The Fallow Season of Hugo Hunter Page 17

  But there was more than just that. The obituary mentioned a son, an Edward Stanton Jr., and that same son came to work at the Herald-Gleaner not much later. He was a nighttime maintenance man, a bit odd, kept to himself—unless something was broken, and then he was unfailingly reliable. I couldn’t remember a single conversation with him, not a single interaction, but when he was in the same room with me, I would steal looks at him and try to find Hugo inside him—a damned difficult proposition given his height and his girth, much more in keeping with his old man’s dimensions than those of the famous half brother he didn’t know.

  I never managed to shake the unfairness of it all, that I should know such things and Hugo should not—and that I should know only because Frank Feeney got a little loose-lipped one night, prompting him and Aurelia to swear me to secrecy.

  So, great, I knew. I remember once being proud that I knew, that I’d been confided in. That’s the juice for a newspaperman, being in the know. That means you’re good. That means you’re trustworthy.

  It was all bullshit now.

  I shook Lainie again. I had more to say.

  From page two of the Billings Herald-Gleaner Local section

  The Billings Playhouse stage production of “Requiem for a Heavyweight” has hit a snag: Olympic medalist Hugo Hunter, who plays the lead role of boxer Mountain Rivera, has dropped out of the cast.

  “He didn’t say much,” said director Joelette Carson, who had the idea of casting the former boxer. “He said there was another opportunity he had to take now. It’s OK. We have a capable understudy and will move forward.”

  Hunter’s deft performance, his first onstage, came as a surprise and helped establish the production as a hit. Drawing on his own past as a professional boxer who never quite made the big time, Hunter packed an emotional wallop with the role, just months after his career ended, seemingly for good, in a loss at the Babcock Theatre.

  34

  I dragged through the front door of my house Monday morning after seeing Lainie off to work. She’d twisted my arm and kept me at her place with the promise of a late movie and a later breakfast, and hey, I’m not made of stone.

  The work cell phone I’d left plugged into the wall after my curt one-week dismissal blinked urgently. I dropped the newspaper on the countertop, fetched the phone, and punched up the voice mail. I was surprised to hear Larry Largeman’s whiskey-sour voice.

  “Hey, bud, give me a call. I think we’re home free.”

  The “we’re” threw me a bit. I still wasn’t sure if I was ally or dupe. I dialed the number.

  “Largeman,” came the answer.

  “Westerly.”

  “Hey, bud. I took care of your case.”

  Still with the vagaries. The only words I wanted to hear were “it has been dismissed” or “Case Schronert has dropped it.” Everything else was just a possible variation on bad news.

  “What’s that mean?” I asked.

  “It’s over. It’s done. No more lawsuit.”

  That was more like it.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  A gargle came through on the other end. “Listen, Mark, do you suppose you can come in today so we can talk about this at more length?”

  “What? Why?”

  “There are ears in the cornfield.”

  “Huh?”

  “Eyes in the potato patch.”

  “Are you having a stroke or something, Largeman?”

  He coughed, and I held the phone away from my ear. “Goddamnit, I don’t want to talk about it on the phone,” he said. “You’re a lousy hint taker, you know that?”

  I ignored it. “I can come by around eleven.”

  “That’ll work.”

  “See you, Largeman.”

  With time to burn, I headed to Hugo’s place. I’d read the paper and gone through my usual bit where he’s concerned—surprised, but not really. I needed to find out what was going on. It did me no good to get on the phone. Hugo monitored his calls, and whether he wanted to talk with me was beside the point. I wanted to talk with him. It was an old trick of mine, this ambushing him wherever and whenever I needed to. The thing was, once you got face time with Hugo, he was so exceedingly polite and eager to please that he’d engage on any topic you cared to bring to him. That affability was golden to the newspaperman I was. I absolutely exploited it, which I suppose makes me craven and insensitive. Whatever. It got me stories, and that was the coin of my realm.

  I didn’t need anything beyond the small pile of newspapers on Hugo’s lawn to know something was amiss, that he hadn’t been home in a while. I pulled out my phone and queued up a number. A few minutes later, I had a lunch date with Raj Hunter.

  Unease scratched at me on the drive to Largeman’s office. In twenty-plus years of dealing with Hugo, I’d come to know something about his unpredictability, and none of it was very good. Some of it I had buried deep. In ’98, the year after the disappointment in London, Hugo up and announced that he was moving to Los Angeles to be with his new girlfriend, that Ashley Lane character who made all those well-received period pieces in the early ’90s but was more a straight-to-video vixen by the time Hugo sank balls-deep into her. So there he went, bought himself a house in the hills and a couple of cars, and what could anyone do? He was twenty-three, it was his money and his life. Frank and Squeaky exacted a promise that training would still happen at the place on Flathead Lake, and Aurelia put on a brave face, because that’s what Aurelia did. I’d try to call every month or so to play catch-up, but Hugo was hard to reach.

