The Fallow Season of Hugo Hunter (13 page)

“Step out and ask somebody where you are. Jesus, Hugo, why aren’t you upstairs in bed?”

A primal scream came back at me. “I’m standing here staring at my picture in the newspaper. I am not fucking getting out of this phone booth and talking to anybody. You come get me right fucking now. East London. Shitload of flowers. Figure it out, Mark.”

“I’ll get Frank.”

“No! No. Do not get Frank. You come alone. Come get me, please.” I swear to God, Hugo started crying right there on the phone. “Come get me.”

“OK. Hang tight. I’ll find you.”

The connection went dead. I got my ass moving.

The concierge called a cab for me, and when I told the driver that my friend was somewhere in East London with a lot of flowers, he said, “Columbia Road,” as if it were the simplest thing in the world, like telling me the time and the temperature.

Even in the dark and the rain, with few other cars on the road, the drive took nearly fifteen minutes. I stared out the window at the passing buildings and watched the first hint of daylight scratch at the sky. The driver minded his business, and for that I was thankful. He no doubt figured that an early, frantic ride to a place I was only guessing at didn’t portend anything good.

The driver made a turn and the headlights flashed on a phone booth. “That your friend?” he said. Hugo was unmistakable. He wore the same button-front shirt and slacks h
e’d
had on at the final press conference for the fight. He cowered as the lights fell on him.

“Wait here,” I told the driver, and I scrambled out of the car and over to the phone booth.

I took off my jacket and gave it to Hugo. “Put this over your head.”

I led him to the car, and we climbed in.

“Everything all right?” the driver asked.

“Yeah, fine,” I said. “He got into a little scrap.”

“Need a hospital?”

“No, just take us back.”

The cabbie backed up. As he turned and looked through the rear window at his progress, I watched the Columbia Road vendors and their incessant motion, scurrying about as their stands took shape. Flowers of every color and size you can imagine, and a few you can’t, filled in the open spaces and cast shadows like monsters on the buildings that lined the street, lit up by the headlights.

And then, just like that, we turned and darkness fell on Columbia Road again.

It was as if w
e’d
never been there.

It all spilled out upstairs, in Hugo’s room, the whole sordid mess.

“I couldn’t sleep,” he said. “I went for a walk.” The walk, he said, led to a pub that led to a table full of young Englishmen, which led to a late-night car ride, which led to a dank basement on Columbia Road.

“And you’ve been doing cocaine,” I said.

“No.” The single word was meek, halfhearted.

“The ring around your nostril says yes.”

A thumb and forefinger flew to his nose, grasping it. He rushed into the bathroom. I badly wanted to follow and start in on him, but I stood my ground.

“Shit,” he said from the bathroom. Running hot water blew whispers of steam into the room. “OK, this is OK, this is going to be OK.”

“Hugo—”

“If I can just get some sleep, I’ll be all right. This is nothing.”

“What about the drug test?” I called in to him.

“Already had it. Passed. I’m good.”

I walked to the entryway. Hugo had his shirt off and his face lathered. He scrubbed at it with his hands.

“Jesus, man, don’t you read your own contracts?”

A sideways glance found me in the mirror. “What?”

“Drug tests before and after, Hugo. You’re screwed. You are so unbelievably screwed. Even if you win, you’re gonna lose. Cocaine stays in your system, what, three days? Four? It doesn’t matter. You’re screwed.”

I don’t think anyone ever hit him with a heavier punch. Hugo shut off the water. He took a towel and cleared the soapy residue from his face. He walked toward me, and I vacated the doorway so he could pass. At the end of the bed, he dropped anchor and sat, silent.

I approached on tentative feet. “Let me go get Frank,” I said, soft and low. “Maybe he can figure a way out of this.”

“No.”

“Hugo—”

“No.”

“He’s gotta know.”

“He can never know about this.”

I stood there, tried to think of an angle I could take that would make Hugo see what he needed to see. He stood and undressed. One by one, the buttons came undone on his shirt, and he tossed it to the floor. He shimmied out of his slacks and piled them up, too. Socks came off and were balled up. He went to the dresser, opened a drawer, and removed a pair of gym shorts and a T-shirt. He climbed into those.

Now he walked past me, toward the bathroom.

“Listen—” I said. He didn’t stop.

