The Fallow Season of Hugo Hunter Read online

  Frank nudged Aurelia. “Can you believe Stanton?”

  “Oh, whatever,” she said, brushing his arm away. “He’s the mayor. Of course he’d be there.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Wait,” I said. “What?”

  “Nothing,” Frank said, a little too fast, a little too abrupt. I might have let it go if not for that.

  “Come on,” I said.

  “Just leave it be—”

  “Well, there’s no chance of that, Frank.”

  Aurelia held a finger to her lips and craned her head to make sure Hugo was still in slumber. She stood up and glared at Frank. “Come out into the yard, you two.”

  We followed her out to the edge of the lawn, under a lamp spraying the street in gold.

  “Well,” she said to Frank, “you brought it up. You want to tell him?”

  “Tell me what?” I said.

  Frank moved in close to me. “Mark, I hate to do this, but I’m going to have to ask for your word that this is off the record. Off the record, out of the atmosphere, out of the solar system. You got me?”

  I held my arms out, an innocent. I hated it when people did this to me. It made for a convenient joke—“Hey, watch what you say around the newspaperman, or he’ll make you famous for all the wrong reasons”—but it came at a considerable cost to my comfort around other people in social settings.

  “You want to pat me down for a wire, Frank?”

  “I’m serious.”

  “So am I.”

  “OK, boys, enough,” Aurelia broke in. Then, in a whisper: “Mayor Stanton is Hugo’s father.”

  I looked at Frank. He nodded grimly.

  “Does Hugo—”

  “Absolutely not,” Aurelia said. “My daughter loved that man. Loved him enough to retreat when Stanton said he didn’t want to be with her, that he wanted to return to his wife. Loved herself enough not to be made a fool. They were over and done long before she found out about Hugo. She didn’t tell him about her son, and she saw no reason to tell her son about a man who didn’t want them.”

  I struggled to sort it all out in my mind. Ted Stanton was one of the most powerful and wealthy men in the state, a former oilman who was about to use the mayor’s job as a springboard to a county commission seat. Some people figured he’d be governor someday. The economic disparity alone was enough to make a connection with Hugo dubious. Here was a hardscrabble kid from the poor South Side, and his daddy lived in splendor on the West End. And still, armed with this knowledge, I could picture Stanton’s mug shot that commonly ran in the Herald-Gleaner, those penetrating green eyes that stared back from the newsprint, and I could see the similarity to the eyes of the boy I now knew to be his son. The galaxy of freckles sprayed across Hugo’s nose was a match, too. It was the black hair, thick as a house painter’s brush, and the fractional-Native complexion that separated Hugo from his father’s image. This apple fell far from the tree.

  “So Stanton doesn’t know,” I said.

  “Nobody’s ever told him,” Aurelia replied.

  “How many people do know?”

  “Three, including you. Now.”

  “What’s with all the questions?” Frank asked.

  “Nothing. I’m just trying to get my head around it. You know, the mayor sat up there and talked to Hugo about his mom. I just thought—”

  “No,” Aurelia said. “I don’t think so. He’s a blowhard, so maybe he was just trying to show off. I don’t know. We haven’t said anything, and we don’t want anything.”

  I looked at my watch. Nearly midnight. “Speaking of fathers,” I said, instantly cringing at my awkward segue, “this daddy should have been home hours ago. Frank, can you give me a lift?”

  We were nearly to my turnoff in the Heights when I broke the silence.

  “I still can’t believe it.”

  Frank gripped the steering wheel. “We shouldn’t have said anything.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s not a good subject. It’s a distraction.”

  “Frank, I’m not going to say anything to anybody.”

  “I’m just saying that it’s not good.”

  I leaned back in the bucket seat. “I will say, it’s a hell of a story.” In the corner of my eye, I caught Frank agitating. “Potentially. Theoretically.”

  Frank said nothing, the clearest possible sign that he was pissed.

  “Frank, there’s so much interest in Hugo. You were there. I don’t have to tell you. There’s going to be a lot of people who want to tell his story. Maybe—”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe you ought to consider how to handle all of this, in case it gets out. Could be dicey for Hugo. Could be dicey for the mayor, too, if he doesn’t know.”

  He pulled into my driveway and shut off the ignition.

  “I have one job, Mark,” he said. “That’s to get him through this next year without any damage coming to him. He made a promise to Aurelia that he’d finish high school before we’d start his career, and he’s gonna honor that promise. I’m gonna honor that promise. So don’t talk to me about handling anything where Hugo’s concerned, OK? I’m on it. And just to be clear: fuck Ted Stanton.”

  “I never suggested that you—”

  He cut me off. “I’m tired, Westerly. Just forget it, OK? Go see your wife. You gotta stop hanging around guys like me.”

  I climbed out of the car and tapped the roof twice, thanking Frank for the ride. He backed out of the driveway and left the neighborhood the way he’d come in.

  I hauled myself up the driveway toward the porch light. On the door, a sheet of yellow legal-pad paper flapped in the night breeze. I reached for it and pulled it close.

  It was Marlene’s line-perfect cursive.

  I guess we’ll see you tomorrow then.

