Chapter 11

Four days later, Frenchy’s lawyer faxed him a list of people.

John, the general contractor he decided on, had his office in Clovis but his activities were widespread on both sides of the state line. “Glad to meet you, Frenchy,” he said. “What did you have in mind?”

“I’m building a factory on my property,” Frenchy explained. “I expect the business to grow as it develops, so I’ll want room to expand production when it does. I’ve also got some special design requirements, so keep that in mind too when you come up with a proposal. I’ll tell you more when we visit the site.”

“What facilities do you already have?” John asked. “Are you repurposing a previously used location, or starting from scratch? I’ve worked with several architects, builders too, and I’ve found that some of the better ones specialize in one or the other as much as possible.”

“It’s a new site, the only thing that’s there right now is a road. It was blacktopped sometime in the past, but it’s going to need repair.”

John made a note on a pad of yellow paper. “I recommend you hire me to be the general contractor, and I’ll work with the various subcontractors you’re going to need. Road crews, for example, use different equipment, excavators and rollers and such, and their people have different skills, foundation contractors too. My people will put up the building, but even there subcontractors will be involved, electrical contractors, plumbing contractors, drywallers and painters and so on, different skills and often enough different unions. I’ll include their bids with mine, and as the general contractor I’ll give you an overall price.”

“I expected that,” Frenchy confirmed. “My property runs alongside a state highway, but I don’t want to put the plant there. I estimate at least a mile, probably farther than that from the highway to reach the site I’ve got in mind.”

“I understand,” John said. “Distance costs more, because everything has to travel farther. What condition is the ground in? Is it level, what kind of drainage are we looking at, and have you looked into permits yet?”

“I was hoping you could take care of the details,” Frenchy said.”

“I can, and actually it’s better if I do,” John agreed. “When can I get access to the site?”

“Why don’t we schedule a time and go out together?”

“Not today, I’ve got other meetings that I can’t skip, but how about tomorrow at 10 o’clock?”

“Works for me,” Frenchy said. “I’ll meet you here at 10 and we’ll go there together.”

John met Frenchy outside the building, along with an assistant who had already packed John’s big SUV with a number of devices that he would need. They started north, turned west an hour later along a secondary road, and reached the ranch’s gate at 11:30. Frenchy unlocked the gate, waved the SUV through, then relocked it.

After Frenchy had taken his seat, John drove the party along the winding road for roughly two miles, most of the time trending northwest, by following the potholed road. On the way, John passed along comments to his assistant, who recorded what he said. Finally, they reached the location Frenchy had in mind.

“Depending on what you have in mind, Frenchy, I recommend you back up about a quarter-mile. The land is flatter,”—John pointed to the location, —”less leveling required, and there’s more room to expand. That low ridge off to the southeast will shield your plant from people driving along the main road. Speaking of that, that road doesn’t get much traffic right now, but you might want to talk to somebody from the state about what you’re doing in case they want to upgrade it before you start operations.”

“I can do that,” Frenchy agreed, taking a small notebook from his coat pocket to enter the memo.

“We can walk from here,” John decided. “I want to look around. You’re thinking an east-to-west orientation, with a small parking lot out front for visitors and a bigger one out back for employees and delivery vehicles?”

“I hadn’t thought that far,” Frenchy confessed, “but now that you mention it, that makes sense. And I see what you mean about that ridge.” The three walked the property, John listening to Frenchy’s ideas and making notes of his own, while the assistant took digital photos, measured slopes and distances which he entered into his book, and noted down information about the soil type.

Two hours later, the small party headed back to Clovis. “I’ll need some time to work on this,” John said. “How about I keep you advised of my progress and what we’re looking at in terms of a completion date? As soon as I’ve got firm data to work with, I’ll draw up a contract and we can discuss cost. Since you already own the property, I’m willing to wait for earnest money until we settle on what work is to be done, but I’ll need a construction advance up front before I can hire subs. Some of the money will go to me of course, because I’ll need to pre-order supplies, and the rest will be paid out to the subs so they can order what they’re going to need. Easiest way, escrow the full amount, agree on a timetable, and have the bank pay out from the escrow when I meet performance objectives.”

“Sounds fair,” Frenchy agreed. “You know what I’ve got in mind, but as for the septic system and wells you mentioned, my ranch foreman has someone who’ll do that. It’s a man he’s used before.”

