“But the stuff in Paraguay looks so bad, I don’t think they’re even going to accept it.”

“You leave that to me. I know the LBI people on the ground here. I can make it work. You just need to send me thirty tons, and then you can go back to reading poetry or whatever.”

“How do I know you can make it work?”

“That’s my problem, right? Your contract is with me, and I’m saying just get me weight and you will get your money.”

Joey didn’t know which was worse, the fear that Kenny was lying to him and that he would be screwed not only out of the money he’d already spent but out of the vast additional outlays still ahead of him, or the idea that Kenny was telling the truth and LBI was going to pay $850K for nearly worthless parts. He saw no choice but to go over Kenny’s head and talk directly to LBI. This entailed a morning of being passed around telephonically by people at LBI headquarters, in Dallas, before he was connected with the pertinent vice president. He laid out his dilemma as plainly as possible: “There aren’t any good parts available for this truck, Kenny Bartles won’t buy out the contract for me, and I don’t want to send you bad parts.”

“Is Bartles willing to accept what you’ve got?” the VP said.

“Yeah. But they’re no good.”

“Not your worry. If Bartles accepts them, you’re off the hook. I suggest you make the shipment right away.”

“I don’t think you’re quite hearing me,” Joey said. “I’m saying you don’t want that shipment.”

The VP digested this for a moment and said, “We will not be doing business with Kenny Bartles in the future. We’re not at all happy about the A10 situation. But that is not your worry. Your worry should be getting sued for nonfulfillment of contract.”

“Who-by Kenny?”

“It’s a total hypothetical. It’s never going to happen, as long as you send the parts. You just need to remember that this is not a perfect war in a perfect world.”

And Joey tried to remember this. Tried to remember that the worst that could happen, in this less than perfect world, was that all the A10s would break down and need to be replaced by better trucks at a later date, and that victory in Iraq might thereby be infinitesimally delayed, and that American taxpayers would have wasted a few million dollars on him and Kenny Bartles and Armando da Rosa and the creeps in Lodz. With the same determination that he’d brought to grabbing hold of his own turds, he flew back to Paraguay and hired an expediter and oversaw the loading of thirty-two tons of parts into containers and drank five bottles of wine in the five nights he had to wait for Logística Internacional to forklift them into a veteran C-130 and fly off with them; but there was no gold ring hidden in this particular pile of shit. When he got back to Washington, he kept right on drinking, and when Connie finally came out with three suitcases and moved in with him, he kept drinking and slept badly, and when Kenny called from Kirkuk to say that the delivery had been accepted and that Joey’s $850,000 was in the pipeline, he had such a bad night that he called Jonathan and confessed what he had done.

“Oh, dude, that’s bad,” Jonathan said.

“Don’t I know it.”

“You just better hope you don’t get caught. I’m already hearing a lot of stories from that eighteen billion in contracts they let in November. I wouldn’t be surprised if we get congressional hearings.”

“Is there somebody I can tell? I don’t even want the money, except what I owe Connie and the bank.”

“That’s very noble of you.”

“I couldn’t screw Connie out of the money. You know that’s the only reason I did it. But I’m wondering if maybe you could tell somebody at the Post what’s going on. Like, that you heard something from an anonymous source?”

“Not if you want it to stay anonymous. And if you don’t, you know who’s going to get smeared, don’t you?”

“But if I’m the whistle-blower?”

“The minute you blow the whistle, Kenny smears you. LBI smears you. They’ve got a whole line item in their budget for smearing whistle-blowers. You’ll be the perfect scapegoat. The pretty-faced college kid with the rusty truck parts? The Post will eat it up. Not that your sentiment doesn’t do you credit. But I highly recommend you stay mum.”

Connie found work at a temp agency while they waited for the dirty $850,000 to filter down through the system. Joey wandered through his days watching TV and playing video games and trying to learn how to be domestic, how to plan a dinner and shop for it, but the simplest short trip to the supermarket exhausted him. The depression that for years had stalked the women nearest him seemed finally to have identified its rightful prey and sunk its teeth in him. The one thing he knew he absolutely had to do, which was tell his family that he’d married Connie, he could not do. Its necessity filled the little apartment like a Pladsky A10 truck, confining him to the margins, leaving him insufficient air to breathe. It was there when he woke up and there when he went to bed. He couldn’t imagine giving the news to his mother, because she would inevitably perceive the marriage as a pointed personal blow to her. Which, in a way, it probably was. But he dreaded no less the conversation with his father, the reopening of that wound. And so, every day, even as the secret suffocated him, even as he imagined Carol blabbing the news to all his former neighbors, one of whom would surely tell his parents soon, he put off making the announcement another day. That Connie never nagged him only made the problem more solely his.

And then one night, on CNN, he saw the news of an ambush outside Fallujah in which several American trucks had broken down, leaving their contract drivers to be butchered by insurgents. Although he didn’t see any A10s in the CNN footage, he became so anxious that he had to drink himself to sleep. He woke up some hours later, in a sweat, mostly sober, beside his wife, who slept literally like a baby-with that world-trusting sweet stillness-and he knew he had to call his father in the morning. He’d never felt so afraid of anything as of making this call. But he could see now that nobody else could advise him what to do, whether to blow the whistle and suffer the consequences or stay mum and keep the money, and that nobody else could absolve him. Connie’s love was too unqualified, his mother’s too self-involved, Jonathan’s too secondary. It was to his strict, principled father that a full accounting needed to be made. He’d been battling him all his life, and now the time had come to admit that he was beaten.

Walter’s father, Gene, was the youngest child of a difficult Swede named Einar Berglund who had immigrated at the turn of the twentieth century. There had been a lot not to like about rural Sweden-compulsory military service, Lutheran pastors meddling in the lives of their parishioners, a social hierarchy that all but precluded upward mobility-but what had actually driven Einar to America, according to the story that Dorothy told Walter, was a problem with his mother.

Einar had been the oldest of eight children, the princeling of his family on its farm in south Österland. His mother, who was perhaps not the first woman to be unsatisfied in her marriage to a Berglund, had favored her firstborn outrageously, dressing him in finer clothes than his siblings were given, feeding him the cream from the others’ milk, and excusing him from farm chores so that he could devote himself to his education and his grooming. (“The vainest man I ever met,” Dorothy said.) The maternal sun had shone on Einar for twenty years, but then, by mistake, his mother had a late baby, a son, and fell for him the way she’d once fallen for Einar; and Einar never forgave her for it. Unable to stand not being the favored one, he sailed for America on his twenty-second birthday. Once he was there, he never went back to Sweden, never saw his mother again, proudly avowed that he’d forgotten every word of his mother tongue, and delivered, at the slightest provocation, lengthy diatribes against “the stupidest, smuggest, narrow-mindedest country on earth.” He became another data point in the American experiment of self-government, an experiment statistically skewed from the outset, because it wasn’t the people with sociable genes who fled the crowded Old World for the new continent; it was the people who didn’t get along well with others.