“It’s not like I wanted her to break her leg,” Joey had said.
“No, I’m sure. I’m sure you wanted the Iraqis to welcome us with wreaths of flowers, too. I’m sure you’re very sorry about how fucked up everything’s gotten. Just not quite sorry enough to not cash in.”
“What was I supposed to do? Say no? Make her go by herself? She’s actually pretty depressed. She’s really looking forward to this trip.”
“And I’m sure Connie understands about that. I’m sure you’ve gotten her total seal of approval.”
“If that were any of your business, I might dignify it with an answer.”
“Hey, you know what? It is totally my business if I have to lie to her about it. I already have to lie about my opinion of Kenny Bartles whenever I talk to her, because you took her money and I don’t want her worrying. And now I’m supposed to lie about this, too?”
“How about just not talking to her constantly instead?”
“It’s not constantly, asshole. I’ve talked to her, like, three times in the last three months. She considers me a friend, all right? And apparently entire weeks can go by without her hearing anything from you. So what am I supposed to do? Not pick up when she calls? She calls me for information about you. Which, there’s something a little weird about this picture, right? Since she is still your girlfriend.”
“I’m not going to Argentina to sleep with your sister.”
“Ha. Ha. Ha.”
“I swear to God, I’m going as a friend. The same way you and Connie are friends. Because your sister’s depressed and it’s a nice thing to do. But Connie’s not going to understand that, so if you could just, like, not mention it, if she calls, that would be the kindest thing you could do for all concerned.”
“You’re so full of shit, Joey, I don’t even want to talk to you anymore. Something’s happened to you that makes me literally sick to my stomach. If Connie calls me while you’re gone, I don’t know what I’m going to say. I probably won’t tell her anything. But the only reason she calls me is she doesn’t hear enough from you, and I’m sick of being in the middle like that. So you do whatever the fuck you want, just leave me out of it.”
Having sworn to Jonathan that he wouldn’t have sex with Jenna, Joey felt insured against every contingency in Argentina. If nothing happened, it would prove him honorable. If something did happen, he would not have to be chagrined and disappointed that something hadn’t. It would answer the question, still open in his mind, of whether he was a soft person or a hard person, and what the future might hold for him. He was very curious about this future. Judging from his nasty text message, Jonathan wasn’t looking to be a part of it either way. And the message definitely did sting, but Joey, for his part, was sick of his friend’s relentless moralizing.
On the plane, in the privacy of their vast seats, and under the influence of a second large drink, Jenna deigned to remove her sunglasses and converse. Joey told her about his recent trip to Poland, chasing the mirage of Pladsky A10 parts, and his discovery that all but a very few of the seeming scores of suppliers advertising these parts on the internet were either bogus or sourced from the same single outlet in Lodz, where Joey and his almost worse than useless interpreter had found shockingly little to buy at any price. Taillights, mudguards, push plates, some battery boxes and grilles, but very few of the engine and suspension parts that were critical for maintaining a vehicle out of production since 1985.
“The internet’s fucked up, isn’t it?” Jenna said. She’d picked all the almonds out of her own nut bowl and was now picking them out of Joey’s.
“So fucked up, so fucked up,” he said.
“Nick always said international e-commerce is for losers. E-anything-financial, really, unless the system’s proprietary. He says free information’s by definition worthless. Like, if a Chinese supplier is listed on the internet, you can tell, just from that, that it can’t be any good.”
“Right, I know that, I’m very aware of that,” Joey said, not wanting to hear about Nick. “But truck parts should be more like eBay or something. Just an efficient way to connect buyers with sellers they might not be able to find otherwise.”
“All I know is Nick never buys anything on the internet. He doesn’t even trust PayPal. And he’s, you know, pretty well up on these things.”
“Well, and that’s why I went to Poland. Because you have to do these things in person.”
“Right, that’s what Nick says, too.”
Her somewhat slack-jawed chewing of the almonds was irritating him, as were her fingers, lovely though they were, as they rooted methodically in his nut bowl. “I thought you didn’t like to drink,” he said.
“Heh-heh. I’ve been working on increasing my tolerance lately. I’ve made great strides.”
