"Harm May's Vegas Money" by Sheldon Lee Compton

Sheldon Lee Compton is the author of twelve books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. His novel, Oblivion Angels, is currently nominated for the Chaffin Award for Fiction, and the Independent Fiction Alliance named his novel, Alice, a best book of the year. His work has also been published in Best Small Fictions 2019 and Best Small Fictions 2022.

Harm May’s Vegas Money

Archie Combs lets his chickens roam around my bottom, telling me that they’re okay, just hunting for worms. “They ain’t layin no more this year so I ain’t feedin them. They can get out there and get something theirself.”

I will never understand Archie. Then sometimes I think I should. When Ginger was around, she’d always tell me to have patience with old people. She was good-hearted that way. Patience was what I drained her of before she left. I took every ounce she could give and she dried up, became a husk of someone me and other people used to know. Even her parents avoided her when they could. And it was unfair.

Ginger was who she was because of what I had put her through. People didn’t understand that, and if there’s one thing good about me at all, it’s that I never joined in the beat down Ginger party. It wasn’t because of guilt because nothing would get rid of my guilt for the ways I behaved while I was drinking, four solid years of the worst I put her through.

The last two years before a drunk gets sober are the hardest on the people who love them. There should be a huge sign around a drunk’s neck, like one of those bright green ones with white letters the highway department uses. Or at least some kind of warning. If I had it my way, every alcoholic in Kentucky should be registered the same way sex predators are registered. You should have to go door to door in the neighborhood and let them know, knock on the damn door and say, Hey I’m an alcoholic.

Today I’m in the horse lot looking generally busy while mostly just moving old brush around from one corner to the other and there’s Archie using a little shovel dozer widing the creek that runs between our places in case my barn crib falls in and clogs up everybody on the creek. Because of this, I’m bound to help by obligation. I wave at him so he sees me. Archie is stone deaf mostly, even without a piece of machinery running.

I cup my hands over my mouth. “Need some help, Archie?”

Archie’s about five feet two inches tall with a long, gray beard that gives him a certain look that’s hard not to picture. He wears these bright red suspenders and his pant legs tucked into his boots. Looks like an elf is what I’m saying. I’ve never seen him not working, and he’s been retired I don’t know how many years.

“Can you drive a standard?” he asks.

“I can.”

Without turning the excavator off Archie yells over the clatter and says to get into his truck, which I just noticed is parked sideways in my driveway. He’s looking for me to pull him out from where he’s got stuck.

“I’ve got in here and buried my tire down right in behind this big slate rock,” he says.

I look into the creek and in the general direction of his back right tire, the one he’s pointing at. I give a quick study for a few seconds, and then nod like I know what he’s talking about. Waiting like I’m in line for the bathroom there at the edge of the creek with Archie’s tire smoking to hell.

“Jump in there and just give it a good go. Try not to drop my transmission out the bottom.”

Now the first thing I worry about is dropping the transmission out the bottom. Not sure how that would go, but it’s bad for sure. Archie’s truck is a strange bright purple with no bed. Instead of a bed it’s this welded metal mesh setup. So I hop in.

Normally I would worry in situations like this, always bothered I’m going to do something wrong. It’s a common thing. Matthew Kendell asked me to chain up to the front of his truck a few months ago and pull him with my truck to his house. He’d broke down for the tenth or so time since buying it from a shady guy in Knockemstiff across the river from Ashland. He’s had trouble with it ever since. Didn’t help a bit that day that I jerked him all over the place pulling him not more than a quarter mile. Ended up breaking the chain so that it snapped toward him at pure lightning speed. Wrapped around the whole left side from the headlight to the back of the door and left dents from every one of the links all up the side.

Perched here in Archie’s truck about to gun the shit out of it with a chain linking us up, I’m not so much worried about dropping his transmission as I am about shooting the chain straight into his head and taking the whole top of his skull off. But I start gunning anyway.

Smoke and more smoke starts lifting up from the back tires like somebody threw a cherry bomb in there, so after ten or twelve seconds, I stop and get out before he can say anything about me keeping at it.

“I’m about to blow both them back tires out, Archie!”

I wave my arms to get him to turn the Bobcat off. He does and dismounts, comes up the bank to stand with me. He pulls hard on his beard and gives it all a quick inspection. He’s about to say something then stops and squats down.

“What’s that yonder, stuck in the mud?”

