For a minute or two, after shaking da Rosa’s oily hand and stepping back into the taxi he’d left waiting in the road, he felt good about himself, about the way he’d handled the negotiation, and about his bravery in traveling to Paraguay to conduct it. What his father didn’t understand about him, what only Connie really did, was that he had an excellent cool head for business. He suspected that he got his instincts from his mother, who was a born competitor, and it gave him a particular filial satisfaction to exercise them. The price he’d extracted from da Rosa was far lower than he’d allowed himself to hope for, and even with the cost of paying a local shipper to load the parts into containers and get them to the airport, even with the staggering sum that it would then cost him to fly the containers by charter to Iraq, he would still be within parameters that would assure him obscene profit. But as the taxi wove through older, colonial portions of Asunción, he began to fear that he couldn’t do it. Could not send such arrantly near-worthless crap to American forces trying to win a tough unconventional war. Although he hadn’t created the problem—Kenny Bartles had done that, by choosing the obsolete, bargain-basement Pladsky to fulfill his own contract—the problem was nonetheless his. And it created an even worse problem: counting the costs of start-up and the paltry but expensive shipment of parts from Lodz, he’d already spent all of Connie’s money and half of the first installment of his bank loan. Even if he were somehow able to back out now, he would leave Connie wiped out and himself in crippling debt. He turned the wedding ring on his finger nervously, turned it and turned it, wanting to put it in his mouth for comfort but not trusting himself not to swallow it again. He tried to tell himself that there must be more A10 parts out there somewhere, in some neglected but rainproof depot in Eastern Europe, but he’d already spent long days searching the internet and making phone calls, and the chances weren’t good.
“Fucking Kenny,” he said aloud, thinking what a very inconvenient time this was to be developing a conscience. “Fucking criminal.”
Back in Miami, waiting for his last connecting flight, he forced himself to call Connie.
“Hi, baby,” she said brightly. “How’s Buenos Aires?”
He skated past the details of his itinerary and cut straight to an account of his anxieties.
“It sounds like you did fantastic,” Connie said. “I mean, twenty thousand dollars, that’s a great price, right?”
“Except that it’s about nineteen thousand more than the stuff is worth.”
“No, baby, it’s worth what Kenny will pay you.”
“And you don’t think I should be, like, morally worried about this? About selling total crap to the government?”
She went silent while she considered this. “I guess,” she said finally, “if it makes you too unhappy, you maybe shouldn’t do it. I only want you to do things that make you happy.”
“I’m not going to lose your money,” he said. “That’s the one thing I know.”
“No, you can lose it. It’s OK. You’ll make some more money somewhere else. I trust you.”
“I’m not going to lose it. I want you to go back to college. I want us to have a life together.”
“Well, then, let’s have it! I’m ready if you are. I’m so ready.”
Out on the tarmac, under an unsettled gray Floridian sky, proven weapons of mass destruction were taxiing hither and thither. Joey wished there were some different world he could belong to, some simpler world in which a good life could be had at nobody else’s expense. “I got a message from your mom,” he said.
“I know,” Connie said. “I was bad, Joey. I didn’t tell her anything, but she saw my ring and she asked me, and I couldn’t not tell her then.”
“She was bitching about how I should tell my parents.”
“So let her bitch. You’ll tell them when you’re ready.”
He was in a somber mood when he got back to Alexandria. No longer having Jenna to look forward to or fantasize about, no longer being able to imagine a good outcome in Paraguay, no longer having anything but unpleasant tasks before him, he ate an entire large bag of ruffled potato chips and called Jonathan to repent and seek solace in friendship. “And here’s the worst of it,” he said. “I went down there as a married man.”
“Dude!” Jonathan said. “You married Connie?”
“Yeah. I did. In August.”
“That is the most insane thing I’ve ever heard.”
“I thought I’d better tell you, since you’ll probably hear about it from Jenna. Who it’s safe to say is not very happy with me right now.”
“She must be
“You know, I know you think she’s awful, but she’s not. She’s just really lost, and all anybody can see is what she looks like. She’s so much less lucky than you are.”
