Flushboy. Stephen Graham Jones

      This project is supported in part by awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs.

      Printed in the United States of America

      10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

       for Skylar

       and for Izzy

      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.

      He’s been standing

      there like a zombie

      all day.

      —Mad Max

      1.

      I come on at four, right after school, and tie my apron and lower my hairnet and get my goggles in place before rolling the gloves on. By the end of the night the pads of my fingers will be pruned from sweat, and the skin around my eyes will be clammy from the goggles—my dad says safety goggles would do the trick, but I prefer the seal of the swimming kind, thanks—and I’ll have earned between thirty and forty dollars of what, technically, should be gratuity. I know better, though.

      It’s shame.

      I probably wouldn’t care about my fifty-one other cents either. If it was even policy that employees could roll through the drive-through like a normal person.

      We’re not supposed to handle family either, but that’s not so much an issue: I don’t have any brothers or sisters, and, my mom, I don’t know what I’d ever do if she ever came through. Probably kill myself. Will an aneurysm. Choke on my fist.

      The girl who works the day shift, Tandy, she has five older brothers.

      For the first few weeks we were open, when the news trucks were here every day to document the process, the phenomenon, her brothers were in line each lunch hour, just to razz her. Make her do her job.

      Because it looks good on the six o’clock broadcast to have cars stacked in the drive-through, my dad looked the other way.

      I assume that, anyway.

      There has to be some reason he’d let policy slide for her and then jam me up for not washing my hands.

      And before you ask, no, she’s not the cheerleader/yoga type, Tandy. But then I’m not forty-four either, I suppose. Or a dad. On a black-and-white monitor, sitting primly on a toilet in a unisex bathroom, maybe she’s every bit the cover girl. Or close enough.

      Except—if the camera was actually aimed at the toilet, either head-on or from the top, then I’d have been busted for not washing my hands and for cigarettes. Unless my dad’s letting them slide for some reason. And he doesn’t let anything slide.

      Five hours, I tell myself. Five hours then I can hand the keys to Roy, the night guy, the one who has to deal with the people weaving home from bars, who think our place is the logical halfway point to the drive-through wedding chapel they’ve always known was at the end of this road

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