Freedom полностью

While she showered, he packed his bag and then loitered on the bed, thinking that, perhaps, now that the air had been cleared, they might have sex once, to avoid the shame and defeat of not having had it, but when Jenna emerged from the bathroom, in a thick Estancia El Triunfo robe, she correctly read the look on his face and said, “No way.”

He shrugged. “You sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure. Go home to your little wife. I don’t like weird people who lie to me. I’m frankly embarrassed to be in the same room with you at this point.”

And so he went to Paraguay, and it was a disaster. Armando da Rosa, the owner of the country’s largest military-surplus dealership, was a neckless ex-officer with merging white eyebrows and hair that looked dyed with black shoe polish. His office, in a slummy suburb of Asunción, had shinily waxed linoleum floors and a large metal desk behind which a Paraguayan flag hung limply on a wooden pole. Its back door opened onto acres of weed and dirt and sheds with rusting corrugated roofs, patrolled by big dogs that were all fang and skeleton and spiky hair and looked as if they’d barely survived electrocution. The impression Joey got from da Rosa’s rambling monologue, in English little better than Joey’s Spanish, was that he had suffered a career setback some years earlier and had escaped court-martial through the efforts of certain loyal officer friends of his, and had received instead, by way of justice, the concession to sell surplus and decommissioned military gear. He was wearing fatigues and a sidearm that made Joey uneasy to walk in front of him. They pushed through weeds ever higher and woodier and more buzzing with outsized South American hornets, until, by a rear fence crowned saggily with concertina, they reached the mother lode of Pladsky A10 truck parts. The good news was that there were certainly a lot of them. The bad news was that they were in abominable condition. A line of rust-rimmed truck hoods lay semi-fallen like toppled dominoes; axles and bumpers were jumbled in piles like giant old chicken bones; engine blocks were strewn in the weeds like the droppings of a T. rex; conical mounds of more severely rusted smaller parts had wildflowers growing on their slopes. Moving through the weeds, Joey turned up nests of mud-caked and/or broken plastic parts, snake pits of hoses and belts cracked by the weather, and decaying cardboard parts cartons with Polish words on them. He was fighting tears of disappointment at the sight of it.

“Lot of rust here,” he said.

“What is rust?”

He broke a large flake of it off the nearest wheel hub. “Rust. Iron oxide.”

“This happens because of the rain,” da Rosa explained.

“I can give you ten thousand dollars for the lot of it,” Joey said. “If it’s more than thirty tons, I can give you fifteen. That’s a lot better than scrap value.”

“Why you want these shit?”

“I’ve got a fleet of trucks I need to maintain.”

“You, you are a very young man. Why you want these?”

“Because I’m stupid.”

Da Rosa gazed off into the tired, buzzing second-growth jungle beyond the fence. “Can’t give you everything.”

“Why not?”

“This trucks, the Army not use. But they can use if there is war. Then my parts are valuable.”

Joey closed his eyes and shuddered at the stupidity of this. “What war? Who are you going to fight? Bolivia?”

“I am saying if there is war we need parts.”

“These parts are fucking useless. I’m offering you fifteen thousand dollars for it. Quince mil dólares.”

Da Rosa shook his head. “Cincuenta mil.”

“Fifty thousand dollars? No. Fucking. Way. You understand? No way.”

“Treinta.”

“Eighteen. Diez y ocho.”

“Veinticinco.”

“I’ll think about it,” Joey said, turning back in the direction of the office. “I’ll think about giving you twenty, if it’s over thirty tons. Veinte, all right? That’s my last offer.”