Fat Girl, Terrestrial: A Novel

Eighteen: The Curious Case of the Capacious Death Investigator

165 CASE FILE #6 Oswego, Kansas, pop. 2,046 Eldon Schnitzler, forty-nine-year-old Caucasian male Two-car garage with a fresh oil stain on one side, the leaking Oldsmobile 88 parked in the driveway outside the closed door; Toro riding lawnmower circa 1982, hedge clippers, pump can for pesticide; workbench with vice, hacksaw, power drill and bits, three-tiered tool chest open and spilling forth an assortment of wrenches and hammers and ratchets and pawls, sawdust and screwdrivers and penny nails scattered beneath; aluminum trash can with dented lid, popsicle stick stuck to the bottom; bicycle tires; gasoline can; rope; toboggan and American Flyer red wagon; washtub full of rusted chain; rake with bent tines, shovel, hoe, trowel, cultivator, green and eighteen The Curious Case of the Capacious Death Investigator 166 white garden hose; opened bag of briquettes, bag of rock salt, burlap sack full of bottle caps, corks, and pull tabs; yellowing stack of Oswego Independents; fishing pole and tackle box, hip waders, butterfly net; Coleman kerosene lamp and cookstove; dozens of empty Meister Bräu cans, one half-empty bottle of Old Charter, and a drained-dry bottle of red grape Mad Dog 20/20; a pair of polished chestnut and nubuck spectator kicks atop a recently dusted shelf, beside a sepia-tone photograph of a man with a waxed mustache, gray hair parted in the middle, lapels of his suit coat visibly shiny with wear, the thumb of one hand tucked under his arm, the other holding a pocket watch, gat beside him on a table and a black medical bag next to that, picture of an occasional gangster I would later learn, part of the chopper squad, quick-fix doctor to the trouble boys, mostly a seamstress double-stitching the plugged and ragged, Eldon’s shabby-dapper quacksalver Great Grandfather Worden. Below that shelf was a collection of a hundred or so egg cartons once housing Grade A Extra Large Fancy Farm Fresh eggs. (Having once been force-famished, I cannot tell you how it pains me to reproduce puny victuals, especially eggs. I sometimes turn to Pierre Petit-Puce, the developer of Petite Cuisine®, for assistance. Pierre, following the path of AlexisCharles -Henri Clérel de Tocqueville’s travels, took one look at the broadening waist of America and saw there was a franc or two to be made by denying it its fondest wish and calling it dinner. Petite Cuisine, arranged on a plate the size of a dime, serves up food that would leave the leanest, most weight-conscious microorganism ravenous, food you must try to spear with a fork fit for a midge [it takes some practice but most community colleges now offer weekend instruction in the art 167 of lancing the elusive morsel]. Naturally, any bite disappears on the tongue, no chance of advancing to bolus, so that you have to press it against the roof of the mouth to confirm that it was indeed delivered, and even then chances are only the most princely tongue, so discriminating as to be easily irritated , will register it. Of course the recherche restaurants that serve Petite Cuisine spend a fortune on miniature flatware, particularly forks, which are often mistaken by the mouth for the plat du jour itself and ingested along with the smidgen of salade niçoise, the confit de fly-sized canard, blancmange, butter-poached toy-sturgeon [farmed in teacups and whose roe are said to be almost perceptibly delectable and therefore cost a king’s ransom]. The autopsy of a frequent consumer of Petite Cuisine will often reveal an appendix as finely bristled as a hedgehog.) And the rest of the endless miscellany that finds its way into domestic storage. Suspicious death amidst clutter can be difficult to determine the cause of, though this death longed to appear self-evident. Eldon Schnitzler hung himself from one of the tracks on which the garage door slid open and shut. Eldon was a small man, 5’ 5”, but even so it took some ambition and grit to properly dangle himself to death from a flimsy contraption in a packed garage, and the blood-speckled whites of his eyes confirmed the cause of death was strangulation. Overturned beside Eldon’s feet was a wooden vegetable crate (Eldon had for years been the produce manager at the local Super Save, also known as the Super Savior because of all the...