After that first walk along the ditch, Mehrzad would sometimes take that way home. He might not if he had to pee. He often had too, since he didn’t like using the school restrooms, there was so much teasing and bullying there.
One afternoon he encountered a boy he knew from school, sitting on the bank of the ditch, with a fishing pole and a line in the water. The pole was propped up on two twigs, each cut just beyond their branching points to form cradles for the pole.
“Hi Peter,” Mehrzad opened.
“Hi Mehrzad,” the boy replied. He seemed wary to Mehrzad.
The Iranian-American boy stood in place, looking over his Chinese-American classmate, then asked, “Do ever catch anything?”
“Yeah.”
“Really? What?”
“Carp.”
“Do you eat carp?”
“No. I’m not allowed to eat anything out of the canal.”
Mehrzad stood an looked down into the water. He looked at the open can of sweet corn by Peter’s side.
“What do you do with the fish?”
“I fertilize my garden with them.”
“You have a garden? I have a garden too.”
“Yeah?,” Peter replied with an extra look at Mehrzad.
“Yeah. I just started though. I planted corn and cantaloupe and stuff. My mom and dad say Persians are good gardeners.”
“Better than Japanese?”
“I don’t know.”
Mehrzad looked at the pole and the makeshift stand, and asked, “why don’t you just hold the pole?”
“Sometimes you have to wait a long time for carp to bite. … And you don’t want to disturb the bait.”
Mehrzad paused, then watched. “Ok. … Bye.” He could feel his bladder prodding him.
“Bye.”
“Good luck.”
“Thanks.”
© 2008 Dan J. Jensen