The Fallow Season of Hugo Hunter (25 page)

Excerpt from
Hugo Hunter: My Good Life and Bad Times

I envied the guys who got up and went to work, every day, same place, same job, year after year. I didn’t see drudgery in that. To be fair, I didn’t really have any perspective at all, but if I had to classify it,
I’d
say I saw honor in it. It was keeping the faith, with coworkers, with one’s own set of skills, with an employer, with the family back home, if there was one.

Professional boxing wasn’t anything like that. It wasn’t an everyday kind of job. It was vast stretches of nothing to do except goof off, followed by a short, intense period of getting in shape, followed by a few minutes of work.

I was good at the getting in shape. I was good at the work. I was very, very bad at the nothingness in between.

I would have been better at punching a clock.

Here’s the hell of that, though: by the time I figured this out, working at an average-Joe kind of job was almost—almost—beyond my reach.
I’d
spent years conditioning myself to do one thing, and the workaday life was something different entirely. Even if I could have risen to some of the jobs I tried, I don’t know that the people I shared that work with could have accepted that in me. They wanted Hugo Hunter, and I found it nearly impossible to explain to them just how much I didn’t want to be that anymore.

Like so many things in my life, my breakthrough came when I had no other choices. When I emerged from drug treatment the last time—and it will be the last time—I knew two things:

First, what I’ve done since Coconut Olson beat me isn’t working and has to change.

Second, I’m never going through that hell again.

Sometimes I look at the young man in the picture frames around my house. He’s sixty pounds lighter than I am, his face drawn tight and his eyes like lasers. I look at him and I think:

Kid, you don’t even know.

46

Even in full Bakken-boom bloom, Stanley, North Dakota, isn’t much. A highway shoots through town on its way to other flatland destinations, there’s a capillary system of town streets, and, if your timing is right, you’ll get a good view of the Empire Builder as it moves along the rails between the West Coast and Chicago. Finding the man camp was simple enough. A cluster of single-wide trailers hugged the highway on the edge of town, smartly positioned across the road from an all-night convenience store.

Squeaky kept the truck idling as I got out to talk to a kid wh
o’d
decamped outside one of the trailers to kill off a Marlboro or two.

“Hey, bud,” I said, “does Hugo live out here?”

“Who?” The roughneck turned his collar up against the cold.

“Hugo Hunter. He was working out here.”

“I don’t know who that is. What do you want with him, anyway?”

The second sentence contradicted the first. I tried another way in. I racked my weary thoughts, trying to remember the names.

“What about Sean?” I said.

“We got three Seans here.”

“What about Jeff?”

“Just one of them.”

I held out my arms, palms up, and gave the kid the look. Everybody knows the look. The I-ain’t-got-all-day look. The I-need-this-buddy look. He nodded at the trailer across the gravel entry road.

“Thanks, bud.”

I broke out in a jog, the snow and ice crunching under my feet, and threw a signal to Squeaky to park the truck and come with me.

Inside of two minutes, Squeaky and I knew our worst fears about this errand were in play. Jeff recognized me when he opened the door, and the color drained out of him in a way that reminded me of the time my old man made me chew a whole bag of Beech-Nut when he caught me rooting through his stash.

To his credit, Jeff let us in and was more forthcoming than the kid
I’d
encountered outside. He talked fast, nervous, but the bigger strokes were clear. Hugo hadn’t been up to snuff out here in the patch—too old, at long last too slow, and too set in his ways to jump when told to, even for the kind of scratch these guys were pulling down. Loath to admit h
e’d
failed again, Hugo had tried to linger on as a sort of camp mascot, a friend to any and all. It had been the thing he chafed against at Feeney’s, sitting around and jawing about the past, and unlike a one-off dinner patron, the guys in the camp eventually grew tired of the stories. They wanted action, danger, something to stave off the boredom.

“One guy told Hugo h
e’d
pay him a hundred bucks for a swing at him, just to see if he could hit him,” Jeff said. “That’s how it started.”

“He did it?”

“Yeah.”

“Was the guy able to hit him?” Squeaky asked.

Jeff shook his head. “No. Pissed him off. Other guys wanted to try, too.”

“How many?” I said.

“Lots.”

“And he let them?”

“Yeah. Drugs, money, whatever. They just gave it to him.”

Squeaky kicked at the carpet. “Goddamnit!” Jeff got quiet. His eyes started moving around the room, looking for escape. I tried to take the pressure down a few notches.

“Did he get hurt?”

“Yeah.”

“Bad?”

Jeff dropped his head. Kept it there awhile. No words. Nothing. And then, finally, “Yeah.”

“Jeff,” I said, and he looked up at me. “If you care about what happens to him, tell us where he is.”

On our way to Williston, I called Raj and told him we were bringing his father home. I fought to deliver my message in matter-of-fact terms, mostly to keep Raj on an even keel so he could hear what I needed him to hear, but also to keep my own emotions at bay and to keep Squeaky’s from spilling over any more than they already had. Goddamn Hugo. Here we went again.

