Yellow Mama E zine

Mud's End

by Anthony Lukas

           Scar backed the van along the pier and into the shed at its end, shut off the engine and killed the lights.
          Shoes pulled the big wooden shed doors closed then flicked the switch of the shed's few dim lights.
          The shed was about 30 feet long, built on a pier that extended out over the river's estuary, like the other piers that lined the riverbank, some with sheds, others with cabins at their ends. 
           Scar slid from the van and met Shoes at the van's back door. Scar was so named because of the jagged scar along his right cheek, the result of an altercation with a debtor who had opposed Scar's attempt to collect the former's gambling debt to Scar's boss. Shoes’s moniker came from his penchant for wearing expensive Italian shoes, an oddity as the rest of his clothes were unremarkable. 
          Scar opened the van's back doors, and he and Shoes hauled the body out onto the wooden floor. O'Neil had been a big man when alive and he hadn't gotten any smaller when dead, so                Shoes did most of the hauling as he was the bigger of the partners.
          They dragged O'Neil to the end of the shed and set him down. Scar grabbed a latch set in the floor and swung a trapdoor open, setting it down quietly. He glanced at the blackness below, then said, “Okay, let's do it.” They grabbed the corpulent corpse and slid it through the hole, dumping it into the river below. Scar started to close the trapdoor, but Shoes was still crouched over the opening and had an odd look on his face.
          “What?” said Scar.
          “I didn't hear no splash.”
          “What'da you mean?”
          “I didn't hear no splash,” repeated Shoes.
          "What the hell are you talking about. . . ?”
           But Shoes had gotten up, gone to the van, and come back with the big five-cell, the same one that they had used to bash O'Neil. Scar thumbed it on and shined it down the hole. “Shit,” he said.
           Scar looked down and saw O'Neil lying in the mud ten feet below the hole in maybe an inch or two of water. “Shit,” he said.
           They'd had to tail O'Neil for hours, waiting for their chance to grab him. He'd been doing his rounds, making his collections, the same collections from which he had been skimming, the same skimming that had led to his demise. And there had been several non-collection stops for drinks and bar dice and shooting the shit before moving on. And now the tide was out.
           “We can't leave him there,” said Shoes. 
           “No,” said Scar
           “It'll be light and someone will see him.”
            “Yeah, yeah, I get it,” said Scar, staring down into the hole. “We got to push him out further.”
            “How we gonna do that?”
            “We gotta go down there.”
             “Shit,” said Shoes.
            “Probably is,” said Scar. “C'mon,” and got up and headed to the shed's doors.
             Out the doors, down the short pier and around to the side and into the narrow space between their pier and the next which had a cabin at the end of it. They slid down the slick embankment and into the dank dark under their pier, making too much noise for Scar's taste.  Shoes raised the flashlight, but Scar hissed “No, someone might see,” looking up at the cabin. 
            Scar had seen an old man at the cabin on and off in the past. Now its windows were dark and there seemed to be no signs of life. Still . . .
           Shoes stuck the flashlight in his belt, and they waited for their eyes to adjust to the gloom. Further out they could see O'Neil's body looking like a ghostly apparition in the faint light that came down from the still-open trapdoor. 
             They slowly made their way through the blackness, feeling along from piling to slimy piling, trying not to breathe the rank river smells. Then Shoes stopped and cursed and was scooping at the mud.
             “Quiet,” said Scar, peering up at the cabin. “What?”
             “My Valentino came off.” Shoes came up with his mud-slimed shoe and shook it, spraying muck over both of them. “Hey!” said Scar, “watch it.”
             Shoes leaned against a piling and squished his shoe back on, then they slopped over to O'Neil. They stood over him for a moment.
            “What a pain in the ass he was and is,” said Scar. “C'mon, lets drag him out.”
             They both grunted as they tugged the heavy corpse out from under the pier, dragging it toward the open water.
            “How far we got to go?” said Shoes, pulling at the now semi-floating body, the water now up to just past his knees 
             “Not far, it drops off here pretty soon . . .” and Shoes yelped as he suddenly sank to his chest and frantically tried to scramble backwards. Scar let go of the stiff, shoving it hard away into the river, and grabbed at Shoes, hauling him back to shallower water. They stood there drenched, slimed, panting, and cursing when there was sudden light. 
            The back door to the cabin had opened and an old, scrawny man stood there. He stared at them and yelled, “There! Told you I heard something funny goin on!” and then a cop came out and pointed her big flashlight at Scar and Shoes. 
            “What are you doing there?” she said.
            Scar had opened his mouth to say something when he felt a bump against his leg. He looked down and there was the floating pain in the ass O'Neil nudging up against him.
            “Shit,” he said. 

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      Former attorney, former chocolatier, current national park worker. Anthony Lukas has been previously published in Yellow Mama, as well as Black Petals, Shotgun Honey, OverMyDeadBody.com, Bewildering Stories, and Mysterical-E magazines

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     Luke Lester is an artist and writer from Victoria, Canada. He has recently been published in Absolute Underground, Black Petals, Flash Fiction North, Paragraph Planet, Ultramarine Literary Review, and Yellow Mama. More of his art and writing can be found on his blog: The Other Place.