FAT GIRL, TERRESTRIAL

a novelBy KELLIE WELLS

The University of Alabama Press

Copyright © 2012 Kellie Wells
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-57366-170-6

Contents

Chapter One

GOLIATH GIRL

I didn’t know I’d killed him until the next day, when the paper reported the death of this man, Hazard Planet, that was his name. He was found at 34th and Strong, right where we’d parted. The paper said the police were investigating “the mysterious circumstances surrounding his death.” As an architect of crime scene miniatures, I couldn’t imagine what would be so befuddling. He’d been found prostrate on the sunny sidewalk, clutching his throat with one hand, a knife still concealed in the other, canister of defensive aerosol, recently deployed, recovered near the body. Where was the ambiguity in that? Granted, it did seem a sensational pose for a dead man to be found in, as though he were anticipating a headline and wanted to make it good. He was asthmatic and had had an anaphylactic attack, a reaction to the pepper spray with which I’d showered his face, a spray my father, ever hopeful I might one day prove to be lovably vulnerable, urged me to carry. I didn’t know the man now known to me as Hazard Planet was asthmatic, how could I? His breath was smooth as satin as he breathed on my neck, no rattle, no wheeze. I was surprised at how odorless it was, his breath. I would have expected the harshly lingering smell of long-digested onions or sausage, or the sharp sting of mossy putrefaction characteristic of the hygienically indifferent. He said, “Hey cunt, hey bitch, hey you hulking punk, hand over your punk money.” His voice rippled low, with a hint of gravel, barely audible, the sound the earth makes when plates briefly shift, a tectonic growl.

This was just the sort of encounter I’d always hoped for.

Even though I was hunched over, his hand tangled in my hair, I could feel him yearning en pointe as he tried to reach my ears, and he snarled, “Who are you to tower above the rest of us?”

It didn’t go exactly as I’d imagined it.

I would always be more raptor than quarry.

You’d think with all the deterrent sprays on the self-protection weaponry market these days, not to mention those nerve-curdling tasers and heart-stopping stun guns, that a fellow with serious pulmonary complaints would steer wide of a life of crime. You’d think. What kind of felonious future can there be for a man who can’t leave home without his inhaler, a man who sucks on a nebulizer every night so he won’t be awakened by dreams of strangulation?

I went to the police station and turned myself in. I spilled my story: innocent victim-to-be out walking in the world, madman with knife on the lurk, self-defense bull’s-eye spritz to the mug, autonomic flight from the scene, belated trembling (okay, more on principle, but I’d been attacked, hadn’t I? Didn’t I deserve to quake, like any sensible jackrabbit hightailing it toward haven?), and later my usual denial (It’s all a swindle, this life, a misunderstanding, this body a hoax, I tell myself every night before happily dreaming of being a shrimp).

The detective didn’t like it one bit that I’d hotfooted it straight home and collapsed in the living room in my favorite overstuffed recliner (purchased by my father from the Big and Tall store, whose strapping mannequins I could see eye to looming eye with when I was twelve), moving it as close as I could to the T.V. and the chipper faces of newscasters, always so radiant and heartening when detailing mayhem in their sing-song delivery, as though war and poverty and famine were only passing phases the world was going through in its upstart adolescence, nothing to sweat in the cush sanctuary of an American living room. I fell asleep in that chair, pleasantly shaken, elated at having finally been thought conquerable, a can of Raid in my hand, the only remotely volatile spray in this joint with the possible chemical muscle to halt the advance of a menacing assailant, the American flag snapping against a background of gently breeze-blown wheat on the screen, national anthem announcing the end of another day of television in Kansas.

You’d think a chronicler of dastardly wrongdoing like me would be thoroughly hardened by now to the snarling desperation that walks the mean streets, would shrug it off, toss it barely a nod. But it’s different when you’re the one with the shiv pressed to your gut and there’s no mystery to solve, only the question of whether you’ll be the diced Humpty some weary flatfoot pieces together. Or so I’d tried to spook myself.

