Zooman Sam Page 6

  13

  "Bulls" was a hit at school on Thursday. Sam pawed the floor with one foot, indicating how ferocious a bull could sometimes be, and how important it was for a zooman to be brave and alert. Then, as Sam had predicted, Mrs. Bennett read Ferdinand to the class. Instead of standing in front of the circle to talk about zookeeping one more time, he adjusted his Bulls cap and sat down to listen to the story. When they read it at home, sometimes his dad pretended to be a matador. He used a towel for a cape, and Anastasia blew a pretend trumpet when Myron the Matador entered the ring.

  Becky whimpered, but didn't cry, because Mrs. Bennett let her be in charge of the flowers. Becky held a bouquet of artificial flowers, and raised one each time the story talked about how beautiful they smelled to Ferdinand.

  On Friday, with his zooman coverall newly washed once again, Sam wore his Bears cap. He demonstrated hibernation (Sam was pretty good at snoring) and showed how a zookeeper tiptoes quietly while his bear sleeps. Then Mrs. Bennett read Blueberries for Sal.

  "We're a pretty good team, Sam," Mrs. Bennett said. "What cap will you wear on Monday?"

  Sam thought about the caps he had not yet worn. There were some scary ones that he wasn't eager to wear. But others were easy. "Colts," he decided.

  "Good," Mrs. Bennett said. "I have some nice books about horses."

  Throughout the weekend, Sam wore his Timberwolves cap and worked with Steve on training Sleuth. They had refilled the Windex bottle with a mixture of vinegar and water. It smelled terrible.

  "But it won't hurt him," Steve had explained. "That's the important thing. He won't like it, but it won't hurt him."

  They took Sleuth to the yard. Sam's sister sat on the porch steps to watch. Anastasia had become very interested in dog training.

  "Sit," Steve commanded. And Sleuth sat.

  Steve arranged the small bottle in his hand, with his finger on the trigger. "Hamburger," he said loudly. Sleuth leaped toward him, and Steve squirted the dog in the face. "No," he said loudly at the same time.

  Sleuth yelped and sat back down, looking puzzled. His nose wiggled, trying to make some sense of vinegar.

  "Hamburger," Steve said, again, and the same things happened. Sleuth leaped; Steve squirted; Sleuth sat.

  "Now you try it, Sam," Steve said, and handed Sam the bottle.

  Sam arranged himself in front of the dog, and when he was ready, he said, "Hamburger!" Sleuth leaped. Sam squirted. Sleuth sat.

  From where she sat on the steps, Anastasia applauded.

  Sam tried again. "Hamburger!" he said loudly. This time, Sleuth got to his feet, hesitated, and then sat back down.

  And one more time. Sam said, "Hamburger!" He held the bottle where the dog could see it. Sleuth didn't move.

  From the porch steps, where he had gone to sit beside Anastasia, Steve called, "Hamburger!" Sleuth sat very still.

  "Cool," Sam said. "We did it! It worked!"

  He turned toward the porch, planning to bow theatrically if his sister applauded again. "Yea, Sam!" Anastasia called. "You guys are great dog trainers!"

  She turned to Steve. "You want to stay for lunch?" she asked. "We can make sandwiches out of leftover meatloaf."

  At the sound of "meatloaf," Sleuth jumped up, knocked Sam over, and dashed to the porch with his ears napping. He thudded into Anastasia, one eager paw on her shoulder.

  Steve stood up with a sigh. "We have more work to do, Sam," he said. "Let me have the squirter."

  It was a long process. All weekend they worked. When they got meatloaf under control, they had to start on peanut butter. With peanut butter done, there was still spaghetti.

  It was a tiring job, Sam realized, being a zookeeper. His book didn't show the exhausting parts. His book showed Zookeeper Jake smiling while he pushed a wheelbarrow filled with silvery fish to the seal pool. It showed Jake washing an elephant with a hose. In his book, all of the animals looked happy and well behaved. The elephant lifted one ear so that Jake could wash behind it. The seals cheerfully caught the fish that Jake threw. In one picture, a chimp with a huge smile sat very still while Jake brushed his teeth with a special brush.

