Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

“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.

“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.