The Fallow Season of Hugo Hunter Read online

  Hugo seemed to shrink with every word, something that didn’t surprise me. It was typical of him, really. He got an idea into his head, became fixated with the result, and didn’t think through the process of getting there.

  “I’d like to try,” he said.

  I stood and walked over to the bookshelf. I scanned the rows and plucked a few books down. The Agassi memoir. Some others, too, either autobiography or biography. Ali. Keyshawn Johnson. Jack Nicklaus. I gave them to Hugo.

  “Some research. Read them, get a feel for the form,” I said.

  “So you’ll help me?”

  As if he had any doubt. As if I could tell him no.

  “I’ll do what I can,” I said. “I want you to do the writing—”

  “No, Mark, I need you to—”

  “Hold on,” I said. “Just listen to me now. I want you to write some stuff for me. Don’t worry about order or making it all fit together or whatever. Just write what you’re feeling, on whatever topic. Bring it to me, and I’ll check it out. If I think I can help you, I will. You understand?”

  “Yeah, great,” he said. “That’s awesome.”

  “No guarantees.” I tried to effect a stern look in the face of the easy Hugo charm.

  “Right. I got you,” he said.

  I came out of the bedroom not fifteen minutes later, fresh out of the shower and with the day’s clothes on my back. I found Hugo at my kitchen table, a dozen pages deep into the Agassi book, and I thought, well, maybe there’s hope for this idea.

  You’ve always got to have hope.

  15

  I didn’t hear much from Hugo in the weeks that followed, just assurances that he was reading and taking notes. Meanwhile, the seasons rolled on for me the same as any other year, with the only difference being my mounting dismay at how quickly time seemed to be moving. I made it through state basketball and wrestling, the variances in Gene Trimear’s moods, and advancing gray in my own hair. Life, by any measure except the loss of time, was better than it had been in a long while.

  The weather kissed us with kindness and warmth in early spring. You can’t count on that in Billings, but if you don’t like what you’re getting in the way of weather, you can burn off fifteen minutes on some other pursuit and the outlook will change.

  The inconvenient math of opposite schedules kept Lainie and me apart more than we’d have liked, but we had a standing Friday golf date. We’d move the venue around—Yegen, Pryor Creek, the rinky-dink little par-three course where she’d beat me even more soundly with the negation of my lone advantage, length off the tee. In this game, we had another way to get close to each other, not that we were having any trouble in that department. Most of the time I felt like a giddy teenager.

  Lainie said she’d picked up the sport from her late husband, Delmar, a three-time state amateur champion. He taught her well. I grew accustomed to standing in sand traps, unleashing a blue blast of profanity at my ball after a failed attempt to get it onto the green, while she squatted over her own three-foot par putt, trying not to laugh aloud at me. And I’d look up at her there, pretty as could be and hell-bent on making me smile, and my frustration would just cut and run. Somehow, I’d done something right to be with her.

  Rain chased us into the Pryor Creek clubhouse on an April afternoon. I sawed on a steak sandwich while Lainie did the crossword. A hand on my shoulder broke the peace.

  “Hiya, Mark.”

  I looked up and into the face of Hugo’s son. It was disquieting. I hadn’t seen Raj in a couple of years, at least. The resemblance to his daddy had only blossomed with time.

  “Jeez, Raj, here, sit down.” I pulled out a chair, and he poured himself into it. “This is Lainie, my—” I looked at her. We had no terms. She reached out her hand, and Raj shook it.

  “Your what?”

  “I’m his girlfriend,” Lainie said. “He keeps wanting to say wench, but we’re slowly breaking him of it.”

  I swatted her with the newspaper. “Shush, you.”

  I sat back down. “You playing golf?” I asked Raj, feeling an immediate flush of foolishness at the question. My grasp of the obvious was airtight.

  “Yeah, meeting some buddies.”

  I leaned into the table, voice a register lower. “You’ve heard, I guess.”

  Raj sat back, lacing his fingers behind his head. “Yeah. Saw it in the paper. He called me a couple of days later.”

