The Fallow Season of Hugo Hunter (11 page)

22

I saw Marlene one time after she left. Her eminently fair division of the household left nothing to contest. We simply had to show up a single time in court to affirm that our wish was to not be married anymore—and in the absence of so many other wishes
I’d
have preferred, I didn’t see how I could deny Marlene that.

She showed up early. I showed up early, too, because I knew she would, and I didn’t want to disappoint her again. We had a few minutes alone, together, in the anteroom. She clutched a small blue purse on her lap. I fiddled with my tie. I hate ties. She looked beautiful—just a little eyeliner and blush, something she rarely put on for me, enough to notice without being stopped in your tracks. I liked it.

“You look nice,” I said.

She choked more life out of that purse. “Thank you.”

I didn’t say anything else. When it was time to enter the courtroom, we went in silence until compelled to speak. We said yes—or, rather, we said no to each other—and we signed our names and we left. She took the elevator. I took the stairs. She went out the north doors and to her car, I presume. I went out the west doors, crossed two streets, and poured myself into a seat at a bar. Frank and Hugo came around to check on me, and to buy me a few. Good friends, those guys.

There’s the occasional night—it’s almost always a night—when I’ve had too much beer and not enough recent companionship, and I pull out the tattered memories of life with Marlene and rearrange them and almost convince myself that we had a chance. We didn’t, of course. The fights between us, from the start, exceeded all reasonable concept of proportion. They never turned physical. It might have been a relief if they had. Instead, we bypassed the usual ramping up—minor disagreement yields to raised voices yields to bitter recrimination—and proceeded directly to the ugliest, most damaging things we could say to each other. At times, it felt like a crazy-making game to me. Could I take away her will to battle me, then save everything by reversing course and telling her I loved her? Could I say I was sorry and make it stick? Whose feelings would be trampled first? Who would come home in the nastier mood and inflict it on the other? It was such an ugly brand of brinkmanship we played that each of us, on the eve of the wedding we had planned just so we could double down on our dysfunction, faced the concern of our respective best friends—but we insisted that yes, we wanted this marriage. We would be better. We would do better. That was the lie we told ourselves, and the lie we believed for a long time.

That lie carried us, man. It carried us through my early years at the
Herald-Gleaner
, when w
e’d
bridge the last week of a month with ramen noodles and found pennies, even as we took up battlements in our ceaseless fights about how thin our margins were. It carried us through the belief that a child would somehow bond us in all the ways we couldn’t manage on our own. When the child came and our division only grew, we lied to ourselves and said we just had to figure out how to make it work now that everything had changed. And we believed it anew.

We couldn’t be saved. That’s the truth I came back to every time I thought about those years, which was far too often. I could rearrange the order of things, fixate on small moments of kindness and laughter and read something bigger into them, but the pathway just wasn’t there. I tried to tell myself that it was no one’s fault, that no one had to take the blame for it, but that was another lie.

Von changed our marriage. That seems a self-evident point. Two plus one equals three, and the mathematics alone shift the variables. What I mean is that Von made it better, at least for Marlene. He made it tolerable for her, because he was the realization of the only dream she ever asserted for herself in our marriage. Thus, he made our existence together tolerable for me, too, because I was all about the path of least resistance. Where before I hung on out of some warped sense of testing my endurance, as if it would have been some mortal failure to give in and say to Marlene, “You know what, this isn’t working for us,” once Von came burping into our lives I stayed in because it required less effort than being honest with myself, or with her, or with our boy.

Had Von lived, had he come home that night he was so angry with me and I with him, had he snubbed me on the way to his room and kissed his mother and seen another sunrise, Marlene and I might be married still, living alone in the same bed and the same rooms.

I still have two pictures of us. One we took in early 1996, when Von was three years old. He sits between us, smiling for the camera with an eagerness he probably never showed again, and Marlene and I sit there, close enough to touch, and we present our son to the world. We’re wearing sweaters, all three of us, but we look good—we’re not the garish families you see on the comedy websites, the ones with costumed dogs and pleather Santa suits. We match our son’s enthusiasm, and if someone were to draw an inference from that photograph, it would be of a happy, contented, growing family. We were none of those things, which just goes to show that you can never assume knowledge of what goes on in someone else’s house on the basis of how things appear from the outside.

