Читать книгу Flushboy - Stephen Graham Jones - Страница 5

So there’s video footage of me not washing my hands in the bathroom at work. My dad says it’s the kind of thing that can tank his whole business. That he has to be extra careful. Don’t I understand?

Usually I just stand there when he’s spewing all this.

Last week I was his show-and-tell for Sunday school class. We wore matching ties, and I was under strict orders not to smile or look sly. Some of those people were his customers, after all.

I don’t know.

Anyway, bam, yeah, the camera caught me: I ran the water but didn’t wash my hands. Even pulled down a paper towel or two because that’s the kind of thing you can hear through a metal door.

So, really, it’s two crimes: bad hygiene and wasting paper towels.

My dad’s real concern, though—this in front of the Sunday schoolers, his voice all reluctant—is the dishonesty of this act I’ve been committing for four months now, since he blackmailed me into working for him.

His concern is that if the city gives us a poor health inspection like everybody’s waiting for, then his stupid little business won’t catch on, go nationwide. In his eyes are dump trucks of franchise money.

Just two more years, though. I say this to myself a lot. Two years and then I’m gone, out of the wash high school already is, off to another state where I can enroll in some land-grant school and not tell anybody that I’m paying higher tuition. Not tell anybody what I did for an hourly wage my junior and senior years. I can be far enough away to forget the warm, anonymous Gatorade bottles I keep finding in the top shelf of my locker at school.

So, while my dad’s lecturing on morals and business models and accountability, how to be a functioning citizen, I stand there moving my feet in my shoes, my lips careless, my hair half in my eyes. Of all the things I don’t say, the main one is that we’re a nine-hundred-foot establishment, remodeled out of the remains of a failed hamburger stand that was itself built on the ruins of an ancient gas station. What this means is that there was only ever one bathroom, a single toilet to serve both the sit-down crowd and the standers.

My question for him, if I ever opened my mouth during one of his lectures, would be, What are cameras doing in there, Dad?

Never mind that, if the health inspector ever finds out about this, it’ll just be because my dad was sitting alone at a television set at three in the morning, his finger on a button that could have erased everything, just like it never happened.

Except that wouldn’t have been right, I know.

But neither is this stupid job.