I don’t know how to explain the next part. Something deep and compulsive, something I couldn’t ignore, moved me toward the bathroom. Fear. Foreboding. Whatever you want to call it, I felt as though I had to be there.

Hugo sat on his knees on the marble floor. A towel encased his right arm, held at an acute angle above his head. In his mouth was a balled-up washcloth.

“No!”

Hugo closed his eyes and crashed his hand against the floor like a pile driver. The snap of the bone was sickening, and his neck and face and eyes bulged red, the washcloth holding his scream in. He toppled over onto the floor.

I ran to him and fell to my knees at his side. I cradled his head and removed the washcloth from his mouth. Tears ran from his eyes to my lap in broken-dam rivulets. His right arm twisted beneath him, still wrapped in the towel, at a grotesque angle.

“Are you stupid?” I said.

Hugo’s words came in gasps. “Help me up.”

I climbed to my feet and lifted him with me, but I nearly went down again when I saw the arm, now freed from the towel. A bone, gray-yellow, poked from the flesh. The towel lay at our feet, soaked with blood.

“Take me to the bed,” Hugo said.

I maneuvered him as best I could, each movement putting stress on his injury. He gritted his teeth to hold back a scream.

“Hand me the phone.”

I complied, setting the receiver against his shoulder while he trapped it with his head. I didn’t want to, but my eyes kept returning to the jutted bone that pierced his skin. “Jesus, Hugo.”

Hugo looked up at me, fingers from his good hand reaching for the phone’s buttons. “You better get out of here now.”

25

Lainie stood at the stove and beat eggs into submission. I sat across from her in Delmar’s terry cloth robe, still a bit uncomfortable in it even though she had insisted that it was fine, her pragmatic assertion being that Delmar, two years dead of cancer, wouldn’t need it anymore. Modesty won out over discomfort, I suppose. My only other choice was to sit there naked. I’m not into crimes against humanity.

“So Frank never found out?” she said.

“No.”

I’d
filled her in on the aftermath of Hugo’s horrifying act, about going back to my room, unable to breathe, trying to pretend like I had no idea what was happening three floors up, what Frank was discovering, what machinations had been set in motion. Frank bought the story that Hugo had tripped and fallen, and the compound fracture and necessary medical attention had served to keep us in London for a few extra suffocating days before we came home.

The fight, of course, was canceled. Rhys Montrose held a press conference and praised Hugo, said he would be more than happy to give him another shot when he healed up, but that never happened. Three months later, Montrose made a mandatory defense against Mozi Qwai and lost by a second-round knockout—nice guy though he was, Montrose was surely a pushover—and Qwai went on to seven successful defenses of the belt before moving up in weight and capturing that title, too. Meanwhile, Hugo dealt with the myriad problems that were only just coming into view.

It’s strange to think of that. Had Hugo beaten Montrose (as we surely knew he would) h
e’d
have been compelled to face Qwai at the peak of his powers, not as the compromised but capable fighter he was seven years later, when they really did go the twelve rounds.

What I hadn’t told Lainie, and what dug at me now, was what London did to me. Or, rather, what I did to myself in London.

She poured the eggs into the melted butter in the pan, and a sizzle went up.

“I’m a fraud,” I said.

She ran a spatula through the eggs, beginning the scramble. “Don’t be silly.”

“I am. There are lines you don’t cross, Lains, and I crossed all of them that night. I became part of the news, and then I helped bury a story.”

“You tried to do right by someone you care about.”

“Caring is a crossed line, too.”

She put a wicked stare on me. “See, when you say things like that, I’m just not sure what to think.”

I flushed with stupidity. I was beginning to find in Lainie a strange dichotomy. As my love for her grew, so too did my recognition that she wouldn’t let me get away with blatant overstatement without showing my work. There would be no unsettled resignation from her. Accountability sucks.

“What I mean is, it’s a slippery slope, getting that close to someone you’re covering. Feeling the way I did—I do—about Hugo paved the way for me to compromise myself in a moment like that. I didn’t do him any favors, and I discredited myself, even if I’m the only other one who knows.”

Lainie slid the eggs onto my plate and then pushed a cup of coffee across the bar to me. “You helped him avoid humiliation.”

“But I didn’t do him any favors. It wasn’t a one-time thing. A year later, Frank pulls him out of a crack house in LA—”

“You couldn’t have known that would happen,” she said.

