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

Jed tagged along behind
me. I tried to ignore the huffing and puffing caused by his ganja-restricted lungs, but when he started to suck in air like a vacuum with a hole in its bag, I slowed my sprint to a fast walk. I was dying to reach the scene of the crime in time to hear what the police made of the scalp, but not at the expense of Jed’s life.

“I bet some kids stole the Chief.” Wheeze.

“Maybe, Jed. You OK?”

He puffed himself up a little but quickly realized he needed the air elsewhere and instead ran his hand through his sweaty curls. His black Phish T-shirt was plastered to his scrawny chest. It wasn’t even eight in the morning yet, and already it felt like Hell’s kitchen. “Oh, ya. I’m fine.” Wheeze. “I had a feeling something like this was going to happen. There’s street gangs forming in town.”

We were coming down the hill. Battle Lake was glittering in the hot morning sun to our right, and a cop car was glittering to our left. Battle Lake Police Chief Gary Wohnt was leaning on his open Jeep door, radio in hand. I could hear his voice, but we were too far away to make out his words. “Where’d you hear that?”

Jed hitched up his belt and pulled a pack of Jolly Ranchers from his back pocket. He offered me a watermelon one and popped it in his own mouth when I shook my head. “I’m not sure where. You know, I might just be thinking of a movie I saw. It’s hard to keep that stuff straight.”

I shook my head. Jed was so transparently dorky that it was hard not to like him. “You want to go talk to Wohnt with me?”

Jed’s face went white except for the bong-shaped ring of acne around his mouth. “Nah. You go on ahead.”

I smiled at his back as he disappeared into the crowd, his shoulders hunched around his ears to make himself less visible. I strolled to Wohnt’s car, reaching it just as he clicked off the radio. “Secure area, Ms. James,” he barked.

“Need help putting up the police tape?”

His Poncherello-style reflective sunglasses were impenetrable as he grabbed the yellow tape from his trunk and strung it around the elm trees despondently circling the Chief’s former position. The empty stand the Chief had stood proudly on for a quarter century stood out like a tombstone. We had lost our leader.

In this part of the state, erecting twenty-three feet of kitsch to honor a person, event, or creature was not out of the ordinary. In fact, if a person happened to be cruising around in space and looked back at Earth, and if the only discernible shapes from that distance were continents, oceans, and gargantuan statues, Battle Lake and its environs would stand out like a white-trash Stonehenge.

There was a reason so many statues ended up in the area, and it was called tourism. The population of any Minnesota town situated near a lake (which is every Minnesota town) swells in the summer as hordes of white-backed men come to fish and drink, long-suffering women come to shop and drink, and kids come because they’re forced to. This built-in audience serves as the perfect justification for creating oversized replicas of everyday phenomena, a dioramic playground for Bob’s Big Boy’s fiberglass family.

The tiny town of Battle Lake, population 747, had more to offer than Chief Wenonga, of course—there were the walleye honey spots, antique shops, an ice cream and candy parlor, cozy resorts, and bait stores—but it was its position at the center of a maelstrom of strange effigies that made it the
crème de la crème
of tourist stops. Oh, yes. The glorious and disturbingly sexy twenty-three-foot fiberglass statue of the Chief had just been the beginning. Eighteen miles to the west of the Chief lay the town of Ashby, where the world’s largest coot overlooked Pelican Lake. The ten-foot-tall concrete mud hen was so heavy that the wings had to be supported by a metal brace.

Fifteen miles to the west and north of the coot sat Fergus Falls, where the world’s biggest otter kept an eye on the shore of Grotto Lake. He was forty feet long from his black nose to his rump of pure poured concrete. Vergas was farther east and served as the residence of a twenty-foot loon. North of that was the world’s largest turkey, twenty-two feet of fowl fiberglass, in Frazee.

South and east of that, in the town of Ottertail, rested the biggest dragonfly in the universe. If you followed the back roads farther south, you’d end up in Alexandria, where you could get your picture taken between the welcoming fiberglass thighs of Ole Oppe, better known as Big Ole. He was a twenty-eight-foot-tall Viking, and although he was taller than Chief Wenonga, I think the Chief could take him in a fair fight. Driving northwest back toward Battle Lake through Vining, you would find everyday objects rendered colossal in scrap metal along Highway 210—a huge clothespin, a titanic toe, a supersized square knot. There was more, but you get the idea.

