The Fallow Season of Hugo Hunter Read online

  “That’s it, then,” Frank said.

  “Frank,” Hugo pleaded, “he never said I couldn’t fight. He just said that he preferred I didn’t, that’s all.”

  There’s a term for that line of argument. Desperate, yes, but brass balls is more like it. And yet, it was in character for Hugo, who could be as adept at parsing words as he once was at taking away an opponent’s offense. I watched Hugo and Frank go at it from a table a safe distance away, my role as observer coming to the fore, and my mind flashed on a happier time, at the training camp before Hugo’s first title shot. In the evening, after Hugo’s ring work was done, we’d sit around the cabin on Flathead Lake that Hugo used as a training base and we’d rip on each other—just ball-busting guy stuff, since the camp was all testosterone, the sparring partners, Hugo, Frank, Squeaky, and me. I’d long since adapted to Frank’s habit of on-the-fly portmanteau words, the most prominent of which, when it came to Hugo, was “flustrated,” but Hugo had heard enough.

  “It’s two words, Frank,” he said that night, as the rest of us roared and Frank fought gamely against the grin pulling at the corners of his mouth. “Flustered and frustrated. One means you’re out of sorts. The other means you’re out of patience.”

  “Oh, yeah, smart-ass?” Frank said. “If I hear any more out of you, I’m going to kick your motherfunking ass.” God, how we howled at that.

  Frank slapped the bar with a towel, pulling me out of my memories. “He sure as shit didn’t say you could fight, Hugo. That was the deal, remember? Written approval. You had a nice run, kid, but it’s over now. Go home, make peace with it, get on with your life.”

  “Frank—”

  “Not another word. It’s over. It’s done. I don’t want to hear about it anymore.”

  Hugo looked to me, searching. I averted my gaze.

  “I’ve got nothing without it, Frank,” he said.

  Were it me, I’d have come from behind the bar and hugged Hugo, some small suggestion that it would all be OK, even if I had my doubts. Maybe I was too softhearted, or maybe I’d gotten too close, but I had sympathy for Hugo. The one thing Hugo did better than almost anyone else, the one constant for much of his life, was being taken away in a most ignominious way. It deserved some ceremony, some deference. At least I thought so.

  Frank, though, stayed rooted to his side of the barrier.

  “You’re going to be alive tomorrow,” Frank said, soft as he was capable of being in that moment. “That’s good enough for me. Damnit, Hugo, it ought to be good enough for you, too.”

  11

  Frank knocked on my door just after three a.m. I watched him through the peephole as he listed like a grade-schooler in a carnival funhouse. I opened the door, and he belched forth a gaseous cloud of his own product.

  “I knew you’d be up,” he said.

  I motioned him in. “I’m predictable that way.” Another evening of watching teenage boys and girls play basketball, followed by a breathless account for the next morning’s paper, was behind me. I was making a hell of an impression with my life’s work.

  I brought Frank into the living room and poured a pot of coffee into him. That seemed to level him out a bit. What began as a malformed lamentation—“That kid’s driving me crazy,” over and over, the words changing here and there but the sentiment straight and true—became a more coherent thought.

  “I put the kibosh on him,” Frank said.

  “Oh?”

  “Called the sporting authority in the Dakotas, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, what’s that state above Utah?”

  “Idaho?”

  “Idaho! And Washington. Called them all. Told them about Hugo and said not to sanction him for a fight. I figure that’s as far as he can get on a bus. He ain’t got a car anymore. I don’t know. Maybe he can get to Nebraska. If he can get to Nebraska”—Frank held up his coffee cup in a toast—“more power to him, let him fight. Screw Nebraska.”

  “So that’s it, then?”

  “That’s it.” Frank gave the thumbs down, a pffffffbbbbbtttt for emphasis.

  “Have some more coffee,” I said. “You did the right thing.”

  While Frank recounted the back-and-forth in his bar, as if I hadn’t been there and seen the whole thing, I tried to noodle out how to tip Olden off to a story we’d have to do. The end of Hugo’s fighting career, even in this advanced state of erosion, was capital-N news, but I didn’t want to open Hugo to the indignity of how it ended and how Frank had necessarily sandbagged him.

