Jenna knocked on the door. “What’s going on in there?”

“Just a minute!”

“What are you doing in there? Jerking off?”

“I said just a minute! I have diarrhea.”

“Oh, Christ. Can you at least hand me a tampon?”

“In a minute!”

Mercifully, the ring turned up in the second of the turds he broke apart. A hardness amid softness, a clean circle within chaos. He rinsed his hands as well as he could in the filthy water, flushed the toilet with his elbow, and bore the ring to the sink. The stench was appalling. He washed his hands and the ring and the faucets three times with lots of soap, while Jenna, outside the door, complained that breakfast was in twenty minutes. And it was a strange thing to feel, but he definitely felt it: when he emerged from the bathroom with the ring on his ring finger, and Jenna rushed past him and then reeled out again, squealing and cursing at the stench, he was a different person. He could see this person so clearly, it was like standing outside himself. He was the person who’d handled his own shit to get his wedding ring back. This wasn’t the person he’d thought he was, or would have chosen to be if he’d been free to choose, but there was something comforting and liberating about being an actual definite someone, rather than a collection of contradictory potential someones.

The world immediately seemed to slow down and steady itself, as if it, too, were settling into a new necessity. The first, spirited horse that he was given at the stables shucked him onto the ground almost gently, without ill will, employing no more violence than was strictly necessary to dislodge him from the saddle. He was then put on a twenty-year-old mare from whose broad back he watched Jenna quickly receding on her stallion down a dusty trail, her left arm raised in backhanded farewell or perhaps just good equestrian form, while Félix galloped past Joey to join her. He saw that it would make sense if she ended up fucking Félix instead of him, since Félix was the vastly superior horseman; he experienced this as a relief, maybe even as a mitzvah, since poor Jenna certainly needed fucking by somebody. He himself spent the morning walking, and eventually cantering, with Ellen’s young daughter, Meredith, the novel reader, and listening while she delivered herself of an impressive store of horse lore. It didn’t make him feel soft to do this; it made him feel firm. The Andean air was lovely. Meredith seemed a little sweet on him and gave him patient instruction in how to be less confusing to his horse. Jeremy, when the group collected for midmorning snacks by a spring at which there was no sign of Jenna and Félix, was more viciously instructive to his quiet, red-faced wife, whom he apparently blamed for falling so far back behind the leaders. Joey, cupping his clean hands to drink spring water from a stone basin, and no longer caring what Jenna might be up to, felt compassion for Jeremy. It was fun to ride horses in Patagonia-she’d been right about that.

His feeling of peace lasted until late in the afternoon, when he checked his voice mail from the room phone, at Jenna’s mother’s expense, and found messages from Carol Monaghan and Kenny Bartles. “Hi, hon, it’s your mother-in-law,” Carol said. “How about that, huh? Mother-in-law! Isn’t that a weird thing to be saying. I think it’s fantastic news, but you know what, Joey? I’ll be honest with you. I think if you thought enough of Connie to marry her, and if you thought highly enough of your own maturity to enter into matrimony, you should have the decency to tell your parents. That’s just my two cents’ worth, but I don’t see any reason for you to keep this so hush-hush unless you’re ashamed of Connie. And I really don’t know what to say about a son-in-law who’s ashamed of my daughter. Maybe I’ll just say I’m not a very good secret keeper, I am personally opposed to all this hush-hush. OK? Maybe I’ll just leave it at that.”

“What the fuck, man?” Kenny Bartles said. “Where the fuck are you? I just sent you like ten e-mails. Are you in Paraguay? Is that why you’re not getting back to me? When the contract says January 31, DOD fucking means January 31. I sure the fuck hope you’ve got something in the pipeline for me, because January 31’s nine days from now. LBI’s already all over my ass because these fucking trucks are breaking down. Some bullshit design flaw in the rear axle, I hope to God you got some rear axles for me. Or whatever, man. Fifteen tons of fucking hood ornaments, I would thank you very much for that. Until you get me some kind of weight, until we can see a date of confirmed delivery of full weight of something, I don’t have a limb to stand on.”

Jenna returned at sunset, all the more gorgeous for being dust-covered. “I’m in love,” she said. “I’ve met the horse of my dreams.”

“I have to leave,” Joey said immediately. “I have to go to Paraguay.”

“What? When?”

“Tomorrow morning. Tonight, ideally.”

“Good Lord, are you that pissed off with me? It’s not my fault you lied to me about your riding skills. I didn’t come here to walk. I didn’t come here to waste five nights of double occupancy, either.”

“Yeah, I’m sorry about that. I’ll pay my half of it back.”

“Fuck paying it back.” She looked him up and down scornfully. “It’s just, do you think you can find some other way to be a disappointment? I’m not sure you’ve checked every conceivable disappointment box yet.”

“That’s a really mean thing to say,” he said quietly.

“Believe me, I can say meaner things, and I intend to.”

“Also, I didn’t tell you I was married. I’m married. I married Connie. We’re going to live together.”

Jenna’s eyes widened, as if with pain. “God, you are weird! You are such a fucking weirdo.”

“I’m aware of that.”

“I thought you actually understood me. Unlike every other guy I’ve ever met. God, I’m stupid!”

“You’re not,” he said, pitying her for the disability of her beauty.

“But if you think I’m sorry to hear you’re married, you are much mistaken. If you think I thought of you as marriage material, my God. I don’t even want to have dinner with you.”

“Then I don’t want to have dinner with you, either.”

“Well, great, then,” she said. “You are now officially the worst travel companion ever.”

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.