I close the truck door and come around beside him. Down in the trenched out place I been spinning is a hard edge. People like me and Archie who’ve lived in the hills all our lives and come across our share of fossils and tree trunks that had turned into stones before time was even a thing recognize when something is outside of that nature. It comes naturally, not through learning, not through a science class somewhere. This hard edge wasn’t natural. It wasn’t a slab of shale, it wasn’t packed sediment. It was something else.

Because we both knew this, we stood for a fairly long time just looking at it. It was the same color as the wet mud around it, an unhealthy brown with streaks of more brilliant brown, darker to almost black. I honestly couldn’t figure out how Archie had spotted it. I pat him on the back.

“Looks like we ought to dig a little more gentle.”

Archie’s not tugging at his beard now. He’s stroking it. The difference between working on a problem and studying something interesting. Since he’s not saying anything, I go get the lighter tools.

I come back with a couple small hammers and a paint brush.

“What’re we doing with the paintbrush?” Archie asks.

I make a dusting motion with the brush, nice and gentle. “You know like on the shows where they uncover rare stuff in the desert. You brush it off real easy.”

Archie looks at me. He’s not smiling, but I can tell he’s amused.

“Well it was a thought anyway.”

“Go ahead and hang on to it, Calton” he says. “Never can tell.”

The sun is high and within a few minutes I have my shirt off. Sweat’s running in my eyes, the sunburn to come is already tightening the skin across my shoulders. Archie’s digging carefully with the claw end of the hammer. He chops out a trench around this encrusted object that’s beginning to look like a jar. When the trench encircles the object, Archie tosses the hammer and digs his fingers underneath, wiggling his fingers until he’s basically holding the object in his hands. He carefully pulls up and up and the object dislodges and comes away, but is still covered in sediment.

“The brush?” I say, offering it like a scalpel.

Archie smiles a little and takes it, begins brushing the crust away.

And by the saints in heaven, it is a jar.

Archie lays the brush down and starts smearing the dirt away with his thumbs. The lid is badly rusted but intact. He looks at me and the looks says to me that he’s about to give it a good shake to see what might happen. I nod. Shake away, Archie.

He brings the jar to his ear and shakes it just a bit, and a bit harder.

“There’s something in there ain’t no doubt about it. I can hear it.”

He hands me the jar. I shake it and listen. Swish thud, swish thud, swish thud. Whatever it is it’s sliding back and forth inside there. I’m wondering how well the lid held up. After all, that’s going to tell the tale. Our little treasure might be just as it was, or it could be a clod of slick mud.

“Go ahead,” Archie says.

“Me?”

“Yeah. Why not? It ain’t going to explode or nothing.”

“I don’t suppose so.”

I decide not to take it slow. Get it over with. If I was bound to get something nasty all over me, I might as well do it fast. Gripping the lid harder than I probably needed to, I twist it quickly and it screws off straight away.

“Humph, well there you go,” Archie says.

He takes the jar from me in a clean swipe and gets his pocket knife out, flicks it open, and begins picking down to the contents. Sounds fall way. There’s only the faint flicks of Archie’s knife blade tinkling the sides of the jar. Then he stops. It’s easy to see he’s holding his breath.

“What? What is it?”

“There’s no way I’m seein what I’m seein,” Archie says. He reaches in and pulls a wad of dollar bills out. An ancient rubber band breaks and floats to the ground. “I know what this is. This, young man, is going to come out to exactly thirty-thousand dollars.”

I look at the lump in his hand. I can see there’s dollar bills there. Buried treasure! I’m clapping him on the back but then it dawns on me.

“What do you mean thirty-thousand? What do you mean with an exact figure like that? Plus, hell, they’s no way in…the…world we just dug up thirty grand here on the creek bank in my front yard.”

“I know it’s that much exactly. Or well exactly enough. I won’t be off by more than five or ten dollars, I guarantee you that.”

We take the wad of bills to the middle of the yard and begin peeling them apart. All hundreds. When I notice he’s pulled off five or six hundreds and that the roll looks no different, I start thinking Archie could be right. He finishes and there’s thirty-thousand on the nose.

I can’t speak. Two things have me stoned out from reality. There’s thirty grand just flopped all over the ground in front of me and Archie knew — he knew — the exact amount.

Archie sits on the grass in front of all the bills and pulls his knees up to his chest, wraps his arms around them. He starts laughing and I’ve had enough. I tell him to stop with the shit and tell me what we’re going to do. Split it? And, in the meantime, how about letting me know when it was exactly that he became a wizard.

“It’s Harm May’s Vegas money.” He goes back to laughing and then buries his face into the palm of his hands. From there he continues, “Harm was just back from Las Vegas in 1957, I mean had just got back. Won,” and here he points at the money, “thirty-thousand dollars at Binion’s.”

