Flushboy. Stephen Graham Jones

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СКАЧАТЬ of thought you already did,” I say, rolling with the punch I know is coming.

      Though policy is to wait until you have six, I take the three Johns and the one Jane to the tanks, and, just like I wanted, when I’ve got the wide cap of tank #2 backed off for the one Jane, Prudence balances up on the ladder and cups her mouth, calling in for Dick.

      Her voice echoes, so that she’s saying it over and over, and for the moment, anyway, I’m glad to be wearing the apron.

      7.

      Like he’s psychic, my dad calls exactly thirty seconds after the door’s shut behind Prudence.

      “Yeah?” I say, trying to push enough boredom into my voice that he’ll know it’s just been business as usual.

      “Checking in…” he says.

      His voice has a definite false lilt to it.

      “Consider me checked,” I say, and pull down the door on the industrial dishwasher. Because there’s not a full load of Johns and Janes, they have enough shoulder room to rattle up off the rack, careen all over the inside of the dishwasher. The steam fogs my goggles.

      “So how’s it going?”

      “One hour down, y’know.”

      “No no no,” my dad says, in a way that I can see him pacing with the phone, pulling neat little flip-turns at the end of his cord. “It’s four to go. It’s all about the attitude.”

      “Right,” I say, the whole bay still steamed over. “Two hundred and forty minutes. Or do you want that broken down into seconds?”

      Silence, of the restrained variety.

      Which is fine with me.

      The sales meetings he makes me and Tandy and a bleary-eyed Roy attend are always at seven on Saturday mornings, when nobody else is out. He calls the meetings classes, calls his school Drive-Through U. It’s at the top of the clipboards we’re supposed to take notes on. Until it became obvious he was the only one participating, he’d even try to lead us in a chant of sorts, one I could only repeat now under hypnosis.

      The reason he holds the meetings on Saturday instead of Sunday, when there’d be even fewer people out, is that Saturday is the day he works the drive-through, because Saturday afternoon is where we are on the disposal truck’s route, and he doesn’t trust us to watch the drive-through and supervise the driver, make sure he’s got all the fittings snugged down right. Either that or the rumors are true and he’s fallen in with some porta-potty mafia or something.

      According to an article in the financial section two months ago (it included a caricature of our “typical” customer), it’s the only way a business like this can be making money. Because it should be costing more than forty-nine cents a pop to dispose of biologically hazardous material.

      My dad’s comeback is that the paper didn’t factor in Upsales.

      Really, too, I don’t care.

      What it means to me is a day off, instead of—and this is how it was the first two weeks—emptying each John and Jane into the toilet by hand, then flushing every fifth time.

      As the city informed us, though, we were neither licensed for that volume of sewage nor was our plumbing rated for it.

      So now disposal is off-site, and my father’s sold his soul to some urine lord or piss merchant. One with goldfish swimming in his bladder, maybe.

      “Listen,” I say, before he can wind up into some lecture, “you know the Bantams are playing the Woodpeckers tonight, right?”

      “Face-off’s at nine,” he says, his voice dropping a bit. “Got money on it, sport?”

      “Just wondering if you could get Roy to come in early or something.”

      My dad breathes in sharp and then back out, as if it’s painful, what he’s about to have to explain to me. It’ll have to do with overtime and employer/employee trust and frivolous stuff like hockey games.

      Except they weren’t always frivolous.

      Without them, we wouldn’t be where we are right now.

      “Don’t worry about it,” I say, cutting him off again.

      “I just don’t understand how—”

      “I said it’s not important, Dad. It’s probably too late to get tickets anyway.”

      This stops him, gives him something else to preach about: how I should plan ahead for things I want. Save and schedule and know what I want to do with my nights. And in addition, Roy’s a grown man, who may have plans of his own.

      “We’ll talk about it Saturday morning,” he finishes.

      “I’m sure we will.”

      “Excuse me?”

      “Nothing. Forget I said anything.”

      “Flush that frown?” he lilts, as if quoting.

      It’s a line from his chant. Our chant.

      I hang up softly, look up into the fish-eye mirror, and realize what time it is: five o’clock. Shift change.

      Lined up all the way to the street are cop cars.

      8.

      The story of Chickenstein is that he or she is worth ten thousand dollars. All you have to do is prove whether the person inside the suit is male or female.

      Behind the closing credits of the news each night, there’s some fool trying.

      The most popular method is to break down the mechanics of Chickenstein’s victory dance, show how this or that move is impossible for a guy or girl to do.

      What this involves is stupid people wearing chicken-beak hats and dancing in their garage.

      When I was a kid, I remember being so sure that every time I closed my eyes, the world changed, relaxed into its natural posture. That everything I saw was a big complicated play, being staged only for me.

      Though I grew out of that, still, living in this town, it’s easy to wonder if there’s not an audience somewhere watching me, waiting for me to call bullshit on all this.

      What’s even worse is that the longer I stay here, the more I buy into it all.

      Like the ice.

      I’m not the one who called the radio station about it, but I was thinking it, that putting on your weekend sneakers and dancing in front of your mother-in-law’s video camera is a whole different thing from strapping into the oversized feet of some chicken costume and dancing out there on the ice in front of thousands of people. You use whole muscle groups you probably didn’t even know you had.

      I’m not all sad СКАЧАТЬ