Point and Shoot, Florida (YU)--Heap once met a man who worked for IBM who described his job as "destaffer."

This was after Heap had left the company. He destaffed himself. Before the Old Rollback got him.

Once, IBM was an employer-for-life. Employees were loyal to the company. The company was paternalistic.

By the time Heap met the destaffer, they were laying employees off, like any other corporation.

Heap had predicted as much.

The Louisiana State Archeologist, whom the salvage grant was awarded to, was the Principal Investigator (PI) on the dig, but it was run by his crew chief, whom Heap and Brenda worked for.

The three of them lived in a house on Bear Lake, Heap and Brenda in one bedroom and the crew chief in the other. The bed Heap and Brenda slept in squeaked, loudly. This inhibited their lovemaking.

They worked long days at the site, anyway, and generally confined their making whoopee to weekends, when the crew chief went to town to call his wife, in New Orleans.

The first thing the crew chief did was hire some laborers to do the grunt work at the site.

He hired three black men and one white man.

Minimum wage was above the prevailing wage for black men, and he was told he couldn't pay it to a black man, he should hire a subcontractor who would pay the black men less and pocket the difference, but he refused to do that.

Many white men would not work side by side with black men, especially for the same wage, but the man who did would.

None of the men had worked for a woman before, or a white woman, in a physical labor capacity, and didn't expect Brenda to know what she was doing, but she could use a shovel like a surgeon uses a scalpel, or a butcher uses a boning knife.

She could use a machete like a man. She could read dirt.

This impressed them the most, once they got used to how hard she worked: that she could read the dirt, she had a feel for what was coming up under the trowel, or shovel, her intuition was uncanny. Once they got up to speed they could appreciate her skill.

The white guy was impressed, too. He didn't like women any better than he liked black people.

But he stuck with it. He hung in there like a hair on a biscuit.

He saw that Heap and Brenda had leather trowel-holders on their belt and had a hippie make him one, custom, or a cobbler. Many cobblers learn their craft in prison, and make custom leatherwork items for motorcycle aficionados. He bought his own trowel.

Our crew was complete. The crew chief, us, three black guys, who used company trowels, and a white guy, with his personal trowel. He didn't know whether to eat lunch with the black guys or with us, the professionals. So he sat kind of apart, by himself. He was aloof. It was sad.

He called his trowel a troll. To live is to war with trolls, Ibsen said.