  What happened out there, in the end, was no big secret. Cocaine, fights with the paparazzi, drunken car crashes. That’s the stuff in the public record. Fourteen months after Hugo left us, Frank and Squeaky were on the coast, pleading with a judge to let Hugo come home and get cleaned up. All the trappings of a fast-expiring fame, gone. His money, gone. At that point, I was socking money away for Von’s college education, any stray dollar I could catch, and it burned my ass that Hugo could be so cavalier with something I worked so hard to bring into the house.

  At Largeman’s office, I sat alone and waited until he emerged in the wake of a toilet flush and running water and offered a handshake. “It’s OK,” he said. “I washed.”

  “It’s an old line, Largeman.”

  “Yeah, but reassuring people of cleanliness never gets old.”

  He signaled me to take a seat, and he settled in behind the desk.

  “So, no more court case,” he said, pushing across the document that verified this. “Best two grand you ever spent, right?”

  “I guess. Why’d he relent?”

  “He knew a superior legal mind when he saw one.”

  “Come on, Largeman.”

  He chuckled and tried to pull me into his mirth, but I’d have none of it. Finally, he sighed and set his hands on the desk.

  “OK, look,” he said. “Your fundamental concern should be this lawsuit, and it’s gone. I’m gonna tell you the rest, but whatever you think of it, remember this: I did what I said I would do. I got rid of it.”

  “OK.” Fewer words are better when you’re bracing for literally anything.

  “So I was thinking that the best way to squash this thing was to short-circuit it. Do you like to go to court?”

  “Never been, other than my divorce.”

  “You’re a lucky bastard, other than your divorce. I hate court. It’s boring. It has rules and stuff. I didn’t want to do that. So I started thinking about Case Schronert. If you’re that guy, you’ve got a reputation, people know you, you’ve got some history. And a guy with history is a guy with secrets. That’s just a fact of life.”

  “It is,” I said. I started to feel a little squeamish.

  “Case Schronert’s secret is that he likes to shack up. A lot. With several women who aren’t his wife. You want to see picture
s?”

  “Jesus,” I said. “You followed him? You took pictures?”

  “Hey! Remember what I said: you’re off the hook.”

  My head began to spin. “You blackmailed him?”

  “I did not blackmail him.” Largeman was actually indignant. That took some gall. “I convinced him of my superiority as an investigator. I suggested to him that if he did me a favor, I could do some good work for him. It’s called revenue streams, buddy boy. You think I’m going to be able to retire on your two thousand clams?”

  “Still.” That’s all I could say amid the mental processing and low-level nausea.

  “You’re making me feel bad,” Largeman said, putting on the full pout for his own benefit. “I’m good at this. Finding out information is what I do. We’re not so different, you and me, except that you announce your presence. I’m more comfortable being the fly on the wall.”

  “I’d say we’re completely different.”

  Largeman came around the desk and offered a handshake, which I accepted. He had washed up, after all.

  “I can understand why you’d say that,” he said, “but we’re really not. We’re in love with the same woman. The difference is, my love for her exists somewhere else in time, before I became what I am. You get her now. You lucky son of a bitch.”

  Excerpt from Hugo Hunter: My Good Life and Bad Times

  I’ve come to learn a few things about the way fame changes people. I’m not talking about me. Those changes are evident to anyone who bothers to look. I’m talking about the way people react to fame when they’re in the presence of it.

  Imagine losing your private life when you’re only seventeen years old.

  When you’re approached by someone with something nice to say, imagine looking at that person and wondering what he or she wants. That’s a terribly cynical outlook, and yet it’s inevitable, too.

  Imagine being asked, repeatedly, for just a few minutes of your time. If you say no, you’re an asshole. If you take the time to explain that if you gave a few minutes to everyone who wanted it, that none of your minutes would belong to you anymore, you’re an asshole.

  In many respects, I was fortunate. Other than the months I was living in Los Angeles, falling in deep with drugs, I never ran with an entourage. Frank and Trevor Feeney kept a tight circle with me. My only family was Grammy, so I didn’t have a lot of people coming to me with their hand out. I’ve lived almost exclusively in the town where I grew up, and people here gave me a certain amount of latitude (although, on the flip side, they’re also more likely to tell me flat out that I’m a disappointment to them).

  Last year, after I bubbled into the news again, and again for all the wrong reasons, a Hollywood producer approached me. He wanted to make a reality TV show out of my life. We never got far enough along in our talks to discuss money, so maybe I’m an idiot for having turned him away. I just didn’t want to enter that cauldron again. Reality TV? No, thanks. For me, plain old reality has been difficult enough.

  35

  At lunch, Raj filled in the details that wouldn’t have been in a newspaper story.

  “He’s on a rig in the Bakken,” he said. “He left a couple of days after—well, you know, after all that stuff at Feeney’s.”

  That clarified everything and exactly nothing. The most pregnant question of all: How does a guy go from greasepaint thespian to grease monkey rig hand in a week? Raj didn’t have all the answers, but he closed the gaps that were within his reach.

  “I took Pop to my apartment that morning after we woke up at your place,” he told me, leaning into his plate of nachos. “Did you see him getting drunk? I didn’t see it. Too much going on.”

  “I didn’t see it,” I said. “I should have.”