The other picture is just me and Marlene, 1985, the only one of our engagement photos that we had blown up so we could put it on the wall. She left it behind, so either she wanted me to have it or she couldn’t bear to keep it. I hung it in Von’s room so I wouldn’t have to see it, wouldn’t have to think about how different and promising the world looked to us back then. Everything that Von left behind went with Marlene. Where he played and slept became just a room, filled with boxes and items that didn’t fit in a house where I lived alone.

That night, after I left Lainie at her place, the dream woke me up, and I could still catch the tendrils of it—Von and Hugo, wrestling on our living room floor, with me sitting in the recliner, frowning at them over my newspaper and Marlene in the kitchen, watching them in wonder, every bit of it playing in my head just as it actually happened. I shuffled out to the bathroom and put some water on my face, setting back the haze and emerging more in the moment. I walked down the hall and opened the door to Von’s room, and I flicked on the light. The bulb, in the socket for years and never engaged for most of them, flickered and went dark. I propped open the door and let the illumination from the hallway spill into the room, and then I stood before the much younger Marlene and me. In the half-light, I could make out only the outlines of our forms. Our teeth, though, couldn’t hide in the shadows. Clear as day, I could see the two upturned smiles, beaming and white and youthful. I tried to remember the day of the photo shoot, where w
e’d
gone, the time of year, but the details had ridden out long ago. It was like digging through the morgue at work and reading a forgotten story
I’d
written years before and being surprised by how active and fresh it seemed. Like it had happened to someone else.

It wasn’t really Marlene I was thinking of. It wasn’t me, either, at least not the version of me that was nearly thirty years gone.

I thought only of Lainie and how time was drawing short. Eventually, and probably soon, she would figure me for the fraud I was.

Excerpt from
Hugo Hunter: My Good Life and Bad Times

Frank Feeney used to tell me that I had to work up a reason to hate my opponents, if only for the minutes we would spend together in the ring. Hate, he said, would focus me on the task at hand—namely, inflicting more violence on my rival than he could inflict on me.

I never hated anyone. Not even Juan Domingo Ascencion, who has a gold medal that belongs to me.

What I did, instead, was rely on a competitiveness that borders on maniacal. In a boxing match, there can be only one winner. It had to be me. If there were some reward beyond the victory—say, a gold medal—that had to belong to me. I’m this way with anything, as it turns out. Checkers, Yahtzee, Ping-Pong, you name it. If there’s victory at stake, if one person is going to win and one is going to lose, I want to be the winner. No, wait, scratch that. I don’t
want
to be the winner. I
have
to be the winner. When you play-wrestle with a child, you’re supposed to let the kid win. I never did. I’m that kind of competitor. Is it healthy? Probably not. Can I do anything to change it? Probably not.

The only two times that drive to win failed me, as it turned out, occurred when I was set to fight for world championships. Both times, I was involved with something beyond the fight game, a monkey on my back. Both times, I was a failure in the eyes of the sporting world.

Try living with that.

23

The pellet-gun vandals stayed busy for the next two nights. Reports of shot-out car and house windows came in from the far West End, Blue Creek, Emerald Hills, the Heights—every neighborhood and enclave in Billings, it seemed. Monday morning, I trundled out to the driveway in my robe to fetch the morning paper and saw that my neighbor Bob Dilfer’s car had been relieved of its driver’s-side windows. That sent me on a frantic reconnoiter around my own property, which turned up clean, thank God. I went back inside without saying anything to Bob. It might make me small and petty, but I couldn’t face Dilfer’s yammering on about his damned Prius that early in the morning.

In the
Herald-Gleaner
, both in the daily dinosaur of a print product and the Wild West of our online forums, the nightly bursts of thuggery were being cast as a Most Alarming Trend. The mayor and the police chief held grim-faced news conferences to assure the citizenry that Everything Possible Was Being Done. The Diploma commissioned a web chat with Chief Roscoe Hamer, and the website crashed under the weight of folks crowding in to express their fear that our fair burg was going to hell. About the only people who seemed happy were the owners of the glass repair places, which were enjoying a windfall to the tune of nearly $250,000.

