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.