“Well, anyway,” he said, “I need some good things to happen in Paraguay, or I don’t know what I’m going to do. I spent a fortune on shipping that Polish crap, and now I’m hearing from my partner, Kenny, that there wasn’t even enough to get partially paid for. It’s sitting in some goat pasture outside Kirkuk, probably not even guarded. And Kenny’s pissed off with me because I didn’t send some other kind of truck parts instead, even though they’re totally useless if they’re not from the same model and manufacturer. Kenny’s like, Just send me weight, because we get paid by weight, if you can believe that. And I’m like, These are thirty-year-old trucks that weren’t built for dust storms or Middle Eastern summers, they’re going to be breaking down, and when you’re trying to run convoys through an insurgency, you do not want your truck to be breaking down. And meanwhile I’ve got plenty of outflow but no income.”
He might have worried about admitting this to Jenna if she’d been paying attention, but she was now yanking on her onboard video screen, peevishly trying to wrest it from its stowage hole. He lent a gallant hand.
“So, I’m sorry,” she said, “you were saying . . . ? Something about not getting paid?”
“Oh, no, I’m definitely getting paid. In fact, I’m probably going to end up making more than Nick does this year.”
“I doubt that, frankly.”
“Well, it’s going to be a lot.”
“Nick’s in a whole different universe of remuneration.”
This was too much for Joey. “Why am I here?” he said. “Do you even want me here? You’ve either been ignoring me or talking about Nick, who I thought you were broken up with.”
Jenna shrugged. “I told you I was grouchy. But a little word to the wise? I’m not too terribly interested in your business deal. The whole reason you’re here and Nick isn’t is I got sick of hearing him talk about money all day and all night.”
“I thought you liked money.”
“It doesn’t mean I like to hear about it. You’re the one who brought it up.”
“I’m sorry I brought it up!”
“OK, then. Apology accepted. But also? I don’t see why I can’t mention Nick if you’re going to be talking about your woman all the time.”
“I talk about her because you ask about her.”
“I’m not sure I see the difference.”
“Well, and also, she’s still my girlfriend.”
“Right. I guess that is one difference.” And she leaned over suddenly and offered her mouth to his. First the merest brush, then a softness almost like warm whipped cream, and then full flesh. Her lips felt every bit as beautiful, as complexly animated and valuable, as they had always looked to him. He leaned into the kiss, but she pulled away and smiled approvingly. “Happy boy,” she said.
When a flight attendant came to take their dinner orders, he asked for beef. He was planning to eat nothing but beef for the entire trip, on the theory that it was somewhat constipating; he hoped to make it all the way to Paraguay before he had to go ring-hunting in the bathroom. Jenna watched Pirates of the Caribbean while she ate, and he put on his headphones and watched it with her, leaning awkwardly into her space rather than pulling up his own screen, but t
here were no further kisses, and the one drawback of business-class seats, as he discovered when the movie ended and they bedded down beneath their respective comforters, was that no cuddling or incidental contact was possible.
He didn’t see how he was going to fall asleep, but then suddenly it was morning and breakfast was being served, and then they were in Argentina. It was nowhere near as exotic as he’d imagined it. Except that everything was in Spanish and more people were smoking, civilization here seemed like civilization anywhere. The plate glass and floor tiles and plastic seats and lighting fixtures were exactly the same, and the flight to Bariloche boarded with the rear seats first, like any American connecting flight, and there was nothing marvelously different about the 727 or the factories and farm fields and highways he could see from the window. Dirt was still dirt, and plants still grew in it. Most of the passengers in the first-class cabin were speaking English, and six of them—an English couple and an American mother with three children—joined Joey and Jenna in wheeling their Priority-tagged luggage to the cushy white Estancia El Triunfo van that was waiting for them in a no-parking zone outside the Bariloche airport.
The driver, an unsmiling young man with thick black chest hair pushing through his half-unbuttoned shirt, rushed over to take Jenna’s bag and stow it in the rear and install her in the front passenger seat before Joey could even clock what was happening. The English couple grabbed the next two seats, and Joey found himself sitting toward the rear with the mother and her daughter, who was reading a young-adult horse novel.