I showed the detective the leather pouch/key ring that had only yesterday housed that canister of pepper spray, which they’d recovered near the body.

The paunchy, sunken detective with gray skin and eyes whose whites were pink as a white rabbit’s sucked on his lower lip and looked me over. “You feel your personal security is threatened? You always carry something to fend off potential assailants?” he asked, not even bothering to conceal the twisting sneer of incredulity.

“‘A violent crime against an individual occurs every eighteen seconds and an assault occurs every twenty-nine seconds,'” I said, quoting the insert that came with the spray. “You never know when some … flour enthusiast might set up a mill and start grinding, if you follow me.”

“Mmm-hmm.” I could see the detective did not like being on the receiving end of crime statistics. “Why did you drop only the can and not the carrier? You took the time to remove it?”

I said, “I take it out when I’m walking. I hide it in my hand.”

He looked at me doubtfully.

I said, “I like to be able to get into my house after a mugging.” I jingled the keys, unsnapped the pouch from the ring, and laid it on the table. “I have a habit of dropping things when fleeing desperadoes,” I added, pursing my mouth in a half scoff, trying to look like a repeat offendee. He waggled his furry eyebrows at me suggestively. Somehow I thought this would settle it. I thought it would be reassuring to a mind that stumbled over and sniffed incongruous details to be able to reunite the can and its carrier, be able to shove them triumphantly— perp and accomplice—into a plastic bag and seal them away, zipped and labeled: Planet Homicide, Exhibit 1, to be hidden in the dank catacombs where top secret police business is stored, taken there in the dead of night by a blandly uniformed man whose sole occupation it is to look to his left, to his right, then cautiously toss potentially pivotal and incriminating bagged-up proof of villainy into giant boxes marked EVIDENCE.

He sucked on his teeth, sat down on the side of the table, picked up the canister and inserted it into its pouch, pulled it out, in again, out, set them back on the table, folded his hands in his lap, loosed a breeze from his schnoz. He said, “The thing I don’t get, the thing that just don’t figure, is what a feeble little cow patty like that would be doing risking faulty lungs on a cream-corn-fed punk …” he looked at my chest, at the disproportionately modest but undeniable breasts apparent beneath my t-shirt, the double-check of a crack detective, “I beg your pardon, what he’d want from a broad,” he chuckled, “like you.”

It galled me a little that I did not strike him as your typical victim, but I was cheered by the fact that I’d warranted the word “broad” (despite my hunch that he had in mind more width than dame). It made him seem small to me, so hopelessly cop-ish, in a 1930s noir sort of way, yearning, as he clearly was, for a Rico Bandello, snarling Scarface, to step foot in his precinct, but the Shame of the Nation rarely comes to Kansas. I pictured myself as a lithe and smirking, stiletto-breasted fatale, bent at the waist and forever straightening the seams of her stockings over shapely gams, a swath of silken Veronica Lake hair eclipsing one eye. And I imagined the detective going home to a sad, brown apartment, one beer, cocktail onions, and molding orange processed cheese food in the fridge, an emaciated cat, left behind by an ex-squeeze, endlessly pawing its phantom claws against a soiled plaid wool couch, elaborate rabbit ears stretching the length of the cramped living room to lessen the snow of his old Motorola. In my mind, I ballooned even more in stature and loomed big as a crane above him. Then I took the wrecking ball of my fist and dropped it on his head, tap-tapped him into the ground like a nail. On occasion I could see some advantage in being a lolloping mastodon.

“He wanted my punk money,” I said. I felt the heat of the dead man’s breath on my throat as I spoke.

“What kind of name is Wallis for a … girl anyway?” he asked with squinting eyes, as if he’d just uncovered an inconsistency in a shaky, uncorroborated alibi: girl, a likely story. “Hey, wait a minute,” he said. “You’re that kid, that ‘Dollhouse of Death’ kid, aren’t you? There’s a picture of you on a wall around here somewhere. You’re bigger,” he looked me over like he was sizing up a shank of beef at auction, “definitely bigger,” he said, arching those woolly inchworms over his eyes, “but you were no peewee then, were you, and you still got the same mug.”