Every bit of this deranged splendor was flaunted in or within sixty miles of Battle Lake, situated in Otter Tail County in west central Minnesota, a land unto itself where there’s one boat for every six residents. My three months living here had proven that Otter Tail County had all the makings of a Midwestern Bermuda Triangle, and the fact that Chief Wenonga had gone missing just underscored that notion.

By the time Gary Wohnt had come full circle with the yellow and black tape, a crowd had gathered and two more police cars had pulled up, one county and one Battle Lake. Kennie Rogers was in the back of the Battle Lake car, behind the cage. When the driver failed to let her out immediately, she began pounding on the inside of her window. The crowd chuckled, but had the sense to do it facing away from her.

“For heaven’s sake, didn’t your mama raise you right?” Kennie demanded of the young officer, once she was released. Her Southern accent was eternally puzzling, given that she was born in Battle Lake and had only moved out of town for two semesters about twenty years ago to get her cosmetology degree from Alexandria Technical College, all of forty-five miles away.

The offending officer, a baby-faced newcomer named Miller, had to steady her by her elbow as she adjusted her patriotic stovepipe hat, which rode three inches taller than the crowd. It did a lovely job of accenting her glittering, Roaring ’20s–style can-can dress with the metallic fringe. The dress itself was charming, if completely out of place, and several sizes too small for Kennie.

She ducked her flustered, red, white, and blue bedecked body under the crime scene tape and marched right up to Gary Wohnt. I was at the front of the crowd and heard every word they said.

“What in the hay-ell is goin’ on here?”

Gary Wohnt fished a tiny, black-white-and-yellow tub of lip balm out of his front shirt pocket and twisted off the top. He frosted his lips like they were devil’s food cake before answering her. “Wenonga is gone.”

“And I’m not stupid. Now that the introductions are over, why don’t you tell me what in the hay-ell is goin’ on here?”

That was when the Otter Tail County officer came up, a 35-mm camera around his neck, and slipped a latex glove onto each hand. “Chief Wohnt, Ms. Rogers.” He nodded to both and proceeded to the statue’s base.

“You know Brando is supposed to be here any minute,” Kennie hissed to Wohnt. “And you pulled me out of rehearsal for this?”

I perked up my ears. Marlon Brando? And what sort of rehearsal was Kennie at, wearing that outfit?

“I know,” Wohnt said. He capped the Carmex and slipped it back into his pocket.

Kennie threw her hands up in exasperation, nearly knocking off her Uncle Sam hat. She stormed over to the county officer, who was photographing the post where I had seen the scalp earlier today. “What are ya’all takin’ pictures of?” She asked, her voice sweet like honey.

“Ms. Rogers, I’m going to have to ask you to leave the secured area. Officer Miller? Will you please escort Ms. Rogers out of the cordoned area? And grab the fingerprinting kit from the backseat of my car. I’ve got a good set here.”

The crowd was buzzing behind me, but I couldn’t hear it over the sound of my stomach crashing to the pavement. That good set of fingerprints was very likely mine. I had stepped right into it again.

I felt green. If
they found my fingerprints on Wenonga’s post, mixed in with the blood, I would be a prime suspect in whatever statue-stealing, man-scalping extravaganza had taken place here. And I knew from experience that the local law would not be sympathetic to my case. I could confess to Wohnt right now about having touched the post, but the fact that I hadn’t told him right away would make me appear guilty.

I threaded my way through the crowd, trying to put distance between the cops and me, and ran smack dab into Dr. Castle. Today she was dressed in conservative espadrilles, an ankle-length peasant skirt in muted browns, and a beige silk tank top. Her hair was pulled back into a bun, and her face was pale except for the sunburned tip of her nose.

“Whoa,” she said, smiling kindly as she stepped back a pace. “See something up there you didn’t like?”

I smiled weakly. “I think I ate a bad breakfast.”

She nodded sympathetically. “I saw you at the town hall meeting yesterday, right?”

“Me, and a bunch of angry citizens. You know the Chief is gone, right?”

She stared at the space where his head used to be. “They know who did it?”

