Traffic was shit. Traffic was usual. Traffic was that time of morning when Nanjing’s half awake workday stress slid up its collective ass and stapled it shut. Who knew why the train had felt the need to come in just before rush hour, or why they still called it that when everything bogged down to a crawl. Regardless, Gao Huan saw no sense in fussing over urban forces of nature. His truck was technically in motion. Slow motion, perhaps, but so was everyone else. And they would all get there eventually, wherever it was they were headed.
Brakes squealed, a horn brayed at losing its spot in the shuffle. Gao Huan drummed his fingers on the wheel and turned up the tunes. He poked the hula girl on his dashboard, watching her shake her body in time to the calypso beat as he waited for his own chance to jump in the line and nose himself into the next lane over. She held court with an army of kitsch from a fat and happy Buddha to a depleted crown air freshener and a fluorescent red Guan Yu, looking more like a clown outside an American burger joint than an avatar of the god of fortune. A purikura snapshot of Yan and Yingying was pasted next to the stereo controls, festooned with a spray of neon stars. Yan smiled. Yingying made a rabbit face, showing off a missing front tooth. Gao Huan secretly hoped she never grew out of that phase.
A holiday jingle rang out from the cup holder in the center console. Gao Huan dropped the stereo volume and took the call, waiting a beat instead of bothering to say hello.
“Yo!” Bo, starting off with his usual holler. “What are you up to?”
“Taking a leak.” Gao Huan laughed. “Stuck on Xuanwu Avenue. Why?”
“How much space have you got?”
“I’m full up.”
“Sort of full or really full?”
“Got a tight load of flat screens.” Inching forward once again, Gao Huan reflexively braked as a moped zipped in front of his cab. “Wall to wall. Floor to ceiling.”
“So you can’t shuffle it around any.”
“No.”
“And you can’t squeeze anything in the cracks.”
“What cracks?” Gao Huan snorted. ”I’ve only got one, and I don’t think you want anything back out of there.”
The two of them had been friends since junior middle school. Bo was skinny and ragged in last year’s uniform, prime target for some well-off shitbird in search of free food and proclaimed fear. Gao Huan, twice his size and mostly solid, took Bo’s lunch back and made the bully eat dirt instead. Bo taught Gao Huan to solve a magic cube instead of rearranging the stickers. He eventually taught himself to drive, pestering Gao Huan to buddy up when he managed to save for a rusty and wheezing truck. It was an easy sell. Gao Huan’s father had been laid off from his radio and television factory, his iron rice bowl of guaranteed salary and pension melted into the profit of some new capitalist overlord. Nanjing’s roads and ports and railways buzzed day and night, no matter who owned the goods or the plants cranking them out. The action was all there and waiting for the two of them to stake their claim.
“Can you go unload a few? Not that much. Ten or so.” Cubic meters, their currency of cargo volume – which generally seemed to either waste a trailer or overflow it. And of course it would have to overflow when one of them was already full up.
“Where? Lianyun Market? There goes another hour if I’m lucky.” Gao Huan sighed. “Can’t I just get yours when I’m done?”
“It’s now or never, bro. Dispatch gave me fifteen minutes to take it or leave it. They said this shipment’s already late.”
“Then who cares if it’s later?”
“The loudmouths upstream who needed it out of the warehouse an hour ago.”
Said loudmouths were shipping agents at the top of the tangled logistical food chain. Jobs came down through a stack of subsidiaries who all took their own cut off the top. Gao Huan and Bo were sometimes shoved together with other odds and ends, a disorganized and underpaid substitute for an actual team. More often they were thrown the dregs, called in for cleanup after a no-show. They had set out to be kings of the road. The past years increasingly had them panning for change in the gutter.
“It is what it is, isn’t it?” Bo sighed. “I’ll call around.”
“Good luck.”
The music collection ended as traffic sped up onto the cloverleaf to the Ningluo Expressway. Gao Huan popped in a new one, grinning through his best guess at sounding out the lyrics. English was one of many subjects long since forgotten after dropping out of school to put fees toward business. Gao Huan remembered how to order food, ask for the bathroom, and swear. He figured that just about covered the basics, assuming he ever had the misfortune to wind up across an ocean all by himself.
Halfway across an islet of farmland between the Yangtze river and its Jiajiang offshoot, a front tire began to thump in disconcerting rhythm. Gao Huan had no chance to slow down before it let go with a pop. His cab skidded hard to the left, shedding flat rinds of rubber in the rear view mirror. Gao Huan fishtailed back under control, a hissed breath from a coupe that had been sneaking past in his blind spot. By the time he screeched to a stop on the shoulder, his rim was grinding concrete.
Gao Huan jumped out of the cab, spitting a stream of curses at the ruined tire. It couldn’t have been a nail or a rock or some other stray bit of road debris, a puncture trivially plugged up with the patch kit kept behind his seat. It had to be a blowout, and Gao Huan had to have gone and lent out his spare. Bo had never gotten around to buying a replacement after wearing his old one down to the mesh.
Gao Huan was once again reminded that sharing and caring had their limits, especially as he went through his speed dial and found no one else around to return the favor. Yuyao was backed up in line over at Xinshengwei Port. Jingxuan was twiddling his thumbs in a warehouse lot for a shipment yet to materialize. Qiang was heading onto the expressway southbound, but without any emergency rubber on hand.
With another expletive – this one halfway sighed – Gao Huan punched the final and dreaded number.