Freedom [224]
“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