“What the fuck happened to you?” Ted said when Harv showed up at the site. He made a point of looking Harv up and down. Presumably noticed that Harv was still wearing yesterday’s change of clothes instead of his work clothes, the main difference being that the change of clothes were clean. “Don’t wanna talk [...]
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Harv woke up the next day with his head filled with rocks. At first he didn’t know where he was, and a confused panic washed over him until the body next to him shifted, and he remembered how the night had ended, more or less clearly. He sat up, swing his feet over the side [...]
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In short order the waitress emerged from the front, full of faux-attentiveness under the auspices of taking their orders, and staring at them while pretending not to stare at them. This, too, the giant must have been well used to. They ordered glasses of wine — Harv caught himself wondering how she could possibly be [...]
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The most annoying thing about working on this crew was that Harv was the worst one at getting chicks, by a longshot. Elan was good-looking and charming in a kind of exuberent boy genius way, and generally had his pick of whoever; Ted was in his mid-fifties but looked seasoned and rakish, and that, combined [...]
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The next few days ran together, the way the last decade had run together: one long stretch of the same old shit differentiated only by the particular locale in which they happened to be working. He wondered why it should feel this way, since compared to how a lot of other people were living Harv [...]
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The day’s work went well enough, and by the end of it he even liked the other guys again, an effect he’d experienced enough times to not be surprised by it anymore. With everyone working together they prepared the ground in only four hours: smoothed, packed, filled, repacked, then gelled and staked. Harv, as usual, [...]
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Harv slept hard and without dreams and woke up annoyed, which was par for the course. He’d woken up annoyed for as long as he could remember, but he’d woken up at least twice as annoyed since the time William told him that everybody else woke up in good spirits. “I’m not really too dramatic [...]
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All they could do that first night was check the site and unload some shit from the truck that nobody without special equipment could steal, like half-ton containers of gypcrete and the flexiron molding which, in addition to weighing three hundred pounds per rod, also came in fifteen-foot segments. If it had been shorter and [...]
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By the time they got to the job everybody was surly, not just Harv, which is why they went to the job before the hotel: they were tired of each other, and unloading the truck and prepping the site and talking to the client would get them out of each other’s faces and minds. They’d [...]
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Harv wanted to stop for lunch but nobody else was hungry. Ted, who was driving, said: if you really need to stop we’ll stop; but he said it in that way that implied that he’d think Harv was a douchebag, and in fact he already thought Harv was a douchebag for bringing it up in [...]
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