Chapter 118: Engines Waiting in the Yard

“Cooke...”

The big man lying on the stinking bed roared, “Fuck,” then froze for a moment and tossed the filthy magazine onto the bedside table.

He tidied himself up briefly. Anyone would have done the same after being shouted at by his mother at a time like this. He walked out of the reeking room and complained, “What are you yelling for?”

Cooke was already thirty-one years old, but he was not married. In the Baler Federation, being over twenty and still living with one’s parents was regarded as a kind of “disability.” Normal people usually left their parents’ home after reaching adulthood and getting their first job, then began trying to form a small family of their own.

But Cooke had not. He was already thirty-one, and still had not left that comfort zone. That might also have been why he still had not married. No one liked his current situation.

Watching her strong, burly son complain at the top of his lungs, the old woman was not afraid in the least. Instead, she pointed impatiently toward the telephone in the corner. “Damn it, someone’s calling you. I honestly can’t imagine why anyone would call you. Is it because you don’t bathe, or because you stink?”

Cooke cursed under his breath as he walked toward the corner. This was not a wealthy family. At least, wealthy families did not have bedrooms that stank.

But the family had not been doing too badly before. Before Cooke lost his job, he could bring home a respectable paycheck every month.

Perhaps precisely because he was a big truck driver and had no time to waste on romance, all his relationships with girls ended in failure.

When he finally had time, the girls despised him as an unemployed man who had never left his comfort zone.

Perhaps in a few more years, marriage would come for him. By then, there might be a girl thrown out of her parents’ home, with nowhere to live and no future to speak of. In order to obtain a stable life, that girl might become Cooke’s wife.

Such cases were common. Women often appeared before people in the image of vulnerability, then demanded that a man capable of supporting them take them away. As for making their own effort, that was only the thinking of a minority of women.

Most women were no different from Cooke at this moment. If one could stay inside a comfort zone and never leave, why adapt to the outside world?

Scratching the hairy belly bulging beneath his old clothes, Cooke picked up the phone. His voice was loud. Big truck drivers never had quiet voices.

The noise inside a cab meant that if they wanted to talk with the rest of the convoy, they had to turn themselves into loudmouths. Sometimes a loud voice was also a way to avoid trouble. In certain motels along the highway, a loud voice gave a man a natural advantage.