Traffic Flow
He woke up at five-fifteen in the morning. Ratko was fifty years old. He woke up as always with some nervous sensations. After years of bad choices on Ratko’s part – of not enough sleep, of the ravages of drinking and then of not drinking and a complicated relationship with his children, crushing amounts of hard labor and a bad marriage among other things his nerves had declared a degree of autonomy; they no longer gave shrift to what happened in his life and instead vibrated quietly and incessantly in accordance with their own silent purposes. He lit a cigarette. The sun was up because it was summertime. In the wintertime it would be dark when he got up. Soon, his ex-wife would demand to be taken somewhere for the long weekend, even though they were no longer married and he would spend seven, maybe eight-hundred dollars in three days and feel ripped off, because he had no power over tradition. The past events of his life were like an army of tiny children’s hands pushing him, which individually were weak, but altogether provided a force that he couldn’t counter. He smoked his cigarette and drank his coffee. He looked out the window of his apartment, past the many parking lots, past the other apartment-blocks – homogenous, gray-brown monoliths of sensible, affordable habitation, out past stucco homes and asphalt arteries, eventually to the dark, brooding mountains, which perpetually defied the local’s attempts to be humanized, be it through a kind of sentimental personification or the breathy spirituality that represented, more or less, what remained of wild-eyed, sixties idealism, there on the West Coast. His eyes squinted, forever creased and puffy – quietly displaying the battle between the immediate needs of the body and the needs of the overall human project for anyone who wished to peer within them. In the corner of his mouth stuck little flecks of white foam. He smoked another cigarette and put the rudiments of lunch – a sausage, a tomato, a salt shaker, a herring tin, a banana, a loaf of French bread from the super market and some cookies, into his lunch box. He went down below to his car.
His aging Chevy Cavalier functioned poorly; he suspected that it ran on only three of its four cylinders. Its interior smelled like stale tobacco, as did all of his things. The blue-gray paintjob had long lost its luster. The door on the passenger side didn’t open from the outside, nor did the passenger seat stay in place. Instead, it slid back and forth on its rails in response to the vehicle’s motion.
He left the garage. The vehicle accelerated roughly.
He lit another cigarette. He was always smoking.
The freeway carried on. The concrete pathways opened up before him. Along the side he could see dry brush, sometimes trees with leaves and down below, the structures of habitation and commerce – all in various stages of life, from new to several decades old – many already becoming grimy and beginning to decay.
His mind turned over and over. His rational consciousness lacked the power to effectively subdue the ragged, disparate, primitive elements that constantly ruminated in his brain. His exhausted mind, he thought, was not unlike the former Yugoslavia, which he had left when it was the present Yugoslavia some twenty-seven years earlier. Perhaps, he thought, his rational mind was like the iron fist of Tito, except that he hated Tito. It was early with the sun still low on the horizon. It was an absurd comparison to begin with.
He changed lanes. The wipers often went on when he activated his blinkers. Sometimes he couldn’t cancel them without stopping the engine. This made him angry and he knew his heart beat too quickly – unhealthily. He understood that soon his organism would fail, as he aged in a way, that even by his own disillusioned standards, seemed ungraceful. His wipers went off. Through his mind flitted a half remembered religious saying – some left over something from his childhood, still tossing around in his brain. As a child, he’d been as Catholic as the majority, which he thought was as Catholic as ever should be expected of anyone. There were so many other things that had happened since then – so many things which were significant and so many things which were not.
The orange sun sat low on the horizon. He knew that it would be hot, and when it was hot, he would be uncomfortable.
The gray asphalt carried so many cars and in them were so many solitary faces. They came from many places. Their goals were similar.
He listened to the AM news radio station, as he did every morning, hoping that in some way, its traffic wisdom would lessen his discomfort. One of the broadcasters claimed – as his recorded voice did countless times throughout the day – that his was the official weather station, but such a claim was preposterous, because even as things are, one cannot get a licensing agreement with the weather.
Primarily the voices did not talk about traffic – they talked about traffic every ten minutes – on the ones, as they put it: at one minute past, eleven minutes past, twenty-one and so forth. At other times they spoke of other things. However, regardless of subject, they always spoke with the same tone of voice – concerned and paternal, seemingly grave but quick to vanish. They used this tone always no matter the subject. Everything was given roughly similar airtime and played almost equally often in the rotation before it was replaced by some other piece of information. In this way, it became difficult to distinguish between what was trivial and what was important.
