The Fallow Season of Hugo Hunter Read online

  And yet, as I stood in the tunnel waiting for the houselights to come down and the music to start so I could make my way to the ring, I felt on the verge of losing control of my movements and my bodily functions. I’d heard whispers in the press before the fight, wondering if I was just a flash in the pan in Barcelona who would get exposed in the pro game, where it’s grown men and no headgear. I had no such fears. I was worried, no doubt about it, but it was rooted in other things: Is the rust gone? Can I set the pace early? Can I get up the stairs to the ring without falling down in front of fifteen thousand people?

  Two things let me know I was OK. The first was seeing my sportswriter friend, Mark Westerly, along press row as I made my way to the ring, everybody screaming and the music blaring. I gave him a little nod and he gave me a little wink, and that calmed me considerably.

  The second occurred in the first few seconds of the first round. The first jab I threw connected squarely with Briggs’s chin, and I knew then that I was much faster than he was. I backed up after that and invited him in, and sure enough, I saw his own jab coming from way back. I slipped inside it and threw an uppercut to the stomach that knocked the air from him. A minute and thirty-seven seconds into the round, it was over.

  I was going to be all right.

  31

  We collected our tickets at the box office and stepped inside the theater lobby. Lainie waved, and I looked up to see Raj standing against the far wall, under the placard listing the theater’s benefactors. She grabbed my hand and we walked over.

  “What are you doing here?” I said. I was mildly surprised. Raj tended to keep his distance from Hugo. Force of habit, I suppose.

  Lainie jabbed me in the side. “I invited him.”

  God, I could be dumb sometimes. “Good,” I said. “Going to be interesting.”

  Raj fiddled with his tie. The kid—hell, any kid—was more comfortable in T-shirts and khaki shorts. I gave him credit for making the attempt.

  “Does he know I’m coming?” Raj asked Lainie.

  “He doesn’t know we’re coming,” she said. “No extra pressure, right?”

  Lainie reached for my hand, and then for Raj’s. “Come on, men. Let’s go see a play.”

  Any hesitations I had about Hugo’s headlong dive into theater—and I had many, starting with his base irresponsibility of leaving his job at Feeney’s—eroded when I saw him on the stage that night. We sat in a middle row, just out of the reach of the footlights, and we watched him. The few novice moves I picked up on, like a nervous glance at the audience in his first scene, fell away quickly and yielded to a display of remarkable control. I’m not a theater critic. Far from it. But for my money—$17.95 plus a $5.00 lukewarm beer at intermission—Hugo became tragic Mountain Rivera. The performance had verisimilitude, it had depth, it had pathos. It occurred to me, as I sat there, that beyond the obvious parallels between Hugo’s character and his real life, he had been prepping for this role for a long time. Hugo knew how to sell a show, and he was doing it again there on the stage.

  Traveling all those years with Hugo, I had occasion to see and meet some famous people. Athletes. Actors and actresses. A few politicians, although most of them stay away from overt blood sports. Some surprise you with their physical dimension, because you’re used to seeing them bigger than life and reality right-sizes them. Some aren’t as glamorous as they’re made out to be. Some are even more devastatingly attractive. My point, I guess, is that the one commonality is their fame alters how they move through the world. A famous person—at least a famous person whose face is his currency—can’t hide in plain sight. I’d seen that with Hugo in Billings, and years earlier everywhere else. A current goes through a room or a city street when someone famous enters the scene. The chemistry changes. The way others comport themselves is transformed.

  At some point in Hugo’s performance, he stopped being who he was and became who he was playing. I grasped Lainie’s hand and leaned over and said, “My god. He’s wonderful.” She smiled, and I looked beyond her, to Raj, lost in the art his father was making. It was a glorious night.

  We went over to Feeney’s after the show—Hugo; Lainie; Raj; me; and his director, Joelette, who’d approached Hugo about the play originally and most assuredly was not his lover, since she was accompanied by her partner, Hannah.

