Surrender

Randy was perched on the lip of the conveyor belt at El Paso central, trying to decide if the suitcase riding from the receiving room was worth swiping, when an old lady sitting on a latticed-aluminum bench nearby hollered, “Then shoot me.”

The bus station was nearly empty. A newspaper lay on the marble, open to an article about a rumored bus driver’s strike, but neither Randy nor the old woman, Varene, cared much if the rumor was true. There was no hurry to get where they were going.

Varene’s voice had the scratchy timbre of a crow. Her toes dangled an inch above the floor. Behind her bench, a pudgy forty-year-old man said, “Shut up, Mom, you’re causing a scene.”

“You’re - damn - right,” Varene said, making her voice louder with each word. “And I’ll keep on causing a scene until you promise.” The word promise echoed off the bare plaster walls.

Randy looked at the floor, and ran his fingers up his face. The old woman was performing for him. His fingers stopped just below his cheekbone at the prick of a few hairs missed by the washroom razor.

“My mind starts to go," Varene said, "you shoot me like a sick horse. No Shady Hill Convalescent for me.” Hating her son's face, she rested her eyes on Randy, the stranger across the way.

“I gotta get back to the bank," said the son.

“Fine,” said Varene, without taking her eyes from the stranger. “Do that.”

The station attendant disappeared from behind the information window. Randy’s thoughts returned to the unclaimed baggage on the conveyor belt. Probably not worth swiping. It was heading through the rubber flaps at the mouth of the receiving room when the belt jerked to a halt. Heavy strips of black rubber froze over the suitcase like theater curtains, and an echo of gears died against the walls. The cavernous room was invaded by an intimate silence.

“We stuck?” Varene said. They were the last two souls in the bus hall.

“Beats me,” Randy’s voice croaked. He hadn’t spoken a word in two days.

Varene opened her purse, felt for her glasses case. Over the blur of her vision appeared a sharp outline: a muscular body under his tight clothes, thinning black hair, a young face. He looked like a Hollywood cowboy, boots and suede shirt, crazy in this heat.

“Going to T or C?” she asked.

“Pardon?” he said.

“You going to Truth or Consequences?”

“I reckon I am.”

“You reckon?” she repeated. A would-be cowboy.

The electric doors whirred open. In the sunlight stood a small boy in a felt cowboy hat, bewildered by his own power over the doorway. Varene twitched her fingers, a secret wave. The boy shot a toy gun at her: Pop! Varene clutched her chest. “You got me,” she gasped.

A large woman with long straight hair yanked the boy away from these strangers with her fist. The doors whirred shut and the paranoid mama was muted like a bad TV show. Varene hated women like her.

The electric doors opened again and a teenage girl, in long white shorts and a collared blue T-shirt, stepped in.

“Anyone going to T or C?” she called out.

“Right here,” Varene said, raising her finger in the air. She smiled at Randy.

Randy froze like a lizard. He didn’t need this old woman. He still had three hundred dollars left from that stupid Portugese guy's ranch. Everything had gone smoothly there until, at the end of a long driveway, that little mutt began yapping and he had to take it in his arms and choke it quiet. All night he'd wanted to surrender his guilt to the passing cars, even to the distant planes in the sky. But no posse came, and even a week later, he could feel on his face the last clammy breath of the dog.

“Y’all better come with me if you’re going to Truth or Consequences,” said the girl, “‘cause the drivers went on strike two hours ago, and the buses aren’t going nowhere.”

Varene pointed her finger at Randy as she stood. “This gentleman’s coming too,” she said, and winked. “I reckon.”

He told himself not to move. But a smile invaded his face like an unconscious twitch.“Here I come,” he said.

#

Randy took Varene’s elbow in his fingers as she climbed into the van. Her arm was surprisingly supple under her blouse. She slid across the vinyl seat towards the window, brushed her polyester pants and sat up straight, knees locked, like a girl in her first summer dress. Her profile, the long fine nose and plump lips, was frozen like a statue’s, but the expression under her giant glasses was so blindly hopeful that it sent through Randy a shudder of disgust. She didn’t look like she had much money stashed away. He climbed onto the seat beside her.