“That won’t work,” John demurred, “not for the kind of commercial setup you want. Your man could supply facilities for a ranch, maybe, but not a factory! To start with, you’ll need a treatment plant for the well water before you can use it, and a sewage treatment plant for discharged water. The well water is probably good enough to drink, most of the wells out this way are, but in New Mexico it pays to not take chances. Even if there’s no arsenic, radon, or sulfur, the water will almost certainly contain too much calcium and iron for long-term use, not to mention that hard water will eventually damage your plumbing. It’s actually more cost-effective to put in the treatment plant first and get that stuff out before the water reaches the building. The facilities won’t need to be city-sized, just big enough to treat all the water supplied to and discharged from your buildings. One possible source of savings later on, if you intend to landscape your factory you can use untreated well water or treated sewage for watering plants. You mentioned expanding, so the system will have to be designed to allow for future expansion.

“I hoped I wouldn’t have to go that far,” Frenchy worried. “Funds are limited right now. I expect additional financing later on, but that’s then, not now.”

“The county people won’t approve your plans unless they meet code,” John cautioned, “and that includes electrical, water, and sewage treatment. I’ll put it into an appendix for now, you can approve it separately, but you’ll need to come up with a permanent solution before I can begin construction. Depending on how many workers you intend to hire, you might get away with using portable toilets as a temporary solution, but that can get expensive in a hurry. The sooner you get permanent systems on-line, the better.

“Another thing, I didn’t see any sign of a power line. The nearest source is probably twenty miles from your site, so we need to talk about that too. My workers will need power on site when we begin putting up the building, so if you don’t have commercial power I’ll need to rent generators.”

“Put that on the back burner too,” Frenchy said. “I hope to have my own generators available by the time you begin working. One of my associates says they’re available cheap.”

“Cheap can be a problem,” John warned. “You mentioned you were short on money, so let’s clear that up right now. You can have the project done fast or you can have it cheap, but you can’t have both. Your building, probably more than one based on what you’re telling me, is not just four walls and a roof. The foundation comes first, and it has to reflect the work load you anticipate, and plumbing and electrical service have to be designed in from the beginning. Plumbing is more than toilets and drinking water, you’ve also got to have automatic fire extinguishers and fire hose outlets. There’s a lot of other stuff too, stuff professionals keep up with so customers don’t have to. I work with architects, usually a company, and they have libraries of standard plans. You and I will get together with one and he’ll modify one of their plans, based on what you tell us you need. It’s faster than designing everything from scratch, and generally speaking it’s cheaper.

“I would normally schedule a crew, say the road crew, to work until the job is finished, then move another crew in to do the next task. But if you can come up with the money, I can run multiple crews to speed up the job. A crew can build roads, for example, while another crew puts up the perimeter fence, and my people can be building the foundation footings while all that is going on. As soon as the footings are ready, I’ll order concrete. There are companies in Clovis and Roswell, so I’ll shop around. The good news is that the land is level and firm enough to support heavy equipment, so as soon as you approve the plans I’ll get bids from the subcontractors.

“The up-front issue right now is money, because you’re self-financing the project. In order for me to run multiple crews, the initial payment has to be enough for me to pay my subs and that’s non-negotiable. Think of it this way, you’re essentially hiring more than one company, my company plus the architects and the subcontractors, and all of us need to be paid. We need up-front money to buy supplies and hire people, and I have to provide that from what you pay me. There will be additional draws as completion points are met, and I’ll need money at each stage before I can move on. Even if there are hold-backs to ensure quality, the money will have to be available in escrow. The contract will include payment schedules, and meeting those is your responsibility. So long as the money’s there when it’s due, the rest is my responsibility. Fair enough?”

“Fair enough,” Frenchy agreed. “We’ve got a deal.”

Frenchy’s home sold within the month, Will auctioned off his Picassos, and other investors added more money. The total was, in fact, more than Frenchy had expected. He called John, and after a short discussion they approved using multiple crews.

The first crews showed up the following Monday, and the need for immediate electrical power caused the first contract modification. John rented portable generators for the building crews as an interim measure, and that afternoon Frenchy met with John and the architect in charge. Under the modified plan, a power house would be completed first, generators added, and the main electrical distribution box would be installed as soon as it was available.

