Chapter 6

I think that Jo realized about half a minute before I did that we could make a good living if we could get more of those big-company contracts, especially the kind of repeat business that we had with Laughing Hog Dance Hall and such. These had to be big outfits to pay us the equivalent of $2,500 per day on a continuing basis. Unfortunately, there just were not that many such operations in and around Dothan. We were going to have to move to a larger city, probably Montgomery’s size at the minimum, to get that kind of business.

Neither Jo nor I were insisting on staying in Alabama, but we did feel some sentimental attachment for the state. We still had most of that lottery prize to fall back on if we did run into trouble, but we decided to let the situation ride for now. Jo did send off letters introducing our business and what kind of services we offered to the largest outfits in this corner of the state, and some outfits in Georgia and Florida. She did have Judy review the letter before she mailed it to make sure that we were not promising something that we could not deliver.

To our surprise, the first answer she got was from the nuclear power station wanting to discuss with us a survey of their site. Several employees had reported seeing wild hogs on the property as they came to work or left. So far, no damage had been done, but there was always that possibility. Management wanted to forestall that if they could.

Jo telephoned the management of the power station and set up a meeting. She invited Judy to go along with us. We went to the meeting prepared to hold the meeting and immediately make a survey of their site to see what needed to be done. A second meeting would wrap it up or set up a continuing sweep routine for the site.

That morning, the site manager had been forced to use his car to chase two rutting hogs from his reserved parking place when he showed up for work. That was enough to ensure us some sort of contract. The first meeting was simply a formal agreement to survey the grounds before we issued a proposal. We would be paid $1,000 for our preliminary survey at a minimum, but we would be paid an extra $250 for every hog we killed in the process of the survey, and we were to dispose of the carcasses. That amounted to a bonus of $40-50 for each hog we killed, but I did not say anything about that to the site manager.

We left the meeting with Judy and the assistant head of security, Hal Frumpton, riding with us. The entire site was virtually flat and free of gullies and what not, so it was easy to cover the ground in our pickup. As usual, Jo was in the front passenger seat and I was driving. Judy and Hal were in the back seat.

We were hardly out of the parking lot when Judy spotted a hog. She pointed it out and I drove close enough to it for Jo to take a shot. As usual, we all had hearing protection, so Jo fired as soon as I came to a stop. Scratch one hog. We planned to come back for it and continued our search. We didn’t search in a formal grid pattern, but, rather, we looked at the likely places to find hogs. There was another of those common abandoned pecan groves, so we made a point of looking there. That produced four hogs, three killed by Jo and one by me. Man, we had five dead hogs, and we had just started to look for them.

Our last place to look was a little park used by the employees as a pleasant place to eat lunch, or just to wait out the last of their lunch break. Dammit, three hogs were there attacking the trash containers. Jo killed them. They were probably looking for apple cores and things like that. Hal was absolutely disgusted. He was pissed because the B&G (Buildings and Grounds) Department had not reported this sort of thing to Security, but had simply cleaned up the mess each day and had ignored the hogs. I didn’t want to get involved in interdepartmental squabbles, so I withheld any comments.

Anyway, that was enough of a survey, so Jo and Judy went in for a second meeting while Hal called for some B&G people to help me pick up the nine carcasses. This was a profitable morning. We picked up a total of $1,414 for a long morning’s worth of work. The women came out of the manager’s office with a contract for us to sweep the area once a week for four weeks on Monday afternoons at $2,000 per sweep.

They also agreed to keep all fence gates closed and locked. The only gate permanently open was the one reserved for emergency vehicles, and two guards were to be kept permanently at the site. They had a shotgun to take care of hogs that tried to enter. I hoped it worked, but I could see us picking up at least one hog in every sweep.

We dropped Judy off at the parking lot to pick up her car. Jo and I grabbed a burger and fries and made the rounds selling the nine hog carcasses to the butcher shops. We were tired after that, so we went home to nap and to enjoy our favorite indoor sport.

Dammit, right in the middle of our activity, and it was not the nap, the telephone rang. It was Bill, so I reluctantly answered the phone. I put it on speaker-phone and said, “Hello, Bill. Jo and I are both home, and you have called at a very inconvenient time, so please make it as quick as you can.”

Bill laughed and said, “Okay, sorry about that, Jo. I can tell that this is on speaker-phone. I’ll make it short. I have an investment for you to look into that is a license to print money, yet it is available at an impossibly low price if we react soon. Call me back on my cellphone when you are available for a business discussion.”

“Okay, you should hear from me in about half an hour. Goodbye for now.” I hung up before he could think of anything else to talk about and returned to my business with Jo.

It was about 45 minutes later when I returned Bill’s call. “Hi, Bill. Jo and I have the time and the interest to talk to you now. What is so attractive?”

“Actually, what I want to say would be better done in a personal meeting. Let’s meet tonight for supper and an investment discussion at Laughing Hog. I’ll call Jed and make the reservation for his small dinning room if y’all can make it. Judy will come as your corporate attorney. How does that sound?”

Jo nodded, so I said, “That sounds fine. We’ll be there as near 7:00 PM as we can make it. See you then. Goodbye.”

Later, at the Laughing Hog Dance Hall, we four was sitting around a table just finishing up a meal of barbecue and beer. We had all limited our beer intake so that we could be sure of a sober head when talking about business.

Bill dragged out a bulging briefcase from under the table and started pulling papers from it. “John, Jo, what I have here is a chance to buy a functioning truck stop. The best part about it is that it is right across the highway. I’m sure that you have noticed the Wiregrass Truck Stop and the fact that it is almost always full of semi-trucks.

“Well, the former owner-manager has died of a heart attack, make that old age if you want the truth, and his widow wants nothing to do with the place. She is 83 years old, and all she wants to do is to move to the Gulf Coast in some retirement community and laze away her declining years with bridge games and the sun. There are no other relatives to make a claim, and that is not important, because the will leaves everything to the widow, lock, stock, and barrel.

“All she wants is enough money to pay for that sort of retirement for the rest of her life. She is willing to settle for $1,750,000 for the truck stop. The asking price is so low because she wants the money in one lump sum, and she wants it in two weeks. She has that time limit because she wants to join a friend, and the last apartment at the retirement home will be put out for general offers in just two more weeks.

“The only bad thing that I can find out about the truck stop is that it has the same kind of trouble as Jed did with wild hogs. That is right down your line, so I thought that you would not be bothered by that. A reputable accounting firm has gone over the books, and I have the paperwork with me. Currently, the truck stop is turning in a net profit of just short of $500,000 per year.