Sounds crazy to me.

“Okay so why is this that money?”

“Has to be. I bet you anything you won’t find a year on not one of those bills that’s over 1957. How would that be for proof?”

It was a good enough idea for proof that I didn’t even answer. I started checking bills. Every one of them. None were dated after 1957.

“Holy shit,” I said.

“Holy shit indeed, young man.”

“So we split it. Holy shit. Fifteen-thousand dollars apiece.”

“Ain’t got a problem with that, but I got to thinkin about the time you…confirmed it all there checkin the years. Let’s talk to Danny at the historical society. Anybody my age will know exactly what this is and how important it is to the lore of the town of Red Knife.”

After strangling Archie, imagining it with a small smile he may or may not have noticed, I realized I still had no clue how he knew all this.

“Money in a jar ain’t really history, Archie. Unless you got more than that.”

“Oh I got more than that. It has to do with the 1957 flood and a poor feller by the name of Harm May.”

“That name does sound familiar.”

“Probably because he’s the feller went to Vegas won thirty-thousand dollars came back and left it in this trailer he was living in beside his house that burned to the ground at some point people could hardly remember.” Archie took a deep breath and kept on. “Next day was the ’57 flood. Some fifteen feet of water. People in downtown was takin to their second stories, if they had them, to get away from flood water in their first stories. Water got Harm’s trailer and floated in about forty feet north of his burned out house. Completely flooded—”

“Holy shit.”

“Holy shit indeed, young man. That jar of money was gone. Folks looked everywhere as much as they could, what with their houses destroyed and vehicles flooded over and their property floated off on the Big Sandy.”

“So wait. This is where Harm May used to live?”

“This is where, yep. Jar must of got mucked over and sunk in. They’s feet and feet of mud after the flood.”

We sat quietly for a handful of seconds. The bills had started to dry and were flapping a little in a cool breeze whipping through. The clouds were cotton but coloring gray and moving slower than before when it was all bright white and blue and the clouds were big fluffs floating across the sky, morphing into various interpretable shapes.

We divided the money, each of us making multiple counts afterwards before Archie finally left. Alone with two handfuls of excavated bills, I decided instead of going inside to hide the money, I’d instead go buy a tamper, use it to flatten a spot for one of those little buildings that had a porch and little windows, a door just like on a real house. Spending time in my house just made me depressed these days. And most of all it was something to do besides think of Ginger.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Despite my honest intentions to get started on a section of the bottom field for a tiny building slash house sort of thing, I found myself parked outside Ginger’s house. I drove straight there, and I knew why; everybody looking at the situation would have been able to tell why. I wanted to show her I had some money and maybe things could change. I thought she put a lot of importance on money when we were together, either because she grew up poor or because I couldn’t keep steady work back then and she had to constantly shuffle around what money we had to pay bills. She did this the whole time I was spending hundreds of dollars on vodka and destroying parts of the house expensive to repair—doors, windows, a stove once. It cost her a lot living with me, in all the ways things can cost a person. She lost money, but she also lost her pride and her happiness and her desire to improve her life beyond daily survival. What she went through put blinders on her, made her feel the only thing she could do well was not get herself killed by a drunk on a particularly bad night.

This should only mean anything to me, but I never laid a hand on her. She hit me a few times, once chipping a bone in my jaw. All my abuse against her was with words, the fastest punching, hardest hitting kind of blow you can strike against another. Words sculpted and refined like sharpening a knife blade, one stroke at a time, down and out, and done during the drinking alone time.

Ginger come to expect the worst when I’d go to the barn and not come back for a couple hours. She learned that what I’d been doing in the barn was drinking steady and sharpening my tongue, using all the hurt as a whetstone. The biggest part of me dreaded knocking the door.

Like in a movie, I stand on the porch longer than would be normal for a visitor. I wasn’t a visitor; I was a haunt from the past. I was a bad dream coming back up in the night, except worse. Here I was in the daylight. Finally, I knock. I hear somebody coming through the house and a man opens the door.

He’s tall and lanky and has this crooked, big-toothed smile girls go crazy for. Has on a belt buckle plainly got from rodeoing. Looks to be for bull riding, as best as I can tell. His Wrangler shirt and jeans are muddy and oil-stained. He has dirt under his nails.

“What?”

His voice is about what I’d expected it to be, too. Quick, pushy right off the bat.

“Ginger around?” I say, and look around his shoulder into the house. He shifts so that we’re eye to eye again.

“Old boyfriend, huh?”

