Dragonhaven (2 page)

Eleanor wouldn't touch the bugs and beetles, and the bigger live (or soon-to-be-knocked-on-the-head) stuff Eric or Katie would deal with, but she'd put the vegetables and fruit in the buckets after Martha or I cut it up if it needed cutting. (
Madagascariensis
is such a lazy slob it won't eat its carrots unless they are chopped up first.) She wasn't really that much help since we had to keep a sharp eye on her; she felt that fairness meant that everybody got the same thing, but most of the fun food is whatever the Wilsonville and Cheyenne supermarkets feel like sending us of the stuff that's still around after its sell-by date and, for example, citrus gives
russo
diarrhea. But Eleanor will get older, and living at Smokehill is weird enough (okay, okay, I admit it) so it's good if you feel involved. But how many kids get to help out at a zoo? Who needs normal?

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—”

Katie's usually brighter than this. Maybe the smell was getting to her. She got sympathetic. “Jake,” she said gently. “There's a lot of crap out there. It's not worth getting mad all the time, okay? You've got better things to do. Think about the gate money this group brought us, and forget the rest.”

I stared at her, feeling as if my whole head was getting redder and redder, like if they turned the lights off you could have seen in the dark by the glow of my head. Why was she saying this to me? Why was it upsetting me so much that she was saying this to me? She was only telling the truth. Crap was crap and there's a lot of it around. But it was probably
crap
that killed my mother—nobody will admit this but what probably happened is that the guide she'd been promised didn't show and didn't show, and she had to sit there watching her six-month sabbatical from Smokehill going for nothing (that much we knew for sure), and she found somebody else to take her and the somebody wasn't good enough and either got her into trouble or let her get herself into trouble and then fled. But we'll never
know
, okay?

After Mom died, and then Snark, my dog, only seven months and twelve days later, everything started getting to me a lot worse than it used to. All the time I'd been growing up we were both the biggest and acre for acre the poorest national park in the country. Because of the Institute we're sitting ducks for all the dragon nuts out there, and lots and
lots
of them come, and while most of them are happy with the diorama and the film clips and the bus tour, and are perfectly normal okay humans with like
manners
, way too many of them want to bother the staff of the Institute and waste our time arguing and complaining about the traveling restrictions inside the park and the information available at the tourist center and the brush-off they get from our Rangers.

The staff of the Institute, what a joke. That's my dad and a short-term graduate student or two. (Sometimes they're only part-time. Their grant pays for them to live here but they spend most of their time writing their PhDs.) Since Mom died they haven't even given him an extra graduate student. But these people don't get it that we
have
to be this way, this strict and cautious, and we're not ripping them off, we need their ticket fees to stay alive. And the government doesn't get it either, which is why they never let us have enough money.

But Mom's the one who had the sense of humor about it and while she was alive I used to think our fruit loops were funny because she did. She's the one who started calling them f.l.s. It was after Mom disappeared that the f.l.s. didn't seem so funny any more and my brain started zoning out and I started playing a lot more Space Marauder or Annihilate than I ever used to, and then when they found her at the bottom of that ravine with her neck broken and only her teeth to tell them who she was and no way of ever knowing what she was doing dead at the bottom of a ravine because she was a very, very careful person but what would
you
do if the only half sabbatical you were going to get that
decade
was being wasted because some pighead administrator had screwed up? And then my dog died and I was kind of a mess for a while. You don't need to know any more about that, except that as almost-fifteen-year-olds go I was maybe a little twitchier than some.

All this and a lot more besides went boiling through my head for about the millionth time when Katie told me not to be so mad about all the crap there was around, while the nincompoop went on scrambling his students' brains (actually he probably wasn't—I don't think many of them were paying attention), and where I stopped thinking was
If I go berserk right now—in public—start hammering the walls with my shovel and screaming—in front of a bunch of sixteen-year-olds—I'll never forgive her.
Which was true, even if it wasn't her fault. There was a lump like a burning basketball in my throat and I didn't dare blink my eyes for fear of what would spill out. But even Eric's eyes water sometimes when he's doing
odoratus
.

The main thing I was thinking was, It's been
two years
. Almost three. And a little thing like Katie being the wrong kind of sympathetic at the wrong moment and I'm going to pieces.

At last I managed to say, “The gate money wasn't much. They'd've got a school discount.”

Katie took this as a joke, and laughed, and the danger was over. I went back to scrubbing, although I probably took some of the floor with it.

 

When I was younger I used to say that I didn't understand why so many nuts had to be crazy over
dragons
. What about Yukon wolves, cougars, grizzly bears, ichthyosauruses, griffins, several kinds of shark, lions, tigers, and Caspian walruses, any of which will eat human when it's available, and every one of which is on the next-step-extinction super-endangered list, partly, of course, because of their eating habits? But no. The biggest, fruitiest fruit loops go for dragons. Enter “dragon” at your favorite search site, and stand back. In fact, go make yourself a cup of coffee, because it'll still be churning out hits by the time you get back. None of the rest of the critters comes close. Well, Nessie does pretty well, especially since they found her a couple of boyfriends in one of those Scandinavian lochs. Now everyone's standing around waiting for her to reproduce. She hasn't though. Maybe she's a he after all, or the hes are shes too. It's not only dragons we don't know enough about.