“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.”

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 royally pissed off.”

“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.”

Joey proceeded to tell Jonathan the story of the ring, and the ghastly scene in the bathroom, with his hands full of crap and Jenna knocking on the door, and in his own laughter and in Jonathan’s laughter and disgusted groans he found the solace he’d been looking for. What had been abhorrent for five minutes made a great story forever after. When he went on to admit that Jonathan had been right about Kenny Bartles, Jonathan’s response was clear and adamant: “You’ve got to bail out of that contract.”

“It’s not so easy. I’ve got to protect Connie’s investment.”

“Find a way out. Just do it. The stuff going on over there is really bad. It’s worse than you even know.”

“Do you still hate me?” Joey said.

“I don’t hate you. I think you’ve been a total asshole. But hating you doesn’t seem to be an option for me.”

Joey felt enough cheered by this talk to go to bed and sleep for twelve hours. The next morning, when it was midafternoon in Iraq, he called Kenny Bartles and asked to be let out of his contract.

“What about all the parts in Paraguay?” Kenny said.

“There was plenty of weight. But it’s all useless rusted shit.”

“Send it anyway. My ass is on the line.”

“You’re the one who bought the stupid A10s,” Joey said. “It’s not my fault there’s no parts for them.”

“You just told me there’s plenty of parts. And I’m telling you to send them. What am I not understanding here?”

“I’m saying I think you should find somebody else to buy me out. I don’t want to be a part of this.”

“Joey, whoa, man, listen. You signed the contract. And this is not the eleventh hour for Shipment Number One, this is the fucking thirteenth hour. You cannot back out on me now. Not unless you want to eat whatever you’re already out of pocket. At the moment, I don’t even have the cash to buy you out, because the Army hasn’t paid me for the parts yet, because your Polish shipment was too light. Try to look at this from my side, would you?”