The Fallow Season of Hugo Hunter Read online

  While I accounted for my losses on the flight home, Hugo balanced the ledger of his life and found it wanting. I could hear him and Frank talking in the seats in front of mine.

  “No fight offers,” Hugo said, as much a question as a declaration.

  “I don’t know where we go from here,” Frank said.

  A pause. “I thought, you know, after we got the title—”

  “We didn’t get the title,” Frank said.

  “Yeah, I know. What I’m saying is, I thought there’d be defenses coming, unification bouts, more money.”

  “All thoughts you should have had before you ate yourself out of your shot.”

  That one hurt, even from where I sat.

  It was quiet again. Say what you want about Hugo’s impulses—and that night, you could have said plenty—but he plotted a tight course where Frank was concerned. Frank demanded that kind of deference years earlier, and it stuck.

  “You remember what I asked you to do?” Hugo said.

  “I do.”

  “We need to hold off on that. I’m going to need that cash.”

  “No.”

  “What?”

  “No. Absolutely not.”

  “Frank, it’s my money.”

  “Yeah, it’s yours. And you’ve told me what you want done, and I’m going to do it. You gave me power of attorney—”

  “Not to ignore what I want.”

  “—after all that shit went down in California, you said, ‘I need some backup here,’ and you told me to set up an account for Raj, and goddamn it, Hugo, that’s what I’m going to do.”

  “But don’t you understand, I—”

  A week or so later, when we could finally talk about it, Frank told me he heard a reverberation in my throat, an animal’s growl, as I came over the back of the seat at Hugo. I cuffed him in the ear, split that cauliflower wide open, and it spilled blood and pus. Frank scrambled into the aisle and looped an arm around me, carrying me to the back of the plane. Squeaky, in the seat ahead of Hugo, tangled up his arms and held him back from going at me.

  Frank had me pinned against the bulkhead, his chest rendering me motionless. He spoke in my ear, soft words only I could hear. “Not this. Not now.”

  “What’s your problem, man?” Hugo shouted at me, wriggling against Squeaky’s hold.

  I was hysterical, the flash of violence having spun my emotions out of my control, my voice pitching into a scream. “It’s his fucking kid, Frank. His fucking kid.”

  Frank drew me into an embrace, still talking to me. “Yeah. And he’s mine. I need you to sit down.” I lunged again, and he drove me into the bulkhead. “I’m telling you, Mark, sit down.”

  I couldn’t dislodge Frank, and my burst of energy abandoned me as quickly as it appeared. I sat. Frank went back to his seat next to Hugo, while Squeaky dabbed his broken ear. I sat with my eyes cast toward my shoes. I wanted to cry, but I was all cried out from the preceding days, nothing left in my heart or my tear ducts that I could offer. I looked at my shoes and I waited to get home. The balance of the flight passed without incident or another word. I waited for Frank, Hugo, and Squeaky to exit, then I shuffled out behind them, hanging well back. In the empty terminal, I used a pay phone to call a cab.

  Once outside, I sat on the curb and waited for my ride. Billings, below me at the foot of the Rimrocks, cast its light against the black spring sky. The wind kicked up, and I rocked against it, shivering. Across the parking lot and the road, atop the Rims, lay the places I’d gone to when I was young. It was an all-purpose venue for the invincible—a place where you could get drunk on cheap beer with your buddies and send crushed cans skittering down the sandstone walls. Or you could find a nook for solitude, you and the sky and the rattlesnakes, and contemplate the universe.

  I’d met Marlene there, at a blow-off-the-steam-after-graduation kegger. She came with another guy, a mook who had no concept of the beauty she’d graced him with. I knew, I knew it completely, and she left with me. We got married, and you know how that turned out.

  The cab came. I knocked the driver’s queries back across the net, one by one.

  “They run flights this time of night?”

  I looked at the digital dash display glowing in the dark. “Private charter.”

  “You some kind of big deal?”

  Breathe in. Breathe out. “No.”