Lainie called me twice Sunday, and I ducked her both times. I wasn’t ready to talk, and I wasn’t ready to talk about why I wasn’t ready to talk. I like my life in compartments—work here, home here, social life there, with the pathways between them known only to me. Lainie was breaking down that discipline, crossing boundaries, learning things that I wasn’t ready to tell her, things I might never be ready to tell her.
I’d
spent more than twenty years finding a place of peace, or at least bearable unease, on the subject of Hugo, and she was already challenging my position there. What would she do or say when she found out more? I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answer.

Monday night, I was back on the desk at the
Herald-Gleaner
, and she called me again. Nowhere to hide.

“Take me to lunch tomorrow?” she asked.

“I can do that.”

“I missed you yesterday.”

“Yeah, busy.”

“OK. Noon then? At the clinic?”

“That’ll be fine.”

We said our good-byes, and I hung up. I sat staring at the phone, wanting a do-over on the whole exchange. The Diploma came barreling out of his office, relieving me of that thought.

“Damn, Mark, I need you to roll on this,” he said. “Miles and Eighth. Cops think they have the vandals.”

I looked around the office. Just the copy editors, me, and Pennington. Everybody else was at dinner, I guess. “Where’s Eddy?” I asked.

“City council meeting. Get going. Cops are there now. Grubbs is heading over to shoot it.”

It had been years since I did a cop beat, clear back to my intern days at the
Herald-Gleaner
, before Trimear brought me aboard full-time with the sports staff and long before he figured out that he didn’t like me all that much. I remembered now how much I craved the adrenaline rush of a spontaneous, unpredictable story. Put back on the job by the Diploma, I fractured a fair number of traffic laws whipping my Malibu through downtown and up into the asscrack of midtown Billings.

Near the intersection of Miles and Eighth, the strobes crossed my face, bathing the inside of my car in blue. I jammed it into an empty spot on the street and tumbled out to stand among the ten or twelve gawkers who had congregated on the corner.

In the middle of the street, a gray sedan sat at an angle, the left front tire blown out and the front end splattered with bullet holes. The cops had three men face down in the nearest yard, and across from them, two other officers talked with an older guy, maybe fifty-five or sixty, in a pair of basketball shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt. He gesticulated with a fair amount of fervor. The cops nodded as they followed the line of his hands.

My cell phone buzzed, a text from the Diploma:
TV going live. What’s up?

Finding out
, I typed and sent.

Tweet as soon as u can.

I nudged the guy next to me and nodded at the scene. “What happened?”

“Old guy came out shooting, I guess.”

I crossed the street. One of the cops talking to the older guy peeled off and walked toward me, hand up. I showed him my work badge.

“What happened?” I asked.

“Still sorting it out, but looks like those guys over there”—he motioned at the scene across the street—“picked the wrong house to hit.”

“How so?”

He started laughing and then, perhaps realizing the impropriety, walked it back to a broad smile. “Damnedest thing. So those guys roll up and start shooting out windows in this guy’s garage. Problem is, he’s in there. Bigger problem is, he’s got an AR15—”

“I’m sorry, an A
R . . .
”

“Big freaking gun. Semiautomatic. The guy was in there cleaning and loading it. H
e’d
just finished when Team Loser over there started in. So he hits the garage door opener, comes striding out, and starts blasting away.”

“Jesus.”

The cop laughed. “Yeah. It could have been a bad scene. He wasn’t aiming to kill, just neutralize. I imagine those boys are going to need a change of underwear.”

“Will he be charged?”

“Not our department. I doubt it, though. He’s legal to own the gun, no record, he was defending his property. Plus, if these guys are who we think they are, what jury would convict him?”

I thanked the officer and hung back a bit to get Pennington’s tweet posted. I pictured the twitterpating back at the office over what passes for journalism these days: “Homeowner shoots at suspected pellet-gun vandals.” I flagged down Larry Grubbs, who was snapping pictures on the other side of the street, and filled him in. We agreed that the gold standard would be getting Dirty Harry Homeowner to talk with us. We would have to wait for the cops to finish with him.

