The Fallow Season of Hugo Hunter (10 page)

Excerpt from
Hugo
Hunter: My Good Life and Bad Times

Even before I went to Barcelona, I didn’t have much in common with my peers at Billings Senior High School. I was a poor South Side kid, someone who preferred spending time at my grammy’s house to hanging out at the mall or making out up on the Rimrocks.

After I came home from the Olympics, I enjoyed more attention, but in an odd way, my isolation from other kids my age simply grew.

It was easy enough to figure out why adults were suddenly interested in me and my story. It was a vicarious thrill for them to see an Olympic athlete and to hear me talk about what happened there in Spain. Kids my age, by and large, weren’t as interested. I was one of them, and so what if I went to another country and won an Olympic medal? That didn’t make me any better than them, they reasoned.

It might surprise them to know that I agreed with them. I just wanted to come back, put my head down, and do well enough at school to graduate. I didn’t need or want confrontations over whether I was too full of myself. After I went to a football game that fall and autograph seekers swamped me in the stands, the quarterback of the team confronted me in the hallway at school and demanded that I stay away from the team’s games. I get it. He didn’t want to be overshadowed. I didn’t want to overshadow him. He thought I was the adversary, but I was on his side.

That’s the thing about fame. If you have it, it’s almost never on your terms. You become what other people—people who don’t really know you—imagine you to be. And if you don’t live up to that, if you disappoint them in some way that you don’t even see, you lose credibility in their eyes.

It took me a long time to learn that lesson. A long time and a lot of lost friendships and money.

20

Unless you’ve lived through something similar, it’s hard to understand what a constrictive place Hugo’s hometown became after the Olympics. The Wheaties people put him on their box of cereal in November of that year, and he couldn’t even escape his own image when he tagged along with Aurelia to the grocery store. He stopped going to football games or any other extracurricular school functions because the attention he received detracted from the other kids—and in fairness to them, they had reason to be upset by that. But if you’re going to give those people a pass under the auspices of kids being kids, you have to give Hugo some credit for recognizing how divisive his presence could be.

By winter, he was just gutting it out, trying to break through to graduation and into the clear.

One of Hugo’s few outlets was the movie theater. He took to rolling up late, after the previews had started, and quietly buying a ticket. H
e’d
stand at the back of the theater during the show, then walk to the front and out the door before everybody else tumbled out. Two, three times a week, that’s how Hugo Hunter moved unseen among the people of Billings.

And that’s also how he met Seyna Wynn.

At Feeney’s, Hugo told us that it started with a wisecrack from Seyna, who was in the ticket booth when he arrived for a late showing of
The Bodyguard
. “I wonder how much I can get from
National Enquirer
for telling them that the great Hugo Hunter watches wussy movies.”

“I probably fell for her right there,” Hugo said. “All the girls at Billings Senior who wanted to date me, they were kissing my ass. I hated that. Seyna, she got tough with me. She had some moxie to her.”

Soon enough, Hugo wasn’t buying movie tickets anymore, just waiting on a bench outside for Seyna’s shift to end so they could do what a goodly number of Billings kids have done for as long as a town has spilled out below the Rimrocks. You drive up to the top of the butte, overlooking the city lights below, and you find yourself a spot that belongs only to you, at least for a night, and you get busy being young and reckless.

Seyna was a smart girl—a smart-ass, yes, but well educated, too. What she lacked was some direction. A year older than Hugo and already out of high school, she worked a mindless movie theater job as a protest against her father’s idea that she go east like her mother before her, pull down a degree from Smith College, and go on from there to the corporate world. The Wynns were, and remain, big movers in Billings. Samuel, her father, owns the Mercedes dealership and sits on a half-dozen boards that touch on damn near every aspect of civic life, and Barb, her mom, runs the city’s preeminent public relations firm. Seyna, following the playbook of disaffected youth clear back to time’s beginnings, rejected all of that. In Hugo, she found someone to tweak her old man, who was downright apoplectic at the idea of his well-groomed daughter ending up with a bastard son of the city’s gritty South Side. In Seyna, Hugo found someone who valued him outside his tightly controlled sphere of school, home, and boxing.

