He Won a Free Fishing Trip. He Accidentally Stopped a War.
Earl Cussin’ won a raffle he did not enter.
That is the part everybody skips past, and it is the part that should have stopped the whole thing before it started. A man does not simply receive a free fishing trip in the mail. Somebody has to want him to have it. But the envelope said all expenses paid and it said trophy waters and it had a picture of water on it, and Earl Cussin’ has never in his life looked at a picture of water and then asked a follow-up question.
So he packs the boat.
Not a boat. The boat. A battered bass rig with one good seat and a trolling motor that has been making a noise since 2009, loaded onto a trailer and pointed at the single most contested stretch of salt water on the face of the earth. He brings his wife Brenda, who is formidable in the specific way that women who have run a household on nothing for thirty years are formidable, and who is the only person in this book with any sense at any point. He brings Cousin Donnie, who has ideas. He brings his seventy-two-year-old mother Velma, because Velma was not asked and Velma was coming.
And he brings coolers. A great many coolers. The exact number is disputed by everyone involved.
What Earl does not bring is one single piece of diplomatic training, one word of any local language, one functioning understanding of international maritime law, or one flicker of doubt.
The Strait of Hormuz, at the moment this family arrives in it, is about one bad radar blip away from open war. A fifth of the world’s oil goes through a channel twenty-one miles across. There are warships on both sides of it with their targeting systems warm. Every professional in that water has spent an entire career learning to read a small unidentified vessel behaving unpredictably, and there has never once in the history of the region been a small unidentified vessel behaving as unpredictably as a Cussin’ family fishing trip.
And somebody wants it to go off.
There is a billionaire military contractor in this book who has worked out the arithmetic that a great many real ones have worked out, which is that an attack is worth more than peace, and that if the attacks are not happening on their own then there is a business opportunity in helping. He is manufacturing incidents. He is very good at it. He has never once had to explain himself to anybody, and he has certainly never had to explain himself to a man in a cut-off shirt who does not know what a contractor is and would not be impressed if he did.
Because that is the joke this whole book runs on, and it runs on it beautifully.
Every single person in the Strait of Hormuz is playing an enormous, delicate, catastrophically high-stakes game. Two navies are reading each other’s movements to the minute. An empire’s worth of money is riding on the next ninety seconds. Analysts are watching screens. Missiles are aimed.
And in the middle of all of it there is one man in a bass boat who has correctly identified the only crisis that actually matters, which is that something enormous is stealing his line.
Not taking it. Stealing it. There is a difference and Earl will explain it to you.
What follows is the most sustained run of accidental competence in modern literature. They dodge drones, mostly by not understanding that they are drones. They invade a luxury yacht, which is a sequence I am not going to spoil except to say that Velma is involved and that a buffet is destroyed. Cousin Donnie’s homemade bait, which he has been perfecting in a bucket since before they left, turns out to be less of a bait and more of a biological event, and there is a point at which a serious government has to convene a serious meeting about it.
Somewhere in there they invent impossibly cheap fuel. By accident. While arguing.
And then, because the world has run out of qualified people and is down to whoever is actually standing there, four people from a place nobody has heard of end up negotiating a peace between two navies using the only instruments available to them, which are fishing tackle, pure stubbornness, and Brenda.
Brenda is the reason it works. I want that said plainly. Earl is the engine and Donnie is the chaos and Velma is the wild card, but Brenda Cussin’ is the one who looks a room full of armed men in the face and tells them how it is going to go, and the astonishing thing, the thing that will have you putting the book down and staring at a wall, is that they listen. Not because she outranks them. Because in thirty years of running a house on a bad income she has developed a tone of voice that no military on earth has a countermeasure for.
This is the most purely fun thing I have ever written and I am not going to pretend otherwise. It is loud. It is enormous. It goes bigger every chapter and then it goes bigger than that. There is a boat chase. There is an international incident caused by a cooler. There is a scene involving a helicopter, a stringer of fish, and a man in a very expensive shirt having the worst afternoon of his life, and I laughed out loud writing it, alone, in a room, like a lunatic.
But underneath all of it there is the thing that makes these people worth two hundred pages of your life, which is that they never once consider quitting and they never once consider leaving anybody behind. Not each other, and by the end, not the strangers either. They are not clever. They are not qualified. Nobody would have picked them. They just refuse to go home, and it turns out that refusing to go home is a foreign policy.
Earl Cussin’ wanted to catch the biggest fish of his life.
He is going to have to stop a war first, and he is going to be extremely annoyed about the interruption.
More Unhinged Reads
New here? Start with Books Like Quan Millz: 13 Unhinged Reads That Go Just As Hard or Funny Trailer Park Books: 12 Comedies Set in the Worst Zip Code in America.