  “I wish Aurelia was here,” Frank said, the first thing to penetrate my own foggy thoughts. “She’d straighten him out.”

  “She was something special,” I said.

  “Dignity and grace.” I looked over at Frank as he spoke. He lay on his back across my couch, his eyes lost in the maze of the ceiling pattern. “I never met anybody like her. First time she brought him to me, she laid it all out. ‘He’s being beat up and made fun of. He’s scared. Your job is to make sure he can defend himself and that he isn’t scared anymore.’ Just like that. It wasn’t a request, just an order. You think I was going to tell her no?”

  “And look what you ended up with,” I said. “Did you have any idea?”

  Frank scoffed. “Shit, no. Pure athletic ability, sure. I saw that almost immediately, but in boxing, that’s not near enough. I had to find out if he was hard enough to do what needed to be done. You remember watching Roberto Duran?”

  “Sort of,” I said. “I saw the two Leonard fights when I was in high school. You know, no más and all that.”

  Frank whistled, a long, baleful blast, and he flopped onto his side. “Oh, man, you should have seen Duran as a lightweight. That’s when he was a killer. Manos de piedra, hands of stone. He used to convince himself before fights that the other guy had killed his mom. He’d come in there with a rage. I mean, he hated those guys he fought. It was scary. And then it’d be done, and he could flip it off and be a regular guy.” He looked me over. “Anybody can learn the punches. The willingness to hurt another man for no reason at all, and for every reason there is—that’s the part you can’t teach.”

  “That’s the part I never got,” I said. “Hugo’s not cold-blooded. Far from it.”

  “No, he’s not. But he’s hungry—or he was. Think about all the things he didn’t have—no dad, no mom after he was ten years old, no respect in his neighborhood, him and Aurelia living hand to mouth in that house. You give me a kid who doesn’t want, and I can’t do anything with him. You give me a kid who’s nothing but desire, and now you’re talking. When I saw what Hugo had inside”—he thumped a fist against his chest—“I told Aurelia that she didn’t have to pay a dime for him to work out with me. As if she could, anyway.”

  I sat quietly. I wasn’t sure how to phrase the question I wanted to ask. Frank yawned and turned toward the cushions, so I settled on directness.

  “He says he still has the desire. How do you tell him to shut it down?”

  Frank rolled back toward me. I got the thousand-yard stare again. “It’s not desire that Hugo has. It’s muscle memory. We think we’re meant to do one thing, and when that thing ends, we don’t know how to cope. I was a boxing trainer, and then I wasn’t. I own a bar now. That was my next thing. Hugo, he’s just got to find his.”

  Frank nestled into my couch and began snoring. I got up, set a blanket across his girth, and retreated to my bedroom to wrestle with my own slumber.

  12

  For sheer spectacle, I’ve never seen anything like what happened in Billings the day we returned from Barcelona.

  I was first up the Jetway, and the concussive beat from inside the terminal rattled that tin can. It was tittering laughter and the brass band blowing through some practice notes and the hum of anticipation and the smell of carnival popcorn. I expected something big. Marlene had tipped me off when I’d called from JFK between flights. “It�
��s unbelievable what’s happening here,” she’d said, and there I was, always with something better, saying, “It’s unbelievable what happened in Spain.” There are so many things I regret saying to her, and that—a stupid, tossed-off line that one-upped her—is one of them.

  On our last connection, the flight from Minneapolis, Frank leaned in all casual and said to Hugo, “I think there’s this little to-do planned back home.” Hugo nodded in his self-assured way and went back to feigning sleep, the only way he could keep the well-intentioned folks who shared our flight from queuing up at his aisle seat, seeking pictures or autographs.

  As we crested the ramp, it was me, then Frank with his coat over his arm and a newspaper jammed in his back pocket, and finally Hugo with a duffel bag over his shoulder.

  The terminal looked like a glitter bomb had gone off. Streamers hung from the ceiling tiles and poster board signs clung to the walls, every letter a different color: “Welcome Home, Champ.” “Hugo Hunter, Our Hero.” “He’s a Knockout!” We stood there for at least a second or two, blocking traffic off the plane, before recognition registered with the gathered throng and they finally lurched into action. The off-key notes of the “Rocky” theme blared out, and this surge of humanity came at us, all hands and mouths and a garble of congratulations.

