The Third Talmage Powell Crime MEGAPACK™: 25 Classic Mysteries

The Dame Across the River

Originally published in Manhunt, April 1958.

There was a house across the river. It meant nothing at first. Too many other things were real, thirty one-thousand dollar bills in each of the money belts Trantham and I wore day and night — and Ingram.

The money, and Ingram, and the river. Those were the real things when we first crossed the river. We had lost Ingram somewhere back yonder, we thought, in the endless days and miles of running. We couldn’t be sure. Ingram was a hard man, and a tenacious cop. Pathological in his tenaciousness. Nothing mattered to Ingram except winning.

Now the river was our shield and shelter. Even Ingram’s authority meant nothing here, unless he went through channels. And local and state governmental bodies in Mexico moved slowly. There were too many men in such bodies who carried a resentment of the large, powerful nation on their north border. It meant something to them to have the big northern neighbor asking for something. It gave them a chance to be important.

Trantham despised the hole we had run to. It was a sprawling adobe house on the edge of a village. Comfortable enough, and there was Zangara to cook and keep the place clean. But of an evening, the faint and only breeze of the day would carry the smells of the village to us. Sweat and sour cooking and refuse both human and animal.

Trantham would sit in the patio and curse. He made a serious occupation of it, cursing the heat and mosquitoes, and mesquite, and the resaca land itself. He hated it all. He was tired, bitter, and lonely.

I was sick of the place myself, and just as filled up with Trantham and his cursing. We were here because he’d left a set of fingerprints when we’d stole the money. He’d been fingerprinted before, Ingram had almost got us at the very start.

Now that we were here, I thought we should make the best of it. What else could be done? In a few days we’d know for certain whether or not we’d shaken Ingram. If he’d lost us, we could reenter somewhere in the Big Bend country. From there, I hoped Trantham would go to Vegas and spend his money. He talked enough of the lights and activity and of touching a woman again. With only stolid Indian faces in the village, Trantham tortured himself with the thought of a clean face and smooth slender figure.

For myself, I liked the idea of Oregon and the purchase of a business. I had made mine. I wore it next to the skin in the heavy belt. I was finished with that sort of thing — if Ingram had lost us and if we survived the heat and filth and screaming boredom on this side of the river.

Nobody in the village spoke much English. A few words. Even their Spanish was a bastard language of old Castilian and Indian words and corrupted American words that had lost their meaning and pronunciation in crossing the dividing line between the two countries.

Had there been a fluent linguist in the village it would have done us no good. They were friendly at first. But that didn’t last long. Trantham’s contempt for them took care of that. He despised them all, even more than he despised their land. And they sensed it. I could feel their sensing of it. I saw it in their eyes and silence, and their hatred reached out to us like a dark and tangible thing. A lurking, old hatred. It was spawned in the days of the Spanish conquistadors — and Trantham had fanned it and revitalized it with his curses and kicks and raw unconcealed contempt.

Soon, except for Zangara, we were quite alone, as isolated as we might have been on an island in the middle of the sea. The village was there, and we were here, and they had marked us taboo.

They stood and watched silently as we came into the village to buy food. They sold us rotten eggs and meat crawling with maggots. Or they told us by gestures that they had no meat, and we lived on grubby vegetables for two or three days at a time, until we sent Zangara into the village with enough money to bribe away a scrawny chicken or cut of mutton.

Zangara took our money and never returned change, though I suspected he was buying in the village at current prices. He was a tall, thin man of indeterminate age. His skin was like dark brown leather stretched over his bones. He had a great hawk-beak nose and pointed chin and crags of bone over his glistening black eyes. His coarse black hair grew low on his round, sloping forehead.

“Mucho dinero, señor,” he would say when I tried to find out how much an item had cost. Much money. All the money he had carried into the village.

Trantham would curse him until the curses ended in a choked gasp. And Zangara would look at him with his face a blank, brown skull. Trantham would wheel and stalk off, aching to break Zangara’s chicken-thin neck in his two heavy hands. But he never laid a finger on Zangara. We needed the man. Without him, we might buy nothing from the village. He was our final contact with the world. With something beyond this sun-baked adobe house and a pair of money belts holding thirty thousand dollars apiece.

As if our isolation were not bad enough, Trantham and I began to keep separated from each other. I was ready to gag on his raving. The mere sound of his voice became even more hateful than the endless heat and humidity. And my efforts to accept things calmly infuriated him.

We never permitted the tension to reach the breaking point. Each realized how dependent he was on the other. Each heard in the silence of the nights the throb, throb of hatred from the village and the rustling shadow of Ingram across the river.

By unspoken agreement Trantham and I avoided each other. If he were in the patio, I remained on the front porch reading or playing solitaire — and I even invented two new solitaire games of my own — or looking through the rusty screening at the river or mesquite.

