Two hundred bucks an hour, plus tips
Like any place where tired people worked for little pay, there were corners of the shack that never got cleaned. Grease settled in sticky layers on the locked server case and on the notebook flipped open to the list of manager passwords. Staticky clumps of dust were tracked through the always-unlocked inner door onto the steel floor, where it would combine with the gunk of popped ketchup packets, spilled slushes, and smushed maraschino cherries into a sticky slurry that fattened the roaches. The nightly spray-and-decompress procedure did nothing to exterminate them; the smart ones hid in the freezer and pressure suits and sipped the stale air until morning.
Julio and I were performing our usual parts in this ineffectual nightly ritual—me on the squeegee and him on the compressed air hose—when an order was called in from Stall 4. Two medium Sprites with coconut syrup, a large chili cheese dog, and fifteen soft pretzels.
A weary sigh escaped Julio’s managerial propriety. “We don’t have carbonation today, is flat Sprite okay?” Apparently, the answer was no; the drinks disappeared from the screen. He jumped up to the high shelf for the salt shaker he had just tidied and booted up the oven. I bounced over to the uniform closet. Five minutes until I had to be out the door.
It took seven minutes, not the franchise-mandated five, for me to unseal and exit the heavy outer door. The safety handbook dictated that a piercing alarm would blare if the inner door wasn’t fully locked, but it had been silenced by laziness and a bit of soldering, and there was no sound as I stepped onto the all-pervading dust.
Stall 4 was occupied by a white pickup truck, as wide as it was tall and thrice as long. It was slotted between the two menu panels with some difficulty; the truck had left deep, zigzagging tracks as its driver alternated between pulling in and backing out. I squeezed myself past the folded side mirror into the gap on the driver’s side, lifting my tray like an offering. The tinted outer window slid down to reveal a wrinkled mouth ringed by patchy whiskers emerging from the shadow of a visor. Behind it, on the passenger seat, a round face glowed like the earth.
The driver spoke into the intercom, and the stall panel relayed his gruff voice. “How much do I owe you? I only have cash.”
“Four hundred and sixty dollars and seven cents, but I’ll have to go inside for the change.”
He cycled a fiver into the window. “Keep it.”
I set the lidded tray on the wide window ledge and he cycled the foil bag in. The rest of the parking lot was empty, and a scrap of discarded wrapper reflected an unmoving spot of earthshine into the corner of my eye. I put on my best customer-service face and hoped that it was visible through the glare of the visor. It was good karma to talk to tippers—one conversation could turn a tipper into a regular. “Are y’all planning on eating those pretzels all by yourself?”
The illuminated face opened its mouth to speak, but the whiskered mouth snapped a cursory “yup” and turned away. I snatched the tray back before he could close the window on my gloves.
It was hard to be brusque in low gravity and soft dust. At full speed, the truck moved at a quick jogging pace, and I watched the driver’s scowl deepen through the windshield as he reversed onto the road, clumsily realigned the truck with the hard-packed tracks, and accelerated away from the column of dust that showered down behind them.
I turned back towards the shack and its yellow portholes. Its last paint job was done at least twenty years ago; the faded lettering on the facade still advertised the New Millennium Special Combo Meal with an Exclusive Collectible Figurine. Out here in the sticks, hiring a painter was more trouble than giving the occasional explanation that the New Millennium Special was no longer available, and the repainting support ticket had almost certainly been buried under the other unanswered requests for pest control, a refill of the CO2 tank, a filter replacement, and solar panel cleaning. Julio often joked that it would be more cost-effective to burn the shack down and rebuild it somewhere with customers, but we both knew that we didn’t have enough oxygen to even burn the fries.
Julio’s voice buzzed in my ear. “Where’re ya at, kid?”
To cheer myself up, I jumped my way back, the suit tank clattering gently against the gasket around my waist. I yawned, and the faint breeze of the helmet cooled the inside of my mouth. I checked the clock in my visor: only 20 minutes until lunar midnight. Time to pump it out, lock it up, and look forward to sweeping up the unlucky roaches in the morning.