Zooman Sam (9 page)

"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.

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.