Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

“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?”

“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.