Читать книгу Flushboy - Stephen Graham Jones - Страница 11

In the downtime between customers, the suggested duties of drive-through personnel is to:

a) prepare more brochure packets

b) sort through the customer satisfaction cards and mark for action any that need action

c) restock the Upsale items

What I do is go back to the tanks and smoke a cigarette, one glove off, my goggles pushed up to my forehead.

There are probably cameras here as well, but screw it.

If I had my cell on me I could call Prudence, my girlfriend since sixth grade, but something about being so close to my dad’s shop-made FM transmitter doesn’t allow any signal to get through. Either that or there’s so many news satellites trained on us that the bandwidth’s all cluttered with attention.

Behind the tanks, like she’s asking to be caught, are Tandy’s cigarette butts. I usually sweep them up for her. Not because it’s a safety hazard—I’m pretty sure that five hundred gallons of urine are only psychologically combustible—but because I could get blamed for them, have to do another Sunday school walk of shame or something.

When I see her, trading off shifts, we don’t say anything, because there’s nothing to say. We know where we are, we know what we do. On Saturday, the one day we each have off per week, should we ever be under the same food court or lobby or department store security camera, and somebody’s watching us on that closed-circuit feed, we’ll stand out, I know: the slumped shoulders, the slack face, the vacant, war-torn stare, like we’ve seen too much already. If ghosts could walk and mumble and wear clothes, that’s what we’d be, I think. The only place we wouldn’t stand out is the nursing home.

So, no, we don’t need to be reminded about this by ever talking to each other.

As far as Tandy knows, too—as far as I know she knows—the new Spanish/English signs in the bathroom about mandatory hygiene procedures are just one more of the suggestions my dad’s taken from his small businessman’s handbook.

In case you can’t read either Spanish or English, there’s a diagram as well, a stick-person me, who, after he doesn’t wash his hands, ends up outside the Hut, with X’s for eyes and wavy lines coming off his hands.

Whether Roy can read or has to follow the diagram, I have no idea.

Unlike Tandy and me, he enjoys the job, always shows up ten minutes early, his thermoses of coffee slung all over his body, a non-regulation bandanna tied around his head, low over his eyes.

Maybe this is what third-shift people are like.

My father used to check on him, I know, ease through the drive-through in some elaborate disguise, trying to trip Roy up, but one night after a three AM spot-check I found my dad in the kitchen, slamming one of his fake beers so fast it was spilling down his chest.

When he looked at me, his eyes were blown wide, his lower lip trembling.

I didn’t ask, don’t think he would have told me anyway.

After my cigarette—I balance the butt on the emergency flush plug of the first tank, because I’ll be back—I drape my right glove over my left shoulder and sort the day’s haul of customer satisfaction cards. They’re part of the packet of brochures we give. The customer can either drop them in the box bolted to the back of the building or they can mail them in.

Mixed in with the cards, like every time, are religious pamphlets and business cards.

At the bottom, though—at what would have been the top, before the box was emptied—are two tickets for the Bantams game tonight.

I look through my window, out at the city.

Chickenstein.

He was here.

Or she.

My hand shaking a little, I spread the rest of the cards and pamphlets across the counter, only stop digging through them when I get to the ones that are always there as well, the cards that are wavy now because they were wet before.

On one of them once, scrawled in pen, was: sorry—didn’t have anything else to write with.

There’s a reason we use yellow cardstock for the cards now, instead of the standard white.

I pull my glove back on.