“It doesn’t matter.”

She came around the bar and sat next to me with her own plate. She leaned in and nuzzled me under the chin, and I slipped an arm around her back and pulled her in. It was just her and me and the Aqua Velva leavings of her dead husband.

“It matters,” she whispered. Then, a little louder, this: “You can make yourself crazy, refiguring it all after the fact. You did what you thought was best at the time. You helped a friend. That’s what matters.”

Just before six a.m., as the neighborhood began to stir, we crawled back into bed. Lainie had a day off that she pronounced fit for all-hours sleeping. I had one hell of a tequila-induced headache I needed to burn off before reporting to the
Herald-Gleaner
in the afternoon.

I made like a cocoon around Lainie, our naked bodies fitting together as if our symmetry had been a grand design. I grew hard even at her casual touch. She felt me and said, against the current of onrushing sleep, that sh
e’d
be ready in a few hours. Not more than a minute later, I listened as she purred in slumber, and I nestled my chin into her neck and breathed her in.

It’s not that she didn’t make sense. She always did. But her sensibility was underpinned by a practical way of looking at things that just didn’t have much currency in the house-of-mirrors realm of journalism.
I’d
been conditioned to not express opinions on politics, not cheer for a good sports play, not take sides—indeed, in some endeavors I was compelled to present the dissenting side of incontrovertible facts. This is the folly of objective journalism as practiced at most newspapers, and certainly at unsophisticated rags like the
Billings Herald-Gleaner
. It attempts to subvert human nature.

And yet, even if I give myself a pass on all that, I can’t say that what I did in London came entirely from a place of pity and affection for Hugo. Were that so, I might have assimilated it and moved on, in my own head, years earlier.

The truth is, I did it for me as much as I did it for him. Maybe more.

Had the full story emerged about Hugo in London, had he faced the shame and ridicule of a positive drug test, his career might well have ended there. Boxing forgives a lot—rapists and murderers are welcomed back if they can still throw a punch—but Hugo’s circumstances were different. Frank, I’m certain, would have quit him on the spot, appalled at the reality that Hugo could undermine all of their hard work in a single night. Back home in Billings, Aurelia’s tentative peace with her grandson’s brutal sport would have been in jeopardy, and among us all, only she had the unilateral power to move Hugo to action—or, in this hypothetical case, inaction. When we found out the extent of Hugo’s problem, when the destruction wrought by it was just as crippling but less collateral, Aurelia marshaled the support that helped him through rehabilitation and recovery. She recognized that the attendant activities of Hugo’s sport—the training, the eating right, the focus of preparation for an opponent—mitigated against idle hands, and she gave her blessing and commandment for him and Frank to continue. A lot had gone by the wayside by then. But in London, a few years earlier? I don’t know. Aurelia might not have countenanced that.

As for me, I’ve come to the conclusion that I didn’t want it to be over.

If Hugo had been done,
I’d
have been forced to trade in expense-account dinners and Las Vegas and London for a grimy desk at the
Herald-Gleaner
and Friday night football games.
I’d
have had to listen to Trimear curse his Excel files and watch Landry sleep through a shift and laugh at Raymont’s jokes.
I’d
have had to sit through interminable conference room meetings with a cavalcade of editors, each one convinced that we were doing it all wrong and that he could fix it, and each one just imposing new and constricting policies upon us.
I’d
have had to eat sheet cakes marking smarter colleagues’ departures.
I’d
have had to stand in the newsroom and applaud politely while the publisher handed out logo T-shirts when we came in under budget for the fiscal year.

I’d
already had to do a lot of that stuff, because Hugo wasn’t always in training, but I certainly dreaded the thought of more.

And now, as I listened to the rising and falling breath of the woman I loved, I could be honest with myself: a sidelined Hugo meant I would be at home more often, forced to confront the emptiness of my life with Marlene and my distance from my son. Marlene often accused me of believing that neglect could solve anything, and my disagreement with her on that point came out in bullheaded ways. Why wouldn’t it? She was right.

By protecting Hugo that night,
I’d
protected myself from unpleasantness, from accountability, from reckoning. And now, Hugo’s fighting days surely done and Lainie pulling at threads
I’d
left alone for years, everything
I’d
held at bay was coming for me.

I sank my head into the nape of Lainie’s neck.

How could she not see that I was a coward?