  “I haven’t talked to him in a while. What’s he doing?”

  Raj gave me a searching look. This wasn’t our pattern. For years, I’d been the one who gave him information about his old man on the sly. I nodded my head toward Lainie, my distraction from my usual interests.

  “Working for Feeney, I guess. It was a short conversation. You know how it is.”

  “I do.”

  Lainie cut in to save us from the conversational cliff. “What do you do, Raj?”

  “I’m at Rocky Mountain College.”

  “What are you studying?”

  “Education, but I think I’m going to try for my master’s and become a PA.”

  “PA?” I said.

  “Physician’s assistant,” they said in unison.

  “Good school,” Lainie said. “My husband was the golf coach there.”

  And so it began. My girlfriend—girlfriend!—and Hugo’s son had found common ground, and that pretty well cut me out of the conversation. I gladly ceded the floor to them.

  It was just as well. They prattled on, fast friends, veering from literature to string theory. I’d toss in occasionally, but mostly I sat back and listened. The reminders that life moves on were all around me now. Here was Raj, forever a little boy in my own sensibility but now fully a man. Here, the woman who’d prompted me to move past my insecurities and history and try again. Even so, I felt the inexorable pull toward the past. My mind, even more keenly attuned to thoughts of fathers and sons since I’d unloaded to Lainie about Von, headed off in the direction of Hugo. I wished he was here for this moment with his boy. I wished, too, that I hadn’t willingly given up time with my son. There was nothing to recapture.

  Excerpt from the introduction of Hugo Hunter: My Good Life and Bad Times

  When I was in high school, there was a popular song titled “Don’t Know What You Got (Till It’s Gone).” It was a sappy, cheesy song by a hair-metal band, and it concerned romantic love. But the sentiment applies equally to just about anything, and now, with my fighting career over, I find that it’s true for me, too.

  I had three chances at greatness as a boxer. You could argue that the first, in the Olympics, came through for me. I won that fight. Everybody knows it, and I was as celebrated for the injustice of my loss as I would have been for a victory. As a pro, I twice had a shot at winning a world title, and I squandered both of them. If there’s anything I truly regret about my career as a professional boxer, it’s not the money I lost or the fact that I can’t throw a left hook the way I used to. It’s that I didn’t bring my best effort to those two opportunities, and as a result they are lost to me forever.

  Think about this: If it’s love you want, you can keep trying until you’re dead and buried. If you’re an actor, you can keep going to auditions until you finally get that part. If you’re a writer, you can keep pounding out words until finally they’re arranged in the proper order and your book gets published. All it costs you is time and effort.

  But if you’re a fighter—if your aim is to get in the best possible shape and go into the ring and inflict violence on another human being—you have a limited amount of time to do that while the flesh is as willing as the mind.

  I will never have that chance again. I will never know what it is to raise my hands in victory while a championship belt is fitted around my waist. I will never hear the words “world champion Hugo Hunter.”

  I don’t feel sorry for myself.
I’m not owed any of that. The opportunities were there, and I did not take them.

  I find it difficult to live with this sometimes.

  16

  Von died on May 8, 2005. Twenty days later, I kissed Marlene on the forehead—she didn’t move, didn’t look at me—and then carried a suitcase and my computer bag down to the end of our driveway to wait for a cab. A jet bound for Vegas stood on the tarmac at Logan Airport, and I was due to board it.

  If you’d asked me two years earlier if Hugo would have a second chance at a title, I’d have laughed at your silly ass. By my estimation, that opportunity was nearly seven years in the rearview, buried under false starts, halfhearted proclamations of readiness, struggles to beat guys who weren’t qualified to wash Hugo’s trunks, and a monkey on his back that nearly wiped us all out.

