The Fallow Season of Hugo Hunter Read online

  “Yes.” It was all I could do to hold it together.

  “I just hoped you’d be OK. I couldn’t stay, I couldn’t help you with that, but I hoped that for you. For me, too.”

  “I did, too. For both of us.”

  I don’t know what I wanted from the trip, except to satisfy an urge I had to see Marlene again. Closure? Sure. But what’s that, really? I guess it’s what I got that day in Casper.

  Marlene looked out the window. Hugo had gotten out of the car and was now pacing the sidewalk, careful not to make eye contact.

  “He watches over you,” she said.

  “He’s a good friend.”

  She stood, and I stood to meet her. “Thank you for coming to see me, Mark. I’m glad you did. And I’m glad for your happiness. I really am.”

  “Thank you.”

  She paused in the doorway to put on her sunglasses, and then she headed for her car, waving to Hugo. The car door opened, and she folded herself into the seat. I watched through the café window as her eyes found me, and she smiled. I lifted a hand in a wave, and she responded in kind.

  She backed out of the parking spot. I kept my hand up. She drove out of the frame, and that was it.

  42

  Lainie and I made it through Christmas without the wheels coming off our private enterprise. We had made a pact that we wouldn’t tell friends and family members about Zygote Westerly until after the first trimester screen, which lay just beyond the new year. That would be just about the time Lainie would begin to show in a way that made circumspection a moot point anyway.

  So it was that we cooked up a big holiday feast, stuffed the stockings, and listened as Tony and Jo told us about their impending happiness, the child who would be born four or five weeks after his or her uncle or aunt. Hugs and handshakes came out in public, and Lainie and I saved the maniacal giggles for later, when we were alone in bed. What a surprise we had in store for them, and what a twenty-first-century family we had shaping up.

  Left to my own devices, I became intimately familiar with Google searches on terms like amniocentesis, and saw that our immediate life would be cast against an every-two-weeks measuring stick: the obstetrical history appointment, the obstetrical physical appointment, the chromosomal testing, the childbirth classes that we’d fit in on Tuesdays (my only option given the crappy split-day schedule I was working at the Herald-Gleaner), quad screening, AFP testing, GTT, and the rest of the alphabet soup.

  At twelve weeks, on a gloomy day that blew snow sideways in Billings, we got the pronouncement we were seeking. There’s nothing easy about carrying a child to term; when you figure all of the things that have to happen just so, it’s amazing we’re as successful as we are at propagating the species. At Lainie’s age, the caution, for her doctors and for us, ratcheted up considerably.

  The ob-gyn gave us the news, in words I ended up using for the e-mail that announced the impending arrival to our friends: “Looks like the kid has done this before.”

  Before work, I carried a few celebratory cigars over to Feeney’s. The pull of family and obligation had changed the spheres I operated in, but when it came to singular news I had to unload, Frank Feeney was as good a friend as I’d ever had, next to Hugo. I’d wanted to hate him after he punched me out, after he said what he did to Lainie, but I couldn’t. Too much history. Too much knowledge. Too much.

  “What’s this?” he asked as I handed him a cigar.

  “You can figure this one out,” I said. “I know it. Think hard.”

  He gave me the finger. It was beautiful.

  “I’m gonna be a daddy,” I said.

  “No shit?”

  “One hundred percent shitless.”

  Frank came around from behind the bar and scooped me into a bear hug. My weight gain aside, the old boy could still throw me around like I was nothing. I really would have to think twice about taking a swing at him again. “I gotta call Trevor,” he said. “He’ll get a kick out of this.”

  I pulled another cigar from my pocket and handed it to him. “For Squeaky. But hold on a second.”

  We settled into seats at the bar.

  “Have you heard from Hugo?” I asked.

  “Not since . . . well, you know.”

  “Really?”

  “Yep.”

  “That was, what, four months ago?”

  “I guess.”

  “I’ll call Raj. Hugo’s not answering the number I have for him.” I’d tried that morning, and in the car on the way to the bar. Nothing. I had news for him, and some work clothes that Lainie had picked out for Christmas. I hadn’t seen him since the trip to Casper. When we got back, time did what it tends to do. It dribbled away from us.

  “I’ve seen the kid. Came in a few times with a girl he’s been seeing.”

  “You ask him about Hugo?”

  “No. Why would I?”

  I was flummoxed. “Why wouldn’t you?”

  That irritated Frank. He stood up and retreated to his usual spot. “I haven’t gone anywhere, you know? Somebody wants to say something to me, here I am. Like you, Mark. You found me. It ain’t hard. And congratulations to you.”

  Raj didn’t get back to me until deep into my shift at the Herald-Gleaner, when the phones were popping every couple of minutes with a coach calling in a basketball result. I had to make it quick.

  “Where’s your dad?” I asked.

  “The patch, I guess. I don’t know.”

  “When did you hear from him last?”

  “A couple of weeks ago. Before Christmas. Said he was staying on to make some money. He sent me some cash.”

  “He sound OK?”

  “What’s with all the questions, Mark?”

  I looked over the transom at Trimear, who was giving me angry eyes to indicate that I needed to dump this personal call and get back on the phones.