There were three passengers, Randy and Varene in back, and a plump mining exec in the front seat jabbing into his phone. The driver announced that she helped pay her college tuition by strike-breaking at the station, shuttling stranded travelers to Deming and Truth or Consequences. She was studying management at Western N.M. University, in Silver City.

The man in the front seat shifted to face the girl. “A young lady with business sense, I like that,” he said. He had the stiff bloat of someone who has just eaten too many ribs. Randy imagined squashing his soft face against the dashboard.

Varene whispered to Randy, “Clear career goals are my favorite!” and rolled her eyes.

He smiled and winked back.

Varene glanced at his personalized belt buckle, which he’d swiped in Lordsburg a few weeks before, and said, “Looks like we got a long ride, Tom.” She offered her hand. “I’m Varene.”

“Pleasure, Varene.”

Varene blushed. His cowboy politeness was an act, but a good one. Up front, the driver and exec were the same bland breed as her son. Generations as joyless as the WalMarts which had strangled every town Varene once roared through. The man next to her was different. Maybe forty years younger than her, but like her, born too late.

Her hip began to throb. She said, “When’s this darn rain coming? I can feel the monsoon in my hip. I broke it when I was your age. Know what a goat-tie is?” He shook his head. Varene said, “Well, I got wrestling with the wrong goat. You’ve been to a rodeo.”

Randy pictured a line of angry-faced children dressed in jeans and boots, with handkerchiefs choked tight around their tiny necks, scurrying after a panicked animal in the mud. His girlfriend Lexie had dragged him to a children’s rodeo at a racetrack near Reno, two years back, when they were talking about having a kid. He couldn't remember Lexie’s face anymore. He remembered her neck, the basin of smooth skin rising and falling below her voicebox. Whenever she lied to him he'd stare at her neck, as though by staring hard enough he could snap it.

He said, “I’ve seen a goat-tie, now that I think of it.”

Across the river, a shantytown of blue and red shacks marked the northern tip of Mexico. The river looked frozen, under a smog as thick as glue. Charcoal clouds throbbed to the south, painfully distant. Then the slums of Juarez receded, and the road carved along crumbling desert mountains, out of Texas and into New Mexico.

“I just visited my Ma in El Paso,” Varene said, watching weeds whizz past. “She was a wild one. Ran away from Louisiana at fourteen with a silver prospector. Couldn’t stop her from what she put her mind to. She’d get snookered on wind and horses.” Varene thought of her mother this morning, a stew of wrinkles and bones. “Wind and horses,” Varene said again. It was a cruel life that allowed people to live so long. “Where you from, Tom?”

“From Denver, originally,” he said. “But I may settle in Truth or Consequences.”

“What's your trade?”

“I con strangers out of their money,” he said.

She burst into girlish laughter. “Here, take my jewelry,” she said. It was a terrible laugh, uncontrolled, heartbreaking, and it turned her flesh into jelly. “So you’re a lawyer, then, Tom? I won't tell anyone, I hate lawyers too.”

Randy stared out at giant rocks alongside the highway. He had nothing against her generation of women. She didn’t like the truth, but she deserved better than his usual story about poor Tom with a poor sick Daddy who could use just a few hundred dollars, pay you back next week.

“I repossess airplanes,” he said.

“You what?”

“Repossess airplanes. For credit companies.”

Free-form lies formed in his head, complex and beautiful, like crystal. He imagined a repo-for-hire for regional banks, jumpstarting Cessnas on dirt runways. Randy was always amazed that his partner - he'd come to think of his prey as willing partners in a game - believed him. He wished Varene laughed at his lie. His lies brought him money, a bed, shoulders to cry on, but no longer felt like the purification ritual they once did. He’d had a fantasy about settling for real in the town of Truth or Consequences, working at the hot springs baths, and if old folks wrote him into their wills, fine, but he wouldn't have to lie. That notion was dying with each moment here. His latest lie wound around him like a snake.