  It was easy enough for me to slip by. I wasn’t the object of their attention. I retreated to the side and found Marlene and kissed her, then knelt in front of her and rubbed her belly. “Trimear wants me to ride down with Hugo,” I said, and she teared up but nodded vigorously, the bravest face she could show me as I disappointed her again.

  I looked back at the commotion and found Frank, who had sidled off to the edge of the scrum. I saw Hugo make eye contact with him and give the universal raised-eyebrows signal of “Where the hell is she?” and Frank nodded and plunged into the squirming mass.

  “I’ll get a ride home,” I told Marlene. I was gone before she answered, pulled to the periphery of the crowd surrounding Hugo.

  “What’re you going to do now, Hugo?” one guy asked him.

  “I’d like to sleep, sir,” Hugo said, looking him in the eye, showing the confidence of a boy-become-man that he hadn’t exhibited before Barcelona.

  At last, Frank parted the crowd, coming up the middle, his right hand around the tiny left wrist of Aurelia, pulling her through. He twirled her into her grandson’s arms, and Hugo held on to her.

  “Where were you?” he said.

  “Waiting at the back.”

  “Grammy, you don’t wait on anybody.”

  “Oh, hush.” She pulled away from him just a bit and ran her hands along his shoulders, straightening his Team USA sweatshirt. “These nice people came to see you. We’ll have plenty of time to talk later.”

  Hugo slipped a finger under her chin and lifted it until their eyes met. “Did you watch me?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Every time.”

  “Came up one short,” he said.

  She smiled and shook her head. “Nobody here thinks so,” she said, and Hugo hugged her again as the crowd went wild.

  We rode from the airport in a white limousine, Hugo and Aurelia and Frank and me, and a Yellowstone County commissioner named Rolf Eklund. People stood on both sides of the road, holding signs welcoming Hugo home. Later, on the cusp of his first title fight, Hugo and I would talk about that day and that line of humanity just wanting a glimpse of him. “It didn’t seem real,” he’d say. “I’ve been down the steep drop of Twenty-Seventh Street so many times—lonely times, on my feet, pounding out the miles. To see all these people there, and to know they were there for me, it was stunning. I mean, I can’t think of another word.”

  At JFK, I’d called Gene Trimear after hanging up with my wife, and he’d laid out the plan for me. We’d use my status as an insider to do a behind-the-scenes story on Hugo Hunter Day. That put me in the awkward position of trying to fire questions at Hugo while knowing full well the answers.

  “Roll down that window, son, and lean out if you want to,” Commissioner Eklund said.

  I reached for Hugo’s hand and stopped him from engaging the button. “I want to ask you a few questions before we get to the courthouse.”

  “Sure, Mark, fire away.”

  And so began the ping-pong of conversation around the limo, a frenetic, disjointed scene I tried to capture in print the next morning.

  Here’s Frank, nosing through the compartments in back. “Any whiskey?”

  “No whiskey,” Commissioner Eklund said. “The county can’t be liable for that. There are some Cokes in there.”

  Aurelia: “Oh, this is so exciting.”

  Me: “Did you expect a greeting like this, Hugo?”

  Frank: “I don’t want a Coke.”

  Hugo: “I don’t know what I expected. It’s amazing.”

  Commissioner Eklund: “We’re almost there, Frank. How about I buy you a drink later?”

  Me: “What are you going to do now?”

  Aurelia: “I’ll have a Coke, Frank.”

  Frank: “You’re on, Commish.”

  Hugo: “I haven’t thought too much about it.” (This, by the way, was a lie with a capital L. What Hugo was going to do next occupied his every thought, and Frank’s, and mine, for that matter. Asleep on the plane, I’d dreamed about what was next and wondered if my marriage would survive it. Seeing the reception put on for Hugo, I couldn’t help but think of what was next. Always, always what was next.)

  Commissioner Eklund: “Would you just look at that!”