  Also, Jake's suit, the one that said ZOOKEEPER JAKE in red letters on the chest, always seemed to be clean. Sam's suit wasn't. Sam's coverall had muddy paw prints all over it, and egg yolk from breakfast. His mom had washed it at least ten times, but every day it got dirty again. Every night at bedtime, Sam's mom groaned when he took off his zooman suit and she saw how dirty it was. Every night she asked, "Sam, do you think that maybe tomorrow—"

  But every night Sam said no. There were twenty-eight more hats. Then there were twenty-seven. And then twenty-six. Sam still had a lot of zooman time left to do.

  14

  "My goodness, Sam, you're so tall!" Mrs. Bennett said on Friday morning. "You shot up overnight!" Then she looked at him more carefully and began to laugh. "And I can see why!"

  Sam laughed, too. He had thought it was pretty funny when he had looked at himself in the mirror at home. He was wearing six hats today, one on top of the other. He had to walk very carefully to keep them all up there without toppling.

  He had finished all of the easy animals with short names, earlier that week. Colts on Monday. Then he wore his Rams cap on Tuesday, and talked about how a zookeeper would take care of sheep.

  "You have to shear a lot," Sam had explained. "You have to use special scissors." He used plastic scissors to demonstrate, and pretended to remove the fuzzy coat of a stuffed animal. He knew Mrs. Bennett wouldn't like it if he really cut. "Shear, shear, shear," Sam said, as he faked cutting. "Then you make a coat out of the wool," he explained.

  "How do you make a coat?" Lindsay asked, with her forehead wrinkled up into a puzzled look.

  Sam didn't really know. But he said, "Good question, Lindsay." Then he made a guess. "You sew it with a big needle and thread."

  Adam called loudly out from the circle without even raising his hand. "Guys don't sew! Only ladies sew!"

  "The zookeeper's wife makes a coat," Sam said, after he had thought about it for a moment.

  "Excuse me, fellows," said Big Ben. "Plenty of guys sew. There's no rule that says only ladies sew. See this button right here?" He pointed to a white button on his denim shirt. "That button fell off, and I sewed it back myself, just last night."

  Everybody was silent for a moment, admiring Big Ben's button. "Cool," Adam said at last.

  "Now," said Mrs. Bennett, "I'll read Sheep in a Jeep." She went to the bookcase.

  Sam sat down with the other children. "Shhh," he said, because they were still talking about Big Ben's button. He said "Shhh" so that they would quiet down. But he said it for another reason, too. He was noticing that the first letters of "Sheep" on the book Mrs. Bennett was holding made the "Shhh" sound.

  "Shhh," he said quietly to himself again, looking at the title of the book.

  On Wednesday, Sam had done Lions. Mrs. Bennett let them all practice roaring for a while until it got out of hand and Adam had to go to the time-out chair, where he continued to roar in an angry whisper, while Miss Ruth read a book called The Lion and the Little Red Bird.

  Thursday was Bucks. It was almost the last of the easy hats with short names. Sharks was still left, but Sam knew that Sharks would cause problems because it was so scary. He was beginning to have a pretty good idea about how he would handle those very scary hats like Sharks, but he wasn't quite ready yet.

  So on Thursday he did Bucks, which he explained to the other children meant "men deer."

  "I went to a restaurant with my mom and dad and my Uncle Dan," Eli told the class. "And the doors said BUCKS and DOES, and Uncle Dan went to the BUCKS, and it was the bathroom. So then my mom took me, and we went to DOES."

  "When my mom takes me to the bathroom in a restaurant," Lindsay said, "we go to LADIES."

  Leah waved her hand in the air. "We get to go to HANDICAPPED!" she said. "Because of my wheelchair!"

  "Children!" Zooman Sam said impatiently
. "We're not having a lesson about bathrooms today. We're supposed to be talking about deer. Who can think of an interesting thing about deer?" He waited, hoping no one would mention Bambi's mother being shot by hunters because he knew it would make Becky cry.

  "Antlers!" called Adam, and wiggled his fingers up behind his ears.

  Then Mrs. Bennett did a whole science lesson about antlers. Antlers were pretty interesting things, actually, and Sam wished that he had them. He felt the top of his head, reaching under his Bucks cap, to see if perhaps there were some little knobby things starting. That's the way antlers appeared on baby deer; they just popped up one day, as a surprise. Chicken pox had happened that way to Sam, and had not been any fun at all. Sam wondered whether there might be a chance that antlers could happen to a boy. But it wasn't happening to him, so he sighed and pushed his cap back down on his hair.

