Читать книгу Flushboy - Stephen Graham Jones - Страница 12

In my darkest hours, I allow the possibility of a convoy of out-of-state school buses nosing into our parking lot.

For vehicles too heavy for the tracks, policy is to walk the Johns and Janes out to the vehicle. This involves wearing the converted Whac-A-Mole tray that hangs on your shoulders with two padded hooks, like bass drummers in marching bands have.

In the slots the moles once lived in are overspray canisters and sponges and curtains and wipes and gloves and brochures. Twice I’ve found a coffee can, with change in it.

As the tray only carries eight used or empty bottles, what a busload would mean is about eight thousand sloshing trips, while trying to manage the drive-through as well.

Policy during an outbreak of service like this is to wear adequate back support.

I think my father is afraid I might sue him.

He thinks it’s my back I’m worried about.

For the next twenty minutes, though, until four-thirty, no school buses appear on the horizon. Twice a blue Nova pulls up to the leading edge of the track, but each time she loses nerve, backs out.

The bathrooms a mile down at the truck stop are free, we know. “But not private.” This is written in tempura paint on our front glass.

It’s not all my father wanted the sign-people to paint, but there wasn’t room for everything he wanted them to write, not if we still wanted the words to be readable from the street. So now we have brochures.

What they document is the inevitable development of establishments such as this one.

It starts a year ago at a Bantams game, where they serve beer. Where the urinals are in constant use, pretty much. The women’s side as well. Aside from various hygienic issues (here my dad’s supplied testimony from ex-custodial workers and pictures so close-up they look like scratch ’n sniffs), the opposing team—this is supposition, but it’s hockey, too, and everything goes in hockey—somehow managed to replace the home side’s urinal cakes with urinal cakes that had some of the properties of dry ice, apparently. The result was that for the second and third periods, the men’s room was clogged with a sort of warm fog of pee: “the urine of a thousand or more gentlemen that night, mingling in your lungs.” The result of that was an outbreak of bronchitis and sinus infections like the city had never seen. One old fan’s death had even been attributed to the incident, though when Dad prints his name, he gives him his own special line, like a little headstone in the text. Like he’s surrounding him with the moment of quiet he deserves. But he doesn’t include an obituary picture, as we don’t want to be sensationalistic.

The idea of breathing urine is enough, really.

What he doesn’t say in the brochure is that some eight thousand male fans went home that night unaware, not coughing.

What he’d never say is that two of those fans were us.

To him it’s not like lying. In business, he says, all is fair, so long as it’s legal.

I don’t think he learned this in Sunday school.