  “Where’d you come from?”

  “Vegas.”

  “Gambling?”

  “In a manner of speaking, yeah.”

  “Win big?”

  “Lost it all.”

  Things got quiet after that. In my driveway, I peeled off the fare plus a not-so-big-shot tip and handed it over the seat, then got out.

  “Next time you’ll do better,” he said.

  “Yeah.”

  I stepped through the front door and flipped on the hall light. The illuminated path led to the living room, where I again flipped a switch.

  Couch gone. Love seat still there. One recliner gone. I looked into the dining room. Three chairs instead of six.

  “Marlene?” I was calling to a ghost.

  The bedrooms revealed the same King Herod touch. Our bed, still there. Von’s bed, gone. White squares on yellowed walls where half the pictures came down. The chifforobe gone, and Von’s upright dresser pulled into our bedroom.

  I returned to the dining room and found a stack of papers with a sticky note affixed to them.

  Mark—

  I took $8,731 out of savings, half of what was there, in addition to the furniture and other items. I will take nothing else. It’s your house—you paid for it, and I don’t want it.

  If you’ll sign the papers at the places marked, this will be over, and I think that’s best for both of us.

  I will call you when I’m ready. Please don’t call me.

  Good luck (that sounds stupid),

  Marlene

  P.S. Sorry about Hugo. I know how much you love him.

  17

  Interstate 94 unfurled in front of Lainie and me, leading home after our golf game.

  “Why don’t you have bench seats?” Lainie asked.

  “I don’t know. Why?”

  “Because I want to come over there and snog you.”

  I arched an eyebrow. “I could drive faster. We could be snogging on your couch in fifteen minutes.”

  She poked me in the ribs. “Not likely, mister. You have to go to work. And I have a rigorous day of . . . well, I’ll figure something out.”

  “Why don’t I have bench seats?” I lamented.

  “Exactly.” Lainie giggled. I reached for her hand.

  “Raj is a nice young man,” she said. “I didn’t know Hugo had a son.”

  “Probably by design. I think Raj’s mother would like as few people as possible to know that.”

  She squeezed my hand. “Come on now. Don’t be glib. Tell me.”

  When Hugo left for Barcelona, it was with the intention to come back to Montana and complete his final year at Billings Senior. By then, it was pretty well accepted that college wasn’t an immediate part of his future, that he would see what he could do as a professional fighter. Even Aurelia, who never got comfortable with his fighting despite her key role in setting it in motion, knew it. But she extracted a promise from Hugo: graduate, then turn pro.

  What happened at the Olympics threw infinite complications into that plan.

  Every Olympics has its prepackaged stars, the ones the national media has identified as the most compelling. In 1992, it was the “Dream Team” of NBA players on the US basketball squad, Jennifer Capriati on the tennis court, Carl Lewis on the track, Greg Louganis in the diving competitions. Hugo was the star nobody saw coming.

  “It started with some of the European papers,” I told Lainie. “They were struck
by his looks and his story. They’ve got kind of a fetish about the Old West over there, and here’s Hugo, this seventeen-year-old kid with the odd name, he’s from Montana, he’s got Indian blood and these green eyes. Plus, he’s fun as hell to watch fight, or at least he was.”

  By the time Hugo got to the final, the whole world seemed to be watching him. And then came that awful decision by the referee, disqualifying Hugo. It’s been more than twenty years now, so at some point the hope evaporates, but you just wonder if anybody will ever make that right. It’s not as if the evidence is open to interpretation—even today, you can call up the video on YouTube and see for yourself. It’s not fair to Hugo. Hell, it’s not fair to Juan Domingo Ascencion, who will always have a figurative asterisk next to his title as an Olympic gold medalist.

