The Fallow Season of Hugo Hunter Read online

  It wasn’t really Marlene I was thinking of. It wasn’t me, either, at least not the version of me that was nearly thirty years gone.

  I thought only of Lainie and how time was drawing short. Eventually, and probably soon, she would figure me for the fraud I was.

  Excerpt from Hugo Hunter: My Good Life and Bad Times

  Frank Feeney used to tell me that I had to work up a reason to hate my opponents, if only for the minutes we would spend together in the ring. Hate, he said, would focus me on the task at hand—namely, inflicting more violence on my rival than he could inflict on me.

  I never hated anyone. Not even Juan Domingo Ascencion, who has a gold medal that belongs to me.

  What I did, instead, was rely on a competitiveness that borders on maniacal. In a boxing match, there can be only one winner. It had to be me. If there were some reward beyond the victory—say, a gold medal—that had to belong to me. I’m this way with anything, as it turns out. Checkers, Yahtzee, Ping-Pong, you name it. If there’s victory at stake, if one person is going to win and one is going to lose, I want to be the winner. No, wait, scratch that. I don’t want to be the winner. I have to be the winner. When you play-wrestle with a child, you’re supposed to let the kid win. I never did. I’m that kind of competitor. Is it healthy? Probably not. Can I do anything to change it? Probably not.

  The only two times that drive to win failed me, as it turned out, occurred when I was set to fight for world championships. Both times, I was involved with something beyond the fight game, a monkey on my back. Both times, I was a failure in the eyes of the sporting world.

  Try living with that.

  23

  The pellet-gun vandals stayed busy for the next two nights. Reports of shot-out car and house windows came in from the far West End, Blue Creek, Emerald Hills, the Heights—every neighborhood and enclave in Billings, it seemed. Monday morning, I trundled out to the driveway in my robe to fetch the morning paper and saw that my neighbor Bob Dilfer’s car had been relieved of its driver’s-side windows. That sent me on a frantic reconnoiter around my own property, which turned up clean, thank God. I went back inside without saying anything to Bob. It might make me small and petty, but I couldn’t face Dilfer’s yammering on about his damned Prius that early in the morning.

  In the Herald-Gleaner, both in the daily dinosaur of a print product and the Wild West of our online forums, the nightly bursts of thuggery were being cast as a Most Alarming Trend. The mayor and the police chief held grim-faced news conferences to assure the citizenry that Everything Possible Was Being Done. The Diploma commissioned a web chat with Chief Roscoe Hamer, and the website crashed under the weight of folks crowding in to express their fear that our fair burg was going to hell. About the only people who seemed happy were the owners of the glass repair places, which were enjoying a windfall to the tune of nearly $250,000.

  Lainie called me twice Sunday, and I ducked her both times. I wasn’t ready to talk, and I wasn’t ready to talk about why I wasn’t ready to talk. I like my life in compartments—work here, home here, social life there, with the pathways between them known only to me. Lainie was breaking down that discipline, crossing boundaries, learning things that I wasn’t ready to tell her, things I might never be ready to tell her. I’d spent more than twenty years finding a place of peace, or at least bearable unease, on the subject of Hugo, and she was already challenging my position there. What would she do or say when she found out more? I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answer.

  Monday night, I was back on the desk at the Herald-Gleaner, and she called me again. Nowhere to hide.

  “Take me to lunch tomorrow?” she asked.

  “I can do that.”

  “I missed you yesterday.”

  “Yeah, busy.”

  “OK. Noon then? At the clinic?”

  “That’ll be fine.”

  We said our good-byes, and I hung up. I sat staring at the phone, wanting a do-over on the whole exchange. The Diploma came barreling out of his office, relieving me of that thought.

  “Damn, Mark, I need you to roll on this,” he said. “Miles and Eighth. Cops think they have the vandals.”

  I looked around the office. Just the copy editors, me, and Pennington. Everybody else was at dinner, I guess. “Where’s Eddy?” I asked.

  “City council meeting. Get going. Cops are there now. Grubbs is heading over to shoot it.”

  It had been years since I did a cop beat, clear back to my intern days at the Herald-Gleaner, before Trimear brought me aboard full-time with the sports staff and long before he figured out that he didn’t like me all that much. I remembered now how much I craved the adrenaline rush of a spontaneous, unpredictable story. Put back on the job by the Diploma, I fractured a fair number of traffic laws whipping my Malibu through downtown and up into the asscrack of midtown Billings.

  Near the intersection of Miles and Eighth, the strobes crossed my face, bathing the inside of my car in blue. I jammed it into an empty spot on the street and tumbled out to stand among the ten or twelve gawkers who had congregated on the corner.

  In the middle of the street, a gray sedan sat at an angle, the left front tire blown out and the front end splattered with bullet holes. The cops had three men face down in the nearest yard, and across from them, two other officers talked with an older guy, maybe fifty-five or sixty, in a pair of basketball shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt. He gesticulated with a fair amount of fervor. The cops nodded as they followed the line of his hands.

