The Fallow Season of Hugo Hunter (12 page)

“When I pictured saying this to you, this isn’t where I thought it would be.” She laughed, a little chuckle that dribbled off. “I’m going to say this thing, it’s very hard for me, and then you can decide what you want to do.”

I nodded.

“I love you. OK? I didn’t think I would again, not after Delmar, and I didn’t want to, but I do.”

“Lainie, I—”

“Wait. Let me finish. And because I love you, there isn’t anything you can say to me about what you’ve done before I met you that will change that. OK? If it’s time you need, time I have. If it’s secrets and you can’t part with them, that’s something else. I’m not saying I won’t love you. But secrets make everything harder. Everything. You understand what I’m saying?”

“Yes,” I said, the briefest acknowledgment I could muster so I could get to what I really wanted to say, what
I’d
been dying to say before she said it first. “I love you, too, Lains.”

“Good.” She smiled. The whole damn world lit up. “That’s the right thing to say.”

“I want to tell you,” I said. “I think I’ll need to get drunk to do it.”

“Beer?” she said.

“Tequila. Lots and lots of tequila.”

“I’ll be waiting up for you tonight. First bottle’s on me.”

I drove northward toward home, up the face of the Rimrocks to the little parking lot below the airport. Summer was pushing toward us now, dislodging spring. I walked down along the concrete trail and took a seat on a bench overlooking town. Behind me, joggers, bicyclists, and dog walkers plied the opportunities of a warm, clear day.

I traced my life through the bramble of streets and neighborhoods below me. There, in the central part of town, where Lewis Avenue meets Fifteenth Street, sat the house I grew up in. I slid my eyes left, moving east, to the oil refinery where my father, a pipe fitter, worked from 1960, three years before I came along, to 1989. We never connected much. I was bookish, like my mother, and Dad never saw the work value in what I did, chronicling others’ lives instead of living my own, by his estimation. My memories are buffeted by the knowledge of how difficult it was for us to have a decent conversation. Some people say time does something about that, downsizes recall into something easier to take. I haven’t found that to be true where Dad is concerned.
I’d
have liked to talk to him about Von. Maybe I could have understood him a little better when my own son seemed so unlike me, when our conversations were so eerily reminiscent of what
I’d
gone through with my own father, but Dad was gone by early 1991.

Closer to me, almost close enough to touch it seemed, lay Montana State University Billings—Eastern Montana College when I went there. I found the big brick building, dead center in my view, and I went three windows up and four over. My first dorm room. The roommate
I’d
been saddled with and despised, an awkward kid from Geraldine, was now the majority leader of the state senate. How the hell did that happen?

Now I telescoped in to the South Side. I found South Park, the big patch of grass in Billings’s oldest, poorest neighborhood, an oasis among the iron-barred gas station windows and halfway houses and tenements. The trees obscured my view of Hugo’s house on the southeast corner of the park, Aurelia’s house before that. Well tended, at least as long as Aurelia was here, although not so much these days, when neglect pervaded so much of our lives.

The first time I went there, it was to see a boy. Now he was a man. A grown-ass man, Hugo liked to say. So much had changed. So little, too. Who would have thought twenty years ago that Hugo and I would both still be here, still punching?

Excerpt from
Hugo Hunter: My Good Life and Bad Times

If there’s a sports adjective I despise, it’s
snakebit
.

Unfortunately, it’s one often applied to me.

Here’s the problem with it:
Snakebit
suggests that factors beyond your control have conspired to defeat you. That you were motoring along, minding your own business, doing everything right, and some variable injected itself into your contest and you lost because of that.

What a bunch of nonsense.

Certainly, you could argue that the Olympic final qualified for such a description. I had Juan Domingo Ascencion beaten dead to rights, knocked out, and I did so legally. The gold medal that was rightfully mine went to him because of corruption. That’s an outside variable, to be sure.

But still, I could have knocked him out earlier, when the end of the round wasn’t so imminent. I could have played it safe, not pressed, and taken a decision that was surely mine. There were things I could have done.

Mostly, I object to
snakebit
because no athlete wants to think he doesn’t have control of everything in the field of play or, in my case, in the squared circle. To admit that you’re powerless against your circumstances goes against everything you’ve worked for and the considerable sense of self required to get in there and trade punches with another man.

Interestingly enough, submitting to a higher power and admitting my weaknesses is the only way to stay even in a fight against the toughest opponent I’ve ever known.

It’s a continual chore to reconcile those contradictions.

