The Last American
This story appeared in an online edition of The Circle magazine.
 
A combination of things inspired this story.  Among them were the economic downturn of 2001-2003, my own move from California to North Carolina, and a real estate course.  The Silicon Valley tech. boom of the late 1990s was very much on my mind - I lived in Silicon Valley during the good years.  It was an amazing time.  I'm glad I left before the bubble burst.
I came home from work one day and saw my neighbor Dean tearing apart his swimming pool.  It was a big old concrete, below-ground pool.  Maybe half Olympic size.  Poor bastard put it in just last summer, before his life started falling apart.                                                                      * * * * * * * * * * "Hey, Dean, what's up?" He was down in there, grunting away with his sledgehammer, busting up that pool something good, knee deep in chunks of concrete, gravel and dirt. "Still alive," he huffed.  "How's things?" "Yeah, I'm all right.  You, uh, decide to take the pool out?" He stopped working and leaned against his sledgehammer.  Wiped the sweat off his forehead, huffing and puffing.  Dean's a big guy, dark, one of those guys who looks a little soft until you see him busting up concrete. "Unemployment ran out today.  They told me I can't get it renewed." I really felt for this guy.  Got laid off about six months ago.  Couldn't find a job to save his life.  Not like he wasn't trying, you know.  I saw him going to interviews.  Whole state was in a slump, people getting laid off all over.  Too many people fighting for too few jobs.  Someone like Dean, in his mid-forties and getting laid off from a blue collar job with a flash-in-the-pan telecom company that was probably never coming back, man that's a spot I don't ever want to be in. Didn't want to lay a bunch of emotional crap on him.  Dean wasn't that kind of guy. "You want some help?" He turned his head to the bucket tied to a rope he was using to haul up the concrete.  "Yeah, man, I could use a hand."                                                                  * * * * * * * * * * Never call Dean "Dino."  Gives folks a really cold stare when they call him that.  People just assume he was named after Dean Martin for some reason.  He let's them believe it.  "Yeah, Dean Martin, Rat Pack, sure, funny..."  He told me the truth once.  He wasn't named after Dean Martin.  He just got tired of explaining to everyone who Dean Acheson was.                                                                  * * * * * * * * * * I helped him until after dark that night.  I didn't have to ask why he was going after the pool.  Put it in when he thought life was going to keep going up.  When communications gadgets were flying off the shelves and stock options were all the rage.  When he had the good life and a good wife.  Yeah, I wondered what a young, good-looking thing like Sandi was doing with Dean.  Figured it was none of my business.  Hell, who wouldn't build a pool if his wife looked that hot in a bikini.  Turned out Dean didn't know the real reason, either.  Like maybe she was counting on his stock options to pay off big-time.  When he got laid off before he could cash in the options...it was Adios, Sandi. You might be thinking he should have just sold the house.  Two-story Colonial style with a nice big lawn, similar to mine and all the other lots in the subdivision.  Take the equity and get something cheaper.  Again, none of my business.  I thought maybe he was just hanging on to spite Sandi.  He didn't have to pay her any alimony `cause they didn't have any kids and she was cheating on him before the divorce.  Besides, who knew he'd be out of work that long. Here's the thing, though.  I though he was just taking out the pool.  Taking out his frustrations, right?  Look back at that exchange we had.  I asked him if he was taking out the pool.  He never really answered me. I didn't realize just how pissed off he was.                                                                  * * * * * * * * * * The pool disappeared pretty fast.  Dean used his pickup to haul the debris out to the landfill.  He had all day to work, while I was off at my own job. The thing is, he kept digging after the pool was gone.  Just shoveling dirt.  Bringing it up in buckets.  Loading it in his pickup and hauling it off.  I'd walk over and talk to him now and then.  I offered to help him dig.  Sometimes he let me  help.  Sometimes he just said, No, thanks. Tried to ask him what he was doing without being too obvious about it.  What are you doing, Dean, digging to China or something? One day he asked me, looking up from down in that hole, "You know what it means if you own land?"  Never stopped digging, the whole time. "What's that, Dean?" "Means you own everything above it and everything under it," he told me.  No expression, just real matter-of-fact like, the way Dean said everything.  "Everything.  Something our agent told us..."  He froze up for a second, like a record skipping.  The our and us didn't sound right to him.  Not after the way Sandi had split.  "Anyway, my agent told me.  Didn't even think about it till I got sick of seeing that pool.  Means I can dig this hole as deep as I want.  Don't matter what anyone thinks, it's mine." He struck rock long before he got to China.                                                                * * * * * * * * * * Always made sense why Dean bought the house he did, out in the rural burbs.  Thought he had the American Dream going.  It's different for me.  Some folks look at me a little funny when they see me, Joe Single Guy, living in a neighborhood of families and young couples.  Then I point out what I do for a living.  Then I show them my perfectly landscaped yard.  Best way for a landscape designer to show off his work is with his own property.                                                                * * * * * * * * * * Pulled into my drive once and saw a TV news van pulling out of Dean's driveway.  I thought, Holy crap, the guy finally went postal. He was sitting in his back yard, what was left of it.  Had a few beat-up lawn chairs sitting on a concrete porch on the back of his house.  First time in a couple of weeks I saw him doing something besides digging.  Had a little table in front of him, looking at some rocks spread out on the table.  