  We were in the middle of downtown now, and the courthouse lawn looked like the scene of a rock concert—as if everybody in town had squeezed onto that patch of grass in a rollicking mass of anticipation and pompons. When Hugo stepped out of the limousine, a cheer like you’ve never heard went up. Following Hugo all those years, I came to know something about rowdy crowds. Nothing in Barcelona, or anywhere else, could compare with what we heard right there that day in Billings, Montana. The hairs on the back of my neck prickled, and as I followed Commissioner Eklund, Hugo, Frank, and Aurelia up the stairs to the dais, I had to remind myself to breathe.

  I found my way to the back of the gathered mass of dignitaries and ciphered out an angle for observation. Hugo took a seat near the lectern, between Mayor Ted Stanton and Commissioner Eklund. The grass, already burned up from the summer heat, was trampled by the massive glob of humanity that crowded the stage. I looked down the line at Frank and Aurelia. He managed to tolerate the suit he was wearing, while she looked like an angel, an embodiment of grace. It’s fair to say I loved her. Even fairer to say I harbored a bit of a crush on this woman nearly forty years my elder. When I was younger, older women had a wisdom about them that attracted me—not necessarily in sexual ways, and certainly not that with Aurelia. It was an appeal to the mind, an intoxication that comes from recognizing a true sage.

  Both of them wore the lopsided smiles and faraway eyes that I’d seen before. Frank bore the same look after the semifinals, after Hugo beat the guy from Germany and they knew he was going to win a medal. That’s when everything began to get so crazy around them, when Hugo went from a minor curiosity to—well, to whatever he was that day in Billings and in subsequent weeks and months, damn near everywhere you looked. Frank’s visage in Barcelona said “How in the hell did this happen?” The expression in Billings said the same thing.

  I moved closer, stepping sideways through county and city officials, to get nearer the action.

  Mayor Stanton rapped Hugo’s left knee with his fist and said, “Awesome job out there, kid.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You know, I knew your mother. Did you know that?”

  “No, sir.”

  “A wonderful woman. How long has she been gone?”

  “Seven years.”

  “She’d be proud of you today.”

 
; “She was proud of me every day, sir.”

  The mayor got a funny look on his face, just for a moment, like food had gone down the wrong way or something, and then it cleared. “OK,” he said. “Let’s do this.”

  He stood, reached into his pocket for some notecards, and stepped to the lectern. The crowd broke out into chants of “Hu-go! Hu-go! Hu-go!” and drowned out his first few words. He kept fumbling around, trying to get things going, and still the chant came: “Hu-go! Hu-go! Hu-go!”

  Hugo turned around in his seat, looked at me, and said, “That’s my name. Don’t wear it out.”

  Darkness hugged Billings tight when Aurelia, Frank, and I stepped outside her house that evening, leaving Hugo blanket-covered on the recliner, bagging all the sleep he’d missed during a fortnight in Spain.

  “Better enjoy this crisp air while you can, Aurelia,” Frank said. “In another month, you’ll be smelling nothing but sugar beets cooking.” He cast a hand south, toward the plant that looms over the South Side.

  “I like it,” she said, settling into a chair on the porch. She pulled a shawl tight around her shoulders. “To me, it’s the smell of home.” While I appreciated Aurelia’s embrace of one of the defining aspects of her neighborhood—and, really, what choice did she have?—I had to go with Frank on this one. On a day when the wind was blowing out, I could smell that sickly sweet air, something on the order of meat halfway between edible and spoiled, all the way up in the Heights. I spent much of the fall, every year, on the precipice of nausea.

  Frank eased down into the chair next to Aurelia’s. I sat on the railing opposite them.

  “The kid gave a good speech,” Frank said. “Said the right things, thanked the right people.”

  Aurelia clasped her hands and brought them to her mouth. “I’m amazed at how grown-up he seems. Frank, you took a boy to Spain and brought back a man.” She reached down and grasped his hand, and even as she did, a storm cloud crossed her face. “I wish Helene could have seen him. She was the orator in the family, you know. I saw a lot of her in him today. It usually comes in little bits, something he’ll say, a way he’ll cock his head, and she’ll be there. Today was different. She was more fully there, if that makes any sense.”