Knee High by the 4th of July Read Online Free PDF Page A

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