Flushboy. Stephen Graham Jones

pitching this to my dad.

      “And we can have, like, carts, too,” Prudence goes on, “like a roller coaster, that you can ride through the drive-through if you need to go.”

      “Just number one, though.”

      “Of course.”

      “I’ve got standards, I mean.”

      This is another joke. A complete joke. Over-the-top comedy ^gold.

      While she’s there two vehicles come through. One contains a husband and wife, obviously on vacation, who detoured fifty miles probably just to say they’ve done this—they buy every Upsale item I have to offer, and laugh and laugh, then give me one full bottle back (the Jane), along with one empty. The other car is a minivan driven by a desperate mother. She screeches into the emergency lane, the weight of her front tires starting up the red strobe lights.

      Her four-year-old has to go.

      I slide the John and Jane down the greased string, out to her open window.

      In the emergency lane we don’t slow you down by asking which you need, and because it’s an emergency, you pay a flat fee for them both ($5.00), don’t get any curtains or overflow canisters or kiddie models.

      Instead of putting her keys in the bank tube that I’m pretty sure my father stole, the mother just throws them across the twenty feet.

      They sail past my head in slow motion, ding against something behind me and bring it down with them.

      “K-P-E-E!” Prudence yells from her place below the window, then melts into laughter.

      I smile like nobody’s said anything, and the tracks grind forward, the mother not at the wheel anymore at all, the minivan a ghost vehicle, abandoned.

      Because I don’t have a bank tube for her keys fifty-two frantic seconds later, I mime throwing them back. The mother nods, extends her hand, catches them exactly in the center of her palm.

      What she mouths to me is Thank you.

      The John she returns is slippery on the outside, and the kid’s been eating crayons, I’d guess.

      The red strobe light cycles down.

      “Shit,” Prudence says.

      “Not on the kids’ menu,” I tell her, and she punches me soft then opens her hand on my side, nuzzles into my neck.

      Like this, she has control, can stop whenever she needs to.

      “Copro-lites,” I whisper. “For the diet menu.”

      “It’s all diet,” she says back, right into my ear, “all you ever eat’s one bite,” and I eke a laugh out and give her the mother’s two-dollar tip, tell her to buy a purple drink with it, to make her lips taste good.

      “You trying to make me not hate you?” she says, standing up on her toes to stuff the bills into her pocket.

      It’s what we say instead of anything so stupid as love. That we don’t hate each other.

      “Kind 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