  It’s a funny thing, though. For all that Hugo squandered in his prime—the endorsement deals, the headlining bouts, the money, oh, Jesus, the money—he regained his reputation, at least, when he got clean and came out punching. Frank, convinced that he finally had Hugo’s attention, put him on an ambitious schedule when the calendar clicked over to 2004—fights every two or three weeks, first against a few regional tomato cans to build up his confidence, then progressively against tougher opposition until he could regain a world ranking. After that, Frank reasoned, the opportunity would come. After two years of cooling my heels, back on the high school beat while Hugo tried to get clean, I returned to the traveling Hugo Hunter show. As much as people loved him when he was this exotic-looking teenage wunderfighter, they seemed to be even more aboard for a story that promised redemption. My corporate overlords at the Herald-Gleaner could squeeze nickels until Abe Lincoln screamed, but even they recognized this. I had carte blanche to go where Hugo went.

  The maneuverings to push Hugo back into prominence also came with a change in weight. Age and maturity had taken Hugo from lightweight in his amateur days to welterweight as a pro. Frank and Squeaky set about adding yet more bulk to Hugo’s frame, lifting him another class higher, from 147 pounds to a threshold seven pounds heavier. Frank reasoned that Hugo would carry his superior speed to the next level without giving up too much in the way of power.

  After Hugo knocked out Lennie Flatbush, a rugged Irishman, in December 2004, word came down: he’d get his shot. He’d spent the previous year fighting eighteen times and winning every bout. Everything looked ascendant. In February, he signed the contract: $1.2 million for Hugo, $3 million plus a share of the pay-per-view for Mozi Qwai, the undisputed junior middleweight champion. This was a big opportunity for Hugo, a chance to own an entire boxing division. Hugo and Frank and Squeaky went into training. Hugo sparred for hours against handpicked partners, trying to get a handle on the particular challenges posed by Qwai, an evasive southpaw. I buried my son. We met up on the charter flight to Nevada, greeted each other like the old colleagues we were, and flew off into the morning sky with the hope of finding something better.

  Hope is a son of a bitch, anyway.

  I can go back and watch the tapes of most of Hugo’s fights, even now, knowing everything. I can sit there, break them down, watch in wonder at how he could draw another man in, goad him into throwing a punch, then evade it and invoke his own toll of leather. I can appreciate the movement, the grace, and, most of all, the work I know he put in to get there.

  I’ve never looked at the footage of the Qwai fight. Seeing it in person was enough.

  If you thumb back through the media accounts of the fight, you’ll draw a different conclusion from it than anybody in Hugo’s camp did. The Ring magazine called it the forty-seven most boring minutes of the year. Sports Illustrated said it made a senate subcommittee hearing look like a rock concert. And while it’s true that there were no big momentum shifts, no moments of uncertainty, no junctures that required a sportswriter’s favorite phrase, “gut check,” what I saw was horrifying, not stultifying.

  I watched Qwai beat on the kid for twelve rounds—just pound him side to side, back and forth. Lefts and rights and uppercuts and whatever else he wanted to throw. Everything landed. Hugo, proud if outmatched, threw enough punches in return to keep the referee from intervening, which just made everything worse. Afterward, Hugo’s face was like a piece of fruit bloated by the sun—ears cauliflowered and swollen, eye tissue split apart, cheeks purple and green and brown from the bruising.

  Frank, talking to me in the hallway after the main press conference like he always did, called attention to Hugo’s carriage, because there was no way he’d acknowledge for public consumption what had really happened. “Did you see how far apart his legs were?” he said. “That’s the sign of an old fighter.”

  “He’s not even thirty,” I said.

  “It’s a damned hard-run thirty, though. An old-man thirty. That kid is long gone.”

  I must have winced, thinking that I’d have given anything for Von to see thirty.

  “Oh, damnit, Mark. I’m really sorry, man,” he said.

  What Frank didn’t want on the record was this: It wasn’t the nearly thirty years that mattered. It was the previous twenty-eight hours.

  There’s a superstitious art to breaking training when you’re a fighter. When a crew finds something that works, it will follow that script forevermore—or until there’s a slump so bad that all conventions must be challenged. Frank liked to finish training ten days before a bout and send Hugo home to sleep in his own bed, under the careful watch of Aurelia. Then, the week of the fight, the whole crew would board a chartered flight to the venue and set up camp in a hotel for all the sideshow stuff—the joint press conferences and the stare downs and the SportsCenter features. The night before the fight comes the weigh-in, and then an eerie quiet settles over everything until the fighters enter the ring.