“We were good for each other,” Hugo told us, and it struck me that he probably still believed this, despite everything that followed. Even so, Seyna and Hugo weren’t good for anyone else who cared about either of them.

Frank’s reaction proved typically blunt: a girl could mess up everything. She could take Hugo’s mind, his legs (Frank, an old-school man if there ever was one, equated sex with depletion), his hunger, his edge. “I remember Frank telling me, direct quote, ‘The goddamn Beatles weren’t shit after Yoko came along,
’
 ” Hugo said. “And I told him, hey, at least John was getting some trim.”

“You womenfolk do kind of ruin everything good,” I said, nudging Lainie.

“I’ll remember that tonight when we get home,” she said.

We all chuckled at that—even me, the guy who stood to lose the most—and then Hugo turned serious. “The first time Sam and I were alone, he offered me money to leave her be. Ten grand.”

It sounds like something out of a bad TV movie, which I suppose is why it happens in real life. People see that kind of thing and then lean on it when their own sense of control is threatened.
I’d
never heard of the first offer of cash—it amazed me how, even now, new information about Hugo came to light—but I knew well the second one, a decade later, when Hugo was penniless and in recovery, and Sam Wynn dangled cash in exchange for his abdication of parental rights. I’ve taken a few trips around the sun and seen that people are mostly good and bad, rarely pure either way, but that move was unadulterated evil. Sam Wynn took what Hugo loved the most and needed the most and forced him to choose. When Hugo asked me what he should do, I told him that he needed money now but would want to know his boy forever. I told him that it sickened me that he even had to ask.

“I can’t even—wow,” Lainie said.

“I laughed at him,” Hugo said. “I laughed right in his face. I had these endorsements kicking in—I didn’t have the money yet, it was all in this trust for me, waiting till I graduated from high school. That was my deal with Grammy, but it was mine. I told him, ‘Dude, I’m going to make a million dollars. What do I need with ten grand
?
’
 ”

“Mark says you didn’t finish high school.” Damn, Lainie could be direct. Hugo couldn’t hide the wound, and she scrambled to set it right. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to make it sound so harsh.”

“It’s OK.” Hugo was quiet now, his jovial retelling reduced to the stark realities of what actually happened. “No, I didn’t finish school. Only promise to Grammy I never kept. I had my eighteenth birthday in March, and we found out Seyna was pregnant in April. She made it clear that sh
e’d
keep the baby, which is what I wanted, too, and her folks told her that she wasn’t welcome if I was part of the deal.” His eyes drew back their focus, as if fixated on a spot miles from where we sat.

For Lainie, and hell, for me, I finished the story. There was no way to get from there to where we were now without the last details of Hugo giving up on being a boy and facing up to being a man.

“I got a call from Frank—it had to have been the first week in April, because I remember I was wrestling with our tax return—and he said, ‘We’re going out to Las Vegas to sign the contract on Hugo’s first fight.’ So I called Trimear and told him, and that was that. I started following this guy around.”

I smiled at Hugo. He spread his arms wide as if to take in the whole room. “And look where it’s led us,” he said in that happy, booming voice of his. And then, just like that, he grew quiet and looked at the table.

Lainie reached out and took Hugo’s hand and held it, her thumb working the grooves between his knuckles.

21

Night covered us on the drive back to Lainie’s place.

“His life is a tragedy,” she said.

I turned left on Main and headed for the Heights. I think a lot of people might skim the surface of Hugo Hunter and end up where Lainie did. Hugo inspired bleeding hearts. From where I sat, it was hard to be definitive about cause and effect. After a while, the disappointments—those of happenstance, and those of his volition—tended to run together.

“In some ways, I suppose,” I said.

“In every way. That story about her dad offering him ten thousand—”

“Lainie, he took the money.”

“Wait a minute. What? He said—”

“Not the first time. Later. He was broke and in rehab, and Sam offered to pay his debts if he gave up his right to see Raj. So he did it.”

I broke off what I wanted to say further about that subject in particular. It pissed me off at the time, and it sure as hell pissed me off later, when
I’d
have given anything to have a son I could bargain over. To talk about it would only introduce anger and confusion that
I’d
spent a good number of years burying. I instead made a straight line toward generalities.

