The Coral Queen had gone down stern-first in twelve feet of water. Her hull had settled on the marly bottom at a slight angle with the bow aiming upward.
The Coral Queen is a gambling boat and it has not just gone down in twelve feet of water by an act of God. The book opens with Noah arriving at the jail where his father has been arrested for purposely causing the sinking. And it’s not as if his father is denying the charges. In fact, his father is quite proud of being the perpetrator. He has his reasons for wanting to sink a gambling boat, of course. But to disclose that here would be giving far too much away. The reasons for this act of not-quite-civil disobedience is the engine fueling the narrative.
The hardest part of Operation Royal Flush was over. We’d laid the trap and escaped, though barely. Being chased by Luno wasn’t part of the plan, but it didn’t spoil anything. For now, Dusty Muleman and his gorillas wouldn’t be able to figure out what I’d been doing aboard the Coral Queen , since the only clue had gone down the toilets.
Flush is basically one of those novels where a group of kids get together to address a problem that either good adults can’t or corrupt adults won’t. The problem traces back to the decision by Noah’s dad to sink the Coral Queen—a job which is not as easy as one might think. But sinking the boat doesn’t solve the problem at hand. And so, in the tradition of countless similar books, movies and TV shows, a group of kids come together to do what can’t or won’t be done and in this particular case they come up with a secret code name for this act of subversion in the name of the greater good: Operation Royal Flush. As the quote above indicates (as well as the title of the book) this code name is not necessarily limited to the sphere of metaphor. Indeed, that problem that isn’t being adequately addressed by adults is one that literally shoots through the lines of sewage in this boating community.
Even if the snappers weren’t biting, we’d stay until sunset, hoping to see the green flash on the horizon. The flash was kind of a legend in the Keys—some people believed in it and some didn’t. Dad claimed that he’d actually witnessed it once, on a cruise to Fort Jefferson. For our fishing expeditions either Abbey or I always brought a camera, just in case. We had a stack of pretty sunset pictures, but no green flash.
The green flash is mentioned several times throughout the novel. It sounds like the stuff of pure fiction, but it is actually document fact. In fact, if one reads legal disclaimer that accompanies all works of fiction about how any resemblance to real persons is completely coincidental all the way to the end, they will be rewarded with an unexpected and unusual disclaimer within the disclaimer: “The legend of the green flash, however, is well known in the Florida Keys.” The flash becomes a kind of totemic magical property that is connected to the preservation of the marriage of the narrator’s parents which faces extreme difficulties as a result of the actions undertaken in the story.