I nod, look around him again. He stomps on my foot and pushes me in the chest at the same time and I fall back flat on my ass. The wad of money in my back pocket feels like it broke my tailbone.

“Hell, you dick!”

“What’d you call me?” he says.

“Called you a dick,” I say, and point behind him. When he turns his head, I slap him in the side of the jaw and he goes down like a sack of taters.

About that time, Ginger comes through, sees her lanky guy two-by-four flat in the living room floor, and immediately bends to him, lightly smacks his cheek a couple times. He stirs then takes a wild, blind swing around at nothing. She leans back and pats him on the chest.

“It’s me, honey,” she says, but she’s looking at me when she says it.

“What the actual fuck, Cal?”

The lanky guy is scrambling up. He’s looking at me, too, and with about the same look as Ginger. He makes a move toward me, but Ginger grabs him.

“Get out of here, Cal. Just go. Go, go!”

But I ain’t going, not until I show her Harm May’s Vegas money. So I pull the wad out of my back pocket and hold it up in the air. It says all I need to say. Ginger pulls the lanky guy back by the arm.

“Stay in here,” she says. “I’ll talk to him.”

The lanky guy starts like he’s going to make trouble with her now. He takes her by the arm.

“Get your hands off me!”

He immediately does, stands a second, then disappears somewhere into the house.

“Got him trained good.”

“Shut up,” she says. “Where’d that money come from? Have you graduated to a life of crime now or what?”

“Nah, me and Archie found it over there at the house digging out the creek with that Bobcat of his. It’s fifteen-thousand I got here. Don’t believe me, just count it.”

I hand her the money. I’m hoping she takes it as a sign of my good intentions. She counts it standing in the doorway while I’m still standing on the porch, my knuckles buzzing from popping her guy. While she’s counting, I ask, “So who’s the guy?”

She’s still counting but says, “Matt Lee. You don’t know him.”

“I sure don’t, but I bet he ain’t got no fifteen-thousand laying around.”

Ginger stops counting and looks me up and down. She steps onto the porch and closes the front door.

“What? You thinking I’m going to break off with Matt because you show up with what he makes in a couple months with the oil company?”

That pops my bubble pretty quick. No, I didn’t expect her to do that. I didn’t have a clue anybody in Red Knife was making that much money doing anything. I start thinking about where I can ask around about an oil field job. Seeing Ginger folding the wad of bills back and shaking her head tells me all I need to know. I’m thinking quick.

“Well, how much of that do you see? I mean, does he just cash his check and bring it right to you? No, I bet not. I bet he gives you enough for the light bill, the water bill, maybe half on the rent, and then the rest is who knows where. Probably up Goose Creek with Paul Charles and that bunch.”

“Matt don’t do drugs. And he does more than pay bills.”

“Oh yeah, like what?”

“Like we go out and eat. We go riding four-wheelers. We go do things. We don’t sit around the fucking house looking for things to fight about.”

I can see coming here was a mistake. But she’s not handing the money back to me, so there’s that.

“Okay.” I hold my hands up, then put my hand out. “I get it. I’ll take my money and go.”

She pats the rolled up bills in the palm of her hand. “What did you mean Harm May’s Vegas money?”

So I tell her all about it. She grins in a way that actually worries me.

“So Archie’s got the other half? That’s interesting.”

“Why’s that interesting?” I ask. I get a low feeling in my gut. Ginger’s never been a bad person, but she’s always had a weakness for money. What I saw of that weakness may not have been all of it. It’s looking that way at least. She steps back into the living room, leaves the door open, but doesn’t invite me in.

“Matt! Hey Matt!”

Matt comes like a sick puppy out of the kitchen, sees me still there and straightens up.

“Cal here knows a guy.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

It couldn’t get much worse. Matt Lee, a guy I didn’t know until twenty minutes ago, me, and Ginger are sitting in my car eyeballing Archie’s house. It’s dark because Matt said it would be better if we did it at night. So, this ain’t going the way I wanted.

Turns out, Matt ain’t got an oil company job. That was tactics on Ginger’s part. She was just trying to burn me. The truth is, they’re broke. She’d never admit it, but the second she got that money in her hands she had no intention of giving it back, one way or another.

There’s nothing left for me to do but stop this. It won’t enough by a long shot to just slip off and leave them, remove myself from the situation, as they say. I want to strangle my weakness. I need more than anything to forget about Ginger for good, even if it means castration. Of course it’s not all about sex. It’s about loneliness, too. But there’s no time for that shit now. All I can think to do is distract Ginger.

“Where’s my money?” I ask her.