The small wooden cross that hung from his rear-view mirror moved against the turns of the car and swung forward when he slowed down and moved backwards when he sped up.
In the distance, large pipes let off white clouds of smoke and steam into the hazy blue sky. The sun came up higher and the cool dimness of early morning slowly peeled away, banishing the last vestiges of damp, earthy smell. It was six-thirty in the morning.
He came to a major junction; a massive, cloverleaf overpass twisted onto a bridge that spanned an arm of the wide river and connected one region of work and activity with another. Here people came from many directions to go to all places; some were going to work and many were already at work, bringing gravel, fish, flowers, carpets, money, blank compact disks, office documents, plastic cat figurines with battery powered motors that made their uplifted plastic paws wave stupidly and indefinitely – along with many other things, to various places. People were being yelled at, laughed at, laughing, being surly, being quiet, being bored, smoking, coughing, feeling sick, wishing they were sick, pretending they were sick, wishing they were getting laid, pretending they had recently been getting laid, recently been getting laid and for those who for whatever reasons didn’t have cars the cloverleaf offered bus connections – people running, tired people, falling asleep to the electric hum of the electric engines on the electric busses, which had been added to the city in nineteen forty-seven, maybe as a practical gesture or a gesture of utopian optimism, or out of some kind of now absurd statement to the rest of the world that the people of this city were not afraid to embrace the future. Whatever the reason, no one cared; they were crossing streets – going places. Everything was crowded.
A very tall, skinny young man stood, somewhat stooped, at the intersection of the busy highway and a quiet street. It was here that he waited for Ratko after disembarking from the bus at the massive cloverleaf. He wore a pair of dusty work pants which were much too large and a sweatshirt – the front displayed a large coffee stain and an odd picture of the globe with a badly rendered figure sitting on top of it. Next to him, rested an immense black bag, which when he wore it slung across his shoulder, caused his body to bow and made him walk with a kind of limping shuffle. In it he kept tools, clothing and whatever else he thought necessary in order to be prepared for any possible turn of events. Much of what he brought with him, he had never had an opportunity to use. He had a trowel, which he had carefully wrapped in a plastic bag so that it wouldn’t puncture the wall of his satchel, which he employed primarily for scraping the inside of the cement mixer. Along with his bag, he also carried a lunch box, a dented coffee thermos and a hard hat. From a distance he looked less like a man who made his living through hard labor and more like some traveling Arab merchant who wandered from door to door selling an eclectic array of exquisite and mysterious curios – incense burners, preserved animal body parts, ornate and elongated tea pots of rare metals and the like. Upon closer inspection one saw a somewhat ungainly, but otherwise normal young man who was already tired at six thirty in the morning, who went about with a slightly worried expression across his face.
Another man waited at the intersection. He also was there every day. He worked for a large landscaping company and was waiting for his assistant to arrive. He was of medium build with soft but weathered features. His face looked prematurely aged. Often he smoked while he waited. A pair of clippers, as was customary for the trade, hung in a leather holster by his side. The sun was bright and he squinted. The young man stood in the shade of a tall tree and had removed the large, angular, eighties-era sunglasses that he had found in a garbage can at his work. He looked at a piece of foam packaging and an empty box of Marlboro cigarettes, which had migrated about two feet to the north-east in the three weeks since he’d been coming to that intersection to meet Ratko.
The young man stared at the foam and the empty package of cigarettes. They waited together every morning. They understood each other on some level, if not through intellectual camaraderie, than through a mutual experience of mild but constant physical discomfort and economic inconvenience.
Ratko arrived. The gardener made a perfunctory comment about his assistant’s lateness and then looked away because he didn’t really care. The young man got into the car and they drove off.
Ratko welcomed the young man and the young man greeted him in return. Ratko explained the day’s itinerary; he had also explained this also the evening before; he would explain it again when they reached their destination; he would explain it at various times throughout the day. The young man looked out the window at the wildflowers that grew beside the freeway and at the leaves on the trees that grew on the island in the river near the paper plant. Jets flew overhead and the young man wondered how they would still work after the price of oil became too expensive, or ceased to be extracted from the earth altogether. He imagined that widespread air travel might vanish in his lifetime, but wasn’t sure. Ratko spoke about the Chinese woman with whom he had had a liaison after divorcing his wife. Every morning unfolded in the same way. The young man liked Ratko.
