by Jon Sindell
his uncle the spy; and, also, he had convinced them that Very Wrong was right, Iranians are not even Arabs to begin with. Not that there wasn’t always an undercurrent of tension, for there was: a lingering sense that perhaps Sherman was not really the ardent patriot that he seemed, that maybe an Iranian really is just a different kind of Arab after all (“Iraq is almost the same word as Iran,” Albert noted). Nor was Sherman senseless to this, for when they’d ask him for help with yet another computer project–“C’mon, Sherman, I’m no nerd, man, just use my password and knock out that report for me”–it seemed that the friendly arms wound around his neck were just a bit tighter than friendly arms should be.
Yet if Sherman seemed pleased with his new lot, his father was not. “Why do you join with such riff raff!” scolded the man, an Iraqi-born physician. But Sherman just smiled the mysterious smile he’d shown his classmates for two years and shrugged. “At least he has friends now,” said his mother, the beautiful daughter of an Iranian banker who had fled before the fall of the Shah. She stroked her son’s raven hair. “I think it’s wonderful he has playmates.”
“Such playmates can make big trouble,” said the father. But Sherman refused to go back to the playground without protection, and besides, he figured, it was just a few weeks until the end of the school year, and then he could make a clean break with Duck’s crew. He just had to keep it cool until then, and he had lots to occupy his time, for he was working on a project–a top secret one, like all his endeavors–in the computer lab, where he was already spending inordinate amounts of time writing term history reports for Duck’s gang. Not that he minded doing so, for it kept him in their good graces, and out from under their thumbs. By delaying the completion of the reports until the morning they were due, which was two days before commencement, Sherman managed to reduce his face time with the gang to about twenty minutes a week. Naturally they were thrilled with the reports he produced, all perfectly formatted and spiral-bound, yet riddled with the copious quantity of spelling errors the teacher would expect from them (Sherman had even cribbed the errors from the gang’s own spelling tests to ensure authenticity): Victury Of The West. The New American Millenium. The Impereel Eagle. “What do we owe you?” they asked. Nothing, Sherman insisted. But you deserve something, they said. “I will get it,” he replied.
The day before commencement, Sherman was two hours late coming home. His father, having read that lawlessness among juveniles increases near the end of the school year, feared the worst. He set out in his car to trace Sherman’s usual route home. Near the 7-Eleven, he saw Duck and his gang in a semicircle around the wall, and he could see fragments of a figure pinned up against the wall. It was Uriah Peckinpaugh, his eyes wide with fright, clutching his briefcase to keep Albert Chu from snatching it. Sherman’s dad, who was called “Dr. Zahd” by everyone who knew him despite the fact that he hadn’t practiced medicine since fleeing Iraq, pulled up alongside and blew his horn. “What are you doing!” he thundered.
“Just talking with our lawyer,” Duck grinned. Uriah seized the opportunity to reclaim his briefcase and scurry away.
“Have you seen my son?” said Dr. Zahd.
“Could you describe him?” chortled Duck.
Dr. Zahd had been an army medic during the war with Iran. He had seen men holding their intestines in place, and had learned to see such things clinically, dispassionately, else he could not have functioned. He looked at Duck and company in just this way. “Tell him I’m looking for him if you see him.”
But Sherman was already back home, pacing in anticipation of the next day’s commencement activities. He was up for an award, and he wanted it badly.
The awards for the most part went to the expected recipients, including Mary Wong, who won the Biology Award. At 11:15, Sherman Zahd strode to the podium to accept the Creative Writing Award. “Not bad for a boy who spoke little English when he came to this country from
France,” said the presenting teacher. At about the same time, the answering machines and voice mail boxes of Ms. Elizabeth Saunders, Mr. and Mrs. Oswald Rankin, and Mr. and Mrs. Simon Chu reached their limits, filled to capacity with irate messages from callers who had read the flyers posted on walls and utility poles all over the neighborhood the night before. “Death to America the fashist viper,” the flyers said, repeating a phrase–“the fashist viper”–employed in the history reports authored, but never read by, Duck Saunders, Oddis Rankin, and Albert Chu (Duck had in fact glanced through his paper on the way to class, but didn’t know what either “fashist” or “viper” meant). Only a few of the hundreds of callers seemed intent on accepting the invitation at the bottom of the flyer to “Join our Def Underground Heros call to action to defeat the impereel beast! Break windows! Smash windsheelds! Slash tires! Go crazy!” And while the FBI didn’t really believe that three 12 year-old boys would be dumb enough to put their phone numbers on flyers as incendiary as this (or to form a group called DUH), the fact that the flyers were written in the school computer lab on password-protected computers used by the very kids whose phone numbers appeared on the flyers would cause the agency to keep its files open for quite some time; this thought consoled Sherman Zahd as he sipped a Slurpee and contemplated the lonely summer ahead.
~ end ~
Thank you for reading “Sherman Zahd,” a story loosely based on “Sheherezade.” To see my novel The Mighty Roman, “A hip, funny, fast-paced novel about baseball and the modern American man,” visit Amazon for the ebook or paperback editions. For more of my fiction and other literary goodies, visit Jon Sindell Fiction. And please do feel free to connect with me on Facebook, on Goodreads, or via email to [email protected], as I love connecting with readers. And may peace be upon you, dear Reader!