“My name is Félix,” the driver said into an unnecessary microphone, “welcome to Rio Negro Province please use the seat belts we are driving two hours the road will be bumpy in places I have cold drinks for those who want them El Triunfo is remote but lucksurious you must forgive the bumps in the road thank you.”
The afternoon was clear and blazing, and the way to El Triunfo led through prosperous subalpine country so similar to western Montana that Joey had to wonder why they’d flown eight thousand miles for it. Whatever Félix was saying to Jenna, nonstop, in hushed Spanish, was drowned out by the nonstop braying of the Englishman, Jeremy. He brayed about the good old days when England was at war with Argentina in the Falklands (“our second-finest hour”), the capture of Saddam Hussein (“Har, I wonder how Mister smelled when he came out of that hole”), the hoax of global warming and the irresponsible fearmongering of its perpetrators (“Next year they’ll be warning us about the dangerous new ice age”), the laughable ineptitude of South American central bankers (“When your inflation rate is a thousand percent, methinks your problem is more than bad luck”), the laudable indifference of South Americans to women’s “football” (“Leave it to you Americans to excel at that particular travesty”), the surprisingly drinkable reds coming out of Argentina (“They blow the best wines of South Africa out—of—the—water”), and his own copious salivation at the prospect of eating steak for breakfast, lunch, and dinner (“I’m a carnivore, a carnivore, a terrible disgusting carnivore”).
For relief from Jeremy, Joey struck up a conversation with the mother, Ellen, who was pretty without being attractive and was wearing the stretch cargo pants that a certain kind of mom favored nowadays. “My husband’s a very successful real estate developer,” she said. “I trained as an architect at Stanford, but I’m home with our children now. We decided to homeschool them, which is very rewarding, and great in terms of taking vacations when it suits our schedule, but a lot of work, let me tell you.”
Her children, the reading daughter and the game-playing sons behind her, either didn’t hear this or didn’t mind being a lot of work to her. When she heard that Joey had a small business in Washington, she asked him if he knew about Daniel Jennings. “Dan’s a friend of ours in Morongo Valley,” she said, “who’s done all this research on our taxes. He’s actually gone back and looked at the record of debates in Congress, and you know what he discovered? That there’s no legal basis for the federal income tax.”
“There’s no legal basis for anything, really, when you get right down to it,” Joey said.
“But obviously the federal government doesn’t want you to know that all the money it’s collected for the last hundred years rightfully belongs to us citizens. Dan has a website where ten different history professors say he’s right, there’s no legal basis whatsoever. But nobody in the mainstream media will touch it. Which, don’t you think that’s a little strange? Wouldn’t you think at least one network or one newspaper would want to cover it?”
“I guess there must be some other side to the story,” Joey said.
“But why are we only getting that other side? Doesn’t it seem news-worthy that the federal government owes us taxpayers three hundred trillion dollars? Because that’s the figure Dan came up with, including compound interest. Three hundred trillion dollars.”
“That’s a lot,” he agreed politely. “That would be a million dollars for every person in the country.”
“Exactly. It’s outrageous, don’t you think? How much they owe us.”
He considered pointing out how difficult it would be for the Treasury to refund, say, the money that had been spent on winning World War II, but Ellen didn’t strike him as a person you could argue with, and he was feeling carsick. He could hear Jenna speaking Spanish excellent enough that, having taken it only through high school, he couldn’t catch much beyond her repetition of caballos this and caballos that. Sitting with his eyes closed, in a van full of jerks, he was visited by the thought that the three people he most loved (Connie), liked (Jonathan), and respected (his father) were all at least very unhappy with him, if not, by their own report, sickened by him. He couldn’t free himself of the thought; it was like some kind of conscience reporting for duty. He willed himself not to barf, because wouldn’t barfing now, a mere thirty-six hours after a good barf would have been very useful to him, be the height of irony? He’d imagined that the road to being fully hard, to being bad news, would get steeper and more arduous only gradually, with many compensatory pleasures along the way, and that he would have time to acclimate to each stage of it. But here he was, at the very beginning of the road, already feeling as if he might not have the stomach for it.
