I didn’t sleep, of course. About 4 A.M. I got out of bed, made phone calls, agreed to pay more than it was worth, and by five-thirty was in front of the plant with a pickup truck. I went to the gate, intending to unlock it and drive the truck to the loading dock so that I could run Flexible Frank over the tail gate-Frank weighed four hundred pounds.
There was a new padlock on the gate.
I shinnied over, cutting myself on barbed wire. Once inside, the gate would give me no trouble, as there were a hundred tools in the shop capable of coping with a padlock.
But the lock on the front door had been changed too.
I was looking at it, deciding whether it was easier to break a window with a tire iron, or get the jack out of the truck and brace it between the doorframe and the knob, when somebody shouted, “Hey, you! Hands up!”
I didn’t put my hands up but I turned around. A middie-aged man was pointing a hogleg at me big enough to bombard a city. “Who the devil are you?”
“Who are you?”
“I’m Dan Davis, chief engineer of this outfit.”
“Oh.” He relaxed a little but still aimed the field mortar at me. “Yeah, you match the description. But if you have any identification on you, better let me see it.”
“Why should I? I asked who you are?”
“Me? Nobody you’d know. Name of Joe Todd, with the Desert Protective & Patrol Company. Private license. You ought to know who we are; we’ve had you folks as clients for the night patrol for months. But tonight I’m on as special guard.”
“You are? Then if they gave you a key to the place, use it. I want to get in. And quit pointing that blunderbuss at me.”
He still kept it leveled at me. “I couldn’t rightly do that, Mr. Davis. First place, I don’t have a key. Second place, I had particular orders about you. You aren’t to go in. I’ll let you out the gate.”
“I want the gate opened, all right, but I’m going in.” I looked around for a rock to break a window.
“Please, Mr. Davis . .
“Huh?”
“I’d hate to see you insist, I really would. Because I couldn’t chance shooting you in the legs; I ain’t a very good shot. I’d have to shoot you in the belly. I’ve got soft-nosed bullets in this iron; it’ud be pretty messy.”
I suppose that was what changed my mind, though I would like to think it was something else; i.e. when I looked again through the window I saw that Flexible Frank was not where I had left him.
As he let me out the gate Todd handed me an envelope. “They said to give this to you if you showed up.”
I read it in the cab of the truck. It said:
Dear Mr. Davis,
18 November, 1970
At a regular meeting of the board of directors, held this date, it was voted to terminate all your connection (other than as stockholder) with the corporation, as permitted under paragraph three of your contract. It is requested that you stay off company property. Your personal papers and belongings will be forwarded to you by safe means.
– The board wishes to thank you for your services and regrets the differences in policy opinion which have forced this step on us.
Sincerely yours,
Miles Gentry
Chairman of the Board and General Manager by B. S. Darkin, Sec’y-Treasurer
I read it twice before I recalled that I had never had any contract with the corporation under which to invoke paragraph three or any other paragraph.
Later that day a bonded messenger delivered a package to the motel where I kept my clean underwear. It contained my hat, my desk pen, my other slide rule, a lot of books and personal correspondence, and a number of documents. But it did not contain my notes and drawings for Flexible Frank.
Some of the documents were very interesting. My “contract,” for example-sure enough, paragraph three let them fire me without notice subject to three months’ salary. But paragraph seven was even more interesting. It was the latest form of the yellow-dog clause, one in which the employee agrees to refrain from engaging in a competing occupation for five years by letting his former employers pay him cash to option his services on a first-refusal basis; i.e., I could go back to work any time I wanted to just by going, hat in hand, and asking Miles and Belle for a job-maybe that was why they sent the hat back.