5. Huck
HUCK
I should have stayed away, especially after clashing with Peyton yesterday afternoon, but I couldn’t.
Guilt gnawed at me all night long and I finally gave up trying to sleep.
As the sun started rising over the mountains, I pulled onto the festival grounds.
If Franklin had been so casual about doing a shitty patch job on the house Peyton was trying to sell, I wondered if he’d cut corners on the festival job as well.
I didn’t have an excuse to stop by during the day, so I’d decided to sneak in and take a look before anyone showed up on the job site. For my own peace of mind, I told myself. Didn’t have anything to do with wanting to prove that Peyton had made the wrong call.
Hell, she wasn’t calling the shots anyway. I had no doubt her dad was behind her decision to give Franklin the job. He was probably getting a kickback.
Fuck it. The only thing I cared about was that the job was done right. Based on what Levi had been telling me, Mustang Mountain had experienced enough tragedy over the past two years. The last thing this town needed was to have something bad happen at the Founders Festival.
I could tell as soon as I got out of my truck that whoever had been working on the stage had been doing a crappy job.
The concrete footings weren’t big enough around, and I suspected they hadn’t been poured deep enough either.
No telling how they got that past inspection, but the work must have passed since someone had already started rebuilding the stage.
The more I looked around, the worse it got.
The site was an accident waiting to happen.
I’d wanted to make myself feel better by confirming that Franklin’s work wasn’t up to my standards, but what I saw violated almost every safety code.
I couldn’t let it go. If I didn’t say anything and someone got hurt, I’d be just as liable as the assholes doing the shitty work.
I didn’t have any intention of getting involved, but it was too late. Someone needed to report what was happening, and it looked like that someone was me. Annoyed that I even gave a damn, I started snapping photos to document everything. I was almost done when someone else drove onto the site.
Crouching behind a stack of lumber, I waited to see who would get out of the truck that had just arrived. Finally, Ruby climbed down. She went around to the back and lowered the tailgate. I wasn’t going to be able to take off without her seeing me, so I didn’t even try.
“Hey, Ruby,” I called out as I came up behind her.
She startled. Her hand flew to her chest as she turned around. “Huck. Oh my gosh, you gave me quite a scare.”
“Didn’t mean to scare you. What are you doing out here so early?” A quick look at my watch showed it was a quarter to eight. I must have lost track of time while I wandered around because I had no intention of being there that long.
She patted her chest like she was trying to get her pulse to go back to normal. “I ended up with some extra banana bread at the Merc and figured I’d bring it out to the crew. I’m surprised no one’s here yet.”
“Yeah.” I rubbed at the back of my neck, wishing I’d taken off before she arrived. “I haven’t seen anyone out here this morning.”
“And what are you doing here?” Glasses tipped down, she peered at me over the top of her frames.
“Just checking in. I had a bad feeling about the job going to that Franklin guy. I’m not trying to get anyone in trouble, but I was looking around and the work isn’t up to code. Any suggestions on what I should do about that?”
“Not up to code? What do you mean?” She put her hand above her eyes to shield them from the sun and looked out over the site.
I pulled up the pictures I’d taken and went through them with Ruby, stopping to point out what should have been done versus how Franklin had done it.
When I finished, Ruby clamped her hands on her hips. “We’ve got to do something about this. Someone’s liable to get hurt if we don’t.”
“I couldn’t agree more. So you’ll report it?”
“Me? Oh heavens no. I wouldn’t know where to start. You need to tell someone, Huck.” She nodded, her head bouncing up and down like one of those bobble head dolls my dad used to have on the dash of his old pickup.
I’d thought about it, but if I reported Franklin, I’d look like I was just poking around, trying to find something to hold against him. “It can’t be me. Peyton will think I just came out here to find a reason to tell her she was doing everything wrong.”
“That woman’s been under a ton of pressure,” Ruby said.
“She’s been trying to keep the vendors in line, squelching rumors that the festival’s in trouble, and worrying that we’re not going to make enough to break even.
Everyone thinks they have a right to say how they think it should go, but Peyton’s the only one who’s been willing to roll up her sleeves and make it happen. ”
That was just like her. She’d always been the first one to volunteer for something and often the only one who’d start a project and actually see it through. “She’s not a quitter.”
“No, she isn’t,” Ruby agreed.
Saying it out loud felt like sawing open my chest. I’d never seen her quit anything else, but she hadn’t seemed to have any trouble quitting me.
