Читать книгу Flushboy - Stephen Graham Jones - Страница 13

Prudence shows up just before five, after her yearbook meeting. She sneaks around to my window, jack-in-boxes up to eye level and flashes her camera.

“Jane?” I say in my best customer-service voice.

“No,” she says back, “Prudence, remember?”

It’s our joke.

I let her in the back door. Somewhere in the city, my dad’s having a heart attack.

“Any fish today?” she says, pulling the door shut behind her, touching the handle with only her fingertips.

I hook my head for her to follow me back to my station.

What she’s talking about is how one morning Tandy found one of the Johns in the refrigerator, courtesy, we’re pretty sure, of Roy. Swimming in the yellow-tinted water of the jug—light beer on an empty stomach—was a sluggish goldfish.

It had to be a joke, we’re pretty sure. No fish could survive the urethra. Or, the truth of it is, we can’t imagine the urethra that could be wide enough to pass a goldfish.

Because he didn’t want to mess up our numbers, my dad ceremoniously poured the chilled urine and the goldfish into tank #2.

For all I know, that fish is still in there, invisible in the hearty yellow water. Swimming through a dream it can’t wake from.

Prudence, because she’s like this, has named the goldfish Dick.

I like to watch her mouth when she says it.

Like I said, we’ve been together since grade school.

Twice a week, maybe, she’ll close her eyes and let my hand slip up under her shirt, but then she remembers something her mom told her, I think, and she’s batting me away, her hands soft, her lipstick smeared.

So, yeah. If things shone in any kind of proportion to how much you shine them, I’d be blinding people at the urinal.

She stays with me, though, and I stay with her, and lately she’s even started dropping the occasional aspirin in her coke, always waiting to do it until I’m watching. At first I thought she had a headache or something, but then she told me that when her mom was in high school, all the boys were trying to slip aspirin into the girls’ cokes. The roofies of 1972, I guess.

They work.

On her aspirin and coke, Prudence can’t hear her mom’s voice so well, and leans into me more, and laughs easier, more loopy, like it’s really getting to her this time. Like she might not remember whatever inevitable thing’s about to happen. Like it won’t be her fault.

It won’t be long, I’m pretty sure.

Until then, instead of sex, we talk about fecal matter. Intimacy’s intimacy.

Fecal matter’s the idea Prudence has been working on all week. I’m supposed to pitch it to my dad.

She sits on the floor where the drive-through customers won’t be able to see her and repeats it for me, in the voice I’m supposed to use to sell it: the obvious next step for a venture like this is a covered patio diner out front, over the smooth concrete that used to lead into the twin bays of the gas station, where the tanks are now. The tables are already there, even, from the six months the burger stand was alive. All we’d need to supply, really, is the food.

Not just any food, though.

Prudence’s idea is that the only food people would buy at a place like ours would be novelty food.

And, in keeping with the theme, all the dishes would be made-up to look like turds of one kind or another (“Poo Burger,” “S.O.S.,” “Cowpie,” “Rabbit Pellets,” “Litterbox Cake,” “Duty-Free French Fries,” etc.), and the ice cubes would be yellow, and the pitchers would be Johns and Janes, and the waiters when they delivered the food would do it with their hands in bags turned inside out, and not look happy about it.

Then, going there, it would be a dare of sorts. Just to take one bite, even though it was just sausage or ground beef or whatever. Take one bite and hold it down.

I see her in Texas History 2, designing the menu in her red, decorated spiral.

“What about soup?” I ask her, eyeing a black pickup that’s slowed to make sure this place is real.

“Tortilla,” Prudence says. “With corn in it, right?”

I gag a little but try to hide it.

To her it’s comedy, yeah.

I’m never 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.