  “But here’s the weird part,” I told Lainie. “That loss, the way he lost, was the galvanizing force. If Hugo had just knocked Ascencion out and won the gold, he would have gotten a lot of attention, had some of the same opportunities and all that. But by being robbed the way he was, he got even more. It’s an American thing, you know: justice denied is justice doubly deserved. So when we came back, Frank Feeney had all these business cards spilling out of his suit—media consultants, people who wanted Hugo to pitch their products, that kind of thing. And we come off the plane and there’s Aurelia, and she’s saying, ‘Hey, school’s about to start,’ and we’re . . .” I held my right hand out at an upward angle, then let it droop.

  “Your dicks went soft?” Lainie said.

  I chortled. “Such language, young lady.”

  “That’s what that means.”

  I snorted again. “Well, yeah, OK, in a manner of speaking. We were keyed up, you know. I mean, it was just a heady time. Before Hugo, I spent most nights typing box scores into the computer system. I knew I wouldn’t be doing as much of that anymore. And you can imagine what kinds of things must have been going through his mind. It was hard to dial it back for nine months. Impossible, as it turned out.”

  I turned left into Lainie’s subdivision.

  “Hurry, hurry, hurry,” she said. “Tell me about Raj and his mother.”

  I held her hand again. God, how I loved to touch her. “In due time. I’m gonna shag you first.”

  She pointed at the dashboard clock. Three p.m., the start of my day on the second shift, was coming up fast. “You’ll be late for work.”

  “I don’t care.”

  I pulled the car into her driveway. I took her hand again, and I led her inside. I had things to do, and after that, a story to finish.

  Hugo couldn’t go anywhere in Billings without being mobbed. That’s the thing people don’t get now, when he’s an old, sad story. At seventeen years old, he was pretty much a shut-in. He’d go to school, and there, at least, the teachers and principals had some semblance of control over how much he could be hassled. Then he’d go home. Some afternoons, he’d wander over to Feeney’s gym and work the heavy bag, run, shadowbox, but even that was confined to what it took to keep him semisharp. Sparring? Hell, no. With so much at stake, there was no way Frank would risk injury. And Frank was smart enough to know that he couldn’t train Hugo the way you do with an active fighter—it’s too arduous without some imminent reward. So Hugo went a few times and gave pep talks to the youth boxing team Squeaky was starting to build from the groundswell of interest in the sport after Hugo’s Olympics, but that grew tedious, too.

  I reached out and swept Lainie’s yellow hair behind her ear. She lay naked on the bed, on her stomach, watching me as I shook loose the memories.

  “He was bored as hell, Lains. Who wouldn’t be? It’s different for a kid, though. You can’t just say, ‘Hey, lay low till spring, and it’ll be fine.’ You know? Adults have more patience for that kind of thing. Hell, I’ve been hanging on for twenty-six years, trying to outlast Gene Trimear. But Hugo, he wanted to get going—right now. I couldn’t blame him.”

  She clapped a hand on my stomach, sending me bolt upright.

  “Ouch.”

  She laughed. “You’re telling me everything except the story I want to hear.”

  I propped myself up on my elbows. “Look here, missy. I’ll have you know that I am a professional storyteller.”

  “Windbag.”

  “I beg your pardon.”

  “You’re a professional bag of wind.” She scooted up and pecked me on the lips. “But you’re cute, so I’ll cut you a break. But tell me.”

  “Oh, right,” I said, kissing her in return and swinging my feet to the floor. Truth is, I enjoyed her interest in Hugo. It would have been difficult to satisfy her advancing interest in me if she didn’t want to know about him. Still, I started talking in double time, to tease her over her fixation and make her wait for the payoff. “So, anyway, Hugo met this girl Seyna and got her pregnant and dropped out of high school and started fighting after all, and her parents hated him, and soon enough she hated him, too, and it ended badly, and it was uncomfortable for everyone involved. The end.”

  I stood up.

  “Wait, wait, wait,” Lainie said.

  “I have to shower. I’ll be late for work.”

  A half hour later, Lainie rested her arms on the window frame of my car, leaned in, and kissed me good-bye. “That was a mean trick, telling the story that way.”