“One time,” he heard himself saying, “a couple Mexicans hadn’t sent payment in nine months, or so the bank told me. I get a call to my hotel in El Paso at midnight. I got to cross the aguas negras south of Juarez right away, and get that airplane back. And look out, because the Mexicans may be gunrunners. No problem, I say, ‘cause if they got guns I’ll start running.”

“It’s easier to bullet a duck than it is to duck a bullet,” said Varene.

Randy looked startled. “That’s right,” he said. He listened to the hum of the engine. Outside, a giant refinery spewed smoke against a brown hill of rocks. “So I drive up to the riverbank under a full moon, I looking across the water to Mexico, and say my prayers. Hail Mary and all that, and I don’t even believe in God. Then I dive straight in the black stinking water. I actually swim the Rio Grande to Mexico. I keep expecting to see wetbacks dogpaddling the other direction, telling me I’m crazy, hombre, turn around, you’re going the wrong way!”

Varene laughed, shifting in her seat. Her hip was aching for the storm. If she could forget the physical pain, she thought, she’d be able to forget her withering mama. Her son had said, “At least she's safe here,” and Varene responded by telling him she’d prefer to be shot than to live inside a rotting body. How could her son, who never knew how to live, understand that there might be a right time to die? When he was a boy, Varene had told him tales about stealing liquor for rodeo cowboys, fleeing on horseback from a county sheriff’s truck, sleeping in haystacks, falling in love. She gave him her most magical road lullabies, and still his soul was as flat as his linoleum face.

But this stranger beside her was a noble dreamer, she thought as she watched his brown eyes taking in the road. “So I crawl out into the mud,” he was saying. “I can see the prop, sort of glowing blue in the moonlight. I creep towards the plane, when suddenly BAP-BAP-BAP. Shots! Boom. I’m running--not toward the river, but loyal fool that I am, I’m running toward the plane.”

Randy took a deep breath. He was doing well. A distant gaze behind Varene’s thick glasses told him she wanted to believe the story as much as he did. He said, “You imagine how scared I was. I crack open the door. Dive under the cockpit and start ripping it apart. Where’s the damn starter? Men getting closer. There it is. I turn over the motor. Cr-cr-cr-crumm. Before I know it the propellors are turning. The whole cockpit shakes and buzzes. And the plane’s starting to rotate slowly on the tarmac, like a carnival ride just getting going...”

#

In the flooded soil of a pecan orchard, Varene could see the reflection of the Organ Mountains, lumps of chalky red hanging in the sky. The clouds, last of the monsoon season, had finally caught up with the van, and hovered blue and black above the pecan trees, still stubbornly holding their rain. Nobody spoke. A fist of pain opened and closed inside Varene’s hip. The stranger had told a good story - a bunch of bull, but good enough to pass the time. Outside Varene’s window, the wind tore droplets from the manmade swamp, and pecan trunks emerging from the water looked as ancient and battered as the wood under a pier.

The driver had announced a thirty-mile detour to deliver some paint buckets to her cousin. It was dumb, Randy thought, to deliver the paint for free, but he knew that if this type of kindness were extinct, he’d never be able to cash a stolen check, or borrow the key to a family safe so he could demonstrate the best way to safeguard possessions.

The driver made a sharp turn onto a gravel driveway, and ground the van to a halt in front of a livestock gate. The mining consultant in the front seat jumped out to open the gate, and the door flapped open as the girl drove across the threshold. Wheezing from the exercise, the consultant returned to his seat and slammed the door. “You can tell a real cowboy by the one who won’t sit shotgun, always wants to sit in the middle,” he said, breaking a long silence. The driver said nothing and eased the van forward, so he turned around for an audience and said, “Cuz he knows it ain’t really the shotgun seat, it’s the get-out-and-open-the-gate seat.”