“You know the rehab place behind the hospital—shit, I can’t remember the name. Anyway, that’s where he went before,” I told Raj. “Go up there in the morning and tell them what happened. They’ll be able to help get him in there.”

“OK,” Raj said.

“Are you scared, bud?” I swallowed hard.

“A little.”

“Don’t be. We’ll get him.”

I hung up.

“You gonna call your dad?” I asked Squeaky.

“Ain’t nothing to say yet, is there? Nothing I want to say anyway.”

“No, I guess not.”

“You gonna call your wife?”

“Same answer.”

We found Hugo where Jeff said h
e’d
be, in a 1970s travel trailer parked behind the bar where
I’d
met him that summer night in Williston. A light in the front window burned. I didn’t bother with a knock.

Hugo sat slumped in a camp chair, half in and half out of a pair of jeans, T-shirt caked in his blood, his face a circuit board of stitching that made Squeaky’s handiwork look like a surgeon’s. That beautiful face, crumbled. I choked back the rising bile.

I shook him. Nothing. I shook him again, and Hugo lurched out of sleep with a haymaker right, his forearm clubbing me against the head.

“Grab him!” I yelled.

Squeaky put his weight into it, smothering Hugo’s wild where-am-I swings and tying up his arms.

“Hugo,” he said. “It’s Trevor. I’m here with Mark.”

Hugo looked at Squeaky and then at me, and his eyes rolled back in his head.

“Unbelievable,” Squeaky said. “Look at this shit.”

“Let’s just get him out of here.”

We struggled with the might-as-well-be-dead weight of him, trying to get his clothes on. Once Squeaky had things under control, I made a quick inventory of the trailer. A space heater burned in the dining area, which was thick with pizza boxes and paper plates with barnacles of food dried on them. Broken caplets and their spilled contents littered the floor. I scooped a few into a plastic grocery bag, in case the medical folks wanted them. Scraps of paper caught in hardened pools of vomit.

“Jesus,” Squeaky said.

“Well, we figured.”

“Yeah, but Jesus.”

I cupped Hugo under his arms and nodded at Squeaky to catch the legs.

“Let’s go,” I said.

47

We were brushing the eastern outskirts of Miles City, under a pitch-black sky and more than halfway home, when Hugo came to in the makeshift bed
I’d
fashioned in the crew cab of Squeaky’s truck.

He sat up. “What’re you guys doing here?”

“We were in the neighborhood,” I said.

“My head.”

“I imagine.”

“I gotta lay back down.”

I took off my seat belt and turned around in my seat. Hugo was covering his eyes with his hand. “We’re taking you home,” I said.

“I need a fix.”

“Fuck you,” Squeaky said.

Hugo didn’t say anything, didn’t react in any way I could see. And then his chin began quivering and his face wrenched up. I looked away.

“Mark?” The voice quavered and broke.

“Yeah, Hugo?”

“Nothing.”

“OK.”

I turned back around and watched as Miles City filled our view. Squeaky ground his teeth. I couldn’t begrudge him the anger at Hugo, but Jesus. The timing couldn’t be worse.

“Mark?”

I turned back around. “Yeah?”

“I’m sorry.”

“I know you are.”

“I can’t stop fucking up.”

“Yeah, you can.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I know.”

I pulled out my phone. A little juice remained in it. “Hey, Hugo, Lainie wants to talk to you. You want me to call her for you?”

I interpreted the lack of a response as a yes. I dialed her up. I told her that we were bringing him in, that he was lucid, and that
I’d
be home in a few hours. Then I handed the phone over the seat.

What followed was mostly the squelched garble of my wife’s voice at first, with a few more robust responses finally coming from Hugo, a yes here, a no there. Then “I know,” and “Yes, please.”

A few minutes later—it was the damnedest thing—I heard a voice coming through so clear and true that I had to turn around and see what was going on. There lay Hugo, asleep, an angel’s face somewhere under the carnage, with my phone at his ear and my wife singing “Hush, Little Baby” to him across the miles.

48

It was three a.m. before we reached Billings, the final hundred-mile stretch driven by me. The chore couldn’t have been done without Squeaky, there’s no doubt about that, but every man has his limits. Squeaky’s was Forsyth, Montana.

“Mark,” he said, “I think I just saw a dinosaur running alongside the highway.” He might have. I don’t know. But I figured it best that I took the wheel anyway.

I didn’t call Raj till Hugo was safely inside the emergency room with the doctors.
Codependency
was the kind of clinical mumbo jumbo word I was still several weeks from really learning, much less using in an actual sentence, but even so, I don’t think that’s what kept me from calling earlier. Maybe for the first time I interjected myself into one of Hugo’s decisions for the clearest possible reason. His boy had no business seeing the version of Hugo that we brought into Billings Clinic that night.

