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.
“Oh, dude, that’s bad,” Jonathan said.
“Don’t I know it.”
“You just better hope you don’t get caught. I’m already hearing a lot of stories from that eighteen billion in contracts they let in November. I wouldn’t be surprised if we get congressional hearings.”
“Is there somebody I can tell? I don’t even want the money, except what I owe Connie and the bank.”
“That’s very noble of you.”
“I couldn’t screw Connie out of the money. You know that’s the only reason I did it. But I’m wondering if maybe you could tell somebody at the Post what’s going on. Like, that you heard something from an anonymous source?”
“Not if you want it to stay anonymous. And if you don’t, you know who’s going to get smeared, don’t you?”
“But if I’m the whistle-blower?”
“The minute you blow the whistle, Kenny smears you. LBI smears you. They’ve got a whole line item in their budget for smearing whistle-blowers. You’ll be the perfect scapegoat. The pretty-faced college kid with the rusty truck parts? The Post will eat it up. Not that your sentiment doesn’t do you credit. But I highly recommend you stay mum.”
Connie found work at a temp agency while they waited for the dirty $850,000 to filter down through the system. Joey wandered through his days watching TV and playing video games and trying to learn how to be