  We took a high-top table and grabbed some menus. Hugo looked like he had been lit up from inside. He threw an arm across his son’s shoulders and said, “It’s great to see you, bud.”

  Frank swept by and asked what we were drinking. I ordered a couple of pitchers of Slumpbuster.

  “We’re doing a pulled-pork sandwich special,” he said. “Fries, tots, or salad on the side. Eight ninety-nine.” He kept looking sidelong at Hugo, who noticed.

  “Frank,” he said, his eyes still caked in makeup designed to make him look older and broken.

  “Hugo.” Frank nodded and left.

  “That was weird,” Joelette said.

  “Forget it,” I said. I figured I’d talk to Frank later, tell him what a revelation Hugo had been. In a week and a half, the play would be over and Hugo could get back to work at the bar. Surely that was still doable. This didn’t have to be a major impasse.

  Frank dropped by again with the beer, and I poured the glasses one by one and sent them around the table.

  “You old enough for this?” I asked Raj.

  “As of ten days ago,” he said.

  Hugo slapped his forehead. “Shit. I forgot.”

  I shoved the beer across to Raj before this could derail us. “Belated birthday beers are the best,” I said.

  “Pretty pithy poetry,” Lainie said, leaning into me.

  “Enough,” Hannah tossed in. “I’m thirsty.”

  I lifted my glass. “To Hugo.”

  “To Hugo!”

  Through dinner, I watched Hugo and his son. It was strange—beautiful but strange—for me to see them together again after so many years of dealing with them as separate entities. Raj had done some growing up in my house, when I still had a family there to wrap around him. Sam Wynn’s checkbook had managed to disengage that closeness, but it hadn’t stopped Raj, over the years, from stopping me at some school sporting event and asking about his old man. I’d always been glad to oblige, even when the news wasn’t so good. I was subversive like that.

  Now, they dropped in and out of the table conversation, a rollicking, rolling stream, and confided in each other in between. I couldn’t hear them over the din, but it was plainly deep and honest, the gesticulations carrying import, the attentiveness carrying investment, the intimacy carrying love. I leaned right and found Lainie’s ear. “Look at them,” I said.

  She turned and smiled at me. “I know.”

  “You did that. That happened because of you.”

  She wrapped an arm around my back and pulled me in.

  Our dishes cleared away, Hugo clapped his son on the thigh and said, “I’m gonna hit the head.”

  “Too much information, Pops, but OK.”

  Hugo eased off the barstool and moved around the table, giving Joelette and Hannah shoulder squeezes. When he got to Lainie, he drew her in and planted a kiss on her cheek. I got the sock to the arm. Anything more would have been inappropriate for the venue.

  We watched him head off toward the men’s room with a hitch in his get along, and I turned back to Joelette and said, “How did you know?”

  “Know that he’d be a great Mountain Rivera?”

  “Yes.”

  “I didn’t,” she said. “Honestly, I thought he’d sell some tickets.”

  “Don’t ever admit that,” Lainie said, laughing. “Take the credit.”

  The metallic clatter of silverware hitting the tile floor brought a shattering silence to the bar. I saw Raj’s face go slack, like the muscles in his jaw had been severed, and I turned to see Hug
o, kneeling on the floor with Amber, reaching for the forks and knives that had scattered across it.

  “Leave it be,” Amber said, her voice stretched thin by anger. “You’ve done enough.”

  “I just—”

  “Leave it!”

  Frank, who’d been at a table near the door, came hustling by and said to Raj, “Come get your dad.”

  When they reached the scrum, Frank leaned over and cupped Hugo under the arms and dragged him up. Raj took things from there and guided him back to our table.

  “Take him outside and wait for us,” I told Raj. Hugo looked spent, dazed, like he’d evacuated from the moment.

  “What just happened?” Joelette said.

  I couldn’t believe I’d missed it. Over the course of an hour or so, Hugo had gotten himself drunk. Hell, we all probably had a little too much. Problem was, only Hugo among us couldn’t handle it. From there, the course had been predictable enough.