“Guilty,” I said. Word travels fast in flat places then hangs on the wall yellowing for years after.

“Right, all those kids that disappeared, what, twenty years ago? You’re the one with the brother. Yeah, what was his name? Something strange-like. Otis? Opie?”

“Obie,” I said, “Obadiah,” and then I corked my whistle and stared at the floor.

“I was on a beat in Chicago back then. We heard about it up there. Strange case.” I felt him following the line of my downcast gaze to his own shoes. He wiped a smudge off one of his recently-shined brogues against the back of his other leg. “Yeah, all right then.”

The detective finally exhausted his grill, grudging pity narrowly edging out suspicion, and let me go. As both good cop and bad, he seemed rather haggard by the end, coughing and clutching his stomach. As I was leaving, I thought of telling him, Best not blow town, Mugsy, hardy-har, a conciliatory quip, but reconsidered when I saw him rubbing his whiskered jaw pensively. Though I longed to convince him that I could be imperiled as easily as any petite Pauline strapped to a trestle by a greedy-Gus cabbage-grubbing ne’er-do-well (even I step aside for trains), I was tired, and he appeared to be looking for any excuse to detain me. I could see his was a mind equipped with well-polished 38-caliber crime drama clichés, snug in the holster of his mind, but none, he discovered as he removed his gat and spun the chamber, exactly fitting this moment, alas. Anyway, this canary had sung all she was going to, and so she decided it was time to dust before he thought of a technicality that would allow him to toss her into the hoosegow.

Okay, confession: I’m no petticoat, no girly betty, no hothouse orchid. I’m 8′ 11&fra12;”, still a cubit or so shy of Goliath (depending on who you ask), 490 pounds, a few tubs of butter in excess of the dainty dish my mother, herself a windblown buttercup, assures me is trapped inside, beneath the impudent ballast of flesh. I have black hair straight as straw and skin the consumptive pallor of someone a few quarts low and in need of a transfusion (when I do pale with illness, I am a dim specter, make a corpse look comparatively in the pink). I’ve always had the complexion of an apparition, temperamental skin that begins to bubble and redden if I stand in the spring sun for ten minutes, skin that is otherwise so blood-scarce as to seem invisible, ghoulish. I have decided to give in to the anonymity my skin seems to long for: I’ve made myself disappear— alakazam!—behind the starkly contrasting curtain of hair. My face is more absence than memorable feature, a gap between black strands, like those Styrofoam wig rests. People tell me I look like a host of late-night horror flicks. They say this admiringly. Of course, the Johnny-come-lately-to-Kingdom-Come Goth kids are always trying to recruit me. “You’re a natural,” they tell me.

I sometimes shop at Archaic Smile, a thrift store downtown run by the Visigoths, a group splintered from the usual herd but far too congenially Midwestern to live up to the ambitions of its name. Rome, Kansas, had it not succumbed to cholera back in the day, would have nothing to fear from these glowering lambs, smudge-eyed and sullen. Beneath the wool is only more wool, though they howl at the waxing moon like the wolves they wish they were and knock back their parents’ Wild Turkey between sneers. They set aside for me the occasional full-figure retro fashions donated by other gargantuan gals perhaps now passed on, items that would otherwise be snapped up surprisingly fast, hemmed to size by the frail and waifish, who, having no more pounds to spare lest their bones escape the binding flesh, poke noticeably through, look for other ways to up their wraith quotient, look for apparel to exaggerate their wispy near-nonexistence, their cadaverous beauty, look for something to swallow them whole. Sometimes I want to smack those sunken-eyed wastrel girls into the oblivion their glamorous wasting suggests they are seeking, but I understand too well the pressure to dwindle until you’re a dully shimmering dot on a distant horizon, a speck on the window’s pane, a mote stirred up by the shuffle of leaden feet.

