Chapter 147: The Driver With a Better Story

When Cooke called, James was still tutoring the children through their homework. Among the truck drivers, he was one of the few with any real education. Of course, high education here did not mean he had gone to university or anything like that. He had merely finished high school and then spent a year at a technical school.

This technical school was not the sort of skills-training class set up inside a plant to cheat special education subsidies. It was a proper technical school, and what it taught was truck driving and simple truck repair.

Back then, the repair skills Cooke and the others had learned had all come from James. He might not have been the most conspicuous man in the group, but to this small circle, he was an important core.

Whenever people had certain problems, they would sometimes come to him to discuss them, because he had the highest education.

James did not have a telephone at home. Installing a telephone did not actually cost too much money, but the problem was that even if they installed one, it had no practical value.

No one would be contacting him all day, and he had no need to contact others all day either. So most ordinary households did not have telephones. But they also had “telephones,” public telephones.

Every hundred yards or so, there would be a public telephone booth. When people filled in a home telephone number, they would put down the number of that booth. When the telephone booth rang, someone on the street would pick it up, and then... “James, telephone!” A scream came from outside the window as if someone had run into something horrifying. On James’s child’s exercise book, there was now an extra line that should not have been there.

James straightened up. He walked to the window and looked at the neighbor standing outside the telephone booth, holding the receiver in one hand and looking at him. The man’s voice dropped a little. “Your call, James!”

“I’m not deaf!” he complained. But in truth, there was no real complaint in his tone. Instead, it carried something closer to gratitude.

This was an ordinary people’s neighborhood, and ordinary people’s lives. They rarely said thank you properly. Sometimes they even used fuck you and a raised middle finger in place of words resembling thanks. Yet they understood gratitude, and how to repay it, better than those people in the upper class who looked respectable on the surface and were rotten underneath.

By the time he appeared on the street, he already had a rolled flatbread wrapped in newspaper in his hand. If one did not mind the ink that might stain it, it was definitely something good to eat.

The neighbor took the flatbread and bumped shoulders with him, casually handed him the receiver, then wandered off to the side, biting into the flatbread as he strolled around.

Everyone was out of work. Apart from drifting around the streets all day, they did not know what else to do. If they stayed at home, the women at home would denounce them for being lazy and tell them to get out onto the street and find a job. God knew why these women had forgotten about things like equality at times like this.