Zooman Sam (2 page)

Sam didn't really truly know what he wanted to be when he was grown up. Sometimes he thought he wanted to fly an airplane, and sometimes he thought he wanted to be the guy in the diving suit who fed the fish in the big tank at the New England Aquarium.

All he knew for sure was that he wanted to stand in front of the class tomorrow and hear all the children go "Ooooh" when he told about his
Future Job. More than anything Sam didn't want to be ordinary. He had always been
ordinary,
and he was tired of it. What he wanted was to be—well, he had a special name for it, a private name that he would never tell anybody. It meant somebody important, somebody interesting, somebody more than ordinary. Sam called it, just to himself, the Chief of Wonderfulness.

"Leah has a white coat," Sam told his family, "and she's going to wear a stets———, a stetso———"

"A Stetson hat?" asked Sam's dad. "Does Leah want to be a cowgirl?"

"
No,
" Sam said impatiently. "The thing you wear around your neck when you're a doctor. Leah's going to be a doctor."

"Oh," said Mrs. Krupnik, "a stethoscope."

"Yeah," Sam said. "A stetsocope. And Adam's going to be a fireman. He's wearing his raincoat and boots. And maybe his mom will let him bring a hatchet." Sam sighed in envy, thinking about the hatchet. It would be so cool to bring a hatchet to school. It wouldn't make you Chief of Wonderfulness, but it would be very, very cool.

"Well, Sam," his mother suggested, "you could be a fireman, too. You have a yellow raincoat. I
think you even have a plastic fireman's hat someplace. No hatchet, though. Sorry about the hatchet."

"
No!
" Sam wailed. He had already thrown his raincoat on the floor of his closet. Sam didn't
want
to be a fireman. All of the boys were going to be firemen, except for maybe stupid old Josh, who said he was going to be an Indian—and Mrs. Bennett said no, you should say Native American; so Josh said okay, he was going to be a Native American, and he had a feathered headdress to wear.

"Stupid Josh is going to be a Native American," Sam muttered.

"Don't say 'stupid,' Sam," his mother said.

"But, Mom," Anastasia pointed out, "it
is
stupid. You can't be a Native American unless you
are
Native American. That's like saying you've decided to be Italian."

"Stupid old Josh," Sam muttered again.

"I have an idea," Sam's dad said. "Sam, you could wear a necktie. I can lend you one..."

Already Sam could tell he was going to hate this idea. But he waited politely for his father to finish.

"And," Myron Krupnik went on, "you can
carry a briefcase. I have an old one you can borrow. We can fill it with papers."

"Why?" Sam asked.

"Ta-da!" his father said proudly. "You'll be a college professor. Just like..." He waited expectantly.

"Just like you," Sam said gloomily.

"Dad," Anastasia said, "we love you. But that would not be a cool Future Job for Sam. It's too boring."

Mrs. Krupnik stood up and began to stack the empty plates on top of one another so that she could take them to the kitchen. "Well, Sam," she said. "If you had brought home the note, we would have had more time to prepare. But as it is, you'll have to decide on something, and you'll have to decide on it quickly." She looked at her watch. "It's one hour until your bedtime."

"I already decided," Sam explained angrily, "but I don't have the right clothes."

Everyone else had finished eating dessert, but Sam hadn't even started. He picked up his spoon and put it into his ice cream.

"Well, what did you decide?" his mother asked. "What are you planning to do as a Future Job?"

Sam discovered that his bowl was filled with liquid. Absolutely everything was going wrong for him.

"My Chunky Monkey!" Sam wailed. Just saying the words reminded him, once again, of his Future Job. He had been thinking about it all day. He was pretty certain that it would cause all of the children, even the ones who might have hatchets, to say "Ooooh" when he stood in front of the class. Poking his spoon into the soup that had once been ice cream, he announced it to his family.

"A zookeeper!" Sam said.

There were a lot of things that Sam loved about his family.

He loved that they didn't fight, the way Tucker's family did. Sam had been invited once to Tucker's house to play, on a Saturday afternoon, and he had a terrible time. Tucker's dad was raking the yard, and Tucker's mom yelled that he wasn't doing it right, and then he yelled back, and finally he slammed down the rake and said a very bad word, the S-word, and Sam got a stomachache and wanted to go home.

Sam's mom and dad didn't do that. They argued sometimes, but they never yelled the
S-word at each other and made people have stomachaches.

And Sam loved that his family laughed a lot and acted goofy. He sort of hoped that his friends wouldn't be there, noticing, when his mom and dad and sister acted goofy, like the time they all did a ballet in the living room, twirling around on their toes. Maybe friends wouldn't understand that and would think his family was weird.

But Sam loved it when they all acted goofy together, just their family, like maybe holding fake microphones made out of bagels poked onto forks, and singing old Beatles songs. Sam's mom always put on dark glasses and said she was Yoko, even though Yoko wasn't really truly a Beatle. And they always let Sam be Ringo and do the drums.

Sam thought he had been born into the best family in the world. Even times like tonight, when he was howling and crying and telling them that he had an unfixable problem, secretly he knew that his family would be able to help him fix it. So while he was wailing, he was also waiting.

"Stop crying, Sam," his mother said. "Let's figure this out. And here: you can have some fresh ice cream." In his corner in the kitchen they could hear Sleuth leap up eagerly at the words
ice cream.
Sleuth's hearing was phenomenal. He came into the dining room. But no one paid any attention to the dog. Sam's mom spooned some fresh Chunky Monkey into Sam's bowl.

