Although Martha and I both put our hours in at the orphanage. But then the orphanage is pretty good too. I like little furry baby things, which there aren’t any of at the zoo. Maybe I’m more normal than Eleanor. After the lot at the zoo, something warm and furry or feathery is a nice change too, even if it may throw up all over you. And then there’s warm and furry like a Yukon wolf cub. If Eleanor’s lucky some day she’ll get to hold the broom for it to tear the throat out of while the guy with the sedative gun gets into position.
We’d only just started by the time Katie arrived. Katie makes everyone feel nicer and calmer just by being there, even her daughters. I mean, even Eleanor. Martha is a lot like Katie herself. But after Katie got there Eleanor stopped arguing that since she didn’t like celery nobody else was going to like celery either. (Madagascariensis, I swear, likes celery because the sound it makes slowly crunching it up reminds it of the crack of small bones, without any of the effort of hunting something. You’d think carrots would be even better, but no. Maybe it only hunts things with osteoporosis.)
Then Eric showed up and things went into a decline again—even Katie can’t do much with Eric—but Dad says he’s a good keeper and not everyone wants to live a hundred miles from the nearest real restaurant, work twelve or fourteen hours a day, sometimes seven days a week, and get paid badly, and we’re lucky to have him. That’s Dad’s way of saying “shut up.” It’s a lot better than saying “shut up” but nothing is ever going to make me like Eric.
We got the buckets sorted and started carrying them out. Eleanor is not only only seven and the youngest but she’s not exactly large even for seven (Martha’s small for her age too but she’s twelve) and only an Eleanor-type seven-year-old would insist on carrying a bucket too big and heavy for her, but of course she does. “I’ll take russo,” she says every day. Russo’s her favorite. Russo is also at the far end of the row of cages and Martha and I have to dawdle getting the others set out to give her time, and then she and Martha have this little ritual of Eleanor pretending not to notice that Martha has to lift and dump the food through the chute, because Eleanor can’t.
“She’s going to wear that bucket out, dragging it like that,” snapped Eric.
“You tell her,” I said. Eric glared at me, but I was doing him a favor, giving him an excuse for a good glare.
Once Eric was there to deal with the serious food Katie and I could get started on the cages. Here’s a good example of what passes in Eric’s case for a sense of humor. When I turned thirteen the grown-ups decided it was time I had some real chores, not just fun-food detail at the zoo or helping unpack and stack stuff for the gift shop. Especially given my talent for leaving drifts of Styrofoam munchies and stomp-popped bubblewrap in my wake. It had kind of seemed to me that my time at the orphanage should have counted, but maybe it didn’t because I never had night duty (a growing boy needs his sleep, etc.) and because there was always an adult there with me. Or maybe because I’d been getting underfoot at the orphanage since I was a baby and Mom used to bring me along while she put in her time, and it was like I was too regular and nobody noticed.
Anyway I volunteered for cage cleaning because I knew odoratus doesn’t make me sick the way it does a lot of people, and by doing it I knew I’d get extra slack for when I screwed up elsewhere, which was definitely an issue. Eric accepted my offer fast enough, but he couldn’t let it go without telling everyone that the reason I didn’t mind odoratus was because I was a teenage boy. Very funny, Eric. That doesn’t explain Katie, who also volunteered for odoratus, who is not only a girl—I mean a woman—herself but has two daughters. And her slob of a husband isn’t around any more if the idea is you have to live with slobbishness to be able to deal. Katie’s husband isn’t dead but he might as well be since nobody ever sees him, including his daughters. That may be another reason I kind of like Eleanor really. I don’t think feeling sorry for people is ever going to come easily to Eleanor, but it wouldn’t occur to her to feel sorry for me because my mom’s dead. As far as she’s concerned we’re even, because her dad’s dead. Eleanor has a very black-and-white view of the world. That’s restful too sometimes, except when you’re on her hit list.
She didn’t get it from Katie. Katie has no hit list. Katie volunteered for odoratus so no one else had to do it. That’s what she’s like. (And between her, me, and Eric, no one else does have to do it. Aren’t we just the three stooges of wonderfulness.) And she tried really hard to be careful after my mom died and not look at me funny or anything but it’s like she got it too well instead so when other people started forgetting she didn’t. I mean…well, I’ll give you an example. This happened only a few weeks before Eleanor got the okay to start “helping” at the zoo.
You clean any of the Draco cages by halves, with you in one half and the Draco safely imprisoned in the other half, but odoratus is unique in that he and his harem and the juvvie males are not only behind bars but behind a glass partition as well: We say it’s for the tourists, but even us tough guys can only take so much. We also usually do odoratus in pairs to get it over faster. But we were doing it really macho that day, no masks and helmets (nice cool day with no breeze, you can just about get away with it with the overhead vent open, and you’re going to need a shower afterward anyway), so when this school group led by this thumping big assho—I mean nincompoop stopped to look at our big male odoratus who was busy flapping his ears (odoratus ears are huge and frilly, you know, the better to wave odoratus odor around, except, of course, when there’s a glass wall in the way) and showing off, right next door, we could hear exactly what he was saying to his students.
He had one of those bellowing voices, like he was used to lecturing to thousands, so I mean we could hear exactly. The kids looked a little older than me, and that made it worse somehow. It should have been funny, the nincompoop baying and posturing and odoratus flapping and posturing back, but it wasn’t. I probably started to get sort of maroon, which could have just been the smell, but Katie knows me pretty well. “Steady, Jake,” she said.
“It’s all crap,” I muttered, so he couldn’t possibly overhear me: it doesn’t matter how pissed off any of us Smokehill lifers get, we always think of how something’s going to look to the tourists. “And he’s pretending to teach those kids—”