Ratko’s driving was quick and erratic. The young man looked out the window, which blew cool air on his face; it was open farther than he would have liked, because the constant smoke from Ratko’s cigarette gave him discomfort. He watched endless tilt-up concrete wall wear-houses go by. He read the signs to himself. They were the same again and again – “for sale,” “for lease,” “10,000 sq. ft.” “20 000 sq. ft.” “100 000 sq. ft.” “Nintendo,” “Cannon,” “United Rentals,” “commercial space,” “retail possibilities,” “don’t forget to Save On Foods,” “Pattison,” “Pattison,” “Pattison,” “coming soon…” Some farmland went by. Sikh men and women, dressed in garments of billowing cloth, picked various types of produce; nearby a truck unloaded a portable latrine, so that the immigrant workers would have somewhere to go to the bathroom. In many other places, on what had recently been agricultural land, bleary eyed men like themselves set up tools and prepared themselves for another day of work on what would become new malls, industrial parks and wear-house space. “Coming soon…” was the area’s mantra. It was a landscape of promises.
The young man turned to Ratko, “Did you know that this is the most fertile farmland on earth?” he asked.
“What?” Ratko responded, suddenly jolted from his monologue.
“Did you know that this is the most fertile farmland, here in the Fraser Valley and the river delta, in the world?”
“Oh?” Ratko said.
“I am almost out of cigarettes,” Ratko said; he had about three quarters of a pack left, “At lunch I have to go get more cigarettes.” Ratko felt anxiety, he wanted very much to sit and stare, to do nothing. He felt angry at circumstance.
“I would have got more last night,” he began, “but I was working until eleven o’clock at night. David and Ivan tell me they gonna help me, but they don’t want to help. B’fuck no, they don’t want to work. Why they say they want to work, when they don’t want to. David fuck me up on the weekend. He say he gonna come Saturday, but he don’t show up – what a fucking asshole. I tell him, I gotta get this job finished. I ask him ‘you wanna work?’ and he say yes. I ask you, why he say yes, when he don’t wanna work, why, why? He fuck me up. I gonna tell him, next time I see him, ‘David, you fuck me up.’
“I only take this job, because this guy’s a friend of mine. A Croatian guy. He got lots of money, whoo boy, I tell you…” When he spoke the word “whoo,” the vowels trailed off into a wheezing rasp; they disappeared into the nothingness and died like the licks of light falling from a sparkler… “It’s a big job – cultured stone [artificial stone, cast in concrete and usually attached with cement to wire mesh] everywhere.
“This guy, he get cancer: he’s working up on the scaffolding of his house one day and he get these terrible stomach pains. Whoo boy…” again the rasp… “it hurt so bad he can’t even fucking move. He go to the hospital and they tell him he got stomach cancer. He’s only forty-three. It happen last year. B’fuck, I should be dead by now. Everybody get fucking cancer these days, I tell you. That’s what it is.” He meant “that’s how it is,” or “that’s how it goes,” but always used the other wording. He trailed off.
Staring at the wooden cross, the young man’s head wondered if Ratko was very holy; however, as the young man had no religion, he knew that it was just one of those senseless phrases that pass through bored and tired minds. Ratko was tired of God though he kept the cross out of tradition.
The automobile turned onto a dirt driveway; the former farmland was now being transformed into a vast estate. They passed the plywood security kiosk, where an obliging Sikh kept watch all day; his shift was followed by two more shifts, each staffed by a less obliging Sikh who kept watch during evening and night. To their left, the main building came into view. This was the villa: a single story, covering twenty thousand square feet; it spread out from a large rotunda with massive wings flanking a large courtyard in the front and a swimming pool in the back. Where it hadn’t yet been covered by expensive yellow stones, brought in from the province’s interior, one could see that its walls were made of cinderblocks and concrete. The roof was covered in red ceramic tiles imported from Spain. It emulated some kind of archaic Italian style; maybe one could say Tuscan – it was a word that had been floating around often those days.