  “Just wondering, is all,” I said. “When you hear from him, let him know I’ve got some stuff for him. Have him call me, OK?”

  “Yeah, OK.”

  “Thanks, kid.” I hung up, then immediately picked up a ringing line.

  “About time,” Trimear said.

  “Herald-Gleaner sports, this is Westerly,” I said. Trimear kept staring me down, and I mouthed, “Sorry,” then greeted the Twin Bridges basketball coach. “Great, Jim, how’d it go tonight?” Jim Cardwell downloaded the night’s box score into my ear, and I punched it into the waiting form on my computer screen. Nearly thirty years of journalism, and this was my lot at the Herald-Gleaner.

  Getting old sucks.

  Between editions, Trimear asked me to step into the conference room. I had a feeling what the subject would be. Perspicacity, that’s what it’s called.

  “Don’t sit,” he said. “This won’t take long.”

  “OK.”

  “Phone’s for business use only.”

  “I know. I—”

  “It’s in the employee handbook. You signed the form saying you read the handbook.”

  “You’re right. I did. It won’t happen again.”

  “It better not,” he said.

  “I assume you’ll be taking this up with everybody, then? Hop calls the brewpub to order dinner every night. Landry talks to his girlfriend. I heard you talking to your kid tonight.”

  I looked at him. I didn’t dare smile or make any overt acknowledgment of how I was killing him. I didn’t need to. His neck was bobbing in hyperdrive.

  “Just stay off the phone unless it’s business,” he said.

  “You got it, Gene.”

  “And don’t be a smart-ass.”

  “No, of course not.”

  He opened the door and sent me out, and then he rushed out the side door for his smoke break.

  Excerpt from Hugo Hunter: My Good Life and Bad Times

  By the me
asures of the sport, I am a failed boxer:

  I’m a silver medalist. That means somebody finished better than I did.

  I had two championship matches as a pro. I lost both, in different ways.

  To the extent that I’m remembered at all, a certain narrative threads through this. It’s one of incompletion. To the sportscasters and analysts, I had something lacking. I didn’t want it bad enough. I couldn’t control my impulses long enough. I wasn’t good enough. Any way you slice it all up, it comes down to passion. I didn’t have enough. That’s the story.

  On one hand, I can understand that line of argument. It’s a breezy explanation for something that is otherwise inexplicable. But you know what? No contention makes me angrier than the one that suggests I lack heart.

  I went from nothing in Billings, Montana, to the best amateur lightweight in the world. (Juan Domingo Ascencion and his gold medal will just have to accept that.) At my peak, as both a welterweight and a junior middleweight, I was the second-best professional fighter in the world. Seven billion people on the planet, and only one of them was better at what I did than I was.

  How do you suppose that happens? Well, let me tell you: it happened because I had passion for what I did. Nobody runs the kind of miles I did, chops wood, punches heavy bags, gets in the ring with sparring partners, eats the way I did, and turns himself into a wrecking machine because he’s a dilettante. If I’d wanted to be average, I could have worked at an insurance agency or driven a truck. If you’re a professional fighter, average can get you killed.

  What I had was not a lack of passion. It was an abundance of human frailty. You want to tag me with that, go right ahead. Guilty.

  But don’t say I didn’t have heart.

  43

  I thought for sure I’d died.

  I kicked myself awake, and the moment was gone. I couldn’t even catch a little tendril of it, just a vague memory of feeling like I was going to perish, and my arms and legs kicking straight up in the bed and my heart pounding and my breathing heavy and Lainie asleep next to me, as if nothing had happened. In a way, that was true. I was in our house, our bed. But I was rattled pretty deep.

  I sat up and dropped my legs over the edge of the bed, and I tried to chase down the pieces of my dream, but it was no use. It was gone, a vision dispelled by my waking consciousness.

  The house had been silent when I arrived home, with Lainie well off to dreamland, and I’d wound down by rearranging her office—my office, now that this was as much my home as hers. It seemed a foolish errand. We had a baby on the way, and the space would soon become a nursery, but the activity filled the hour between the end of work and the beginning of sleep.

  My thoughts took root in a common lament, one that revisited me when I found myself at loose ends where Hugo was concerned. It was an unfair thought, not to mention an unreasonable one. It was a wish that Aurelia had found a way to live forever. The most maddening moments with Hugo had come in the void left by her passing. The addiction and the missed opportunities with Montrose and Qwai had left marks on us all, but Hugo’s perpetual inability to sustain himself had emerged only in the years she’d been gone. Maybe it was too much to put on her, that she’d have somehow kept him locked in and on task. But that’s where I was, and I knew it was the same for Frank. She had a way nobody else could manage with Hugo. I wouldn’t say he feared her so much as he feared disappointing her. That hadn’t been enough, of course. Disappointment made regular visitations, but when Aurelia was alive, the prospect of recovery seemed viable.

  Hugo never had a meaningful fight after the loss to Qwai in 2005. Frank knew that was the last shot at a title, and he got out, bought his bar, became an ex-manager. Squeaky offered to keep going with Hugo—all he had was the South Side gym his daddy used to run—but Hugo didn’t want that. In a real way, that night in Vegas severed everything for everybody. I never went on the road with Hugo again. Frank never saw another fight from the corner. Squeaky never worked with another world-class pro.