  And on Friday, Sam wore six hats at once.

  "Orioles," Mrs. Bennett read, and she removed the first hat carefully while Sam stood in front of the circle of children.

  "Ravens," she read next. "Children, be thinking about what these hats have in common. Why did Zooman Sam wear all of these hats together?"

  "Cardinals," she read from the third cap. She lifted the Ravens hat off. "Anybody figured it out yet?"

  Adam waved his hand. "They're all hats!" he suggested loudly.

  Mrs. Bennett smiled and shook her head. "That's not what I'm looking for, Adam," she said. "Think harder." She removed the third cap and revealed the fourth. "Blue Jays!" she read to the class.

  "Can anyone guess what the next one might be?" she asked.

  "I know! I know!" Leah called, waving her arm in the air.

  "Leah? What's your guess?"

  Leah wiggled excitedly in her wheelchair, and Sam knew that she had done exactly what he did, so often: raised her hand and said she knew when she didn't, really. "Uhhhh," Leah said, thinking aloud. "Pigs!" she shouted.

  Mrs. Bennett sighed. "You'd better put your thinking cap on, Leah," she said, and she took the fourth hat off of Sam's head. "Seahawks!" she announced.

  "And now one more." With a nourish Mrs. Bennett removed the Seahawks cap. "Raptors!" she told the class. "Wow! Anybody know what a raptor is?"

  No one knew. But Sam did. "I do," Sam said. "Of course, I'm the zooman."

  Actually, he hadn't known until that morning. His dad had looked it up in the dictionary at breakfast, while his mom stood at the sink trying to scrape some of yesterday's peanut butter from the sleeve of the zooman suit.

  "Tell the class, Sam," Mrs. Bennett suggested.

  "A bird of prey," Sam said.

  "Of pray? Like 'Now I lay me down to sleep'?" Emily asked. She formed her hands into a saying-your-prayers position.

  "No. A different kind of 'prey.' It means it eats other creatures," Sam explained.

  "Oh, no!" howled Becky. "Like bunnies?" She climbed into Big Ben's lap and began to sob.

  15

  Of course the answer that Mrs. Bennett had been looking for was birds. Sam's six Friday hats were all the names of birds.

  "The zookeeper keeps all the birds in the same place," Sam explained. "Like a big giant cage. It's called a..." But he couldn't remember. His father had told him the word that morning, but now he couldn't remember.

  "A bird cage!" Adam called out.

  Mrs. Bennett leaned down to Sam's ear, the part that showed under the Raptors cap, and whispered the word to him.

  "Aviary," Sam announced. "Say it with me, class."

  "Aviary," all of the children said, except Adam. Adam said "bird cage" again, and Mrs. Bennett frowned at him and shook her head.

  Mrs. Bennett carefully replaced his hats. Orioles, Ravens, Blue Jays, Seahawks, and Cardinals all went one by one back into a tower on top of Raptors, on top of Sam's head.

  Sam tried to think of what else he could tell about birds. He didn't find birds as interesting as other animals, and that was why he had worn all six hats at once, so that he wouldn't have to talk about birds on six different mornings.

  "When the zookeeper feeds the birds," Sam explained, "he goes into the aviary with his bag of bird food. Then he holds out his hand, with food in it, and the birds come and eat right out of his hand."

  "My Uncle Dan has a parrot, and when you hold your hand up, it pecks you," Eli said. "Then it says, 'Only a flesh wound!' and it laughs! It sounds like this." Eli laughed a loud, cackling sort of laugh.

  All of the children began to do parrot laughs. Sam tried to capture their attention again. Being a teacher was very, very hard.

  "The zooman has to wear thick gloves," he said, "so that his hands won't get pecked." Then he announced, "Being a zooman is a dangerous job. You have to be very brave."

  "Like a firefighter," Adam said. "Probably almost as brave as a firefighter."

  "Yeah, firefighters have to be really, really brave," Zachary said in a loud voice. All of the other boys began to nod their heads. One of them began to make a siren sound. Sam saw Mrs. Bennett move to the front of the circle, and he was afraid for a moment that she was going to go to the piano and start the music for the firemen song. But she didn't. She had a book in her hand, and the children became quiet, the way they always did at story time.