“You know, my mama used to say that a leopard can’t change its spots.” Ruby nodded to herself, and I wondered if she was talking to me or lost in some memory.
“Is that supposed to mean something to me?”
“You’re the leopard, honey. You can’t outrun the part of you that wants to fix things, Huck Barrett.” Her lips tilted up in a slight smile. “Can I offer you some banana bread? Seems like there’s no crew to feed and I’ve got a few extra loaves.”
I thought about what Ruby said all day long as I finished the kitchen for the cabin flip.
Was I a leopard? When I left Mustang Mountain, I didn’t look back.
For the past fifteen years, I hadn’t cared about fixing a damn thing.
I’d let the wind blow me whichever way it wanted and followed the jobs.
When the housing market was booming in Idaho, I was there.
When a major hail storm had blown through Texas, I’d gone down there for a few years and worked with a roofing company.
Ruby’s words didn’t make sense, but I was still thinking about them when I met up with Levi and Shane to grab a bite and watch the Mariners’ game on a big screen at Ace’s.
“How did things go today?” Levi asked as he claimed a stool at the high top table. He’d scored a big job in Silver Creek, so I hadn’t seen him all day.
“Fine.” I’d been meaning to ask his opinion about the festival grounds, but wanted to wait until we saw each other in person so I could show him the photos and point out what I’d seen. “I stopped by the festival site.”
“And?” He shot me a quick look, then glanced back at the screen as the Mariners got a guy on first.
“It’s crap. I don’t even know where to start. Between the safety issues and code violations, someone could shut down the whole damn site.”
“That doesn’t make sense. Why would Franklin bid on a job he didn’t plan on doing well?” Levi tore his eyes away from the game. “If the site gets shut down, that’s his license on the line.”
I shrugged. I’d given up trying to keep up with the politics of small town life a hell of a long time ago. Based on what I’d seen working construction in other places, there was never a shortage of guys willing to do stupid shit if they had the right incentive.
“Are you going to report it?” Levi grabbed the beer our server had just set down in front of him.
“I don’t know yet. Can’t think of a reason I could give for snooping around the grounds. Hell, he might even say I was trying to sabotage him because I was bitter I didn’t get the job myself.” With my luck, that’s how it would go down.
“Well, fuck.” Shane shook his head. “That’s pretty diabolical.”
“Yeah.” I took a long sip of my beer and tried to get into the game. Though I’d always been a Mariners fan, watching baseball hadn’t been the same since I stopped playing. I sat there as long as I could stand it, then tossed enough cash on the table to cover my drink. “I’m going to take off.”
With the game in a tie and the Mariners up to bat, neither one of them looked my way as I got up to leave.
That was fine by me. There was something I needed to take care of, and I didn’t plan on telling anyone where I was headed.
I stopped by the cabin flip to grab some equipment and a couple work lights, then drove over to the festival site.
I wasn’t doing this for her. That was the lie I kept telling myself as I unloaded the truck.
The night was quiet except for the low hum of my work lights and the crickets chirping in the tall grass. With no witnesses except for an owl sitting on a tree branch nearby, I got lost in the work.
My hands moved on instinct, finding the flaws, patching them, fixing what Franklin clearly hadn’t bothered to measure twice. I wasn’t getting paid for this. Hell, no one even knew I was here. That was fine. I didn’t need to be recognized for fixing someone else’s mistakes.
Movement at the edge of the fairgrounds caught my attention.
A huge wolf stood there, its head lowered, evaluating me like it was trying to decide if I was worth its time.
I stopped what I was doing and made eye contact.
Growing up in Montana, I’d seen my fair share of wolves, but usually from a distance.
“What do you want?” I yelled. If it wanted to come at me, so be it. I was tired of being underestimated and I wasn’t backing down. Not tonight.
The wolf walked on, disappearing into the darkness past the trees.
I grunted, driving another screw into the brace with a little more force than necessary.
Wood groaned in response. One wrong move and this whole thing would’ve collapsed.
Peyton would have taken the fall. For years, I wondered what would have happened if she’d stood up for me that night all those years ago.
If the town would have turned on her too or if her dad’s influence would have been able to save her.
For the thousandth damn time, I told myself this had nothing to do with Peyton. I just didn’t want people to get hurt.
And for at least the thousandth time since I arrived, I tried to believe it.