  My cell phone buzzed, a text from the Diploma: TV going live. What’s up?

  Finding out, I typed and sent.

  Tweet as soon as u can.

  I nudged the guy next to me and nodded at the scene. “What happened?”

  “Old guy came out shooting, I guess.”

  I crossed the street. One of the cops talking to the older guy peeled off and walked toward me, hand up. I showed him my work badge.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “Still sorting it out, but looks like those guys over there”—he motioned at the scene across the street—“picked the wrong house to hit.”

  “How so?”

  He started laughing and then, perhaps realizing the impropriety, walked it back to a broad smile. “Damnedest thing. So those guys roll up and start shooting out windows in this guy’s garage. Problem is, he’s in there. Bigger problem is, he’s got an AR15—”

  “I’m sorry, an AR . . .”

  “Big freaking gun. Semiautomatic. The guy was in there cleaning and loading it. He’d just finished when Team Loser over there started in. So he hits the garage door opener, comes striding out, and starts blasting away.”

  “Jesus.”

  The cop laughed. “Yeah. It could have been a bad scene. He wasn’t aiming to kill, just neutralize. I imagine those boys are going to need a change of underwear.”

  “Will he be charged?”

  “Not our department. I doubt it, though. He’s legal to own the gun, no record, he was defending his property. Plus, if these guys are who we think they are, what jury would convict him?”

  I thanked the officer and hung back a bit to get Pennington’s tweet posted. I pictured the twitterpating back at the office over what passes for journalism these days: “Homeowner shoots at suspected pellet-gun vandals.” I flagged down Larry Grubbs, who was snapping pictures on the other side of the street, and filled him in. We agreed that the gold standard would be getting Dirty Harry Homeowner to talk with us. We would have to wait for the cops to finish with him.

  While Larry uploaded raw video to the office, I crossed over to get a better look at the perps. One by one, the arresting officers lifted the guys to their feet and moved them toward the patrol cruisers. I braced myself for recognition. They were all young men, muscular, the kind of knuckleheads with whom I was likely to be familiar.

  The first tw
o didn’t register with me, but the third one sure did: Cody Schronert, last seen beating on Hugo Hunter. Such a promising young lad. He looked at me and offered a smirk. I just shook my head.

  The Diploma made sure he splashed my story six columns wide across the front page Tuesday morning. The circulation manager told us later that he’d had to refill the boxes on several Billings street corners and at gas stations around town. Online, people went nuts for the story. Three days later, it remained our most clicked- and commented-on piece, an honor generally reserved for when some country cracker writes a letter to the editor bashing Mooslims and asserting his rights granted by a document he’s never actually read.

  Miles Avenue Homeowner Stands His Ground Against Vandals

  By MARK WESTERLY

  Herald-Gleaner Staff

  Three Billings men with a pellet gun and some bad intentions picked the wrong house to vandalize Monday night.

  Artie Bispuppo, 57, of 801 Miles Ave., was in his garage at about 7 p.m. when the small panes of glass on the garage doors started to shatter. As it turned out, Bispuppo had been cleaning and loading an AR15 semiautomatic—“My baby,” he called it—in response to a wave of property vandalism that has gripped the city in recent days.

  “I had a pretty golldang good idea who was doing it,” said Bispuppo, who described himself as a “freedom-loving, Second-Amendment-saving son of a gun” and a longtime Billings resident. “I was going to be ready if they came here. Kind of hoped they might, actually. It worked out, didn’t it?”

  What happened next, as described by Billings Police, surely gave the vandals the shock of their young lives. Bispuppo triggered the automatic garage door opener and came striding out to his driveway, where he strafed the car carrying the three men with 15 bullets that took out the front tire and left a trail of holes on the car’s front end. When the car stopped, Bispuppo turned the gun on the three men and held them there while police responded to a neighbor’s phone call.

  Arrested at the scene were Michael Ray Russo, 19; Andrew William Marchant, 21; and Cody Reese Schronert, 21. Schronert, in the news recently for defeating Olympic silver medalist Hugo Hunter in a boxing match, is the son of well-known Billings personal-injury lawyer Case “the Ace” Schronert. Reached by phone at home, the elder Schronert said he had no comment.

  So far, the three men have been charged with willful destruction of property in the Miles Avenue case, but Sgt. Ben Blakeley said more charges are likely to follow in more than 150 cases of auto and home windows that have been shot out in Billings in the past few days.

  While Blakeley said police don’t relish the idea of citizens taking the steps that Bispuppo took Monday night, the Billings man isn’t likely to face charges. A state law known as the “castle doctrine” holds that Bispuppo was merely defending his home, Blakeley said.

  For his part, Bispuppo said he had mixed feelings about what happened on Miles Avenue on Monday. On one hand, he said, actually using the AR15 left him “a bit stressed out.” But he also called on other “responsible, God-loving, criminal-hating” people to take an active role in defending their homes and lives.