The three of us are leaned forward in the vehicle the way people do when they’re geared up. I’m in the back, so when I ask, I lean in closer to the middle, nudge Ginger on the back of her arm. She jerks around from staring at Archie’s porchlight and snorts at me, turns back. I nudge again.

“I said where’s my money at?”

Ginger turns sideways in the seat and puts her elbow on the headrest. It looks like a kitchen knife up in the air. It looks like a poster for a horror movie. I surprise myself by not listening. I can’t. All I’m able to do is stare up at Archie’s porch.

He made these his and her chairs for him and his wife last summer. There’s one on each side of the front door. One has Archie’s name on the headrest and the other has his wife’s name, Irene. Archie and Irene. He has one of those cluttered yards that make people confused why somebody would put so many things in there just to have to mow around them all the time. A thick metal pot for flowers Archie welded together a couple years ago and painted red with a white stripe around the top. Three old-time milk jugs he painted red, white, and blue and put at each of the three corners of his front yard. And there’s a slew of birdhouses and bird feeders, as well as two benches, one metal and one wooden, and positioned at opposite ends of the yard.

These are only the things I notice while trying to forget I’ve turned bad people onto good people. And not only had I not been much listening to Ginger talk, as all I’m doing is stalling anyhow, I also hadn’t noticed that Matt Lee opened his car door at some point. He’s leaning out of it with his elbows on his hands. He’s shaking his hands the way a baseball player sometimes will during an at bat, right before they grip up.

“He’s too nervous,” I suddenly say. This could work. “He’s too nervous, sweetie. He’ll get us all locked up like that.” When Matt Lee turns and glares at me, I lock eyes and keep on. “You all are doing this too quick. Messy. It’s going to be sloppy and go sideways. I guarantee it.”

This seems to give Ginger pause. She tugs on Matt Lee’s shirt sleeve and he leans back into the vehicle and slowly eases the door shut.

Ginger looks at me, theatrically turns her head sideways. “I thought you wanted me to have it,” she says. “That was it, right? You come back, give me the cash, me and you da-da-da-da, and then we’re right back together. So, my money, yeah? It’s mine. I got it here in my purse.”

“You done too much meth. Way too much chicken-wire meth.”

“I believe you’re thinking of yourself. You came and gave me money. I accepted. What’s methy about that?”

She’s right. I’m just frustrated. And stupid and lonely.

“Right. You’re right. In that case, leave these people alone, Ginger. Keep that money and just leave these folks alone. You honestly want to do this to them, risk going to jail? Or, thinking the other way, what’s fifteen grand compared to the, well, thing is, you got fifteen already. Handed to you.” I look off at Matt Lee who’s out of the car with his hands on his hips. “And this feller right here? Com’on.”

Ginger looks about as pretty as I’ve seen her look twisted around in the seat again. No pointy elbow, no horror movies. And I can see I got to her somehow. She’s pretty, but her face also’s showing some shame. She sticks her arm out the window and pats the side of vehicle.

“Matt let’s go.”

Matt sticks his head back in. “Hell, why come?”

“Just let’s go.”

Matt Lee don’t seems like he wants to, but he gets back in, and the three of us sit there a beat or two saying nothing. Up above the porch, I see a light come on and then drapes pulled back. It’s Archie. He’s standing real stiff like. The way we’re parked, I know he can see me in the back. I almost wave.

He looks off somewhere into the sky and I notice he’s got a cell phone in his hand. The drapes fall back and I’m sitting there waiting for the light to go off. I’ve never wanted darkness more than right now. I’m counting down. Turn off the light, Archie. Go back to bed. You don’t want anything to do with what’s out here. Take the money to Danny tomorrow and let them put the bills fanned out on a table somewhere in the museum, stick that dusty jar in the middle. It would be a fine setup, a nice addition to the historic certainty of how stupid some people can be and how money makes it worse.

Matt Lee starts up and we’re backing out. He takes it a lot slower than I prefer. The gravel crunches under the tires and I’m thinking about gunning the truck and worrying I’m going to drop a transmission, maybe even the engine, blow it all to hell trying to do nothing but help a neighbor. I’m thinking about how as soon as I got my fifteen folded up, before I even put it in my pocket, I’m making a bad decision in my head, thinking about how I didn’t have a chance in hell of doing anything but going straight to Ginger because of the loneliness and sadness, using that as an excuse to fall flat on my face when I should’ve been happy right then with a bird in hand instead of jumping like a dumbass straight into the bush, straight into where I am right now, still watching for the lights to go out, for Archie to do it different, make the right move.