This is the story of how I came to know Vivica Planet, no dwindler she. And how I made the only person who ever looked upon me adoringly (ishkabibble! sim sala bim!) vanish.

After I’d confessed my accidental sin, the one Commandment I was certain I’d never have to worry about breaking, I felt conspicuous, as though I gave off a homicidal scent or narrowed my eyes in a way that advertised a percolating bloodlust within. I had not meant to kill Hazard Planet, had only meant to subdue him with a sizzling mist of capsaicin. Although at the time I was secretly thrilled to think I seemed a susceptible mark, I later became angry with him for having chosen me, of all the short, frail, defenseless women striding vulnerably along Strong Avenue he might have accosted, women alone and falsely confident in the smoldering light of evening, women from whom he’d pinch some quick spinach then flee, no fatal outcome. But I could hardly blame him for squaring me in his crosshairs. A towering girl spends her life being singled out, sunflower looming among the dwarf buds of crocuses, ostrich scattering runt bantams, the Sears Tower grazing the sky above the humbler edifices engulfed in its shadow, a target from a great distance, a goal always in view. And the immodesty and bald ambition of a mere dame taking up so much space, displacing so much air, well, he was not the first to be piqued by this.

My father, in whom I’d confided the next day and who convinced me to give myself up, had sent me the obit: Hazard Ambrose Planet is survived by his sister, Vivica Inez Planet, and his mother Gladys Ann Samson Planet, both of Kansas City. The family asks that donations be made to the American Lung Association. Before that dramatic growth spurt in junior high that made my body shoot up so quickly it left behind skid marks, left my skin shiny and tight, stretched over big aching bones it was not prepared to cover, my father instructed me in self-defense, taught me how to break the frontal grip of an assailant or flip a rear attacker on his back. My father still likes to think I might one day meet a fuming colossus against whom my training will come in handy, thus proving that despite my ample height and girth I am indeed all girl, desirable lambchop. It’s never easy for a man—high school fullback, raised a law-abiding, god-fearing Midwestern Methodist, whose wife dutifully cooks hot, well-balanced meals, wipes the toothpaste splatters from his bathroom mirror every morning, and doesn’t complain when his Rotary meetings go longer than expected—to accept the relative invulnerability of his daughter, a daughter with an aerial view of the broadening circle of shiny scalp crowning his head, now only child, giant child.

But I was so relieved to read that Hazard Planet was not a married man, had apparently sired no children, and I decided I needed to meet what little family had survived him, needed to know the timbre of their voices and listen to them breathe, needed to show them the last face he set eyes on. The last body he threatened.

“Mrs…. Planet?” I said when a small razor-faced woman who looked more like withered child than adult appeared at the door and stared at me with eyes the color of a new forest fern. I pronounced the name “Planay,” thinking it better to err on the side of continentality. She twisted her lips as though she’d eaten something bitter. “Gladys Planet?” I asked, returning the “net” to her name. She nodded her head once, and it suddenly occurred to me there was no delicate way to explain who I was.

I looked down at my considerable carcass, a body I’ve had occasion to parse every day of my life, Venus of Willendorf belly, tree trunk legs, feet for which shoes had always to be custom made, looked for some clue as to why Gladys Planet’s only son had chosen me, and when I looked up, behind her stood a woman able to look me in the eyes, the first woman I’d ever seen who could, a woman with hair dyed black as thunder, reddish roots beginning to show, bangs blunt cut and crisply geometric in the style of an Egyptian queen, and whose chin was sparsely tufted with hair that appeared spirit-gummed in place. She bent and put her hands on her mother’s shoulders, guided her to the side, then straightened up in front of me. She was a large woman, solid as a diamond, large as … me! My heart accelerated.

(Continues…)

Excerpted from FAT GIRL, TERRESTRIALby KELLIE WELLS Copyright © 2012 by Kellie Wells. Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.