  13

  Aside from handing a tip to Bobby Olden that Hugo was, in all likelihood, finished as a fighter, I spent the next several weeks disengaged from him and the Feeneys. Olden’s story came and went, a tidy enough account. Hugo wouldn’t commit to being done. He acknowledged that it didn’t look good, and that at the minimum he’d have to wait until the Babcock fight series started again in the autumn. Trevor Feeney cast things more definitively: “The end comes for every great fighter. And that’s what Hugo was: a great fighter.”

  In what must have been the biggest indignity of all for Hugo, Billings and its people took the news without breaking stride or, frankly, seeming to give a damn. I’ve seen that kind of wandering interest a hundred times. There’s nothing in the world we won’t grow tired of.

  As for me, it wasn’t that I’d grown weary of Hugo. I’d just been taken in by the simple, sweet distraction of Lainie Vermillion.

  I wouldn’t have laid odds that it was possible I’d see her nearly every day, that I’d even want to, but that’s what happened. I called her that first night she asked me to, before Frank showed up at my place soused, and told her I had a day off coming and I’d like to take her to dinner. She countered by asking me to bring a bottle of wine to her place, a little bungalow near the park, so she could cook for me. I left her house that night with a chaste kiss on the lips and an urgent need to get home and rub one out. Within the first week, she told me she didn’t like my smoking, and instead of saying “tough shit, lady,” as I’d have surely said to anyone else, I stopped. Well, I mostly stopped. I still stepped outside the Herald-Gleaner with Trimear between editions and blazed up while I listened to him carp about his recalcitrant twenty-six-year-old son who’s got Crisco for brains and better by God put that degree to some use and get out of the basement and holy shit did the world not need another friggin’ English major. It would take an English major to know, I supposed. Even so, I barely raised those Camels to my lips, instead letting long lines of ash fall to the sidewalk before I mashed the husk out o
n the building and dropped it into the trash.

  In the days immediately after my first date with Lainie, I faced the long work stretch that Trimear had warned me about when I took the night off to watch Hugo. The district basketball tournaments bounced into town, and I couldn’t get away. So Lainie came to me, bringing me hot dogs and sitting with me on press row between games, the banter between us easy and light. It would be unfair of me to make any comparison that casts a negative light on Marlene, because God knows I alienated her a baker’s dozen different ways, but she never cozied up to what being a newspaperman required of me if I wanted to do it well. Lainie got it from the beginning.

  On our second proper date, I stood in Lainie’s kitchen, cutting carrots for a salad, when I realized that the night was likely to end with me in her bed (or if not that, with the biggest case of blue balls I’d ever experienced). I knew then that once I’d had her, I’d only want more of her, that all the borders I’d erected with other women would be made porous. I couldn’t face that without unburdening myself.

  “Where did your son go to middle school?” I asked her. Tony, a rig hand, was on his two-weeks-on cycle in the oil patch, and I hadn’t yet met him.

  Lainie stood at the stove, stirring the rigatoni. “Castle Rock. Why?”

  I set down the knife and faced her. “He might have known my boy.”

  “But you said—”

  “That I don’t have kids. Yeah. I don’t. But I did. I had a kid.”

  She turned down the burner, took my hand, and led me to the couch in the living room.

  “Tell me,” she said.

  “Von Eric Westerly,” I said, and I swear, I felt like I’d breathed him into the room just by letting his name out. Into my mind came a crashing jumble of thoughts—what he might look like if he’d lived, what I would say to him if I had the chance, whether he’d forgiven me for what I’d done.

  “He’d be twenty-one in October, about the same age as Tony. He only made it to twelve.”

  She brought my hand to her lips and kissed it. I closed my eyes.

  “What happened?”

  There is no good answer for that question, simple though it may be. What happened is that I fathered a son who was smarter than I was the day he was born, who was headstrong (where the hell did he get that?), who had his own sense of what was what, a sense that in his budding adolescence had increasingly put him opposite of me in matters of familial harmony. What happened is that I came home for dinner one night, pissed off about something I can’t even remember, and lit into the boy over the major infraction of leaving the skateboard I’d just bought him in the yard for any young scofflaw to take. What happened is that right there, like a hanging judge, I’d dropped a penalty on him that I couldn’t possibly make stand, something so wildly out of proportion to his transgression that Marlene laughed in her incredulity and thus drew her own ration of my wrath. What happened is that Von ran for the door, grabbing his skateboard out of the front hallway, where I’d put it, and tore out into the dusk. What happened is that I chased him to the top of our hill, the perfect place to see him tucked low on that skateboard, whooshing down into the thicket of lanes below us, his hair blown back by the wind. What happened is that I went back to the house and lingered in the front yard, burning through my smokes and waiting for Von to come back to us. What happened is that he never did.

  “He got hit by a car,” I said. “Three days in the hospital. No brain activity. I wouldn’t let them let him go. I told the doctor I would fucking kill him if he let my boy die.”

  I sniffled. I stared at the ceiling in some futile hope that my filling eyes would drain back into my head. The rest came in a whisper. “You know how that goes. Calmer heads prevailed. They didn’t do anything I hadn’t already done.”