Estancia El Triunfo was undeniably paradisiacal, however. Nestled beside a clear-running stream, surrounded by yellow hills rolling up toward a purple ridgeline of sierras, were lushly watered gardens and paddocks and fully modernized stone guesthouses and stables. Joey and Jenna’s room had deliciously needless expanses of cool tiled floor and big windows open to the rushing of the stream below them. He’d feared there would be two beds, but either Jenna had intended to share a king-size with her mother or she’d changed the reservation. He stretched out on the deep-red brocade bedspread, sinking into its thousand-dollar-a-night plushness. But Jenna was already changing into riding clothes and boots. “Félix is going to show me the horses,” she said. “Do you want to come along?”
He didn’t want to, but he knew he’d better do it anyway. Their shit still stinks was the phrase in his head as they approached the fragrant stables. In golden evening light, Félix and a groom were leading out a splendid black stallion by its bridle. It frisked and skittered and bucked a little, and Jenna went straight over to it, looking rapt in a way that reminded him of Connie and made him like her better, and reached up to stroke the side of its head.
“Cuidado,” Félix said.
“It’s OK,” Jenna said, looking intently into the horse’s eye. “He likes me already. He trusts me, I can tell. Don’t you, baby?”
“¿Deseas que algo algo algo?” Félix said, tugging on the bridle.
“Speak English, please,” Joey said coldly.
“He’s asking if I want them to saddle him,” Jenna explained, and then spoke rapidly in Spanish to Félix, who objected that algo algo algo peligroso; but she was not a person to be gainsaid. While the groom pulled rather brutally on the bridle, she grasped the horse’s mane and Félix put his hairy hand
s on her thighs and boosted her up onto the horse’s bare back. It spread its legs and pranced sideways, straining against the bridle, but Jenna was already leaning far forward, her chest in its mane, her face near its ear, murmuring soothing nothings. Joey was totally impressed. After the horse had been calmed down, she took the reins and cantered off to the far corner of the paddock and engaged in recondite equestrian negotiations, compelling the horse to stand in place, to step backwards, to lower and raise its head.
The groom remarked something to Félix about the chica, something husky and admiring.
“My name’s Joey, by the way,” Joey said.
“Hello,” Félix said, his eyes on Jenna. “You want a horse, too?”
“I’m fine for now. Just do me a favor and speak English, though, OK?”
“As you like.”
It did Joey’s heart good to see how happy Jenna was on the horse. She’d been so negative and depressive, not only on the trip but on the phone for months before it, that he’d begun to wonder if there was anything at all to like about her besides her beauty. He could see now that she at least knew how to enjoy what money could bring her. And yet it was daunting to consider how very much money was required to make her happy. To be the person who kept her in fine horses: not a task for the fainthearted.
Dinner wasn’t served until after ten o’clock, at a long communal table hewn whole from a tree that must have been six feet in diameter. The fabled Argentinean steaks were excellent, and the wine drew brays of approval from Jeremy. Joey and Jenna both put away glass after glass of it, and this may have been why, after midnight, when they were finally making out on their oceanic bed, he experienced his first-ever attack of a phenomenon he’d heard a lot about but had been unable to imagine himself ever experiencing personally. Even in the least appealing of his hookups, he’d performed admirably. Even now, as long as he was confined by his pants, he had the impression of being as hard as the wood of the communal dining table, but either he was mistaken about this or he couldn’t stand full exposure to Jenna. As she humped his bare leg through her underpants, grunting a little with every thrust, he felt himself flying out centrifugally, a satellite breaking free of gravity, mentally farther and farther away from the woman whose tongue was in his mouth and whose gratifyingly nontrivial tits were mashed into his chest. She fooled around more brutally, less pliantly, than Connie did—that was part of it. But he also couldn’t see her face in the dark, and when he couldn’t see it he had only the memory, the idea, of its beauty. He kept telling himself that he was finally getting Jenna, that this was Jenna, Jenna, Jenna. But in the absence of visual confirmation all he had in his arms was a random sweaty attacking female.