The Fallow Season of Hugo Hunter (24 page)

43

I thought for sure
I’d
died.

I kicked myself awake, and the moment was gone. I couldn’t even catch a little tendril of it, just a vague memory of feeling like I was going to perish, and my arms and legs kicking straight up in the bed and my heart pounding and my breathing heavy and Lainie asleep next to me, as if nothing had happened. In a way, that was true. I was in our house, our bed. But I was rattled pretty deep.

I sat up and dropped my legs over the edge of the bed, and I tried to chase down the pieces of my dream, but it was no use. It was gone, a vision dispelled by my waking consciousness.

The house had been silent when I arrived home, with Lainie well off to dreamland, and
I’d
wound down by rearranging her office—my office, now that this was as much my home as hers. It seemed a foolish errand. We had a baby on the way, and the space would soon become a nursery, but the activity filled the hour between the end of work and the beginning of sleep.

My thoughts took root in a common lament, one that revisited me when I found myself at loose ends where Hugo was concerned. It was an unfair thought, not to mention an unreasonable one. It was a wish that Aurelia had found a way to live forever. The most maddening moments with Hugo had come in the void left by her passing. The addiction and the missed opportunities with Montrose and Qwai had left marks on us all, but Hugo’s perpetual inability to sustain himself had emerged only in the years sh
e’d
been gone. Maybe it was too much to put on her, that sh
e’d
have somehow kept him locked in and on task. But that’s where I was, and I knew it was the same for Frank. She had a way nobody else could manage with Hugo. I wouldn’t say he feared her so much as he feared disappointing her. That hadn’t been enough, of course. Disappointment made regular visitations, but when Aurelia was alive, the prospect of recovery seemed viable.

Hugo never had a meaningful fight after the loss to Qwai in 2005. Frank knew that was the last shot at a title, and he got out, bought his bar, became an ex-manager. Squeaky offered to keep going with Hugo—all he had was the South Side gym his daddy used to run—but Hugo didn’t want that. In a real way, that night in Vegas severed everything for everybody. I never went on the road with Hugo again. Frank never saw another fight from the corner. Squeaky never worked with another world-class pro.

But Hugo wasn’t done. He became his own manager, and he cut his own deals with the promoters wh
o’d
helped him make a name through the first ten years of his career. He hired mercenary corner men for the fights that followed. What he never figured out, or never seemed to acknowledge, is that he was on the wrong end of those deals. When Hugo was eighteen, nineteen years old, promoters served up opponents who would build his record. Not bums, necessarily—just decent fighters whose careers were on a downslope, who would look good under the
W
column on Hugo’s ledger. After Qwai, Hugo was the fodder, the good but spent fighter with credibility that any ascendant boxer needs to beat as he builds his own reputation.

With this downgraded status came three losses, in succession, each distinctly devastating.

Hugo got fed first to Julius McGinley, the best of a bad lot of US Olympic team fighters from the 2004 Games. What McGinley lacked in grace and discipline he made up for with a hard head and the most vicious right hand you’ll ever see. They fought in Reno, a doozy of a step down from a headlining Vegas show, and I listened in on a radio station’s webcast from my office cube in Billings, thankful I wasn’t having to witness it. Every time Hugo managed to get a punch off, McGinley would smother him on the ropes, then back off and unload that right hand. At some point, it no longer mattered whether the damned thing landed. McGinley used it to pound Hugo for five rounds, until the referee showed some mercy and called things off. Hugo came home to Billings and to Aurelia and climbed to that top-floor room, blacked out by blankets in the windows, and shut out the world.

He might still be up there if not for Aurelia, who pitched over dead in the front yard not three weeks later. Saddest thing I’ve ever been a part of that wasn’t my own loss. Frank’s the one who called me that morning from the mortuary, asking if I could come down and try to console Hugo. I didn’t have the slightest idea what to say, given how much I was struggling in those months with what had happened to Von and to my marriage, but of course I went. Hugo and I sat together in the chapel and didn’t say a word to each other. W
e’d
already said them all, in better times and in better places.

I thought of that again there on the edge of the bed, as I listened to the nighttime symphony of my new wife’s rising and falling breaths.
I’d
been slow to pick up on what family means, at least in the context of my own life, and reluctant to be expansive beyond the traditional definitions. But if Hugo wasn’t my family, who was? W
e’d
lived in each other’s space and in each other’s thoughts for two decades now. W
e’d
conspired, w
e’d
collided, and w
e’d
kept the faith. At the lowest moment of his life, when Hugo was set to bury the person who loved him most, I sat with him. Not because he was alone in the world. Because he wasn’t.