Two days later, three large fuel tanks were delivered along with a tracked crane to install them. A week later, they were set in place on concrete pads near the power building, and the area had its own branch road for fuel delivery trucks.

Frenchy realized that locking their only impeller-equipped craft in the truck’s cargo box would not be secure enough, so the second addition to the site plan was a large metal building located several hundred yards away from the rest of the complex. The Bedstead would go in the building, now designated as the ‘hangar’, as soon as it was brought to the site.

In the meantime, someone would stay in the converted warehouse in Albuquerque each night, and instead of relying on the building’s external locks the watchman would secure the doors from the inside. An upstairs room was converted to a temporary bedroom by adding a bunk, a refrigerator, microwave, and a small television. Most of the employees had families, but Chuck had not yet met anyone he wanted to settle down with, and Mel was divorced. As a result, the two took over the job of night watchman.

The old ranch’s feeder operation had begun shutting down. As calves were sold to the dairies, no new ones were bought. This freed up employees, but they weren’t laid off; instead, the foreman assigned the newly-excess people to ride the range near the factory site. It was simple enough; load two horses in the trailer, add a bale of hay and a bag of grain in the front compartment, then send a rider to a line shack that was located five miles from the new plant. A relief rider went out every three days to replace the man at the line shack, and the horsemen soon became a familiar site around the construction zone. The construction workers saw them, and gossiped. In the way of things, the rumors spread, and the idly curious stayed away.

Wells were drilled and pumps installed early in the preparation phase. The tanker trucks would need water to sprinkle around the site as well as for wetting the poured concrete to prevent cracking, and as a side effect the sprinkling reduced the amount of dust in the air. As an interim matter, water was furnished to tanker trucks by an overhead pipe. A truck would pull in, the driver opened the tank’s top hatch, filled the tank, then drove away. The remaining output from the pumps was piped to where the treatment plant would be built, outside the fence in its own small building. From there it went into a storage tank, and from there it would eventually be piped to the rest of the complex.

Waste water would be drained away to the sewage plant, and the treated water would eventually be injected via wells back into the ground, minimizing the factory’s impact on scarce ground water. Other businesses had pioneered the approach, so county officials soon approved the system for Frenchy’s factory. Treated and dried sludge from the sewage plant would eventually be distributed around the ranch, enriching the poor soil. Unlike city sludge, this would contain no contaminating heavy metals.

The power house soon held five large diesel generators. FEMA had bought them new originally, used them to power the trailer parks housing victims of Hurricane Katrina, and then warehoused the units. The generators had since been declared surplus and listed for disposal. Frenchy’s purchasing agent bid on the lot, and soon the generators were on their way to New Mexico. Morty found they required little more than inspecting the engines for leaks, changing filters, oil, and topping off the radiator coolant, then function-testing the generators. Each was connected to a load bank consisting of huge resistor coils and cooling fans, then run for an hour at their rated 150kw capacity. Inspections finished, the generators were emplaced in the power building.

Fuel was supplied to the power building via an underground pipe from the elevated fuel tanks that led to a distribution manifold. From there, it went directly to the generators. The arrangement was flexible; a generator could be shut down for maintenance while others continued providing power to the factory campus. The system prevented electrical power interruptions, important because the buildings were all-electric, including the heating system.

The factory site was transformed during the next three months. The access road was repaired, concrete foundations poured, parking areas graded flat, and fences built. Additional permits were acquired as necessary, the water treatment and sewage treatment plants were completed, and work on the factory buildings begun.

A single-lane dirt road led away from the main factory complex, and it hadn’t been used since the hangar was completed. Dust had since drifted over the tracks left by the construction equipment, so the apparently-unused metal building attracted no attention. The separate chain-link fence isolated it from the main campus and discouraged snooping, and a single locked gate, on the side of the fence facing the main complex, boasted a large No Admittance sign. The hangar had a rear personnel door facing the other buildings, and a second one alongside the garage-style rollup door. The latter pair faced the open countryside, meaning that no one working on the factory building ever got a look inside the hangar.

Inside the metal building, most of the space consisted of a large open bay, large enough for the Bedstead and the larger unit planned as its replacement to easily fit inside. Separate rooms off the main bay contained a small workshop, a break room with such creature comforts as were available, and a bathroom. The break room had a tiny kitchen, a pair of tables with four chairs each, and two convertible couches, while the bathroom contained a toilet, lavatory, and shower.