While Larry uploaded raw video to the office, I crossed over to get a better look at the perps. One by one, the arresting officers lifted the guys to their feet and moved them toward the patrol cruisers. I braced myself for recognition. They were all young men, muscular, the kind of knuckleheads with whom I was likely to be familiar.

The first two didn’t register with me, but the third one sure did: Cody Schronert, last seen beating on Hugo Hunter. Such a promising young lad. He looked at me and offered a smirk. I just shook my head.

The Diploma made sure he splashed my story six columns wide across the front page Tuesday morning. The circulation manager told us later that h
e’d
had to refill the boxes on several Billings street corners and at gas stations around town. Online, people went nuts for the story. Three days later, it remained our most clicked- and commented-on piece, an honor generally reserved for when some country cracker writes a letter to the editor bashing Mooslims and asserting his rights granted by a document he’s never actually read.

Miles Avenue Homeowner Stands His Ground Against Vandals

By MARK WESTERLY

Herald-Gleaner Staff

Three Billings men with a pellet gun and some bad intentions picked the wrong house to vandalize Monday night.

Artie Bispuppo, 57, of 801 Miles Ave., was in his garage at about 7 p.m. when the small panes of glass on the garage doors started to shatter. As it turned out, Bispuppo had been cleaning and loading an AR15 semiautomatic—“My baby,” he called it—in response to a wave of property vandalism that has gripped the city in recent days.

“I had a pretty golldang good idea who was doing it,” said Bispuppo, who described himself as a “freedom-loving, Second-Amendment-saving son of a gun” and a longtime Billings resident. “I was going to be ready if they came here. Kind of hoped they might, actually. It worked out, didn’t it?”

What happened next, as described by Billings Police, surely gave the vandals the shock of their young lives. Bispuppo triggered the automatic garage door opener and came striding out to his driveway, where he strafed the car carrying the three men with 15 bullets that took out the front tire and left a trail of holes on the car’s front end. When the car stopped, Bispuppo turned the gun on the three men and held them there while police responded to a neighbor’s phone call.

Arrested at the scene were Michael Ray Russo, 19; Andrew William Marchant, 21; and Cody Reese Schronert, 21. Schronert, in the news recently for defeating Olympic silver medalist Hugo Hunter in a boxing match, is the son of well-known Billings personal-injury lawyer Case “the Ace” Schronert. Reached by phone at home, the elder Schronert said he had no comment.

So far, the three men have been charged with willful destruction of property in the Miles Avenue case, but Sgt. Ben Blakeley said more charges are likely to follow in more than 150 cases of auto and home windows that have been shot out in Billings in the past few days.

While Blakeley said police don’t relish the idea of citizens taking the steps that Bispuppo took Monday night, the Billings man isn’t likely to face charges. A state law known as the “castle doctrine” holds that Bispuppo was merely defending his home, Blakeley said.

For his part, Bispuppo said he had mixed feelings about what happened on Miles Avenue on Monday. On one hand, he said, actually using the AR15 left him “a bit stressed out.” But he also called on other “responsible, God-loving, criminal-hating” people to take an active role in defending their homes and lives.

“We outnumber the punks,” he said. “But the punks seem to win. Not this time, bubba. Not on my street.”

At lunch, Lainie reached over and took my hand. “I read your story this morning.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I’m glad it’s over. What did the insurance people say?”

“Small deductible. No big deal. Car glass has been replaced, and they’ll be out to do the house windows Friday. I went ahead and gave the police the figures. They said it would be helpful with the prosecution.”

“Little assholes.”

“Yeah.”

I watched Lainie eat while I pushed some macaroni salad around my plate.

“I’m sorry about the other night,” I said. “I’m sorry I didn’t call.”

She looked up at me. “No, I’m sorry. I got a little emotional about him, and the instinct for protection kind of kicked in. You know?”

“Yeah.” I squeezed her hand and plunged in. “It’s just tha
t . . .
there’s a lot of stuff about that subject. A lot of stuff I haven’t said. A lot of stuff I’m not sure I can say. I want to tell you, but I’m afraid of what you’ll think of me if I do.”

“About Hugo?” she said.

“Yeah, about Hugo. About me.”

Lainie let go of my hand, laced her fingers and ground them together for a few seconds, and then she reached for me again.