I couldn’t separate that from what came next, four weeks later. Hugo went back to the ring, on a riverboat casino in Mississippi, and he fought a carnival freak show named Coconut Olson so he could pull together enough scratch to pay off Aurelia’s funeral bill. The manufactured story with Olson is that h
e’d
been found on a deserted atoll in the South Pacific, an apparently divinely conceived baby who had been rescued by US servicemen during a training exercise, brought to the States, and raised up right by a Minnesota man, who shot blank sperm, and his barren wife. The truth of the matter—that he was a truck driver born in Georgia who fought on the side—was much less dramatic. Whatever the case, Olson battered Hugo for eight rounds and won a unanimous decision, and back Hugo trudged to Billings, ready to call it a career.

I wanted that for him. We all did. We wanted him to be done, and to be OK with being done.

It never really works out that way, though, does it?

44

A month ago, mid-January, we came to the end and the beginning, Hugo and I.

I’d
just seen Lainie to the car through the slush in the driveway, her hand gripping my forearm as I guided her and our precious cargo through the treacherous bits.

“I’ll shovel this stuff before you get back,” I said. I stood there in my robe, my knees knocking together from the cold, and I kissed her.

“Get inside,” she said.

“Soon as you’re gone.”

“You’ll catch your death.”

“No. Never.”

“Don’t give me promises you can’t keep,” she said, half joking and half admonishing. I held her steady as she dropped into the bucket seat.

“I’ll wake you up when I get home,” I said.

She kissed me again.

I was folding over my egg-white omelet—Lainie had finally reached the end of her tolerance of my weight gain and had put me on a regimen—when the cell phone went off. I checked it. Tony.

“Hey, bud. What’s up?”

“Hey, Mark. Something’s going on with your boy Hugo.”

I pulled the frying pan off the fire. “What?”

“Not sure exactly. I heard some guys talking about it. Is he supposed to be fighting again?”

The anxiety rose up in me. “Hell no. He’s supposed to be working a rig, same as you.”

“He might be.” Tony was trying to be cool, but I could hear the tremble in him. “The chatter I heard was that he’s taking fights for money.”

“Who said this?” I asked.

“Just a couple dudes in my camp. Said guys were ponying up for a crack at him.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know.”

“He was up in Stanley, right?”

“Yeah, that’s what I heard.”

“How many people know about this?”

“A lot,” he said. “Everybody in my camp, it sounds like. Not too many secrets out here.”

My thoughts leaked out in about a dozen directions. “OK, Tony. You call me if you hear anything else.”

“I will.”

I ended the call, considered my options, and realized
I’d
run out of them.
I’d
ignored the line between objectivity and activism with Hugo for years. To do what needed to be done,
I’d
be obliterating it. I had to give myself some room to work. I called Lainie and told her what I intended to do, that I had some cushion to ride things out for a while. God bless her, she said, “Hugo’s the priority. Do it.”

I placed another call, this time to the office, and caught the Diploma off guard.

“Hey, Bill, it’s Westerly. Listen, no other way to say it but this: I’m not coming in again. No, not ever. Can you have HR draw up the paperwork? I’ll come in and sign it this week.”

By quarter after nine, after repeated attempts to reach Hugo on his cell phone, I stood in Frank Feeney’s living room and swallowed a double portion of his truculence.

“Sounds pretty thin to me,” he said. “Guy says he’s heard something, but he’s not sure what or where.”

“It’s not just some guy, Frank. It’s my goddamn stepson.”

“Still.”

“So you’re not going?”

“No. I have things to do here.”

I couldn’t believe it. Ther
e’d
been a time, years ago, when Frank had gone to Los Angeles on a flyer to get Hugo out of trouble. That took the better part of a month, everything on hold, everything uncertain. I was asking for a few hours just to go make sure Hugo was OK.

“You know what this means, right?” I said.

“Yeah.”

“It’s his head, Frank. His brain. He’s had trauma. If he’s fighting, he’s in a lot of trouble.”

Frank’s eyes stayed on me, solid, resolute. “If he is, it’s trouble he’s brought on himself.”

“What’s with you, man? You sat there in the bar and told him you wanted him alive—”

“I do.”

“—and you went on and on about football players. Jesus, man. Don’t you know this is worse? Don’t you care?”

“I’ve got stuff to do here.”

