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Fish or Cut Bait: A Fish Story of Sex, Non-Violence, Death and Dismemberment
"Fish or Cut Bait: A Fish Story of Sex, Non-Violence, Death and Dismemberment" takes place in a small, coastal Maine college town and its environs. In the Greater Bernwick area, where a bake sale is normally major news, two people vanish without a trace within days of each other. One, a lobsterman, apparently drowns while attempting to retrieve his tender that has come loose from its mooring. The other, the chair of the Gender and Women's Studies Department at Snowden College, fails to show up for a conference of feminist scholars in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Pru Dunham, a Snowden College dropout, who has started a successful lobster bait business, has connections to both parties and a plausible motive for wanting each to disappear. One of her connections to Fettkopf is a large commercial freezer that Fettkopf keeps padlocked in the basement of her South Bardswell home. Along with a number of other young Snowden women (all pretty, and slim as eyebrow pencils), Pru had once lived on Ms. Fettkopf’s compound. She admits to police that she is in possession of the freezer, reported missing by a cleaning lady after Fettkopf’s disappearance. Pru tells Bernwick Chief of Police, Dominic Scarlotti that she bought the freezer for her thriving lobster bait business. She also admits that her separation from Fettkopf and her cult (as Pru refers to Fettkopf’s group of devotees) was not on pleasant terms.
After taking groups of students to Sex Week at Yale for several years, Fettkopf founded Sex Week at Snowden. In fact, it is during Sex Week at Snowden that she goes missing. Fettkopf promotes her version of the hookup culture, curricularly and extra-curricularly, and she pushes hard for the preponderance of evidence standard in prosecuting sexual misconduct charges on campus—at least when the alleged misconduct is perpetrated by a male-bodied individual.
Chief Scarlotti suspects that Ms. Dunham knows a lot more about the Fettkopf and Braverman cases than she is letting on. But he has no evidence: no bodies, no articles of clothing, no nothing. Shortly after allowing Pru to leave his office, after requesting that she remain available for later questioning, Chief Scarlotti is informed by one of his men that he has just learned that Ms. Dunham is booked on a flight out of Portland International Jetport that night to Miami and on to Asunción, Paraguay.
Though disappointed, Scarlotti is not worried. Pru, after all, drives a shocking pink Ford F350 pickup truck with dancing lobsters painted on the doors, a sculpted, plastic lobster on the roof and a selection of pro-capitalist, anti-environmentalist bumper stickers, including "Capitalism liberates women" and "Master baiters do it alone." Surely, she will be easy to track down. In fact, a Maine state trooper rather quickly spots the truck heading south on I-95 toward Portland. He stops the vehicle without incident. However, he soon learns, and passes the information along to Chief Scarlotti, that Pru Dunham is not an easy woman to track down.
The following reader's advisory appears on the cover of the book:
A warning to the reader—this book contains themes that are not discussed in polite company: religion, politics, sex and what your teenager is actually doing at that expensive, elite college that is costing you your retirement and your hip replacement. The author abuses the most sacred of sacred cows. If sacred cow abuse offends you, this book is not for you. Women, especially fashionably progressive women, should avoid this book; feminists should burn it.
Pru Dunham, a Snowden College dropout, who has started a successful lobster bait business, has connections to both parties and a plausible motive for wanting each to disappear. One of her connections to Fettkopf is a large commercial freezer that Fettkopf keeps padlocked in the basement of her South Bardswell home. Along with a number of other young Snowden women (all pretty, and slim as eyebrow pencils), Pru had once lived on Ms. Fettkopf’s compound. She admits to police that she is in possession of the freezer, reported missing by a cleaning lady after Fettkopf’s disappearance. Pru tells Bernwick Chief of Police, Dominic Scarlotti that she bought the freezer for her thriving lobster bait business. She also admits that her separation from Fettkopf and her cult (as Pru refers to Fettkopf’s group of devotees) was not on pleasant terms.
After taking groups of students to Sex Week at Yale for several years, Fettkopf founded Sex Week at Snowden. In fact, it is during Sex Week at Snowden that she goes missing. Fettkopf promotes her version of the hookup culture, curricularly and extra-curricularly, and she pushes hard for the preponderance of evidence standard in prosecuting sexual misconduct charges on campus—at least when the alleged misconduct is perpetrated by a male-bodied individual.
Chief Scarlotti suspects that Ms. Dunham knows a lot more about the Fettkopf and Braverman cases than she is letting on. But he has no evidence: no bodies, no articles of clothing, no nothing. Shortly after allowing Pru to leave his office, after requesting that she remain available for later questioning, Chief Scarlotti is informed by one of his men that he has just learned that Ms. Dunham is booked on a flight out of Portland International Jetport that night to Miami and on to Asunción, Paraguay.
Though disappointed, Scarlotti is not worried. Pru, after all, drives a shocking pink Ford F350 pickup truck with dancing lobsters painted on the doors, a sculpted, plastic lobster on the roof and a selection of pro-capitalist, anti-environmentalist bumper stickers, including "Capitalism liberates women" and "Master baiters do it alone." Surely, she will be easy to track down. In fact, a Maine state trooper rather quickly spots the truck heading south on I-95 toward Portland. He stops the vehicle without incident. However, he soon learns, and passes the information along to Chief Scarlotti, that Pru Dunham is not an easy woman to track down.
The following reader's advisory appears on the cover of the book:
A warning to the reader—this book contains themes that are not discussed in polite company: religion, politics, sex and what your teenager is actually doing at that expensive, elite college that is costing you your retirement and your hip replacement. The author abuses the most sacred of sacred cows. If sacred cow abuse offends you, this book is not for you. Women, especially fashionably progressive women, should avoid this book; feminists should burn it.
408 pages, Kindle Edition
Published August 17, 2014
1 person want to read
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