"Are you certain of that choice, Sam?" Mrs. Krupnik asked. "The last time we took you to the zoo, we didn't stay as long as we had planned. Remember? It was in the summer, and it was so hot, and—"

"The only bad thing about a zoo," Sam said, "is the smell. You could get used to it."

"I don't know," his mother said, in a dubious voice. "I'd have a pretty hard time getting used to it, I think. The chimpanzee cage was pretty awful." She licked the spoon she had used to serve the ice cream, but she made a kind of bad-memory face.

"Only the smell," Sam reminded her. "Everything else about the chimpanzees was good."

His mother sighed. "Well, they had cute smiles." She widened her mouth and tried to imitate a chimpanzee smile.

"Show some teeth, Mom," Anastasia said.
Sam's sister made her own chimpanzee smile, with some teeth exposed. "Huh, huh, huh," she said, in a chimpanzee voice.

"You need more lips," Sam's father announced. He'd been reading the
Boston Globe
after dinner, while he sipped his coffee. Sam's mom didn't like people to read at the table, but sometimes she said, "Oh, all right, Myron, just this once." She had said that tonight.

Myron Krupnik put down the
Boston Globe
and did an imitation of a chimpanzee face. He shaped his mouth into a wide smile, and exposed some teeth, but then—this was the best part, Sam thought!—his dad fluffed out his lips. For an instant he looked exactly like a chimpanzee. His beard looked like chimp fur, his mouth looked like a chimp mouth, and his bald head looked like a chimp head.

"
Cool!
" Sam said.

"Amazing," Mrs. Krupnik said. "If you'd just take your glasses off, Myron—"

"Gross, Dad," Anastasia said. "That was
so
gross."

Sam's dad made his chimp face disappear. He looked like Myron Krupnik again. "It's all in the lips," he explained. He picked up the
Boston Globe
again, and continued reading about the
Patriots for a moment. But then he put the paper down.

"What does a zookeeper wear?" Sam's dad asked. Myron Krupnik knew a lot about almost everything. If you asked Mr. Krupnik how to build a rocket, or why the president of the United States wasn't a woman, he would tell you. But sometimes, like right now, Sam was surprised to find that his father was missing important information.
Everyone
knew what zookeepers wear, Sam was secretly thinking.

But he was wrong. Everybody didn't.

"Jeans," Anastasia said, to Sam's amazement. Even his sister didn't know.

"Yes, I'm quite sure it would be jeans," Sam's mother said. "We won't have any trouble at all, fixing you up as a zookeeper, Sam. You were upset about nothing."

"
Not jeans,
" Sam insisted, and a little Chunky Monkey dribbled out of his mouth. He swallowed. "They wear a special zookeeper suit," he told his family, trying very hard to use a polite and patient voice.

"I'll show you!" Sam said. He put down his spoon, climbed out of his seat, and ran into his father's study. He knew exactly where to look. Mr. Krupnik's study was lined with bookcases.
Most of them held grown-up books, books with no pictures at all, books that Sam had never even opened. But beside the couch, on the lowest shelf, next to the floor, were Sam's books.

He had other books in his own bedroom—a whole shelf full—but his favorites were here in his dad's study, so that in the evening, after dinner, he could curl up in the corner of the couch, next to his dad, or maybe on his lap, while his dad read to him.

Holding up the bottom of his father's big Beethoven sweatshirt so that he wouldn't trip on it, Sam squatted down beside the bookcase and found the book he wanted. He took it back to the table, where his family was waiting.

"I remember that one, Sam," his dad said. "We've read that one lots of times."

Sam placed the book on the table in front of his dad. He stood beside him and watched while his father turned the pages of the zoo book.

"The zookeeper's on the page with the lion," Sam whispered. "
There.
" He pointed when his dad reached that page.

Katherine Krupnik, Myron Krupnik, and Anastasia Krupnik all leaned over to examine the zookeeper. Sam didn't need to. Sam knew
exactly
what the zookeeper was wearing.

"Oh, I see, Sam," his mother said. "It
is
a special zookeeper suit. Oh, dear."

"And hat," Sam added, without looking at the picture. The picture was memorized inside his head.

"Yes. And hat. Oh, dear," his mother said a second time. She was frowning. Not like Beethoven, though. Beethoven was frowning a grouchy frown. Katherine Krupnik was frowning a
thinking
sort of frown.

Sam's dad sighed. "I still say a college professor would be a good choice," he said. "A briefcase, maybe a nice striped tie—"

"No," Mrs. Krupnik and Anastasia said together.

"Sam wants to be a zookeeper," Anastasia said.

"I think we can do this," Sam's mom said in a determined voice.

Sam began to finish his Chunky Monkey. His mother and sister were examining the picture carefully.

"I would call it a kind of
coverall,
Sam," his mother said.

"Sometimes garage mechanics wear them," Anastasia added.

"Right!" Sam said. He remembered going to
the garage with his dad, to have the snow tires taken off the car. Sam liked watching when they put the car up high so they could look at its bottom. He wanted to ride in it when it went up, but they wouldn't let him.

At the garage, there was a guy with grease all over his face, and a dirty rag sticking out of his pocket. His sister was right; the suit the garage guy wore was very much like a zookeeper's suit.

"Coverall?" Sam asked.

"Coverall," said Katherine Krupnik. "I think I can do it."

"And the hat?" Sam asked. "The special zookeeper's hat?"

There was a silence. Then Sam's sister, Anastasia, said, "I have an idea about the hat."

What a wonderful family I have, thought Sam.