And all the while this house stood across the river.

It was set apart from the small town over there as our house was set apart. It was frame, and looked very small from this distance. Brown, as if it needed paint and repairs. A house that had stood empty for some time, sleeping in the shadow of the cottonwood tree growing at the corner of the yard.

Then one day Trantham was very quiet. He was on the front porch and I was inside, reading. The very lack of activity on his part finally penetrated my consciousness. He never sat still or was silent for very long. Yet it seemed now a long time since I had heard any sign of him.

I threw aside the six-months-old, dog-eared magazine and walked to the front door.

The heat was a crawling, sticky thing, clouding the mind and souring the body. Yet Trantham was standing in the full glare of the sun, in the front yard.

He was looking at the house across the river.

There was movement at the house, the remote figure of a girl going inside. She was back out in a few seconds, lifting something to her eyes. A brief flash of light caught on the binoculars. She had them trained on Trantham.

I looked at him. His shirt was black with sweat, his hair around his balding crown stuck to his skull with more sweat. He was a big, tall bruiser with powerful rounded shoulders, a heavy chest and corded neck.

He stood unmindful of the sun that he had been cursing this morning. He waved.

I looked across the river.

The girl waved back.

Now it was Trantham who moved. He brushed past me like a bull elephant, giving no indication he knew I was there.

I heard him rummaging violently in his room. Then he came out carrying a pair of binoculars.

I watched him as he raised the glasses and looked at the girl. I saw him suck in his breath, and I saw a tremor cross his shoulders.

I looked toward the girl myself. But without glasses she was too distant from me for her beauty to do to me what it had done to Trantham.

I watched them a few moments longer as they waved and gestured toward each other; and then I went in my room and slammed the door.

Trantham was in much better spirits at supper. Several times he chuckled to himself as we munched on frijoles and tortillas.

For him, the boredom had been shattered today.

They played the game three days. Lurking in the house, the heat crawling through all my cells and veins, I hated Trantham for the first time. I’d never liked him, but this was something different.

I wondered how I could get the binoculars from him. I knew he wouldn’t give them up, and if I challenged him for them there’d be only one result. We were that much on edge.

At lunch the fourth day, Zangara had disappeared. I stood in the kitchen and shouted his name three or four times.

From the doorway, Trantham said quietly, “He’s gone over the river.”

I spun around. “What for?”

Trantham grinned. His face was big and heavy and oily. “He went across the river with a few bucks. That town over there is more Mex than American. He can find out.”

“You damned fool!”

His grin turned to a chuckle. “She’s a real looker, a real doll. Lonely and bored over there, I’m betting.”

“With Ingram in the house maybe.”

“Maybe. I’ll know tonight. Zangara will find out for sure. Those Mex boogers over there will know everything. They’ll talk to Zangara. He’ll get it all.”

I kicked the door closed behind him when he left the room.

I woke from a fitful sleep that night to hear voices. Trantham’s and Zangara’s.

“Good,” Trantham said.

“Lone woman,” Zangara said. “She work. Drugstore. In the town. No strange white man come to town.”

“Fine,” Trantham said.

I swung my feet off my lumpy rope and frame bed and stood up in the darkness. My body was slimy with sweat. The nights never brought much relief from the heat, only the heavy muck smell of the resaca land.

I heard Trantham leave the next room. I started after him.

He was already at the far side of the front yard when I reached the door. I stood with the pulse in my solar plexus beating hard against the heat and watched his heavy shadow blend into the mesquite.

I turned. Zangara’s black bead eyes jumped at me in the yellow lamplight. I cursed him for the first time. “Get the hell out of here!”

“Si, señor,” he said, bowing his way out backward.

I went in my bedroom and sat on the rough-hewn plank that framed the bed. I lighted a cigarette, a dry, hot, strong Mexican cigarette, and tried to get my mind off of it.

The rotten luck, having it happen to Trantham.

A lonely girl. A flirtation across the river. Soon now he would be hearing a woman’s voice, low and laughing.

I was out early the next morning with the binoculars in my hand. The girl was outside, walking across the yard. I got my first close up of her. A very beautiful Mexican girl. Black, waving hair, black, flashing eyes, full red lips. Full rich figure. Hips swinging as she walked up on the porch of the house across the river.

She reached out a hand. A man stepped from the house and took it.

The man was not Trantham, and my flesh was icy under its outer heat and sweat.

The man was Zangara.

The girl laid her head on his shoulder, looked up into his skull face and smiled. And they walked into the house together.

This morning I found Trantham.

He had washed up on the river bank. His throat had been cut. His money belt was gone.

I buried him under some rocks. Then I came back to the house.

Like Trantham, I am carrying thirty thousand dollars.

Zangara and the river are before me.

The village is behind me. I can feel the hatred and silence of it.

Trantham... the stupid, utter fool.