The Fallow Season of Hugo Hunter (15 page)

Excerpt from
Hugo Hunter: My Good Life and Bad Times

Frank Feeney is the father figure I never had, a truth that’s made difficult by the fact that we aren’t talking anymore.

From the time I was eleven years old, Frank’s word was the law. He trained me, he watched over me, he led me to opportunities that would have never come my way without his presence in my life. He was a moral compass, a trusted friend, a rescuer.

I will love him forever.

And yet, there have been betrayals. Mine against him. His against me. One of the things you learn to do in recovery is make amends, to the extent you can, with those who have suffered from your addiction.

What I owe Frank remains undone. What he owes me remains undone as well.

It’s the worst kind of stalemate.

28

I shuffled into Feeney’s and found a seat at the bar. I had plenty to choose from. The lunch crowd had come and gone, leaving Frank alone in the place.

“Where’s your court jester?” I asked him as I settled into my seat.

“Slumpbuster?” Frank said.

“Sure.”

I watched him draw the beer, the glass tilted just so to form a right-sized head. When he served it, I thanked him and then gave him the look
I’d
perfected for reluctant sources. A gentle
come on now, I asked you a question
.

“Ah, hell, you know that kid,” Frank said, sweeping the bar with a rag. “Always something new, always some shiny penny he’s gotta pick up.”

“So he’s gone?”

“Gone from here, yeah. Some girl came in, talking him up. He comes to me the next day and says, ‘Frank, I’m going to be in a play.
’
 ”

“A play?”

“Yeah, she’s one of those artsy types or something. You know, with the theater down the street? She gives him this line about how h
e’d
be perfect for this play they’re doing, and so he comes to me and says he’s gotta go to rehearsals at night. And I’m there saying, ‘Look, asshole, if you’re working here, you work here at night.’ And he says, ‘Come on, Frank, I gotta do this.’ And I tell him, ‘No, you gotta choose.
’
 ”

Frank rubbed his eyes and then laughed. “Well, he chose, I guess.”

It would be a lie to say I was surprised. Oh, the circumstance was a little jarring. I don’t think anyone who knew Hugo would think of him as a thespian. But that h
e’d
up and quit a seemingly good situation—well, that was easy to swallow. It followed a pattern that had been well established since the end of his prizefighting days. Before working at the bar, he had jobs driving a delivery truck for an industrial laundry, putting up sheetrock, organizing the stock at a plumbing supply house, and sweeping the floors at Billings West High School. The operative word, in every case, was
had
.

“Well, he made a liar of me,” I said.

“How so?”

“I talked him up in the paper yesterday. Said he was doing an honorable thing here.”

“Yeah, I saw that,” Frank said. “Thanks for the extra business. You ripped that guy pretty good.”

“They sat me down, Frank. At the paper. Suspended me.”

“For that?”

“Yeah.”

Frank took my glass and topped it off, then set it before me.

“You know,” he said, “I don’t think I want to live in a world where you can’t kick the ass of someone who deserves it.”

Frank wasn’t the person angriest with Hugo. His niece, Amber, had become smitten during Hugo’s brief employment, against Frank’s initial advice that she maintain some distance from him.

“The thing was,” Frank said, “I was worried about something worse than this—I don’t know what, exactly, but we’ve been around the block with Hugo a time or two, you know? But I gotta admit, he treated her well, and he was good to Jackson.”

“Jackson?”

“Her little boy.”

The night Hugo told Frank he was leaving, Amber apparently let him have it, both barrels. Told him he wasn’t reliable, that sh
e’d
made a mistake letting her son grow fond of him, that h
e’d
die alone. Frank’s relaying of that last bit made me cringe. That’s a tough pronouncement to put on anybody. Before Lainie came along, there were many nights I considered that my own probable fate.

“Hugo’s going, ‘Baby, baby, baby, it’s just a play,
’
 ” Frank said. “And she’s going, ‘You don’t get it.’ She’s right. He don’t.”

“What about this girl, the one who pulled him into the play?” I asked.

“Hugo swears there’s nothing going on.”

“Amber believe that?”

Frank snorted. “What do you think?”

I’ll tell you what I thought. I thought that I could have stayed there all day and into the night, slowly putting away Frank Feeney’s brew and my angst. I also thought, rightly, that Hugo wouldn’t be the only lonely man in Billings if I didn’t get off my ass and go tell Lainie what had happened at the
Herald-Gleaner
.

“Well, I guess I’ll go figure out what to do with myself for a week,” I told Frank. “Might be spending more time down here with you.”

“You’re always welcome,” he said. “You know that.”

I tried to pay the bill, but Frank would have none of it. “I figure you made me thirty times this just in referrals,” he said. “Sorry about what happened.”

I gave a sly salute and headed for the door. Before I hit the street, I turned back.

“What’s the name of this play?”