  Lainie squeezed my hand. “Mark, no. It’s not—”

  “Yes,” I said. “It goddamn sure is.”

  She moved into me, her hips and her hands and her head taking up the spaces adjacent to mine, until there was nothing between the end of me and the beginning of her. She cupped my neck in her hand and brought my head to her shoulder and I breathed her in, and then I broke down.

  The skateboard was fine, not a scratch on it. That night, my son lay crumpled and broken on some poor bastard’s lawn. We never brought him home, but the skateboard came back and got propped up in its usual spot in the hallway, because we were too overtaken by our grief to do anything else. Someone who divines meaning from mundane action might suggest that we put it there in some desperate hope of turning things back to that last moment when Von might have decided to stay, or I might have decided not to scold him the way I did, or Marlene, shouted into silence by me, might have intervened and saved us all. I have enough guilt and shame about all of that on my own. I didn’t need to objectify it.

  It was, simply, something he loved, and we loved him, and he was gone and it was still here. It was something he’d left us. The same thing with his bedroom, just across from ours. In those blurred days after Von’s funeral, I’d find Marlene in there, sitting on the edge of his bed, staring at the walls. The sour stink of our adolescent boy lingered in that place. She’d sit on the bed. I’d stand in the doorway. And silence and memory and the perpetual parsing of the things we should have said but didn’t or the things we shouldn’t have said but did—all that taunting shit gathered between us and carried us away from each other.

  14

  Hugo rang my doorbell early on the morning of my next day off. It’s weird to say so, because Billings with its hundred thousand souls isn’t a particularly large town in the scheme of things, but seeing him there on my porch threw me for a loop, as if he’d ventured into a foreign zone. He hadn’t been out this way since Von was still with us, since before Marlene left, and I realized I’d managed to put him in a box. If I were downtown or on the South Side, Hugo fit into the picture. Here, not so much.

  “How’d you get here?” I asked him.

  “A buddy dropped me off. It’s cold, Mark. Can I come in?”

  “Christ, yes. Come on.”

  Hugo pushed into the living room, a place he knew well in some distant, other time. There was a rawness to his movement, an agitation. He didn’t sit. Instead, he ground a path into the carpet with a fast-twitch walk.

  “I don’t have much in the fridge,” I said. “I can scare up some coffee.”

  “No, thanks.” He didn’t look at me, but the pacing continued.

  “Have a seat,” I said.

  “In a minute.”

  I sat down. I thought maybe that might induce him. No dice.

  “Mark,” he said at last. “You know anything about books?”

  “Paper, binding, glue. Haven’t cracked one in who knows when.” I pointed at my bookcase, a static piece of furniture in my house these last few years.

  Hugo stopped and looked at me. “Huh?”

  “I’m just kidding.”

  He came over and sat down on the couch opposite me. Now I had his full attention, his eyes bearing down on me, sharp and focused. Intimidating, if you want to know the truth.

  “What I meant was, have you ever written one?”

  I tugged at the collar of my robe. “Hell, no. I wouldn’t know where to begin.” The truth of the matter is that I wrote the equivalent of a book damn near every couple of months, it seemed, but that was easy. Everything happened in front of my face, and I regurgitated it in five-hundred-word chunks.

  “I want to write a book,” he said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. And I want you to help me.”

  I laughed at the idea of my being helpful with such a thing, and he cringed, and in covering up I cracked a joke—“I could write a book about grabbing ass”—that just made it worse.

  “I’m serious,” he said.

  “Tell me what you’re thinking,” I said.

  “I don
’t know. My story. A cautionary tale. Something like that. I’ve got a good story. I need help with the words, though.”

  Shit, yes, he had a good story. That had never been in dispute. I’d been approached by a publisher back in the immediate post-Barcelona days about writing a quickie Hugo biography. It wasn’t so much for my blinding literary skill as for my fairly unfettered access to Hugo. I’d dropped the subject after Frank Feeney snorted. “Biography? He’s goddamn seventeen years old. He’s barely lived.”

  The living wasn’t a problem now. The focus and motivation after all his other short-circuited aspirations, I feared, would be.

  “So . . . motivational?” I asked. “Or biography? Maybe both?”

  “I don’t know. I mean, I think I can tell people what it’s like when, you know . . .”

  “Things don’t work out?” I finished for him, and he looked wounded.

  “Yeah.”

  “Hugo, I don’t know. I’m not the best person for something like this. I don’t know jack about getting a book published.”

  “Yeah, but you were there. You know the story. I trust you.”

  “When did you get this idea?” I asked.

  “A while ago.”

  “When?”

  “I’ve been thinking about it since, you know.”

  I knew. Since Frank had pulled the plug on him that day after our trip to Billings Clinic.

  “Are you prepared to be honest about everything?” I asked.

  Hugo leaned in, and those eyes cut deeper into me. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, there’s some not-so-good stuff.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Some stuff I’ve never heard you acknowledge. Publishers like that stuff. Did you read Andre Agassi’s book?”

  Hugo shook his head.

  “He came clean about some things. He also came up with some details about things that were common knowledge. Ernest Hemingway talked about how writing is opening up a vein and bleeding onto the page. You prepared to do that?”