Flushboy. Stephen Graham Jones

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 that somebody beat me to that call, don’t get me wrong. It just hurts to remember that I sat in the car for a couple of minutes after I got home, to be sure the caller got it right.

      I don’t know.

      Half of the ten thousand is being put up by the Bantams, the other half by the parent company of the Channel 2 news and its sister radio company, and I don’t know who’s making money from the “Which came first?” shirts, which my mom thinks are a disgrace, an affront to public decency.

      All of which is to say that, for Chickenstein, on game night, hitting the bathroom has become the most complicated trick in town.

      Until my dad opened shop, that is.

      Now, before each game and sometimes even during the second-period slump, when the cheerleaders are shooting t-shirts up to the crowd, Chickenstein will coast up to my window, in costume, and pay for a John and a Jane, take them both into the many folds of the Chickenstein costume, and then, before the second window, will have poured some from the John into the Jane, or the other way around, so that I can’t tell anything.

      And, though I’m sure it’s trashing my dad’s paranoid efforts to keep the urines properly segregated—why this would matter to the porta-potty overlords, I have no clue—what I do with those sacred half bottles is pour the first into the #1 tank, the men’s, and the second into the women’s, old #2.

      The one time the next person in line realized what miraculous thing had just happened right there in front of him, the driver offered me eighty-three dollars for Chickenstein’s “deposit.” It was the driver’s word, like we’re a sperm bank or something. Eighty-three dollars was all he had in his wallet.

      This was one of the days when my dad had us on alert, though. His health-inspector radar had been dinging all day.

      It meant those eighty-three dollars could have been a test.

      Not redistributing the urine is the first thing you learn at Drive-Through U. Not only would it contribute to the possible spread of disease, for which we could be held liable, but the service we offer is supposed to offer complete and total anonymity as well.

      It’s like you get brainwashed after a while.

      So, no, I didn’t sell Chickenstein’s John or Jane that day.

      But still.

      Two days ago, sweeping the tracks, I found two fake chicken feathers. They were the color we all know.

      And now those two tickets in the suggestions box.

      That they were still there meant Chickenstein had come through towards the end of Tandy’s shift. And, because it’s still hours before the game, probably not in costume either.

      The way that makes my heart beat is a betrayal of everything I believe in, yeah.

      I do think it means I’m still alive, though.

      9.

      My father’s term for the wall of police urine washing towards us at each shift change is “the bum rush.” Because cops don’t pay. It’s not that they have a city tab we can charge, anything like that, it’s that, the way they look at it, they’re getting the coffee for free, right? It only makes sense that they should be able to dispose of it for free. And that it keeps them close to the radios, ready to respond, that just means we’re doing our civil service. Helping keep the city safe. Doing our duty.

      Their Johns and occasional Janes are dark and unhealthy.

      You can tell a lot about a person from their pee.

      Some smell like sugar, some like blood.

      Policy is not to offer law enforcement any Upsale items. Because they’d take them.

      For the next ten minutes, then, I process them through the drive-through like the cattle they are, and say Yes, sir a lot more than I mean it, until it becomes a sort of joke and one of the officers towards the end of the line asks what’s so funny?

      I lose my smile, hand him his John and then the overflow canister he snaps his meaty fingers for.

      My face is hot.

      There’s no policy for this.

      “You old enough for this, kid?” the cop asks, nodding down to his lap, pushing into the floorboard with his heels so he can get his shiny belt unsnapped. Holding my eyes the whole time.

      I step off the button, let the track ease him forward, but not before he’s already got his head leaned back in pleasure.

      I’m glad Prudence is already gone.

      On his radio something urgent is happening. The two black-and-whites still in line behind him light up, peel away, and the one already ahead of me at the second window just balances his John on the narrow ledge and squeals off the tracks, shaking everything.

      Because these are cops and might need to blast off just like this, we don’t ask for their keys.

      By the time that last officer gets to the second window, his friend ahead of him has shuddered the tracks enough to splash pee everywhere.

      Instead of giving me back the wet John, the officer, still holding my eyes as if daring me to stop him, pours its contents into a series of styrofoam cups he scrounges from his dash and floorboard.

      “Sir—” I try to say, but I’m a gnat to him.

      The same way you can’t bring your own cups through the fast-food drive-through for refills—their policy is only to put their own cups under their fountains—we can’t process any urine not in a John or a Jane.

      That doesn’t stop him from lining them like shot glasses on my bar, then taking out his pistol, wiping it down with a wipe he snaps his fingers for.

      Pooled around his old coffee cups is more pee. The afternoon sky is reflected in its surface.

      “Shouldn’t