  “We outnumber the punks,” he said. “But the punks seem to win. Not this time, bubba. Not on my street.”

  At lunch, Lainie reached over and took my hand. “I read your story this morning.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I’m glad it’s over. What did the insurance people say?”

  “Small deductible. No big deal. Car glass has been replaced, and they’ll be out to do the house windows Friday. I went ahead and gave the police the figures. They said it would be helpful with the prosecution.”

  “Little assholes.”

  “Yeah.”

  I watched Lainie eat while I pushed some macaroni salad around my plate.

  “I’m sorry about the other night,” I said. “I’m sorry I didn’t call.”

  She looked up at me. “No, I’m sorry. I got a little emotional about him, and the instinct for protection kind of kicked in. You know?”

  “Yeah.” I squeezed her hand and plunged in. “It’s just that . . . there’s a lot of stuff about that subject. A lot of stuff I haven’t said. A lot of stuff I’m not sure I can say. I want to tell you, but I’m afraid of what you’ll think of me if I do.”

  “About Hugo?” she said.

  “Yeah, about Hugo. About me.”

  Lainie let go of my hand, laced her fingers and ground them together for a few seconds, and then she reached for me again.

  “When I pictured saying this to you, this isn’t where I thought it would be.” She laughed, a little chuckle that dribbled off. “I’m going to say this thing, it’s very hard for me, and then you can decide what you want to do.”

  I nodded.

  “I love you. OK? I didn’t think I would again, not after Delmar, and I didn’t want to, but I do.”

  “Lainie, I—”

  “Wait. Let me finish. And because I love you, there isn’t anything you can say to me about what you’ve done before I met you that will change that. OK? If it’s time you need, time I have. If it’s secrets and you can’t part with them, that’s something else. I’m not saying I won’t love you. But secrets make everything harder. Everything. You understand what I’m saying?”

  “Yes,” I said, the briefest acknowledgment I could muster so I could get to what I really wanted to say, what I’d been dying to say before she said it first. “I love you, too, Lains.”

  “Good.” She smiled. The whole damn world lit up. “That’s the right thing to say.”

  “I want to tell you,” I said. “I think I’ll need to get drunk to do it.”

  “Beer?” she said.

  “Tequila. Lots and lots of tequila.”

  “I’ll be waiting up for you tonight. First bottle’s on me.”

  I drove northward toward home, up the face of the Rimrocks to the little parking lot below the airport. Summer was pushing toward us now, dislodging spring. I walked down along the concrete trail and took a seat on a bench overlooking town. Behind me, joggers, bicyclists, and dog walkers plied the opportunities of a warm, clear day.

  I traced my life through the bramble of streets and neighborhoods below me. There, in the central part of town, where Lewis Avenue meets Fifteenth Street, sat the house I grew up in. I slid my eyes left, moving east, to the oil refinery where my father, a pipe fitter, worked from 1960, three years before I came along, to 1989. We never connected much. I was bookish, like my mother, and Dad never saw the work value in what I did, chronicling others’ lives instead of living my own, by his estimation. My memories are buffeted by the knowledge of how difficult it was for us to have a decent conversation. Some people say time does something about that, downsizes recall into something easier to take. I haven’t found that to be true where Dad is concerned. I’d have liked to talk to him about Von. Maybe I could have understood him a little better when my own son seemed so unlike me, when our conversations were so eerily reminiscent of what I’d gone through with my own father, but Dad was gone by early 1991.

  Closer to me, almost close enough to touch it seemed, lay Montana State University Billings—Eastern Montana College when I went there. I found the big brick building, dead center in my view, and I went three windows up and four over. My first dorm room. The roommate I’d been saddled with and despised, an awkward kid from Geraldine, was now the majority leader of the state senate. How the hell did that happen?

  Now I telescoped in to the South Side. I found South Park, the big patch of grass in Billings’s oldest, poorest neighborhood, an oasis among the iron-barred gas station windows and halfway houses and tenements. The trees obscured my view of Hugo’s house on the southeast corner of the park, Aurelia’s house before that. Well tended, at least as long as Aurelia was here, although not so much these days, when neglect pervaded so much of our lives.

  The first time I we
nt there, it was to see a boy. Now he was a man. A grown-ass man, Hugo liked to say. So much had changed. So little, too. Who would have thought twenty years ago that Hugo and I would both still be here, still punching?

  Excerpt from Hugo Hunter: My Good Life and Bad Times

  If there’s a sports adjective I despise, it’s snakebit.

  Unfortunately, it’s one often applied to me.

  Here’s the problem with it: Snakebit suggests that factors beyond your control have conspired to defeat you. That you were motoring along, minding your own business, doing everything right, and some variable injected itself into your contest and you lost because of that.

  What a bunch of nonsense.

  Certainly, you could argue that the Olympic final qualified for such a description. I had Juan Domingo Ascencion beaten dead to rights, knocked out, and I did so legally. The gold medal that was rightfully mine went to him because of corruption. That’s an outside variable, to be sure.