The driver's cousin, a girl of sixteen, waved from the doorway of a shingled shack, then looked up at the sky, as though she could see the clouds about to burst. Randy glanced at his hands. The black hairs on his wrists looked useless and sad. He looked at the girl again. She wore a tank-top, shorts, and purple socks with no shoes. He imagined that she had sprouted from the soil, mother tending the herb garden, all the family in purple socks. He wondered why he'd never met a girl like this when he was her age. He wished he'd been raised here, down a long gravel road, with a purple-sock girl to teach him to swim, give him his first kiss and marry him just out of high school. He’d spent childhood listening to Black Sabbath and spraypainting pentagrams onto parking lot toll-booths and popping whatever his friends brought into town--acid, oxy, whatever they could get their hands on--and then blowing up mailboxes, robbing the gas station that paid him under the table two dollars less than minimum wage. There was nothing he could do to change any of that. He opened the sliding door of the van and stepped out.

The purple-sock girl walked on tiptoes, as though trying not to hurt the earthworms under the gravel. “I’ll get it,” said Randy, and peeled open the van’s rear doors. Three jumbo-sized paint buckets leaned against the back seat. He scooped one handle under each palm. Feeling a sharp pain in the small of his back, he shuffled through the gravel as quickly as he could. As he reached the stone walkway, the girl stumbled, bowlegged, towards the doorway, dangling the third bucket between her legs, her arms pressed together. She lurched inside just as the bucket dropped onto the wooden floor. She exhaled and said, “Thanks a lot.”

“Sure thing,” Randy said without stepping away from the door. It was dark in the house. No voices, no television, nothing.

“Do you want something to drink?” she asked.

“Sure,” he said. “Pop?”

The girl stared at him for a moment, then echoed him, as though it were a command: “Pop.” She was tall and pale, with straight black hair, her skin a soft dark around the eyes. “You mean soda?”

The girl disappeared into the inviting gloom. Randy took a tentative step past the buckets on the door mat, and stood inside, massaging the small of his back. Now’s my chance to escape, he thought, forget that old woman and her measly life savings. He heard a refrigerator opening. Once again the kindness of strangers. A squeak and fizz. He could say he was an organic-pecan certifier her parents had hired...

His heart began to pound as the soda fizzed into a glass. He wanted to cry in the girl’s bosom. His weakness disgusted him. A distantly familiar heat oozed from the pit of his stomach, along the inside of his left arm, to his fist.

“Better than a truck stop,” said a crow voice.

He jerked his head around, ready to surrender. Varene stood on the walkway, watching like a jealous angel, her hair a halo of white.

“Don’t worry about the drink,” he called into the house, and walked back towards the van. As he passed Varene, he said quietly, “You following me?”

She blinked a few times.

He stared down at her, the tiny woman under a cloud of grey hair. He looked lost, almost terrified, and it frightened her. When Varene was young she had slept in trailers, barns and fields. She shouldn't be afraid of a stranger now.

A breath of cold wind swept past them. Varene looked up at the sky. “Just getting you away from lightning,” she said.

As the first drops of rain broke with a slap onto the stones, turning them from grey to black, a flash turned the house hot white, and the pain in Varene’s hip flared so hot that she gasped. Better this way, exploding, than throbbing coyly. They hurried towards the van. She leaned against the door, and Randy, thinking she was about to faint, pushed her inside. This touch would have to do, she thought. Strangers were always better anyhow.

A roll of thunder sliced the air. Under the van the ground shook as though pounded by giant horse hooves. Randy sat holding Varene, uncomfortable with the closeness of her tiny body. He didn’t want to look up and see the girl in the doorway, rain falling into the soda glass. Nature had cursed him today. It had conspired to make Varene the one. They smelled the richness of the earth, a dog smell. Soft sheets of water swept over the windows. Varene exhaled luxuriously, closing her eyes as the pain in her hip slid away from her like a ghost.

#

Rain turned dirt to mud. Rain burst onto the windshield, and was flung away by the overactive wipers. Then the wipers squeaked against dry glass. The grey light faded to deep blue and the storm, at one moment so promising, crept away, saggy and spent, over the mountains.

Varene could smell his hot musky odor in the cramped air of the speeding van. His suede shirt clung to him like a dead animal.

“My couch folds out, Tom,” she said.

“The bank said they’d pay for my motel.”

“I thought you quit stealing planes for them.”

“I’ll be getting a job at the hot springs baths.”