They parked the car. The young man got his things and went toward the garage at the northern-most end of the north-eastern wing (the villa was aligned perfectly in relation to the cardinal points of the compass) where they kept some things – a hand-held, gas-powered masonry saw, some electrical cords, a gerry can of gas and some personal tools – in a green metal lock-box. Ratko stretched, went to the bathroom and then walked behind the villa to the place where they were working. He tried to lay out the day’s tasks in his mind, but found it all too difficult. Time was his enemy; he neither wanted it to pass, nor did he want it to stay still as there was only one, unbroken substance to his life; the ramifications of either amounted to the same thing. At that particular moment, however, there was nothing he could do until the young man set up. He stood in the sunlight, back behind a number of walls, where there were no other workers or machines. He smoked a cigarette and stared off at the golden fields and the stretch of trees that had been planted along the property’s edge as a windbreak.
The young man put the things from the box along with his things from the car, onto a brick-dolly. He greeted the carpenters and went out into the courtyard. The morning was cool, but the sun was warm where it hit directly. He felt tired and slow; he wanted to fall asleep under a tree somewhere where he could hear a stream. He tried to move more quickly, more efficiently because he wanted to take pride in his work; he wanted to be known as someone who was capable and responsible.
Presently he remembered something that his sixth grade teacher had said. She was an austere English woman, of moderate personal ambition. She prided herself on being the only instructor in the district who was also a member of the school-board administration. She had said, “For all your lives, you have been told to strive for excellence. For all of your scholastic career, you have been told that excellence was expected. Until you graduate, you will be told to work for A+, as though it meant something very important, but I’m going to let you in on a secret now, perhaps it will save you some heartache. The real world doesn’t care about your excellence, it doesn’t care about what you have done. There is no A+ in the real world, the only grade out there is C. The real world doesn’t expect you to be excellent, only satisfactory. When employers are looking at how well you are doing your job, they will only care that your performance has been satisfactory. Remember that, and your life will be made much easier.
The young man pushed the dolly up the two-by-twelve plank that had been set over the stairs at the rotunda’s entrance. Going through the building was the quickest route to the back. The elements of the structure’s design – small, recessed windows, thick walls and vaulted ceilings – that would have served in a Mediterranean climate to keep the interior cool, served in this city, with its atmosphere of almost perpetual rain, to make the villa into a cavern of gloom any months outside of summer.
The young man came around back and began setting up the equipment. He plugged the cord into the cement mixer and began unrolling it towards the outlet on the south-east wing. From above, the villa looked something like a four-legged spider. Ratko ambled towards him.
“What is taking you so long?” he asked, “We have to get going. We gotta work now; in the afternoon, will be to hot. We can’t get nothing done,” he said, much more a command than a prophesy.
After the young man had made ready for the day, Ratko asked, looking at the nascent cinder-block pool-house and trying to envision its completed appearance.
“How high the sills gotta be?”
“I think Jan said thirty-seven inches,” the young man replied. Jan was one of the site supervisors, a spindly Dutchman. His eyes were a little buggy and his demeanor was one of nervous confidence which belied his gross incompetence. There were two site supervisors, their domains were divided in order to streamline the job, but no one seemed to know exactly along which lines. One worker had said that Jan was in charge of what he called the “flatware:” the water-lines, the grading, the roadways, the septic-field and so forth, while Brian, the other, concerned himself with the house itself, although this description was inadequate. In reality, each concerned himself with everything. Jan gave many orders and took many measurements. He could often be seen walking around self-importantly with a tape and the laser level or bent over some worker, delivering a lecture about responsibilities and time. Things often seemed behind schedule. He was very condescending if ever asked to repeat himself. The young man had already asked him for the height of the sills several times. Jan was frustrated and everything had become uncertain.
“We can’t start work until we know,” Ratko said.
“I think it’s thirty-seven inches, do you want me to go ask again?” the young man asked.
“We’ll we gotta know. I’m tired of all this fucking bullshit. I only want to do it once. Jan don’t know how to do his fucking job. He is nice guy, but he don’t know how to do his fucking job,” Ratko answered.
“I’ll ask Brian,” the young man said.
“Well okay, we gotta know,” Ratko said.
It was one of those days when the “flatware” people were off and the carpenters were far away so silence resonated around them. The young man listened to the sound of the dirt under his boots and to the wind through the golden grass. He could smell the nearby river and the cottonwoods that grew by it; sometimes he caught the scent of the ocean and dreamt of sailing away to someplace beautiful and quiet.