  Around us, the other customers slipped back into their own worlds and conversations. “We’d better pay and get out of here,” I said to Lainie.

  I was settling the bill with cash when Frank came by.

  “You shouldn’t have brought him,” he said.

  I looked my old friend in the face. It was twisted, emotional, irrational.

  “We were celebrating,” I said. “He’s gone now. No big deal.”

  “A dozen other places you could have gone,” Frank said, voice rising. “Why here?”

  “Because you’re his people,” Lainie said. I turned to look at her. She was every bit as pissed off as he was.

  “Lady,” Frank said, “who the fuck are you?”

  That tore it. I took a swing at Frank, an act dumb as dumb could be. Had Hugo been there, he might have instructed me on the need for a strong defense to back up one’s offense, but he wasn’t, and I didn’t, and the lights went out quickly after that.

  32

  I awoke in the frayed gray tapestry of morning on Lainie’s sectional, Hugo’s socked, stinky feet in my face. Raj sat erect in the recliner across from me, his head thrown back in slumber.

  “Raj.”

  I tried to blink my eyes into focus. They hurt. He didn’t stir.

  “Raj.”

  Hugo’s son swatted a hand across his face and turned his head away from me.

  “Raj.”

  He shook his head now and blinked awake. “What?”

  “What happened?”

  “You don’t remember?” Our voices were whispers. Hugo flopped over and ground himself into the back of his part of the sectional.

  “Hugo,” I said. “I remember . . . my fucking head.” I passed the fingers of both hands under my eyes and found the welt. “Did Frank punch me?”

  “That’s what that lady said.”

  “Lady?”

  “You know, your lady.”

  “Lainie.”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “No,” I said. “Never mind.”

  “Here’s an idea,” came Hugo’s voice, a low hum. “How about both of you shut up?”

  We all broke into giggles at that. Hugo rolled again on the couch and then sat up. I did the same, and the rush of blood to my head set off a new round of pain.

  “What are we doing here?” Hugo said.

  “My question exactly,” I said.

  Here came Raj with the answers. “Well, let’s see,” he said, pointing at his father. “You were drunk.” He moved the finger to me. “And you got punched out by an old man. Me and your lady got you both in the cars and brought you here. We’re the brains of this crew, apparently.”

  “Stop saying ‘your lady,’ dude,” I said. “This isn’t the ’70s.”

  Raj just grinned at me.

  “Frank took a swing at you?” Hugo said.

  “I think the fair thing to say is that I took a swing at him first.”

  “Why?”

  “He insulted my lady.”

  We all cracked up again.

  “I just wanted to tell Amber I missed her,” Hugo lamented.

  “She didn’t get that message, Pop,” Raj said.

  I touched the lump under my eye, and pain shot through me again. “I can’t believe Frank punched me.”

  “How’s it feel?” Raj asked.

  “Like I got hit by the right hand of God.”

  “Impossible,” Hugo said. “Frank fights at a much higher weight than God.”

  We cackled loudly at that one, until I shushed us. “Don’t want to wake up Lainie. Which reminds me: What the hell am I doing out here with you whipdicks? I’m going to bed. You guys need anything?”

  Hugo lay back down on the couch. “We’re good, Mark. Sleep tight. Keep your chin tucked next time.”

  By the time Lainie and I awoke four hours later, the Hunter men were gone, leaving just the two of us for breakfast. I got my first good look at the dent Frank had put in me. The lump was about the size of a robin’s egg, a grotesque, angry purple.

  Lainie, behind me in the bathroom, draped her arms across my chest and kissed my ear. “That’s the most chivalrous thing anyone’s done for me.”

  “Well, you know me.”

  “Maybe the dumbest, too,” she said.

  I grabbed one of her hands and pretended to bite into it. “Don’t mess with me, lady. I’m dangerous.”

  She clapped my shoulders and stepped back. We watched each other in the mirror.

  “I like those guys,” she said.