“I wish I was as above it all as you,” I said. “I wish I could just not give a shit.”

He didn’t say anything, and I didn’t have anything left. I went out the door and headed for the car. I sat there for a couple of minutes, arguing with myself over whether to push this thing with Frank just a little further. I could see all the arguments, but I couldn’t see the one that would make him say,
you know what, I’ll go
. I backed out of the driveway and was just about to throw it into drive when Frank came jogging out, motioning for me to lower my window.

“What?”

“Meet Trevor at the McDonald’s in Lockwood. He’ll go. More use than me anyway.”

45

We were about thirty miles east of Billings, making plodding progress in the snow, when a call came through. I motioned for Squeaky to turn off the radio, and then I answered.

“Heya, Bobby.”

Olden’s voice came back at me. “Mark. I heard you’re leaving us. I don’t know what’s going on, but I hope it’s a good thing for you.”

“Thanks for that.”

“So, listen, I’ve got kind of a weird question for you. Can I talk to you real quick?”

“Go ahead.”

“Well, it’s a little bit of bad news, I guess. You talked to Hugo lately?”

I covered the mouthpiece.
“
Herald-Gleaner
,”
I said to Squeaky.

“A couple of weeks ago, I think. Why?”

“You on the road?” Olden asked.

“Just heading home.”

Squeaky looked at me, and I shook my head.

“What’s going on, Bobby?” I said.

He cleared his throat. He wasn’t sure what to do. “Been hearing stuff about some bare-knuckle fighting in the Bakken, that Hugo’s involved in it. Gene wants me to go out there and check it out, but—”

“Shitty day to drive to North Dakota,” I said.

“Yeah. I’m just wondering if you’ve heard anything.”

“Gosh, no, Bobby. Shit. Bare-knuckle fighting?”

“That’s what we’re hearing.”

“What is this, 1890? That’s awful.” I cringed. I was laying the dumb act on too thick.

“You wouldn’t know where he is, would you?”

I tried to pull up my scant knowledge of western North Dakota. If I was going to do this thing—this thing being a lie the size of cannon ordnance—I needed to get the geography right.

“Last I talked to him, he was in New Town.”

“New Town? Really? I’m hearing this is happening around Stanley.”

“No, he started there, but he moved to a rig in New Town last I heard.”

“OK, thanks, Mark. I’m glad I called. I really owe you one.”

“Let me know what you find out, OK?”

“You bet,” he said.

I ended the call. “Jesus.”

“What the hell was all that?” Squeaky said.

I was worried, worried as all hell. Bobby was green, but he had real promise as a reporter, much more than I had at the same age. I hoped
I’d
sounded convincing.

“Mark?”

“That was the last of Hugo’s dignity if we don’t get to him first,” I finally said. “We’ve got a forty-minute head start, and I maybe just bought us another forty, and the weather’s getting worse, thank God.”

Squeaky looked at me quizzically, and then the notion kicked in and he smiled.

“You want to go faster?” he said. He mashed down on the accelerator, and his big Ford pickup did a little shimmy, and we were out of there.

We turned hard north at Glendive. The Yellowstone, my guide just a few months earlier on my work trip to Sidney, stretched out, frozen, but we caught a break. The westerly storm blew through a narrow corridor along Interstate 94, and once w
e’d
put about fifteen miles down toward Sidney and Fairview and the upper Dakota border, the snow stopped sliding across the windshield, visibility spread out, and Squeaky was able to put more horsepower on the case.

“What’s this thing look like to you?” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, do you think we’re gonna have to tangle with anybody to get him? Is he on drugs again?”

“Jesus, I hope not.” I said it, but I could tell Squeaky didn’t see much reason for optimism, and truth be told, neither did I. God, how I wished Hugo had answered his phone, just once.

“I’m just wondering what we’re in for,” he said.

“Well, it can’t be very good, you know? I just want to find him and get him home. We can worry about the rest later.”

“All right.”

Squeaky has a dead giveaway for his own agitation. He starts cracking his knuckles.

“What?” I said.

“It pisses me off.”

“What does?”

“This whole thing with Hugo. Man, that guy has had chances
I’d
have loved to get. He’s a million times better than I ever was, and he has no discipline, no character. Pisses me off.”

“So what I hear you saying is that you’re pissed.”

“Yeah. You making fun of me?”

“No.”

“I’ll turn right around.”

“Squeaky—Trevor—I’m not. OK? I get that you’re pissed. I get that he screwed up his chances. I’m just saying, I want to find him and get him home. We’ll have plenty of time to wring everything out if we can just get him home.”