The young man saw Brian in the distance. He was tall – about six foot six – and powerful, shirt tucked in, nothing out of place. He wore a blue hardhat atop his bald, shaved head. He had two daughters, both of whom he loved very much. One managed a restaurant; he feared that that she spent too much time at parties and was wasting her potential. The other studied commerce at the British Columbia Institute of Technology; he was immensely proud of her. He would often state that they were both very clever and then bashfully suggest that they must have “gotten it from their mother.” Brian tried to avoid Ratko and the young man. He felt the two asked too much of him. The sight of the young man’s approach set off a spark of fear in Brian’s heart.
“Hello Brian,” the young man said.
“Top of the morning to you,” he replied.
“I have a question for you,” the young man said.
“Shoot,” Brian replied.
“The sills on the pool-house, Ratko wants to know how high they are. I think they’re supposed to be thirty-seven inches,” the young man said.
“Didn’t Jan tell you?” Brian asked.
“He keeps being wrong,” the young man said, “can you tell me?”
“Not off the top of the old pointy,” Brian replied, indicating that he meant his head.
“I’ll go see if I can get the measurements for you.” Brian walked off and disappeared around the corner. The birds in the nearby bushes let out a melodious song, the young man wanted to fall asleep forever. Then the young man saw Jan in the distance. The young man called out “Hello Jan.”
“Hello,” he said.
“Ratko wants to know how high to make the sills,” the young man said.
“I already told him,” Jan said.
“He wants to know again,” the young man replied.
“Just measure down from the top,” Jan said.
“There is no top,” the young man replied.
“I’m starting to get fed up,” Jan said.
“Could you please just come over and look one more time,” the young man asked.
“I can’t waste all my time on you two, I have other things to look after you know,” he said.
“Please, just one more time.” Jan went and got the laser level and the big tripod that it sat on. They went back to the pool-house.
“Do you know how to use the laser level?” Jan asked.
“No,” the young man replied. Jan seemed agitated.
“Well, it’s easy to use. I’m not going to do your work for you anymore. I have other things to get done,” He said and quickly started to walk away.
“Wait,” the young man yelled.
“I’m not going to hold your hand any longer,” he yelled back. Jan was filled with indignity and uncertainty. He desired respect and employment, but seemed to be failing at both. He had already taken a drastic pay cut. The more he failed, the more clearly he saw the failures of the world; the more his ineptitude showed, the more vividly did he see the ineptitude of all human endeavors. He felt angry and tried to take cover from the earth.
“What he say?”
“He told me to do it,” The young man answered.
“What an asshole.”
“Yeah,” the young man said.
“Thirty seven inches?” Ratko asked.
“I guess so.”
“Yeah, I guess that’s what it is.”
After a little while it was break time. Ratko decided to go get cigarettes. He drove off. The young man stayed behind. Trees lined the roadside and Ratko played with the radio. He saw a fruit stand and thought that after work, he would stop there. He imagined that the fruit would be fresh and cheap. His eyes felt tired and as he drove, he fought to stay awake. He had to smoke continually in order to remain awake. He felt the fresh sea air against his tired skin. He thought back on the farm of his childhood. He thought of his father, also a mason – a hardworking, practical man, who at the end of his life had set about to build his own crypt. Ratko’s father built an ornate, gothic structure and made a place for himself and for his wife on his property, near a pleasant grove of trees. The idea discomforted Ratko. While he did not particularly enjoy life, he did not want to die, nor did he want to think about death; in this respect he was more modern than his father. The road followed a finger of the river; the area was an estuary and the water was light blue and opaque with silt. He looked out at the trees – alder, birch, cotton-wood – blowing, out across the distance in the gentle breeze. On the horizon he could see hazy clouds. He pulled into a small roadside complex which consisted of a grocery, a video store and a pizza restaurant. The man behind the counter was Chinese. Ratko bought two packs of Benson and Hedges extra special light – one hundred size.
The area had been settled by the whites, developed originally by the whites and more recently, by the Chinese; the remaining farmland was worked and sometimes owned by the Indians and the other Indians, now called First Nations or Indigenous Peoples lived on a reserve near the ferry terminal where they set up various roadside services and like everyone else, tried to turn whatever small advantages they had into profit.