  But Hugo wasn’t done. He became his own manager, and he cut his own deals with the promoters who’d helped him make a name through the first ten years of his career. He hired mercenary corner men for the fights that followed. What he never figured out, or never seemed to acknowledge, is that he was on the wrong end of those deals. When Hugo was eighteen, nineteen years old, promoters served up opponents who would build his record. Not bums, necessarily—just decent fighters whose careers were on a downslope, who would look good under the W column on Hugo’s ledger. After Qwai, Hugo was the fodder, the good but spent fighter with credibility that any ascendant boxer needs to beat as he builds his own reputation.

  With this downgraded status came three losses, in succession, each distinctly devastating.

  Hugo got fed first to Julius McGinley, the best of a bad lot of US Olympic team fighters from the 2004 Games. What McGinley lacked in grace and discipline he made up for with a hard head and the most vicious right hand you’ll ever see. They fought in Reno, a doozy of a step down from a headlining Vegas show, and I listened in on a radio station’s webcast from my office cube in Billings, thankful I wasn’t having to witness it. Every time Hugo managed to get a punch off, McGinley would smother him on the ropes, then back off and unload that right hand. At some point, it no longer mattered whether the damned thing landed. McGinley used it to pound Hugo for five rounds, until the referee showed some mercy and called things off. Hugo came home to Billings and to Aurelia and climbed to that top-floor room, blacked out by blankets in the windows, and shut out the world.

  He might still be up there if not for Aurelia, who pitched over dead in the front yard not three weeks later. Saddest thing I’ve ever been a part of that wasn’t my own loss. Frank’s the one who called me that morning from the mortuary, asking if I could come down and try to console Hugo. I didn’t have the slightest idea what to say, given how much I was struggling in those months with what had happened to Von and to my marriage, but of course I went. Hugo and I sat together in the chapel and didn’t say a word to each other. We’d already said them all, in better times and in better places.

  I thought of that again there on the edge of the bed, as I listened to the nighttime symphony of my new wife’s rising and falling breaths. I’d been slow to pick up on what family means, at least in the context of my own life, and reluctant to be expansive beyond the traditional definitions. But if Hugo wasn’t my family, who was? We’d lived in each other’s space and in each other’s thoughts for two decades now. We’d conspired, we’d collided, and we’d kept the faith. At the lowest moment of his life, when Hugo was set to bury the person who loved him most, I sat with him. Not because he was alone in the world. Because he wasn’t.

  I couldn’t separate that from what came next, four weeks later. Hugo went back to the ring, on a riverboat casino in Mississippi, and he fought a carnival freak show named Coconut Olson so he could pull together enough scratch to pay off Aurelia’s funeral bill. The manufactured story with Olson is that he’d been found on a deserted atoll in the South Pacific, an apparently divinely conceived baby who had been rescued by US servicemen during a training exercise, brought to the States, and raised up right by a Minnesota man, who shot blank sperm, and his barren wife. The truth of the matter—that he was a truck driver born in Georgia who fought on the side—was much less dramatic. Whatever the case, Olson battered Hugo for eight rounds and won a unanimous decision, and back Hugo trudged to Billings, ready to call it a career.

  I wanted that for him. We all did. We wanted him to be done, and to be OK with being done.

  It never really works out that way, though, does it?

  44

  A month ago, mid-January, we came to the end and the beginning, Hugo and I.

  I’d just seen Lainie to the car through the slush in the driveway, her hand gripping my forearm as I guided her and our precious cargo through the treacherous bits.

 
“I’ll shovel this stuff before you get back,” I said. I stood there in my robe, my knees knocking together from the cold, and I kissed her.

  “Get inside,” she said.

  “Soon as you’re gone.”

  “You’ll catch your death.”

  “No. Never.”

  “Don’t give me promises you can’t keep,” she said, half joking and half admonishing. I held her steady as she dropped into the bucket seat.

  “I’ll wake you up when I get home,” I said.

  She kissed me again.

  I was folding over my egg-white omelet—Lainie had finally reached the end of her tolerance of my weight gain and had put me on a regimen—when the cell phone went off. I checked it. Tony.

  “Hey, bud. What’s up?”

  “Hey, Mark. Something’s going on with your boy Hugo.”

  I pulled the frying pan off the fire. “What?”

  “Not sure exactly. I heard some guys talking about it. Is he supposed to be fighting again?”

  The anxiety rose up in me. “Hell no. He’s supposed to be working a rig, same as you.”

  “He might be.” Tony was trying to be cool, but I could hear the tremble in him. “The chatter I heard was that he’s taking fights for money.”

  “Who said this?” I asked.

  “Just a couple dudes in my camp. Said guys were ponying up for a crack at him.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “He was up in Stanley, right?”

  “Yeah, that’s what I heard.”

  “How many people know about this?”

  “A lot,” he said. “Everybody in my camp, it sounds like. Not too many secrets out here.”

  My thoughts leaked out in about a dozen directions. “OK, Tony. You call me if you hear anything else.”