I studied her face as she stared at the sky. Her eyes were a light green, almost translucent, and she had a light dusting of freckles over her cheeks and her peeling nose. The police didn’t know who had taken the Chief, but I knew who
didn’t
—me—and I also knew who would gain from doing it: Dr. Castle and Les Pastner. Since it would be in my best interest to pin that tail to a donkey other than myself, post haste, I’d best start asking questions. I swallowed my bile and held out my hand.

“They don’t. I’m Mira James, by the way.” She shook my proffered hand, warmly and confidently. “I work for the
Battle Lake Recall
. Mind if I buy you a beer tonight and pick your brain for an article I’m working on about Wenonga Days?” I winced at my own choice of words, considering that there might be a little brain on the Wenonga base.

“Sure. Like we say in PEAS, all press is good press.”

“How about the Rusty Nail at 7:00? It’s right on Lake Street, a block or so down from Stub’s.”

“It’s a plan.” She winked and moved toward the front of the crowd as Jed stepped back toward me.

“This is wild stuff, Mira.” His normally bloodshot eyes were glowing, and the sun had dried the sweat from his curls, making them wild. “I heard one of the cops say there was a scalp on the post. Someone got scalped!”

“Mm hmm.” I tuned him out as I wondered how I could find out what Les Pastner, my other suspect, had been up to last night. It wouldn’t be easy. The man pretty much kept to himself, living in the woods in a two-room house he had built for himself. It was basically a glorified cabin, and except for his mangy dog, he was alone out there. He had occasionally visited the library to check out books on tracking, the French Revolution, and bombs, but we had never conversed in depth. I had witnessed him once or twice on a good rant at Bonnie and Clyde’s, one of two bars in Clitherall, so I knew that he would talk if the right buttons were pressed. I needed to figure out what those buttons were.

Jed interrupted my thoughts. “You hear what everyone is saying? People think the ghost of Wenonga’s come back to get us all.” He laughed and grabbed another Jolly Rancher. Grape. “Hey, Mir. Wanna have supper tonight? Say, the Rusty Nail at 6:00. I was supposed to meet up with some people to go to the street dance later, but you could hang out with us.”

“Sure, Jed. Whatever.” I quickly scanned the crowd to make sure Les wasn’t here, searching for his telltale greasy gray hair and fatigues, but there were too many people around and I wasn’t tall enough to see over most of the heads.

“Great! I’ll pick you up.”

“What?”

“For supper and the dance tonight. I’ll pick you up at 6:00.”

Shit. I replayed our conversation in my head. Shit. “No, sorry, I’ll meet you at the Nail. I have other plans later.”

He looked slightly dejected, or maybe it was just the exertion of our sprint up the block and two Jolly Ranchers catching up with him. “Cool. Some other time.”

“Cool.” I smiled at Jed, who really was a harmless sort, and pulled out of the crowd. As I walked away, I puzzled over who this Brando person that Kennie had referred to was, and why he would care about the missing Chief. Although it was against my better judgment and actually my survival instinct and every fiber of my being, I decided to go to the source to find out more.

She was not hard to find.

“Kennie?” I said, when I was within speaking distance.

She looked down her nose at me, a few inches taller even in her star spangled ballet slippers. “Hello, Mira. It looks like we’all got ourselves another mystery. Are you on the case?”

“It’s pure coincidence that I’m here, though I’d sure like to get the Chief back in time for the Wenonga Days kickoff tonight. Was that Brando person you were talking about part of the entertainment?”

For a second, I thought she was going to ignore me. She probably still felt slighted for being booted from the secured area. Then, in her haughtiest voice, she straightened her red, white, and blue hat and said, “Brando Erikkson is an artist. He and his company, Fibertastic Enterprises, created the Chief.” Her voice was raising, and the spangles on her dress started shivering like pebbles before an earthquake. “Do ya’ hear me? And we have lost him! WE have LOST him!”

Kennie was working herself into a lather, and lord knows where that would have gone if Mrs. Berns hadn’t walked by just then in her flower-patterned housedress and muttered, “You look like ten pounds of shit in a five-pound bag, Rogers.”

Immediately, Kennie was back to her plasticine self. “And a good day to you all, too, Mrs. Berns. I can count on you’all helping with the Fourth of July parade cleanup, right?”

Mrs. Berns snorted and kept walking. “I’d rather clean my bathroom with my tongue.”