  “Yeah. Me, too.”

  “Three men, each of you an only child,” she said. “Interesting.”

  She smiled at me in that warm, knowing way of hers, a way that suggested she didn’t have anything more to offer than that oblique observation. It was only later that I figured it out, that Hugo, Raj, and I had imposed our own dynamics on our disparate existences. There’s family you’re stuck with, and family you choose. For us, it was the latter course.

  Those guys mean everything to me.

  33

  The night before I went back to work, Von came to see me in my slumber. We were all together again, me and Marlene and our boy, and Von talked to me about a brother he had on the way. It didn’t compute, in the dream or in the immediate aftermath, when I jolted awake and lay there next to Lainie and her woodcutter snores, trying to make sense of it.

  Marlene never got pregnant again. It was an unspoken understanding that a child had done little to improve things between us, save for sucking some of the uglier exchanges out of the air. We weren’t good partners, but we weren’t monstrous to each other, either. We weren’t going to subject a child to that. And when we lost Von, that was the end for us. The indifferent hand of circumstance had taken away our hearts and given us the final shove.

  And yet, between the folds of sleep, my son had come to me and talked to me of family. He appeared as he had the last time I saw him alive, that moppish brown hair, those sturdy, steady eyes that gave him the mien of someone much older. He talked to me of commitment and of follow-through, of the notion that anyone can live with anyone else when times are good, and that the measure of things is taken when it’s easier to walk than to stay. He didn’t tell me I’d failed him and his mom. His manner was gentle, advisory. But I knew. He knew. It was inescapable.

  In my dream, I sat still for the comeuppance, because . . . because he made so much damn sense. Because his twelve-year-old mouth yawped out the wisdom of elders. Because I think sometimes maybe I’m forgetting what he looked like and sounded like, and he’d come to remind me.

  And then he was gone, and I was awake, and the night spilled into the window above our heads, and I shook Lainie awake and told her I needed to tell her something. And Lainie, God love her, came flying into that sudden moment. “Tell me.”

  I started with that morning at
the clinic, when I first saw her and I couldn’t think of anything else. I started with the kindness in her face that drew me in, and the tartness that leveled me, in a good way. The best way.

  “I don’t know what you thought of me—”

  “I thought you were adorable,” she said.

  “—but I knew I had to talk to you, and then once I talked to you I knew that I had to see you again.”

  “Yes.”

  “And it’s been everything, Lains. Everything. I don’t know what these last few months would look like if it weren’t for you.”

  She slid against me. “I know.”

  “You’re smart like that.”

  She smiled. “You’re lucky to have me.”

  “I am, at that.”

  I wrapped myself around Lainie and kissed her neck as she fell back into the sleep that I knew wouldn’t be coming for me again. Once the wheels start turning, that’s it. My day begins. I’ve heard that the difference between real life and fiction is that things happen in fiction because of other things, while real life is just a series of human events, some related, some spontaneous. I don’t know. I’m a chronicler, not a philosopher. I try to leave it to other people to make cosmic sense of it all.

  I’d had two families in my life, the one I was born into and the one I tried to build. Dad was gone. Mom, too. Von. Marlene had taken her $8,000 and the remainder of her dignity and lit out for God-only-knows-where. It would have been easy enough, lying there next to Lainie and holding on for dear life, to wonder why so much loss should be visited on me, but self-pity wasn’t in my viewfinder.

  And then my scattered thoughts shifted, coagulated, and I wondered if Von wasn’t telling me about another duty I had. I thought of Hugo and those who had been taken from him. More than that, I thought of the losses he didn’t even know about. I remembered the day Ted Stanton died—it had to be four or five years back now. It was big news in Billings, and I read the story in the Herald-Gleaner the next morning about his bombast and his political acumen and his wealth, and I remember wishing I could call up Hugo and talk to him about this man who had supplied half of his genetic material. I couldn’t, of course, because I’d made a promise to a woman who a year later would also be gone and who loved Hugo more than anyone.