“Look, it’s just hard to be in the business of feeling sorry for Hugo,” I said, “because every piece of bad luck—and there’s been a lot—can be paired up with an instance where he just made a dumb decision for the wrong reasons, or made the right decision at the wrong time. I think Frank has him pegged right. He’s the kind of guy you’ll do something for again and again, because you genuinely love him, even when you know you’ll end up being disappointed eventually.”

Lainie let go of my hand. “That’s pretty cynical.”

I reached for her, but she was having none of it. Failing placation, I defended myself. “Well, I am cynical. Mark Westerly, cynic, glad to meet you.” I laughed. She didn’t. “And in Hugo’s case, it’s well earned.”

“Show your work, then.”

“Lains, this is silly,” I said. “I’ve been around the block a few times with this guy. I probably got too close to him, to tell you the truth. He’s my friend. So’s Frank. I probably never should have let it come to that.”

“What do you mean?”

“I should have kept some distance, some detachment. I can’t be objective. Not about Hugo.”

She stepped into that opening. “See? That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I interrupted, “but you’re not objective, either. You look at him and you see this lost kid, or maybe you see some chance to fix him. This
kid
, Lains, is thirty-seven years old, and he is where he is mostly because of his own screwups. But you—you think you can make it better somehow.”

I bit the inside of my lip.
I’d
said too much, too harshly. I gripped the steering wheel hard and pulled into her subdivision.

“I’m sad for you,” she said.

“Oh, Jesus.”

“No, really, I am. Aren’t you lucky that no one holds you to the standard you have for him?”

“Oh, Jesus.”

“Stop saying that.”

“No, look.” I pointed dead ahead, at her car sitting in her driveway. Broken glass sparkled on the concrete, put there by holes blown into the back and side windows. I reached into my glove box and pulled out a flashlight, and we exited the car for a closer look.

The front window of the house, a checkerboard of small panes, was dotted with entry holes. Lainie fumbled with her keys, trying to get the door unlocked. Once we were in, we found pellets scattered across the front-room carpet. Little lead pellets, like the ones for the air gun
I’d
bought my son on his eleventh birthday.

“What the hell?” I said.

Outside, it became obvious that the whole neighborhood had been hit. Lainie and I walked up and down her street, finding some of her neighbors outside in their pajamas, assessing the damage, as perplexed as we were. Others, we woke up when we saw what had happened to their cars.

The knowledge that Lainie’s house wasn’t alone closed the case on one pressing question—who the hell had it in for her?—while inspiring another: What kind of jackass drives around shooting out car and house windows? There are some real knuckleheads in this town.

I put in a call to the
Herald-Gleaner
and told Gregg Eddy, our nighttime cops reporter, that w
e’d
counted in the neighborhood twenty-five car windows and about half that many houses shot up. Similar calls were coming from all over town, he said—West End, South Side, the central business district. Whoever was doing this, or the many whoevers, had gotten around that evening. “Quiet night up until about an hour ago,” Gregg said. “I don’t know if I can get up there, but mind if I use your numbers?”

“Sure, go ahead,” I said. “Could be more damage on other streets, too. We haven’t been anywhere else.”

“Cops’ll know. Thanks, Mark.”

We sat on the front stoop, waiting for an officer to get to Lainie’s place. I told her
I’d
stick around to talk to the police. She told me to go home.

“It’s been a long night,” she said. “
I’d
just as soon be alone.”

“Look, if this is about—”

“My heart hurts a little, Mark. I just need some time to think.”

“What about the mess in the house? I’ll help you clean it up.”

“No,” she said. “It’ll keep. The police might want to take a look. Go on home. OK? I’ll call you.”

Fear took hold of me. I regretted my nonchalance about Hugo. She could see it didn’t reflect well on me. “Don’t shut me out. Not about tonight.”

She smiled, only I couldn’t tell if it came from warmth or pity. My guts were playing Twister.

She leaned over and kissed me. “You just need a little more work,” she said. “A little more time with me, and you’ll be a damn good man.”