Not too likely, she thought. Varene remembered visiting one of the condemned springs after moving to town, after her third husband died. She’d been alone. It was a muggy, worthless day. Rust stains crept down the walls below each pipe, over metal tubs coated with dust, a shower cap left on the floor a decade before. Floating in the air above the tubs was a contraption of ropes and pulleys, built to lower weak-hearted old women and men into the curative waters. In a dream that night, the ropes and pulleys had lowered a screaming woman into formaldehyde. It didn’t matter. If she feared the man next to her, she was dying. “I’m asking you to stay with me,” she said.

“I can afford a motel.”

“Don’t be stupid,” she said.

Turtleback Mountain was black against the sky behind Truth or Consequences. The mining consultant pointed to a motel outside town, and before he got out he patted his thick hand on the driver’s knee. She gave him a grim smile, lips squeezed together.

A few minutes later she deposited Varene and Randy at the Snappy Mart which served as bus station. Varene watched the girl wave from the van and make a U-turn, heading back to her small business dreams. Varene felt lucky to have been born long before. A few stars pierced the sky in the east, and below these lingered the black clouds, and flashes of silent electricity. The market beacon hummed above them with fluorescent light against the twilit sky. The desert air, which had seemed so pure, was oozing with life again. Paper-winged gnats, moths the size of small bats, swirled around the beacon. They divebombed, sailed too far, and bulleted back again, tangling with all the other fools in a frenzy to get closer to the light.

Varene and Randy walked in silence down a wide street, toward a stuccoed two-story structure. In the heyday of the hot springs, it had been a motel, but now it had been converted into efficiency-apartments for retirees.

“Coming up on my barn, Tom.”

Her heart swelled at the sound of her own voice. Calling this stupid place a barn, what a fool she was! Maybe it was really could be barn, she thought, with a nice fluffy stack of hay, where young Varene, seventeen years old, once lay on her back under a lanky cowboy, a pompous hog-tie stud, who gave her a brand new pain in her flesh that she didn't want to ever stop. Had Varene really winked at a barn owl hidden in the rafters, all those years ago? Had that silent bird really winked back?

They approached the dismal building, a door marked 23. This is crazy, Varene thought as she fished into her purse with trembling fingers. Her fingers grazed her old leather wallet, a cold stick of lipstick, the cast-off phone her son gave her, a sharp spare earring, two bunched-up tissues, and finally a single key at the chalky bottom. Yes, this is wonderful and crazy, she told herself, trying to keep her hand steady as she brought the key to the lock. I’m about to be robbed blind.

To Randy the moment was familiar. His partner would give him a final glance to prove that she was smart enough to know a con when she sees one, but needing to believe that people aren’t all bad, would invite him inside anyway. Then she’d lie dreaming that he was an angel when, under cover of darkness, he took what he wanted and sneaked away.

He'd never seen a face after he’d betrayed it. He never saw the heartbreak when his partner woke to find her new friend, and her savings, gone. When I steal from this one, he thought, I’ll do it in front of her eyes. She deserves to see who I am.

Varene opened the door and flicked on the light. A single room. A kitchenette on one wall, yellowed venetian blinds at the windows. It surprised Randy to see the unmade bed in the center of the room, and it surprised Varene too, for she’d forgotten what a solitary woman she was. The way the sheets were bunched up, a person could have been lying there.

Randy pictured his ex in there, the sheet falling at the small of her back. He still couldn’t put her features together, didn’t want to, but he smelled Lexie’s baby-powder perfume, her sour breath as she kissed him without closing her eyes, after being missing all night and coming up with another story about having to take care of her friend Cheryl, who had been beat up outside the casino, but didn’t have any bruises to show for it.

Varene yanked her sheets tight, erasing Lexie, and then Randy and she stood alone in the room.

“Would you like some tea, Tom?” she asked.

Rage swept to his chest in a wave, and he looked down at the carpet. She liked Tom but she cared nothing for Randy, he thought.

“No, that’s all right.”

“Coffee?”

“No.”

“I know what you want. Something strong.”

She had seen his bewildered look before, on the faces of men who didn’t realize how much they'd drunk.

