashed onto my computer screen: “Find a Man Casserole.” The ingredients were tried-and-true. Two cans cream of mushroom soup, half a box of elbow macaroni, half a cup of milk, a can of tuna (the better to bait your man with, I imagine), one can of green beans, and half a cup of pearl onions. Boil the macaroni until soft, drain, and then bake the whole works at 375 degrees for 50 minutes, pull out, cover in a fish-scale pattern with whole, plain, non-ruffled potato chips, and cook for another five minutes or until chips are browned.

This town was missing one giant man and most of another, littler one, and maybe, just maybe, if all of Battle Lake cooked this casserole the same night, we’d find the Chief and the guy-minus-a-chunk-of-scalp who disappeared with him. If nothing else, it would offer the locals some variety from fried panfish and frozen pizza.

I was emailing a copy of this recipe to Ron Sims, my editor, and enjoying the calming feeling I get when I finish a job, when the door to the café crashed open. In fell a red-faced Jedediah Heike, son of the owners of the Last Resort, a popular summer spot on the north side of town. Jed was an amiable stoner in his early twenties, medium height with stringy arms and legs swinging off his skinny body, his happy head topped off with a mop of curly brown hair. He had befriended me when I moved to town in March and was overall a sweet and harmless guy, if not the sharpest tool in the shed. I foresaw him living with his parents his entire life, a regular Battle Lake fixture. However, because he spent most of his time smiling and nodding his head, he didn’t possess a lot of credibility in town. “Chief Wenonga is gone!”

I groaned. Of all the people to spread the news. And now I could surmise the worst, that the Chief wasn’t supposed to be gone. He had been stolen. Sid came out from the back room. “What’s that, Jedediah? Are you OK?”

“The Chief Wenonga statue. It’s missing. It’s gone!”

“You ever hear about the little boy who cried wolf, Jeddy?”

The handful of patrons in the café laughed good-naturedly at the joke, but Jedediah’s face fell. His brown doe-eyes landed hopefully on me.

I sighed and stood up, walking into the main room. “It’s true. I drove by there this morning. Chief Wenonga is gone.”

Jed grinned like a football fan watching an overtime game who’s just discovered a fresh, whole Dorito in the crack of his recliner.

“Why didn’t you say anything?” Sid asked me. Nancy came up behind and put her arm around her partner.

I shrugged, feigning innocence. “I thought they took it as part of the Chief Wenonga Days deal. You think we should call someone?”

“Ya!” Sid reverted to a good Norwegian brogue in times of stress. She dialed the Battle Lake Police Department, got through to someone, and in minutes, a Crown Vic sped past, siren blaring. I didn’t know if they were responding to my 911 or Sid’s call, but the results were the same.

Most of the café customers were on the street by this time, gawking in the direction of the Shoreline. I shut down my computer, bundled up my uneaten bagel in a napkin, and jogged down the road. There was safety in numbers, and now I could snoop up close while the whole town milled about. Besides, I wanted to be there when Gary Wohnt discovered that somebody had stolen a twenty-three-foot heirloom on his watch.