As If We Were Prey

In "Traveling Einstein," Art Brewley goes about Michigan in his truck, stopping at town centers, gathering crowds, answering any and all questions: "What vegetable yields the most pounds of produce per acre?" "What's the only venomous British snake?" "What kind of animals was Napoleon afraid of?"

In "Mystery Park," Ray Munger stops near Negaunee, finds a waitress who will help him free the captive bear from Sonny Bob's Mystery Park near the local Shell station. And in "Perfect Bass," Willis and Ed pull up a huge bass out of the water on Bridge Lake and name it Murphy.

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Bass fishing? Traveling Einsteins? Bear cages? I'd rather be in Muskegon, or Pokagon, or Oronoko. But...

... Delp has a way with words, and soon enough I am hooked on Murphy. Willis and Ed take him home, plunge him into a tub full of water, start fattening him up. Murphy is independent, though: he's not interested in being stuffed with bread or bugs or delicacies, he'll only do worms. So Ed goes over to Buck's Bait every week to buy "three or four dozen."

Buck himself would step out from behind the one-way glass in his office and stand behind Rudy, the clerk. "You must be eating these goddamn things, Ed. That's about twenty dozen in the last two months." And each time I'd say, "You bet your ass, Buck ... love 'em fried, sautéed, use 'em in my eggs every day..."

Ed and Willis want to get Murphy so fat that they can appear on television, show off "some kind of goofy lure" and sell the rights... "and then we got a house in Florida."

Suddenly Murphy starts to coöperate. By mistake Ed drops a cotton ball soaked in WD-40 in the tub and Murphy starts "slashing and charging like a small shark."

Did I tell you that I didn't like sports stories, especially fish stories? My father dragged me off to fish every weekend before I reached the age of reason and I would sulk in the back there on the Trout River ... but I fell hook line and sinker to the "Perfect Bass."

"The rest of the month we fed Murphy like he was a prize Hereford. We soaked french fries in the WD, and Murphy ballooned up almost in front of our eyes." Can you tell when a fish-fanatic is diddling with you? I can ... and I still couldn't stop reading. Especially when Lutz appears at the front door.

As the old song goes, you can't chop your mama up in Massachusetts*** and, evidently, you can't fatten your bass up in your bathtub in Michigan. Inspector Lutz works for the state fish fuzz, but as he's pounding on the front door, Ed and Willis sneak out the back. They get Murphy over to Bridge Lake and slip him in under the ice. Lutz is mad but he's too slow to pinch them. At the end of the story, Ed tells us, "We both knew we'd be back in June, opening day of the bass season ... armed with Ed's Minnow and enough WD-40 to float a battleship."

The eight stories here are enough to make you laugh and maybe almost cry ... and the last one, about the woodshop guy who was never able to leave Vietnam behind, may even give you the collywobbles. The answer to Einsteins' three questions above are:

Cabbage;
Adder;
Cats.

At one stop the woman who looks like Donna Reed asks Einstein, "What's the difference between what a man desires and what a woman desires?" He says he doesn't answer personal questions but she replies that it comes from the writings of Pam Houston. And she answers it herself: "A man desires the satisfaction of his desire; a woman desires the condition of desiring."

Einstein is so impressed that he marries this Donna Reed lookalike as quickly as possible. Perhaps it's because she had all the answers; at least the ones he didn't.