“Can I sit down?” he said.

“Oh, I’m sorry. Please.”

The couch caved in under his weight. Springs creaked, the brown cloth stretched, he sunk deep. He looked down, unwilling to watch Varene putter around the fridge. His stiff, dirty boots pressed into the carpet. He felt sorry for them for ending up on his feet. He heard Varene’s shoes, cheap soft rubber-soled old lady shoes, squeaking on the linoleum. She might have been a beautiful woman once, he thought. This was where she planned to spend the last twenty years of her life, the length of a whole childhood wasted in this prison. He imagined her hot breath, the way her body might feel if he were choking her the way he choked that dog. An act of mercy. Would he be able to breathe easily afterwards? Would he have the peace of mind to eat her food and take her jewelry if she were dead? He wondered what kind of dinner he could make from the scraps in her cabinets. Food, quiet, peace. His poor boots. He swiveled them, toe to heel, toe to heel.

“Tom? You all right?”

His hands were hot. “Please don’t call me Tom,” he said.

“I’m gonna boil up some hot dogs, I’m hungry,” she said. Her head felt light. She walked behind the counter into the kitchenette. Then she turned. “What?”

“Don’t call me Tom. I never said my name was Tom.”

“Sure, you...” She looked across the room at the stranger on her couch.

“You assumed. You looked down here.” He patted his belt buckle.

She glanced at her own knuckles as she clutched the counter.

The couch held him in its soft paw. He looked at the blinds, at the stucco white ceiling, back at Varene. He didn’t want to feel this way. His leg was trembling, his body heavy. His voice howled like a sleepwalker trying to hoist himself from a dream: “My name isn’t Tom.”

“Well,” she said, her voice calm. “What’s your name, then?” She opened a drawer, next to her waist.

“I told you,” he said, “I con people like you into giving me money. I told you that. Why don’t you listen?”

She glared at him as her hands fumbled in the drawer. “I know,” she said. “It’s okay. What’s your name?”

“What are you doing?” he said, feeling strength return to his legs. He wouldn’t be suckered today. He rose from the couch. He felt powerful, like an insect stretching from its skin. His limbs were vast, his boots on the carpet miles away.

“Getting hot dogs,” Varene said.

He advanced towards her. “Gun in there?”

“Oscar Meyer.” She held up a package of wieners.

“I know you got a gun.”

“I’m hungry,” she said. “Aren’t you?”

“Shut up,” he said, stopping an arm’s length away from her. “Look at me.” She obeyed him.

Varene thought, This is a just any man with brown eyes. “I see you,” she said. “I know who you are. Whatever your name is.” She glanced at his belt buckle, then his face. “Tom. Hank. Geronimo.”

“It’s Randy,” he said.

“Well listen, Randy,” Varene said. “Before I turned fifty, I hitchhiked by myself. I stole rabbits from farms and ate them wet.” She didn’t dare release him from her gaze, so she focused on his right eye. She said, “I wanted to screw every man who passed me on the road. And I did. So don’t warn me about your kind of man. I like your kind of man.” She listened to her voice, the clipped, gravelly voice of an old woman, and it sounded funny to her. She stood before him, holding a bulwark of hot dogs wrapped tight in plastic. She could feel blood rushing to her face. Blushing like a girl. It didn’t matter what happened now.

She said, “There’s nothing you can take that wasn’t already taken.”

He exhaled slowly. At last somebody looked into his eye. He lifted his hand towards her face. No need to tell any more stories. No need to wait for her to fall asleep. No need to tiptoe out in the darkness. This was her gift to him. They were not afraid of what was going to happen. At last somebody saw who he was, who he was becoming. The dingy apartment was beautiful, his strength and hers were viciously beautiful. His hand cupped her face. The touch began as a gentle one. Her cheek felt soft, and his fingers felt soft, released from their calloused skin. He gripped her face, harder now. Her breath on his palm. She could soon forget all she needed to forget. He saw her fist, squeezing the package of hot dogs tighter and tighter. If she kept that up, he thought, she was going to ruin his dinner.