Flushboy. Stephen Graham Jones

settle?” I snap back just as bored, tilting my head out at all the places in the city that aren’t this place.

      This stops his gun-cleaning thing.

      “Got a manager here, kid, or you all alone, like?”

      I look away, lick my lips to keep my mouth shut, and hand him a pack of brochures, tell him to have a nice day.

      He waggles the slick John up by his head, leans into his sunglasses and eases away.

      With a pencil I promise to throw away so nobody’ll ever put it in their mouth again, I push each of the styrofoam cups back out into the world.

      10.

      Instead of dropping the warm Gatorade bottles I find on the top shelf of my locker in the trash on the way to class, I set them behind me, just anywhere, and don’t look around, even though I know there’s some group watching me, waiting.

      I’ve been written up four times now for littering in the halls.

      On the fifth, I’ll have to have a parent come up to get me back into school.

      How I hold the Gatorade bottles is with a piece of torn-out notebook paper. It isn’t a rubber glove. One of these days, the bottle’s going to slip through the paper, crash into the ground, splash some jock’s pee all over my legs.

      At that point the joke will be complete, I think.

      That isn’t what makes me close my eyes each time I spin my lock, though.

      What makes me close my eyes is that, since we got lockable lockers in the seventh grade, I’ve only ever had one combination: Prudence’s birthday.

      Whether she knows about the bottles or not, I don’t know, and there’s no easy way to ask. Especially not if I happen to be holding her hand at the time, or have designs on where my hand might be going later.

      The nightmare in line right behind the one about the school bus of kids is the one where, twenty years later, my own children are looking at one of my old high school yearbooks and come upon a shot the yearbook editor has worked in near the fold and cropped down all skinny, as if she wanted to hide it, will be my locker, open, the Gatorade bottles clustered on the top shelf, the joke lost in black-and-white, so that I have to swallow it, say to my kids that I don’t know what that’s about, no.

      The question will be whether the mother of those children—my wife—whether when it’s her birthday, that combination of numbers will roll into place in my head, and I’ll be holding my breath again, waiting, praying.

      But I’d forgive her of anything, I think.

      It’s five-thirty. So many minutes to go.

      11.

      The brochures. If my dad spot-checks me and I don’t have at least twenty packets rubber-banded and ready to go—his wet dream is some citywide sewage catastrophe, I think, forcing people to us in droves—then brochures will become the focus of the next Drive-Through U. intensive, and, midway through the demonstration, either my head will implode or the rest of me will become violent. Neither of which I want to have to deal with on my day off.

      So, to save my Saturday and maybe my life, I slouch to the rack at the second window and fan all the slick pamphlets and brochures and decals out, start leafing them together in the recommended and, supposedly, market-tested sequence.

      As for who that particular market was, I’m guessing it was my mother, reluctant and out of excuses at the kitchen table, my father sitting across from her, his fingers churched together, the toes of his loafers fluttering on the fake wood floor, the telepathy he’s trying to direct across the table at her so thick you can practically see it.

      We’re on the ground floor of something big here.

      This is the future.

      That yellow glow in the pot at the end of the rainbow, it isn’t gold.

      These are all things we’ve found carefully printed onto the dry-erase board on the refrigerator.

      Another: Diuretics?

      They’re what make people pee more.

      But how to get them into every condiment tray and salt shaker in town? Or, better yet, how to condition the consumer so that, when he sees our distinctive sign, he has a sudden and wholly undeniable urge to relieve himself?

      For the first month we were open, the rubber band that held the packet of brochures together was a delicate, made-to-break elastic string. It connected to the flare of each nostril of a series of Halloween noses we’d spray-painted gold. The noses were in honor of the sixteenth-century astronomer Tycho Brahe, our “proprietor in spirit.” His family crest, altered just enough, is monogrammed onto the collars of our uniform shirts and painted onto the tinted glass of the front door.

      He died in 1601 from a burst bladder, because it would have been rude to leave the party he was throwing.

      According to the brochures, he’s a lesson for us all.

      As for the noses, Brahe had a prosthetic one, so my dad thought all his customers should as well, to properly display their corporate allegiance.

      A plastic, golden nose, however, it’s significantly different than a brand name artfully worked into the pocket of a pair of jeans.

      There must be nothing about this in my father’s small businessman’s handbook. His dream book, my mother calls it.

      Satan’s bible, more like.

      We still have boxes and boxes of the noses and are supposed to distribute them with a “fraternal smile” upon request. It’s a smile I’ve seen Roy attempt in a workshop once. He looked like he’d just swallowed a live lizard, and was trying hard to keep it down.

      As for the rest of the brochures, there’s:

      • that legendary Bantams game and the rash of lung ailments that followed, all delivered in a very solemn, facts-only tone, and never allowing the possibility that most of the coughing people were trying to get in on a class-action suit, or that it was respiratory season already;

      • the brief, pictorial history of urinals—a tour nobody wants to take, really;

      • the historical uses of urine: tanning hides, flushing out wounds, making paint, hydrating the dehydrated, filtering mustard gas in some world war or another, marking territory, carrying disease, “paving dreams,” etc., and not including “deviant” sex acts (my father’s word);

      • the support-group pamphlets: something from a Shy Kidneys Services, a “Paruresis—Do You Have It?” foldout from the American Urological Association, a “Nocturnal Enuresis” wordfind/sleep-aid, and, for some reason, an insert about how Porta-John Enterprises can supply facilities for whatever event you’re having, be it black tie or blue-collar;

      • and, finally, the thinly veiled, happy version of my dad’s life as a small businessman, exaggerated in all the necessary places.

      It’s that last brochure I find myself studying sometimes, between customers. In it, my dad is idealized, perfect, predestined.

      Driven.

      The other way of saying that is that he’s got certain fetishes.

      As a graduate student in biochemistry—this was before he defected to the land of business administration—his thesis (still “in process”) was an analysis of amphetamine levels in the urine of truckers. The way he collected his samples was by taking assistants and volunteers with him into the unmapped wilds of the interstate ditches, to fish unburst plastic bottles up from the tall grass, a prize each time. The way he tells it, I can see him holding the trucker pee up to the sun, angling it back and forth so the light can glisten through it, bathe his face golden.

      Due to a lack of volunteers, however—just one was hardy enough for the whole six weeks—the study had