When Raj did come around, however, I spared him no bad news. “He’s cut up,” I said. His midsection, mottled in purple and black and yellow, looked like somebody had been working him over with a pipe wrench, I told Raj. And the scatterings of opiates I found in the trailer suggested that a two-day patch job in the hospital wasn’t going to near cut it.

“I’ll go to the rehab place first thing in the morning,” Raj said.

“It is morning, kid.”

“Later, I mean.”

Beyond that, words seemed an unnecessary expense. All we could do was wait. I dipped my head back and fell into adenoidal sleep, a lapsing of consciousness that could be undone any time a nurse or orderly walked by. A few times, I popped an eye open and caught Raj bagging his own z’s. It was all good. H
e’d
need his energy.

Squeaky had hightailed it out after the drop-off, back home to his wife and kids, and eventually to a confab with Frank. I left it with Squeaky to give the old man the score and let him decide what to do. A guy’s gotta start somewhere with the right living, and
I’d
made the decision that my friendship, relationship, whatever you want to call it with Hugo was going to be based on honesty starting then.
I’d
seen enough of what the other side brings.
I’d
like to say it was a thunderclap moment of clarity, but now, with the benefit of hindsight, I think it’s something
I’d
been working toward all that year.

“Are you Mr. Hunter’s brother?”

The voice brought me out of my veneer of sleep. I looked up into the face of an ER nurse.

“This is his son.” I pointed at Raj, asleep next to me.

She smiled at me, a suggestion that she was in on some kind of ruse. “He asked for his brother.”

I clapped my knees and willed my body to stand. “I guess that’s me, then.” I pointed at Raj again. “What about him?”

“He asked to see you alone. If his son wakes up, I’ll send him in.”

Hugo lay on a gurney in a small operating room, waiting for transport to a suite upstairs. I sidled up to him and squeezed his hand, waking him.

“Mark.”

Looking at him challenged every bit of constitution I had. The doctors’ stitch-perfect patching had made my friend look like a shorter, more corpulent version of Frankenstein’s monster.

“I’m here,” I said.

“Mark, I’m so thirsty.”

I scanned the room and found a Dixie cup dispenser. I filled a cup with water and brought it to Hugo. I helped ease his head up and poured the water into him. Down his smock, too.

He swallowed and gasped for breath.

“More,” he said.

I repeated the maneuver, a bit more successfully this time.

“Thank you,” he said.

I pulled up a chair and sat down. “Raj is here.”

“Where?”

“Outside.”

“Does h
e . . .
did yo
u . . .
?”

“He’s got a pretty good grasp of the situation, yeah.”

“Oh, no.”

“He loves you. We all do.”

Hugo’s tears came again. I put my head down, grabbed his hand, and held on.

“Why?” he asked.

“Because we’re hardheaded sonsabitches.”

I waited for Hugo to fight off the sniffles.

“Listen, Hugo, he’s going to be in here in a sec and I’m going to leave you alone,” I said. “You guys have a lot to talk about, and the doctor wants to talk to me.”

“OK.”

“I’m your brother, you know.”

“I know. That’s what I told them.”

“OK,” I said. “But I need to tell you something first. It’s something I should have told you a long time ago. It’s not fair that I knew and you didn’t, and I’m sorry, and we can talk a hundred million times after this if you want to work it out, or you want to scream at me, or whatever. OK? Whatever it takes.”

Hugo didn’t take his eyes off me, which I took as a good sign. A focused Hugo was better by far than the alternative.

“OK,” he said.

“All right.” I gripped his hand tighter. “I’m your brother. But you’ve got another brother, a real one, your own blood.”

I gave it to him straight. He had two families. He had Raj and Lainie and me and Squeaky, and even Frank. Someday, h
e’d
even have Frank again, I was sure of it. He also had someone he didn’t know. It’s better than nothing.

Tears brimmed in his eyes the deeper I got into it, and I struggled to hold my gaze on him and contain my own emotions. It’s a hell of a thing to tell a grown man that everything he’s taken for granted isn’t as it seems. I could give him his people, but I couldn’t give him directions on how to make his way to them. I couldn’t take away the hurt that the father he never knew was in the ground, unable to validate him. If he still needed that, h
e’d
have to find it somewhere else.

“Jesus,” Hugo said.

“I know.” God, how I knew. I knew the weight of the thing that
I’d
just put on him.
I’d
been carrying it for a long time. It was the right thing to do, but it wasn’t without its toll.

“I don’t know what to do,” Hugo said. “About any of this.”

“That’s OK,” I said. “You’re not on the clock. It doesn’t have to be decided now.”

I reached for his forearm and grabbed hold, and Hugo—damn the pain, damn everything—seized hold of the back of my shirt, pulling himself into a sitting position and tumbling his head forward to my shoulder. For that one night, he buried his pain there.