  “He didn’t want to go to his house,” Raj said. “He said he was still hungover, so I was like, ‘I got a couch.’ My roommate was all, ‘That’s Hugo Hunter on our couch.’ Yeah. My dad.”

  “What’d Hugo say?”

  Raj sat back in his chair. “You know, the same stuff. He was sorry. He needed to get his shit together. I’ve heard it before.”

  “We all have.”

  “Yeah. So he called a day or so later and said he was getting a lift to Williston, that there was a rig job waiting for him. He said he loves that Amber woman and that he had to grow up.”

  “Did he say where he’ll be?”

  “No. He said he’d call me every couple of weeks and stay in touch. You want me to let you know if I hear from him?”

  “That’d be great, Raj.”

  “No problem. He said he really felt like this time it was going to work out for him.”

  “What’d you say?”

  “I wished him luck. What else could I do?”

  Nothing. It wasn’t a question that demanded an answer.

  “I hope it works for him,” Raj said, “but I’ve got my own stuff going on. You know?”

  I reached across the table and snared a nacho off his plate and popped it in my mouth, and I shrugged.

  I can’t say I was surprised by Raj’s attitude, though I was sorry to hear it. That’s what Hugo tended to do. He’d grind on you and grind on you with his dreams and schemes, and by the time he came up with something that might work, you were too exhausted to invest more than middling hope in it.

  The fact was, the oil field sounded like a half-decent idea to me. It had its dangers and cautionary tales, sure, but it also had things Hugo badly needed: a job and money. I also couldn’t discount the potential benefits of having his time and attention focused. That’s how boxing had first beguiled him and then held him close. When he was doing it, when he was turned intently toward a goal, he was, at once, more of a danger to his opponent and less a danger to himself.

  Raj had made the simple and sane decision to protect himself. He’d let hope in—he had youth on his side and could make that investment freely—and he’d gone on with his own life. I had to concede that, whatever I thought of his mother and his grandfather, he’d been raised well. I could sit there and condemn their actions, which I’d witnessed and which I believed I could see in full, but I couldn’t say anything negative about the results. And given the time that had passed us by, perhaps it was time for me to let it go.

  36

  Nobody at the Herald-Gleaner took my weeklong interlude as an opportunity to clean the joint up. I returned that afternoon to the same old workspace in the same old dingy corner of the office and with the same old Trimear preoccupied with the same old nonsense.

  Over the years, I’d seen a few colleagues sat down for various transgressions, most of them specious. The truly gifted problem employees find a way to exercise just enough incompetence that it’s stealthily subversive, and thus it inspires only heartburn among the bosses. It takes a consistently solid citizen like me to commit a suspension-worthy sin through accepted editorial means.

  The fortunate ones aren’t made to come back. They get pink-slipped, we end up having a glorious drunk in their front yard as a fuck you to the man, and they turn up a few months or years later in a far better place than Billings, Montana. Rick Westphal, truly the worst of the editors I’d had at the Herald-Gleaner, once shit-canned a reporter, Holly Hawkins, because she’d had the temerity to put in freedom-of-information requests on the property tax records of every elected official in Billings and had discovered that, lo and behold, a third of them were delinquent on their bills. She’d approached them all, asked why, gotten a bunch of worthless equivocations, and set about writing the story under the theory that, hey, you might want to know that the folks in charge of the public trust are themselves not trustworthy. The city attorney at the time, a fetid wasteland of human worthlessness named Calvin Tandy, walked into the newsroom, strode up to Holly’s desk, and said, “Darling, that story will never see print.” Ten minutes later, he was out of Westphal’s office and Hawkins was in. The
very definition of a raw deal, except for this: two years later, Hawkins won a Pulitzer in Omaha for an exposé on a buried sex scandal at a parochial school. Lucky for her that she wasn’t good enough for the Herald-Gleaner.

  Newspapers are funny places, man, and when I say funny, I mean it in every constellation. If one gets inside your skin, you keep showing up because you know that someday something extraordinary is going to go down, and there’s no group of people funnier, more caustic, more bitter, more twisted than your coworkers, and you can’t imagine experiencing it anywhere else. And in all the in-between times, when nothing of much import happens and the stories move across your eyes like gray static and you sell out your soul bit by bit, you show up because you have nothing better to do. And you’re completely OK with that trade.

  I walked in, and the downturned faces greeted me as if I’d been away at a dear family member’s funeral. I got grim half smiles, the unspoken part being this: “It was a personnel matter and William Pennington didn’t say anything, but you were gone and we know what happened, and you’re back now and this must be so embarrassing for you.”

  I settled in. “Gene,” I said.

  “Hey, you’re back.” Trimear dropped some page dummies on their edge, squaring them off in his hand. “You ready?”

  “Yeah, sure, you know. What’s the plan?”

  “Typical Monday night. Slow. Need you to fetch phones and take some scores.”

  “Sure.”

  “Need you to go out to Sidney on Wednesday.”

  “What for?” Trimear had just put me on a five-hundred-mile round trip to Montana’s eastern edge and back. Driving straight into the sun on the way out, having it beat on my head on the way home. Endless asphalt ribbons. Not the duty I preferred.