24

Hugo had one thing right in that mess of lies he told William Pennington at Feeney’s: if h
e’d
come to a different end against Rhys Montrose in London, the landscape of his life would look different today. I’ve seen enough in my time to not be too confident about whether it would be better or worse—worse, perhaps, given how self-destructive Hugo could be even without the money and fame that would have come with a world title—but I’m all in on different.

The hell of it is that Hugo had never been better or sharper. Squeaky and Frank took him to the cabin on Flathead Lake in the summer of 1997 and set to carving out the best version of Hugo. He spent July through September up there, chopping wood, running on mountain trails, sparring. By the time camp broke, he stood at his mandated 147 pounds, but the distribution was different—hips narrowed, shoulders broadened, more power rippling through the core of him. If there’s any such thing as an indestructible boxer, we had it that summer in Hugo. He was a piece of iron, impossible to bend. Frank broke camp a day earlier than planned, partly to account for the cross-Atlantic trip that awaited, and partly because, in his last sparring session, Hugo was untouchable. That last word is a sports writing crutch, but in this case, I mean it literally: Dave Runson, a good fighter in his own right, a guy who got into the lower half of the welterweight rankings, could not land a punch on Hugo. All summer, h
e’d
been mimicking Montrose—the upright, move-ahead style, the sticking left jab, the overhand right that was the Brit’s only power punch. By summer’s end, Hugo had him locked down. Ther
e’d
be the jab—stick, stick, stick, stick, finding only Hugo’s gloves—and then the right would come, and Hugo would already be gone, slipping to the side and digging hooks to Runson’s body.

When we boarded the plane in Billings, bound for Minneapolis and then JFK and, finally, Heathrow,
I’d
begun to see the wisdom in Frank’s grow-him-slowly approach to Hugo’s career. At twenty-two, Hugo was a full-on man and a full-on wrecking machine, and Frank probably figured that the extra helping of rage Hugo felt at having to wait so long would only help matters. I almost felt sorry for Montrose, who had no idea what was coming for him.

We touched down in London on October 5, seven days before the fight, to give Hugo a chance to acclimate to the difference in time and place, and to allow for the promotional responsibilities he faced. That was the part Frank barely tolerated—the endless on-camera interviews and pushy fans and set pieces engineered by the fight promoters—but Hugo, as always, lapped it up. He wasn’t quite the curiosity h
e’d
been the last time he was in Europe, no longer the soft-featured kid with the killer name and the dashing ring style. The name still stuck, of course, and the manner inside the ropes had grown even more devastating, but hardness had set into the face. Hugo looked like a guy you wouldn’t want to tangle with, right up until he started talking, and then you belonged to him. Flames sprung up behind his eyes, his mouth lifted at the corners, and h
e’d
turn so engaging, regardless of subject, that a room full of journalists would feel as though he were speaking only to each one of them.

Our flight landed in the early morning hours, but we still faced a scrum of cameras as we moved out of customs. Hugo signed a few autographs while Squeaky minded crowd control.

We at last fell out into the street. Rainwater collected in great puddles on the asphalt, a harbinger. It rained every day we were there, a persistence of water that cast a gloomy pall over London day and night, filling our senses. The limo driver, a puff pastry of a man, greeted us and loaded the bags into a bottomless trunk.

I hadn’t slept much on the flights. I was a white-knuckle flyer, truth be told—too pragmatic not to do it and too damned scared to relax—and had stayed up for long stretches, reading the Richard Hugo book of poetry that Hugo had slipped me before we took off in Billings.
I’d
been so moved by the gesture, and it’s hard to talk about the why of that even now. I felt as though Hugo—our Hugo—was sharing with me some intrinsic part of him, this poet wh
o’d
unknowingly given him a name, the mother many years dead who had looked into his eyes and seen a world in verse.

Somewhere over the Atlantic, I read “Farmer, Dying,” and I cried there in my seat, Squeaky asleep next to me, Frank and Hugo in slumber in the row ahead.

It’s hard to remember now exactly why it caught me the way it did and leveled me right there in business class. I thought of my old man, who left the farm in Carbon County to come to Billings—a small town by the world’s reckoning, a metropolis to any rural Montanan. He never talked much about it, but the lines I read between had been visible enough. Dad was the only son of his own parents, and his leaving had sealed the deal. The farm passed on when they did. Another light went out.

