Acie heard talk over the years about places along rivers and lakes and swamps that told of strange doings. It was the stuff you really believed as kids and laughed at with your friends once you got to school. Stories about talking fig trees, and having to speak orphan babies names out loud when you carried them across bridges, to keep their mommas’ ghosts from getting them. He figured Boggs knew the superstitions too; 
but the old man wasn’t here for magic, Boggs wanted privacy.
“Slow it up over here! Hear me?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Okay, let’s dump this cracker and get out of here, Acie.”
Acie had said nothing about the big sack on the floor. He knew what was likely in it, but not who it was or why he had been put in there. What he was focused on was the money. The money for Garland. That’s all that mattered.
His nose was full of the swamp. He tasted mud, wet wood and dead birds.
The sack was heavy. The body inside must have been a good old boy. Plus, Boggs had put stones in it and tied it shut with a thick rope.
“Stand up at the same time,” Boggs said. Acie was half-crouched while the man seemed to take forever to get on his feet. The canoe wobbled. They tossed the sack overboard. It slipped beneath the floating Sweetgum leaves. Until they dumped the body, Acie hadn’t noticed the other sack rolled up underneath the first one.
“That was Longmire,” Boggs said, nodding to the swamp. “A man who didn’t keep his commitments. You kept your commitment, Acie.”
Acie felt a tickle down the line of his back, like daddy long-legs were running on his spine. Probably it was sweat.
“Okay,” Boggs huffed. “Pay time.” He pulled an envelope from his chest pocket of his dungarees. Then he pulled a pistol from a back pocket. The thick rag came out with it. He leaned forward and held the envelope and pistol against the thwart of the canoe.
Acie sat silently.
“Lot of money in that envelope, Acie. And you earn it. Truth be told, you did most the paddling.”
“Sir, all I want is to pay for my brother’s medicine.”
“I know your story. I know about sickness, Acie,” Boggs said, spitting into the water. “I got the cancer. Had it for years. Gonna get me soon enough, though.” He looked down at the pistol.
“Hundred ways to get the cancer. In my case, a woman put a spell on me aways back,” he said.
Acie wondered if he’d been focused so much on the money he didn’t truly think about the dangers.
Boggs looked like he was in a world of pain. He looked like he was fixing to say something, but instead he took up the pistol and pointed it at Acie’s face.
“Sorry, kid, loose ends get snipped,” he said. “Company’s orders.”
“The Wet Knot” appears in the literary anthology Dark Lane Anthology, Vol. 8, edited by Tim Jeffreys and available now from Dark Lane Books. Click here to order.