And with that, she was swallowed up by the crowd. I decided to copy her disappearing act and slunk away after a quick “thank you” to Kennie. If I jogged across town, I could maybe track Les down before he opened his store and ask him a few questions in private. That weird little militia guy might be the only thing between me and some uncomfortably long jail time, and that was not a reassuring thought.

Despite its grand name, the Meat and RV Store was just an unassuming brown building off of County Road 210. If not for the enormous red-lettered sign featuring a madly grinning sausage driving a Winnebago, it would have been easy to miss. My Toyota was dwarfed by the five used RVs in the parking lot, every one of which had seen better days. A quick scan of the front of the building revealed no light or movement inside, and when I jogged around back, there was no sign of Les’ battered Ford pickup. A quick pull at the rear door revealed that he hadn’t arrived.

Unfortunately, there was nothing to do but go back to the library. Maybe I could catch Les this evening. I could almost hear the clock ticking as I drove to work, me racing against the fingerprinting crew. Time was not on my side.

I was a half an hour early opening the library, and Mrs. Berns was a half an hour late. She showed up with a group of elderly friends who were all tittering about the missing statue, the Fourth of July parade, and Kennie’s surprise guest. The smell of pressed powder and mint Maalox hovered over them like a cloud.

“I hear Marlon Brando is coming to town!” Ida said. She was one of my favorite old ladies in the world, and Battle Lake had a pretty nice selection. She always looked snappy, and today was no exception. Her hair was a crisp white, cut short, and still in the shape of the curlers that she had slept in. She wore a wrinkle-free yellow polo shirt with the collar neatly ironed, brown shorts with a crease in the front, and brown bobby socks with her white Keds.

“Naw, it’s Bronson Pinchot,” Mrs. Berns said. I hadn’t noticed her flip-flops back at Halvorson Park, but her pink toenails complemented the flowers on her housedress nicely.

“The guy from ‘Perfect Strangers’?” Ida asked.

“You sure it’s not Charles Bronson coming to town? I heard Charles Bronson.” This from Ida’s shy sister, Freda. She was dressed almost identical to her sister, except the colors and creases weren’t as crisp.

I shook my head. This was how rumors started in small towns. I set Mrs. Berns to the task of reshelving the returned books, waved at her coterie as it old-lady-shuffled out of the building, and got to work on a rough of my “Mira’s Musings” column. Given the recent happenings, I decided to title it “It’s My Party, and I’ll Fly if I Want To”:

In a strange turn of events, the Chief Wenonga statue disappeared from Battle Lake just as the plans for his twenty-fifth birthday party were getting under way. Police on the scene Friday morning found only four posts and what appeared to be blood at the Halvorson Park location where the Chief has stood proudly for twenty-five years.

The police currently have no leads, and I for sure didn’t do it.

The town of Battle Lake is hoping to have the Chief home for his holiday. If you have any idea what happened to the Chief, please email me at [email protected].

I crossed out the middle line and chewed on the end of a pen. My deadline was technically noon Monday, but I wanted to do more than just write my one column. I wanted to cover all of Wenonga Days, now that it might be Wenonga-less and my ass might be grass. I phoned Ron Sims to get the go-ahead.

“Hi, Ron. How’s tricks?”

Ron was a paunchy, grouchy, warm-hearted man who was fortified in life by his dedication to journalism and drive to publicly make out with his wife. I didn’t know if the latter was a fetish so much as a habit at this point, but if you got Ron and Lisa together, they sprayed each other like cats in heat. Their dedication was both heartwarming and stomach turning.

“You got my article, James?”

“Absolutely. Just typed it up. I have a scoop, though.”

“Scoop this. Chief Wenonga has disappeared, and we have half the state coming for his party today.”

“I know. I might have an idea where he’s gone. I want to cover the whole weekend. I want to be your Wenonga Days go-to gal,” I said.

“You got until noon Monday to get me 1,500 words. I want at least three different articles.”

“Thanks, Ron!”

“Yup.” Click.

I was just about to call Mrs. Berns over to tell her to watch the front while I went to the bathroom when I spotted Battle Lake Police Chief Gary Wohnt striding toward the front glass doors of the library, his shiny lips and fathomless sunglasses reflecting light as sharp as arrows.