“Yeah. Right. OK.”

I chewed on the next bit for a good while, almost to Sidney before I got it right in my head and knew what I wanted to say. The shortness of the winter days cast a pall on the scene, a dour gray that settled over the valley. We still had a long haul in front of us, a little more than a hundred miles, but the rigs on the horizon marked this as the territory where w
e’d
find him. A thickness, a fear, spread through my stomach.

“I’m not lying for him anymore,” I said. “I’m not lying to him, either. I wish your dad had come. There’s some stuff he needs to know.”

“Tell me.”

I gathered myself. Somehow, in my imagining of what
I’d
say, I hadn’t pictured this scene or this particular confidante.

“London,” I said.

“What about it?”

“He was doing coke in London. That story about tripping on the rug? Straight bullshit.”

“So, what, he just—”

“Smashed his own arm to get out of the fight? Yeah.”

Silence moved in. I understood. Squeaky was having to make sense of the nonsensical.
I’d
been there.

“Ho
w’d
you find out?” he asked at last.

“I was there.”

Squeaky looked at me, then looked at the road, then back again. Sidney’s lit-up downtown slid past my window.

“Wh
y’d
you do it?” he asked at last. “Why didn’t you say something?”

I swallowed a couple of times so I didn’t break toward shrill in my answer. “You think I wanted to keep it to myself?” Squeaky started to speak, and I cut him off. We could talk about the meaning of rhetoric later. “You think it did me any good to know that? Shit, man, I did it because he was my friend, and because
I’d
lost all perspective on things.”

Silence filled the cab again. We pushed on toward the state line.

“Dad thought he was using again when we fought Qwai,” he said. “He thought the binge eating was just a cover-up. He was amazed when things came back clean.”

“I don’t know. Maybe,” I said. I never built out the connections between what actually happened on that trip and what I suspected. It would be a lie to say the fight never crossed my mind. But
I’d
come to view the entire episode in the larger context of my grief over Von. I just didn’t give a rat’s ass what happened with Hugo. I shouldn’t have been there at all.

“As long as we’re squaring things up,” Squeaky said, “I’ll tell you what went down that night.”

I gave him a cockeyed look.

“Before the fight, I mean,” he said.

“OK, shoot.”

Squeaky kept stealing sideways glances at me, an every-few-seconds assessment of my attitude. It was weird.

“You know how Dad was done with him after that fight? Retired?”

“Yeah.”

“You ever wonder how he came up with the money for the bar? A full liquor license is expensive. Even then.”

I knew what was coming before Squeaky said it, and I wanted to jam my fingers in my ears and rattle off “nananananananananana” so my illusions weren’t shattered. W
e’d
all found ways to separate ourselves from any ethics we had where Hugo was concerned, but Frank, knowing his guy would be depleted after the crash weight loss, had somebody lay a bet on Qwai and got a payoff at 2–1 odds. Whatever contempt and revulsion I felt—and it was plenty of both—Squeaky’s revelation brought the totality of Frank’s actions toward Hugo these past few years into sharper relief. Guilt, and the flailing defiance of it, brings out some mighty odd behavior. For all Frank’s protestations about how Hugo played him, it now seemed to me that he had no high ground in that game.

“No wonder he didn’t come,” I said.

“Don’t be too hard on him,” Squeaky said. “He did a lot for Hugo. Maybe he thinks he can’t give anything else.”

“Yeah, he can.”

“What?”

“The truth about what he did.”

Squeaky considered that awhile and then, at last, said something that was beyond his pay grade in wisdom.

“On that deal, I think Dad would argue about where the truth of it is,” he said. “That’s what I think.”

I wasn’t going to argue that point, although I certainly could have my way with moral relativity. I was an expert. In any case, I needed Squeaky’s help on this one, and bad-mouthing his old man wouldn’t help matters.

“Turn left here,” I said. W
e’d
just whipped through Fairview and across the state line. Darkness was coming on in full now. The low line of trees on the horizon cut a darker outline against the sky, and long sheets of snow billowed across the postharvest landscape. Across the expanse in all directions, the flames from flaring gas wells waved against the deadening sky.

The road stretched out before us, laying down a path toward the biggest boomtown in the United States. Beyond that, I hoped, waited someone
I’d
come a long way to see.

I had this to make right, and a few other things, too. I could do that, for him and for me. I couldn’t do it for anyone else.