  "This is a nice one," Mrs. Bennett said, holding up the book, "and it fits right in with Sam's hats because it's about a particular bird. Who can guess what bird?" She held the front of the book so that all of the children could see the cover.

  "Owls!" All of the children, including Sam, recognized the book.

  "That's right. This book is called Owl Babies."

  All of the children got into their listening-to-a-story positions. Three of them—Tucker, Will, and Jessie—put their thumbs into their mouths. Eli and Becky curled up in Big Ben's lap. Leah twirled a piece of her hair around her finger. Josh reached into his pocket and took out the small square of faded wool that he always carried there; it was the last piece of his security blanket, and he held it in his hand during quiet times.

  Sam had a listening-to-a-story position, too. He liked to sit with his legs crossed, leaning his head on the big red floor pillow, which was very squishy and soft, with his hands in his pockets feeling the little fuzz that accumulated there.

  But a zooman couldn't do any of that, Sam realized. When you were wearing six hats, you couldn't lean anywhere. You had to hold your head very straight. And a zooman coverall had no pockets.

  Glumly, Sam sat down on a chair, his posture like a soldier, his chin up so that his head was straight and his tower of hats didn't wobble. He poked at a splotch of egg yolk on the knee of his zooman suit. He listened to the story of the owl babies. The littlest owl baby cried a lot in the story, and felt miserable and wanted his mother. Sam felt a little the same way.

  He tried to think about an aviary, and how important he would be, the zooman entering the giant cage wearing his special clothing and carrying special food for all the different kinds of birds, who would be swooping and fluttering and soaring above his head, and—

  Oh, no. Sam had a terrible thought. He could hear Mrs. Bennett's voice, reading the gentle story of the baby owls in their nest, and he heard her read about the sound of the mother owl's huge wings as she came flying down to care for them. But all Sam could think about was bird poop: how it would come raining down on top of him in an aviary; and even if he was wearing his special hat—or six hats, even—he would still be pelted with it, and it would be a million, trillion times worse than a little egg yolk on one knee.

  Not for the first time, Sam wished that he had chosen to be a firefighter with all the other boys, instead of a zookeeper, all alone.

  16

  "Sam, you don't really need to wear all your hats here at home, do you?" his mom asked. "Why don't you take them off for lunch, at least?"

  Sam thought about that and decided it would be okay. His head had begun to feel a little weighted from the six hats, and it felt good to put them back into the plastic bag that he now kep
t in the back hall beside the kitchen.

  "I like seeing your hair," his mother told him, and she ran her fingers through it. Then she asked, "You hungry? I fixed some..." She hesitated and looked around. Sleuth was in his usual spot in the corner of the kitchen.

  Sam could smell what she had prepared for lunch, and he knew it would be safe to say it. "Hot dogs," he announced.

  Sleuth opened his eyes, looked up, glanced at Sam, appeared to think for a moment, and to make a decision, and then put his head back down.

  "That's absolutely amazing, Sam. In just a week, you and Steve have that dog's behavior under control. What a great animal trainer you are!"

  "We haven't finished, though," Sam warned her. "There are some casseroles we haven't done yet. And some desserts."

  "Okay, I'll be careful what I say. But here you are: a hot dog." His mom put the plate in front of him. "And after lunch, shall we go to the library?"

  Sam loved the library. He had always called it the liberry, even though he knew the correct word was library. He liked saying "liberry," which sounded like "blueberry" or "strawberry" or "raspberry," as if you could make jam out of it, or syrup for pancakes. At the IHOP restaurant, where they went sometimes, there was a little pitcher of blueberry syrup. Sam wondered what it would be like if the chef could make liberry syrup to pour on your pancakes, or liberry jam to have with peanut butter in a sandwich.

  When he was older, he decided, he would say the word correctly. But for now, he would say "liberry."

  Mrs. Dilahunt, the children's librarian, greeted him when he entered the Children's Room, which was painted in bright colors and had mobiles hanging from the high ceiling. "Hello there, Sam," she said. "My goodness, a different hat today! What does this one say? Let me see." She came out from behind her desk and examined his cap.