  “Hey, you didn’t want to hear it the way I wanted to tell it.” I gave her a wry smile, and she squinted in mock indignation.

  “Is Trimear going to be mad?” she asked. I loved how, already, she referred to my boss by his last name, like I did. It was so deliciously dehumanizing.

  “Of course,” I said.

  “Good. Will you tell me the whole story later?”

  “Maybe.”

  “I’ll be good.” She unhooked two buttons on her shirt.

  “You vile strumpet,” I teased. I reached out a hand to cover her cleavage. “I really do have to go. I tell you what. Let’s have dinner at Feeney’s tomorrow. You can meet Hugo—”

  “Again.”

  “Right. And Frank. Maybe they’ll tell you the story themselves.”

  “Will they tell it more directly than you do?”

  I dropped the car into reverse but kept the brake engaged. “Of course,” I said. “They’ve never been paid by the word.”

  18

  How I came to despise Gene Trimear didn’t happen spontaneously or with malice aforethought. It dribbled out in indignities and violations big and small. But none was so damaging to our relationship as the time Trimear tried to take the Hugo Hunter beat away from me, soon after we returned from Barcelona and everything started to change.

  I would like to think he didn’t do it out of spite, but Trimear has been enough of a brazen bastard over the years that I’m not willing to foreclose any possibility. A week or so after the Olympics, I sat down with him and mapped out what I thought the upcoming year looked like in coverage terms while we waited for Hugo to finish school. I figured there would be the occasional straight news story—an endorsement deal, or something on Hugo’s coaching little kids or whatever—and that we could supplement it with a longer feature story every six weeks or so where we caught readers up on Hugo’s life, real behind-the-scenes stuff that they weren’t going to get anywhere else. Frank, who was eager to keep Hugo in the news while waiting out the months before he could fight again, had already promised me access to him. I even had what I thought was a great title for the series: The Fallow Season of Hugo Hunter.

  “I like the idea,” Trimear had said then, “but I think we need to be more expansive in our thinking.”

  “Expansive?”

  “This is the biggest sports story we’ve ever had,” he said, a truth that needed no enunciation. “A lot of these guys would like a part of it. Hell, I’d like to write some of it—”

  “You never write,” I said.

  �
��Almost never,” he said. Oh, right, I forgot. He wrote memos. “But I’d like to write about this. So would some of the others.”

  “Well, Gene, I sort of had this plan that—”

  He reached out and patted my notebook, the one I’d shown him, the one full of my scribblings about how we could do these stories. “It’s a great plan. A great plan. I’m just saying that we ought to spread it around a little.”

  “How?”

  “Same as anything. Do you cover every Billings Senior game? Hell, no. Does Landry cover every story out of Rocky Mountain College?”

  “Most of them,” I said.

  “Most, but not all. Nobody has the market cornered on anything around here. We go with the best guy available.”

  I got my back up. “I am the best guy available.”

  His neck started bobbing. “Everybody in this department is qualified to cover this story,” he said.

  “You said the best guy.”

  “I know what I said.” The bobbing sped up. “Look, I’m not going to discuss it further. Thanks for the good work on this. We’ll see how well we can divvy it up.”

  It might have ended there if not for Frank and Hugo. Trimear’s boss at the time, and mine as well, a wide inhabitation of flesh named Rick Westphal, was all aboard the spread-it-around plan, even thanking me for my broad-mindedness when we ran into each other in the men’s room.

  But Hugo’s camp would have none of it.

  Landry came back one day from trying to talk to Frank about Hugo’s training regimen, and he told Trimear, “Son of a bitch wouldn’t talk to me.”

  “Why?”

  “Said he was too busy.”

  Trimear looked over at me. I bore down on my advance story for some high school football game. “You know anything about this?” he asked.

  “Feeney can be pretty testy,” I said.

  A few days later, Landry tried catching up to Hugo after school. Same deal. He came back and told Trimear there’d be no story.