Free This is the Part Where You Laugh by Peter Brown Hoffmeister Page A

“big, big carp out here. They’re no good to eat, but they’re fun to catch.”
    “Why can’t you eat them?”
    “Well, you can,” I say. “I’ve eaten them before. But they taste like mud. And in this lake they kind of taste like goose-poop mud. Plus, there’s lots of bones in them.”
    “That’s a great combination.”
    “Yep.” I reach down and wet my hands. Natalie has the fish next to the dock, and I take the line and pull it in. Then I reach the fish, put my left thumb in the roof of the mouth to hold it, and with my right hand, I pull the treble from its lower jaw, the barb making a wet click sound as it tears through the edge of the lip.
    Natalie says, “Oh, that’s nasty.”
    “Yeah, not the best sound, huh?” I hold the fish at the waterline. Because it’s a carp, it doesn’t struggle to swim away. I say, “Do you want to release it?”
    “Not really.”
    “You don’t?”
    Natalie exhales. “Okay.” She kneels down next to me. “What do I do?”
    She smells good, her hair, like some kind of shampoo or conditioner when it’s wet. I breathe in the smell of her. Say, “Wet your hands, then put your hands over the top of mine. I’ll slide my hands away and you’ll be holding the fish.”
    She follows my directions. Doesn’t say anything. I slide my fingers back and out of her way, and she holds the fish in her hands. That carp has to be at least 10 pounds, one of the biggest I’ve ever seen in the lake.
    I say, “Now with one of your hands, stroke down the side of its body, real mellow.”
    She pets the fish with the tips of her fingers. “Like this?”
    “Yeah. Now run your fingers down the side a little harder and the fish will flip its tail and swim away.”
    She pets twice more, and all of a sudden that carp whips its tail and rips forward into the water. Natalie screams and pulls her hands back. “Oh my gosh,” she says, and sits back laughing. “That scared the shit out of me.”
    “But that’s how you know you’re doing it right. Cause if you pet the fish right, it’ll snap to life just like that.”
    She shakes her head.
    “Cool, huh?”
    “Pretty cool, but it still scared me.” She smells her hands. “And oh wow.” She smells her hands again. Makes a face.
    “Not so good?”
    “No,” she says. “Smell yours. They smell phenomenal.”
    “We can get some of that smell off in the water, but mud or sand or something helps even more.” I reach down and pull some algae, scrub my hands with it, and rinse them in the water. I smell my palms and fingers and they smell a lot better. I grab some more algae and do it again.
    Natalie raises her eyebrows. “Does that work?”
    “Sort of. Mostly.”
    She scrubs with algae too. As we’re leaning over and scrubbing our hands next to each other, I can smell her again, a little bit of whatever she cleans her hair with, and the fainter smell of her skin. I dated a girl the year before, during basketball season, but that girl sprayed a lot of flowery perfume in her hair and on her neck. Every time I kissed her it sort of overwhelmed me, like we were kissing in the Glade aisle at Target. But Natalie, whatever she uses and however she smells, I like it.
    Natalie scrubs her hands three times and rinses them. Sniffs and wrinkles her nose each time. “It’s still not all the way gone.”
    “No,” I say. “You might need a little soap to get the rest off.”
    “But it’s better, I guess. It doesn’t make me gag now.”
    I sit down and let my feet dangle in the water. Natalie sits down next to me.
    I say, “I meant to ask you—why do you hate bass so much? You said that you hate them, remember?”
    Natalie kicks her feet in the water. “They eat frogs.”
    “And you like frogs?”
    “Yeah,” she says, “I love frogs.”
    “Why’s that?”
    “I know it sounds weird.” She shrugs. “But I guess I always did. At my old house on the edge of Lake Oswego, there was a slough nearby, and I used to catch frogs there