  The morning of the weigh-in, Frank put Hugo, stark naked, on a medical scale he’d had delivered to his room. He balanced the weights and read it off: 158 pounds.

  “Shit, kid, that can’t be right. Step off the thing and let’s try again.”

  Down Hugo stepped. Frank reset the balances. Hugo climbed up again.

  “One hundred fifty-eight.” Frank pulled a hand through his hair. “You’re four pounds over, Hugo. What the hell?”

  “Must be the scale.”

  Frank peered at the certification. “Says it was calibrated this month.” He jabbed a finger at Hugo’s belt line and then turned up the volume. “Four goddamned pounds.”

  Hugo shrugged.

  Frank looked fit to kill. And then, the import of the moment clear, he moved with alacrity to do the only thing he could.

  He made Hugo choke down a couple of water pills, which set him to peeing every ten minutes or so, wringing the water out of him. What a diuretic couldn’t do, a little old-fashioned sweating could. Squeaky put an out-of-order sign on the sauna door, and the crew shoved Hugo in there to wring him out.

  To keep his strength up, Frank fed him every couple of hours—sliced up pieces of New York strip that Hugo was told not to swallow. He’d chew and chew, leaching out the juices and nutrients, then spit the rendered flesh into a bowl.

  A little before seven that evening, we all headed downstairs to the ballroom for the weigh-in. Frank had a good poker face, but you could see he was addled. All the work of the year preceding would be undone if Hugo didn’t make weight. If that happened, a few options—all equally undesirable—came to the fore. Qwai, with everything to lose, could call it off. Hugo, with little left to gain, could do the same. Or they could go forward with a nontitle, cross-weight fight for less money and in front of some seriously pissed-off fans.

  “Think light,” Frank told Hugo, imparting the last advice of a desperate man. “Blow all the air out of your lungs before you step up there.”

  Hugo did more than that. After Qwai came in at 154 on the nose, Hugo stripped off his underwear there in front of God and everybody, exhaled, then
mounted the scale.

  “One fifty-three point seven,” went up the announcement.

  Hugo lifted his arms and flexed.

  Frank looked like he’d keel over.

  We flew home a few hours after the fight, grim and silent. SportsCenter played back-to-back on a TV in the McCarran Airport terminal as we waited to board, looping analysis of what we’d all witnessed. The second time we heard Teddy Atlas call Hugo “a complete disappointment—here’s a guy who had everything at his feet and just couldn’t be bothered to scoop it up,” Frank stomped through the empty seats in a rage. “Turn it off,” he yelled at everyone and no one.

  Once we were aloft, I tried to sleep, but like always, it wouldn’t come on my terms. Memories of Von crashed into me, and for once I yearned for the controlled chaos of a high school game, some bit of constant action that would attract my attention and force me out of my own head.

  Von hated sports, one of the more dramatic manifestations of the differences between us. When he was alive, I took it as a mockery, a perpetual reminder that my hopes didn’t count. The day he was born, I did a jig outside the birthing room. I had a boy. My boy. I’d teach him to score a baseball game, lay down a bunt, tackle a man, throw a jab, hook a bowling ball, hit a fade in golf. Hell, I’d even teach him to kick a soccer ball, if that’s what it came to.

  What I got, instead, was an enigma. As Von grew, he developed interests outside mine. Marlene taught him to bake—and she was wondrous at it, so, you know, good for them, having that bonding time. He lived on Harry Potter books and Lord of the Rings movies and online role-playing games. Marlene told me once that maybe I ought to dip a toe into his world, that I might surprise myself and enjoy it. By the time she said that, we’d fallen into a grudging tolerance of each other, and so my answer was so flip, so cruel, that it drives me out of bed some nights to the dining room table, where I stare into a bottomless cup of coffee. “The hell you say,” I said.