Ratko stood on the hot asphalt. He wanted to fall asleep – anywhere, perhaps in his car. He lit a cigarette and got back into his car. Trees lined the road and he searched the radio. He found a station playing an old song. He thought it might be John Lennon. He listened and came to feel a pang of sadness. For some reason the song made him think about his son who had no interests, drifted from job to job and from apartment to apartment – had been evicted more than once, sometimes took cocaine and wasted his money flagrantly. It seemed not unusual to him, however; there were many young men like his son – he felt it was a continent of useless children. He remembered fishing with his son when he was small. He had been a fisherman then. He had worked many jobs. This was America, or at least in his mind, something not far from it, because of that he understood that everything would always be shrouded in a kind of mystery and that he could never be more than half-right about anything. Such was the nature of the place. He listened to the song and did not understand many of the words.
When he returned, the young man asked.
“Should we get back to work?” and Ratko replied.
“B’fuck, why should we kill ourselves? If we kill ourselves, who will thank us? Who will take care of us when we are broken? If we kill ourselves, nobody will thank us, they will only expect us to work harder in the future. We will work at a reasonable pace and that way everyone will be happy and we will not be so tired,” and so they went and sat behind the barn which had cost seven-hundred and fifty thousand dollars. The young man ate an apple and Ratko asked him questions such as: what did the machine behind the tractor do, or what was that over there for, or how many truckloads of dirt did he think were in the pile out in the field? He asked these and many others – about birds, about machines and where things came from.
Afterwards they went back to work. The young man mixed sand and concrete into mortar. He brought cinderblocks to Ratko. The clouds from the horizon came in so that they covered the sky. Everything became cool and misty and all shadows seemed to disappear as diffused light enveloped everything.
At lunch Ratko washed his hands and rinsed his face. The young man filled his water bottle and washed his hands. They went and sat on some crates full of stones that had been placed on the edge of the large field. Ratko made sandwiches from the things he had brought. He shared his cookies with the young man. The sharp ocean breeze blew through the young man’s hair. It was cool enough that it felt almost as though summer had never arrived, but he knew it had. The birds in the bush sang a melodious tune; the songs of the birds, the smell of the ocean and the dull even brightness of the sky became one sensation. Neither of them spoke and then Ratko laughed. The young man looked at him.
“Back, before I come here,” he said, “in my town, there was a crazy guy. In my town, everybody know that he is crazy – his name was Marco – and everybody know that Marco is funny in the head. One time, my friend Drago, he just come to our town and he don’t know anybody. He come into the bar, in the hotel and he say ‘is anybody going up north? I need a ride up north.” And Marco is in the bar. He say ‘I will take you up north if you buy me a beer.’ So Drago buys him a beer and he drink it all at once. Then he say ‘actually, could you buy me one more beer, I am very thirsty.’ So Drago buys him one more beer and then again he drink it down all at once and he say ‘thank you very much. Let’s go outside, that’s where my motorcycle is… don’t worry, I have side car.
“Then they go onto the sidewalk and Marco puts his legs apart and makes his hands like they are on handle bars. He say ‘okay, get in,’ and Drago, he don’t know what to do. He just stares. Marco say again ‘get in.’ He start to get angry, he say ‘if you don’t get in now, then I am going without you.’ All the other people are laughing at Drago because they know Marco is crazy and Drago, he is just standing there, while this crazy guy is yelling at him ‘get in, I am going. What’s wrong with you?’ and Drago is just standing there.
The young man smiled. Again everything was silent.
They went back to work. The young man mixed mortar and cut cinderblocks with a grinder. Ratko laid the blocks up into the wall. Ratko was wearing a green sweatshirt and the young man noticed that it read “Camp Goodtimes” across the front. The young man’s clothes were dusty but Ratko’s were not because he never did cutting or mixing. Ratko lit a cigarette.
“You know,” he began “I had my first kid when I was twenty-two. Then I come here. I get job. I have two more kids when I get here. I never get educated. I work for my family all my life. Nearly thirty years gone. Now, aside from my oldest daughter, my kids don’t do anything. Thirty years and what do I have to show for it? I am old – there is only ten years difference between being young and old, you know – I smoke too much and I am almost deaf.” Then, he paused, took a long drag from his cigarette, looked up towards the sky and as he exhaled, said slowly, with a hint of contrition in his voice.
“Yeah, life is the piece of shit I guess,” and then followed it up with “that’s what it is.”
Shortly afterwards, they packed up their tools and left.
Ratko stopped at the fruit stand where he bought peaches and cherries. Ratko and the young man ate cherries and drove towards the freeway.