Dirt Flippers

By Joan D. Warren

When Joan Warner teamed up with Kurt Bagly, it was an unlikely paring. She was an uptight soccer mom from a well-to-do community who had just started a career in Real Estate. Kurt was a rough-around-the-edges blue collar carpenter with a rap sheet and a beat up pick-up truck.

Recommended by her friend Suzanne, Joan hired Kurt to renovate her basement that had water damage from a blown hot water heater. Little did they know that this one small job would forever change their lives.

A gentle giant with a quick wit and a never ending Camel cigarette hanging from his lips, Kurt wore down Joan’s stick-up-the-butt demeanor and the two became chummy. They shared war stories from his time in the can and her wild party days before entering recovery and starting a family. They realized they had a lot in common, especially their shared dream of one day hitting it rich.

With her budding Real Estate career going nowhere, Joan asked Kurt if he was willing to take a gamble and partner as house flippers. She would handle the Real Estate side and Kurt would do the construction. What seemed like a great way to make some money turned out to be more than they bargained for.

Using combined funds, They flipped a couple of houses and made a few bucks when they hit pay dirt – literally.

Joan found a run-down farm house built in 1889 that was being sold at auction. They bought it for a song and although it easily could have been a tear down, they decided to rehab and got to work cleaning it out.

The house had been owned by an old curmudgeon – a bachelor who rarely left the house. He died of a heart attack in the living room slumped in an old easy chair that was food stained and smelled of urine.

Neighborhood lore painted the old guy to be gruff and unfriendly – especially to kids who liked to ding-dong ditch and watch him scream at them from his dilapidated front porch, threatening to do bodily injury if they didn't leave him the hell alone.

Nick the postal carrier in the neighborhood told Joan and Kurt that Chester Armstrong was a retired Navy man who fought in World War II. Injured in the Battle of the Bulge, he came back to the states suffering from severe PTSD. He took care of his aging parents until they died, living alone in the family home that hadn't seen a paint job since the 1970's.

Every month he collected his government pension and rarely left his sanctuary except to take the bus to the bank and the local A & P.

From the street, the house looked like it could have been on an episode of Hoarders. Windblown trash up against the side of the clapboard façade, overgrown bushes and broken gutters hanging from the roof. It was the stuff childhood nightmares are made of.

The pair spent hours and hours sifting through the contents in hopes of finding anything of value. The afternoon before a cleaning company was scheduled to haul away the tons of junk, they did one last sweep to see if they missed anything worth salvaging.

An amateur sleuth who loved to watch crime shows and a woman with strong intuitions, Joan decided to see if any floorboards were loose. In Many Murder She Wrote episodes, there was always something hiding under a floorboard. Joan had a feeling the old guy must have hidden his fortune somewhere. It wasn’t under the brown, sweat stained mattress – that was the first place she looked.

“You’re wasting your time, Joan. Look at this place. The old geezer didn’t have a pot to piss in and obviously used his Archie Bunker chair to relieve himself. You won’t find anything in this dump,” Kurt scoffed.

On hands and knees, Joan went around moving boxes, broken furniture and stacks of old magazines, looking for a loose floorboard board.

Sweating profusely, she got on her feet.

Resigned to the fact that her intuition was taking a hiatus and just as she was giving up, she stepped on a squeaky board with her old sneaker.

Kurt was nearby and they locked eyes.

“Well, you might just be right,” he said, with a look of disbelief on his face.

Saying a prayer to St. Anthony, the patron saint of all lost things, she pried the pine board back with a screw driver.

Dirt. There was only dirt.

“See you got me all excited for nothing,” Kurt scolded.

“Don’t give up so easily Mr. Downer,” she quipped back.

Reaching in with a well-manicured hand, she felt around the dirt and began digging.

“Get me something to dig with, a cup or something,” she said.

Kurt found an old coffee cup and Joan furiously scooped out piles of dirt, sawdust and paper shreds. After a few minutes, she heard a clank.

She hit something metal.

Kurt fell to his knees and using his big mitt of a hand helped out. They dug like little kids trying to reach China on an abandoned beach.

In no time they removed a small metal box, the kind that held recipe cards back in the day. The gun metal gray box was wrapped in thick elastics to hold it closed.

“Maybe there’s a wad of cash or jewelry or a key to a safe deposit box,” Kurt speculated, clearly overexcited at the find.

“Well, we will see,” Joan said, brushing off the debris and removing the elastics. The blood had drained from her face, her mouth was dry as a dessert and her heartbeat in hyperdrive.

The lid was rusty but opened with a little force. They peered into the box and were disappointed at its contents.

"Great. Nothing. What a waste of time," Kurt said as he leaded against a nearby wall in defeat.

"Let's just see what's in here before you get all pissy," Joan said.

She reached in and removed a few black and white photographs, dog-eared and yellowed with time; a folded up honorable discharge certificate from the Navy and a little black book.

Kurt grabbed the small book and leaved through it. It looked like the old man had drawn child-like pictures on a few of the pages. Pen and Ink drawings of the the layout of the house – schematics really of the interior with details of the rooms.

Curious, Joan thought, why would he tuck this away? What could it mean?

“This is trash! Why would anyone hide this crap?” he asked.

Taking the now empty box, he threw it against a far wall as hard as he could, crumbling the horsehair construction and leaving a whole the size of a diner plate.

“Calm down Kurt and stop destroying the house – you’re the one who is going to fix that hole, you know,” Joan said.

She got up off the floor and went over to the hole. Looking inside, she gasped.

“Kurt, you’re not going to believe this,” she said.

“What now? Rats in the walls?”

“Not rats Kurt – money. Lots of money.”

Kurt ran over and reached his arm in the hole. Out came the wads of cash he was hoping for - and then some.

Joan opened the little black book and looked at the drawings more closely.

“Kurt, I think these pictures are like a treasure map. Mr. Armstrong was leaving clues of where he hid his money. See the arrows pointing to the walls in the living room and bedrooms? He must have kept this as a reminder in case he forgot where he hid it all. Oh my Sweet Lord, we hit pay dirt!”

Kurt ran out to his truck and brought back a crow bar and a pick ax. Together they began ripping apart the walls where Mr. Armstrong had clearly marked where the money was hiding.

After an hour or so, they sat on the linoleum kitchen floor, surrounded by mounds of cash. They threw the bills up in air and showered in their good fortune.

They spent the evening counting the loot - $20,145 in all.

They decided to keep this special find to themselves (it was their property, after all). Why pay taxes on income that was unexpected?

The money was split three ways - a third for each of them and the remainder used as investment funds for the next flip.

Kurt bought a new (used) truck with his windfall and Joan kept hers for a rainy day.

Six months later, Kurt and Joan framed Mr. Armstrong’s Naval discharge certificate and hung in the vestibule of their office space where the neon sign outside brightly displays their newly incorporated business, Armstrong Dirt Flippers.