It wasn’t just the literal parallels. A sense of leaving pervaded that trip.
I’d
walked out of my own house with an admonition to Von to mind his mother if he couldn’t find the respect to listen to me, another hectoring of the boy that lives on in my head, ready to taunt me at random. Hugo and Seyna were divorced—her father had pushed for annulment, a bridge too far by Hugo’s estimation, because you can’t annul a kid—but still squabbled over little Raj. Even Squeaky had pulled himself away from a new wife and a house he was building in the hills east of town. The house that Hugo built.

W
e’d
all calibrated our own lives to this moment for Hugo, and we all expected transcendence. In retrospect, that was probably unfair, both the expectation and how we came to it. Hugo was just a man, susceptible to the fall like anybody else. And what right did we have to claim intrusion on our own lives when we so readily attached ourselves to his? Nobody made us do that. We went along willingly. Eagerly.

Wembley Stadium—the old beast, not the new one that stands in London now—hulked on the horizon, dark and menacing. As we drew closer, the banners, fifty feet high at least, revealed themselves. Hugo, right hand cocked, staring down at us, green eyes boring in. Montrose, standing at an angle, proper and prim. They hung off the top of the stadium and unfurled toward the ground.

The driver brought down the partition. “Impressive, aren’t they?”

Hugo leaned in. “What do you think of Montrose?”

“He’s a good bloke.”

“But as a fighter?”

“He’s a good bloke.”

Hugo laughed and fell back into his seat. “Diplomatic,” he said.

The driver tossed a quick look back at us and then put his attention on the road. Our hotel loomed. “If you don’t mind my saying so, sir, we’re all keen on Rhys.”

“As you should be,” Hugo said.

“It’s just that a boxing champion is special to us. We don’t get many of them.”

I looked at Hugo. He smiled like a cat.

“I understand that,” he said. “I’m still gonna kick his ass.”

It was unusual talk for Hugo. Sure, he could trash talk with anybody—taunting Juan Domingo in Spanish perhaps the most prominent example—but he tended not to carry it out in public forums in such a blunt way. He knew the game. H
e’d
talk up his chances to the press, go chin to chin with an opponent at a weigh-in, that sort of thing. But he wasn’t braggadocious, and he didn’t set out to embarrass anybody anywhere but in the ring.

The London trip was different. The gauntlet of cameras at the airport, the limo driver, people on the street who approached him—Hugo told them all, in indelicate terms, that he was there to lay a whupping on Rhys Montrose. It did not go over well with the stiff-upper-lip British. The
Guardian
called him an ugly American, and an unoriginal one at that, saying John McEnroe twenty years earlier had brought a better brand of brattiness to these shores. Montrose, a lower-middle-class kid from Stoke Newington wh
o’d
made up for a lack of artistry with superior craftsmanship, opted against matching Hugo’s rhetoric. “He can say what he wants, but I’m the one with the belt.” It played well with the folks at home, but it didn’t exactly set
SportsCenter
afire.

The night of the weigh-in, after Hugo had come in at 147 pounds and then invited Montrose to go at it right there for free, I sat on a pub stool with Frank and asked what in the blue blazes was going on with his guy.

“I figure it’s nerves,” he said, staring into his half-empty glass.

I studied Frank’s face. His jaw throbbed from the grinding of his teeth. Nerves, my ass.

“What’s he got to be scared of? This guy’s a cream puff.”

“I didn’t say scared,” Frank said, pouncing on my words like a dog attacking a pork chop. “That’s your word, not mine. I said nerves.”

“Come on, Frank.”

He drained the last of his beer. “It’s nerves. It’s that simple. He’s waited a long time for this—too long, he says—and he’s overcompensating. Once he gets in there tomorrow night and works up a sweat, he’ll be fine. I gotta go.”

The hotel room phone woke me just after four in the morning on fight day.
I’d
been cascading through a pleasant dream—one long lost to me now—and the ringing sent me headlong into the black-gray of awakening.

I picked up, my heart kicking in from fear. Had something happened back home?

“Yes?”

“Mark.”

Hugo.

“What the hell?” I said.

“You gotta come get me.”

I tried to sweep away the remnants of sleep still sandbagging me. “What? Where are you?” Seven hours earlier,
I’d
been there for bed check.
I’d
watched him and Frank say their goodnights as Hugo sat down to a New York strip steak. The weigh-in attained, he was now adding back protein and carbs to fortify himself for the battle ahead.

“I have no fucking idea,” Hugo said. “Somewhere in East London, I think. We crossed the river. There’s all these flowers around.”

“Flowers?”

“Fucking plants, man. Flowers. Petals and shit. All these people setting up booths and flowers.”

“Where are you calling from?”

“A phone booth.”