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By Root 6852 0

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