Hub
Hub McCready is seventy-seven years old. He welded on drilling rigs for forty years, from the Anadarko Basin to the Gulf. He has a hand like a catcher’s mitt and a voice like gravel in a bucket.
He has also been watching the kids get on the bus by his mailbox every school morning for longer than I have been alive. He keeps a coffee can too. His has dog biscuits in it for the kids to give his old heeler.
I drove over the long way Friday after work, all thirty-one miles, because I was not going to pay Vance twice in one day.
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Hub was sitting in a lawn chair in his shop door. He listened to the whole thing without saying a word. Then he stood up and walked down to the creek bank with me.
He looked at the rock ledge on his side. He looked across at ours. He looked at the broken slab downstream.
“Drill pipe,” he said.
“Four and a half. Range two.”
“You’ll want to weld a plate across the tool joints so nobody catches a toe.” He kicked the ledge with his boot. “Set your mat on this rock. This ledge has been here since Noah.”
“Will you check my welds?”
“Every one.” He looked at me sideways. “And if I find one I don’t like, you’ll grind it out and do it over, and you won’t sass me.”
“I’ve never sassed you in my life, Hub.”
“You were nine,” he said, “and you told me my truck sounded like a sick cow.”
“It did.”
“It did,” he agreed, and that was the closest Hub comes to laughing.