He just sat there, looking at these rocks, sucking down a glass of ice water. "Hey, Dean, you a TV star now?" "Nah."  He barely looked up at me.  Just sat there giving those rocks a dumb look.  I got closer and saw they weren't just rocks.  They looked like tools.  Some Indian arrow heads.  Some looked like maybe hatchets or axes or something. "Hey, man, did you find those?" "Out there."  He waved his hand toward the canyon that used to be his back yard.  "Bunches of these things down in there.  Didn't know what to do, so I called the university.  Some professor came out, took some pictures.  Said maybe they're worth something." Dean let me pick up some of the artifacts, look them over, feel the rough edges of the cool, chiseled flint.  Rocks of ages, grays and browns, some small and splintered, some half a foot across and in perfect condition.  I knew what he was thinking, same thing I was.  Wondering what the people were like who used these gizmos.  What was their history?  Did they use the arrowheads to hunt or to fight? Most important.  What happened to them? "You know what happened to those poor sons-of-bitches," Dean looked at me.  "Government took their homes."                                                            * * * * * * * * * * One weekend I was helping Dean dig his "Indian rock hole," as I called it.  It was the first time I got a clue about what was really going on in that guy's head. Every day I thought he couldn't dig much deeper without the sides collapsing on him.  Every day he fooled me and kept going.  It was slow work for one guy, hauling all that dirt out of there.  He must have gone down close to fifty feet, using a rope ladder for himself and a bucket/pulley system to bring the dirt out.  I was afraid to go down there for a while, but he showed me how he was digging at angles and using boards to keep the thing stable. It was cooler in the hole.  That's how deep we were.  Digging down into that sandy clay soil with pick-axes and shovels. "Government did this, man," Dean said. It was out of the blue, I didn't know what to say.  I almost didn't say anything, then decided to put my foot in it.  "What's that, Dean?" "Country's going down the tubes.  People like me all over, losing their jobs.  Think about, twenty years ago, forty years ago."  All the time, he kept whaling away at that packed soil, taking out frustrations for a lifetime.  "What's better now than it was?  We got more hungry people.  More poor people.  More kids abandoned.  More traffic.  More roads.  Less trees.  Less parks.  Less healthcare." "Yeah...yeah, guess you got a point there." When he looked up at me with these big, sad eyes, I thought the poor guy was going to cry.  "Government let that company lay off me and the others.  Let `em make up bogus promises about the stock options to keep the union off their backs.  You know what the government's letting them do now?  My job didn't disappear.  None of them did.  Most of the jobs are getting moved out of the country.  Mexico or someplace.  Hire the same number of people, just pay `em a lot less.  That's all." He didn't have to add on the rest.  If the government let his company tease him with stock options, and if the government let his company move all those jobs out of the country, then it was the government that busted up his marriage.  Truth was, it was the government's actions that turned that phony chick onto him in the first place.  I didn't ask him what those people in the other countries were supposed to do, who probably needed the money more than most of us did. I guess if you didn't know Dean, you might have thought he was wanting to overthrow the government or some crazy stuff like that.  Nothing like it.  He was just angry and hurt.  Angrier than I could understand.  And a guy like Dean, raised like he was in the place he was, he wouldn't be likely to know what to do with emotions like that.  Some men drank.  Some picked fights.  Some looked for scapegoats, like different races or religions.  Probably his dad did some of that stuff. Somehow Dean turned out different than that.  He knew better than to blame someone else for his troubles.  End of the day, he didn't really blame the government for his own lot.  He blamed the government for not doing the things they were supposed to do.  The things they promised. Life just left Dean with all this anger that he didn't know what to do with.  Anger about his failed marriage.  About his job.  About the way so many in the world got screwed who deserved better.  So he went out in his yard and started digging.                                                                  * * * * * * * * * * Next day I was sitting on my patio reading the newspaper.  Dean was digging to China.  A couple of vans came charging up into his driveway and that university guy jumped out.  Guy ran over to Dean, yelling down at him to stop digging, they had to talk to him, it was urgent, all that. Dean told me about it later.  Turns out those "Indian rocks" he found were worth something.  Really rare stuff, I guess.  Made by some tribe that disappeared long before the Creek and Cherokee tribes even came along.  The professor said they were going to rewrite history.  So the university gave him a pretty penny for the right to excavate the site.  They took hundreds of those artifacts out of Dean's yard.  Ended up paying him a fortune.  Even agreed to restore his back yard to its original condition. No pool, of course.  That only made sense. Dean got his name and face all over the TV news.  Had to unplug his phone, it wouldn't stop ringing.  Got a job offer out of it.  Doing background checks on people, for security type jobs, you know.  President of the company saw Dean on the news, heard his story.  The guy said, "Anyone with that kind of determination can have a great career in investigation work."  Dean loves the work, he's making a good living. Dean's doing some volunteer work, too.  Helping out with some political campaigns.  Guy's not exactly a political strategist, but he's helping to set up phone systems for campaign offices.  He's working against every incumbent in every office that represents our area.  Says he'll do whatever he can to help get a clean slate. Dean figures there's a lot of work to do.  He's a patient guy. Home Personal Links Image Galleries Journeys The Good Old Days The Movie Quotes Project Fiction Rules of the Road