Читать книгу Flushboy - Stephen Graham Jones - Страница 16

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 you be flipping burgers?” he says, smiling.

“Don’t you have a domestic dispute to 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.