Frank snorted again. “You’re not gonna believe it,” he said.

“Try me.”

“
Requiem for a Heavyweight
.”

29

I went down to the South Side to see Hugo.
I’d
neglected him for a few weeks anyway, but more than that, I didn’t like taking any bit of news from Frank as gospel, at least where Hugo was concerned. It’s an old reporter thing, to corroborate everything. I knew that all of us tended to cycle our experiences with Hugo through our own filters. Frank’s were predisposed to disappointment. Mine were, too, but I told myself that I needed to be open to hearing Hugo’s side of things.

A few years of neglect had done a number on Aurelia’s house. Blue paint flecked away on the eaves above the door, and I remembered how Hugo had come home from Mississippi after losing to Coconut Olson, long after Frank had bailed out and Squeaky had been sent to the sidelines. It was a nothing fight against a young fighter, the kind of fighter Hugo had once been, and it came out the way things had been ordained. Olson got a victory that looked good on paper, and Hugo came home a busted, tired boxer and paid off his grandma’s funeral bills.

Once he got back, he had climbed up to that bedroom and stayed for weeks.
I’d
gone to see him a few times, but h
e’d
never come out to stay. H
e’d
come down and h
e’d
chat for a bit, and then h
e’d
be gone again. Before Aurelia died, she had been on him about the house—“Hugo, can you paint it for me?”—and dutiful grandson that he was, h
e’d
told her, yes, h
e’d
do it, just as soon as he had the time. He promised.

Four years had slid off the calendar since she left, and still the promise went unfulfilled. It pissed me the hell off.

I knocked on the front door. Nothing. No stirring from the other side that I could hear.

I went around between the house and the garage, to the little concrete path leading to the backyard. On my tiptoes, I could get my eyes above the fence. Hugo sat in a weather-battered Adirondack chair, his back to me.

“You taking visitors?” I said.

Hugo lurched up out of the chair and turned around. He wore an old robe, molecules of terry cloth holding it together, and a T-shirt and a pair of basketball shorts that were only slightly less vintage.

“Hey, Mark, come on through.” Hugo ambled over and lifted the latch for me. “Sit down, man.” He pulled an old barstool across the patio and set it up opposite his seat. We settled in.

“Damn, you look good, Mark.”

“Thanks. It’s only been a couple of weeks since you’ve seen me. This isn’t old-home week or anything.”

Hugo chuckled and made like he was going to throw a punch at me, our old patter. “I know, I know. But you do look good.”

“Thanks.”

“I read what you wrote about me,” he said.

“Yeah? You kind of made a liar out of me, didn’t you?”

“You talked to Frank, I guess.”

“I did.”

“He’s mad, I guess.”

I took measure of him. He had a bit of a hangdog look, an expectation born of experience that Frank considered him a screwup. He wasn’t far wrong.

“I didn’t get anger from him,” I said. “He just doesn’t get it. It looked like you were doing well there, hanging out, entertaining people. He just—”

“Glory days.”

“Huh?”

“You know,” he said. “Like the Springsteen song. Frank was paying me to relive my glory days for the people who came in.”

“Well, yeah, I guess.”

“It’s a sad song, though. You know? Like there’s nothing better out there.” He looked at me plaintively.

“But Hugo, the song is about a guy who topped out in high school. That’s not you.”

“It’s not? Barcelona happened when I was in high school. That wasn’t the top?”

“It didn’t have to be. That’s the point. You had possibilities. The guy in the song, he’s just some schmuck drinking beer. You had a chance at something greater.”

His face twisted, like h
e’d
been gut-socked. I stopped cold. I was fixing him with an even sadder song.

“Jesus, Hugo, I’m sorry. I mean, there’s truth, and then there’s—”

He waved his hand toward me. “It’s not like I don’t know.”

I scrambled for a different way in with him. “So, a play?”

He leaned forward, his hands flying around as if someone had jump-started him.

“Yeah. I’m Mountain Rivera.”

“I figured.”

“He’s a washed-up old boxer.”

“I know.”

“It’s a great part.”

“Yeah, but you don’t know anything about boxing.”

“Screw you.”

We busted up over that.

Hugo invited me inside for some coffee. I followed him through the back door to the kitchen. The place had served as the center of so many gatherings, it was like walking in on the ghosts of our younger selves. It was almost as if I could see Aurelia there at the stove, her back to us as she worked up a pot of stew or a pan of enchiladas—anything she had, really, to keep us there with Hugo, his family by extension. Frank would be in the far corner, knocking back the beer that Aurelia kept in the house only for him. Squeaky would sit across from Frank, deciphering a crossword and, later, sudoku, that crazy-ass Japanese number game, and h
e’d
scold us once the roaring got too loud, as it always did. And Hugo would be in the middle of it all, at the table or Aurelia’s side, listening to the chatter or helping his grammy. That it was all for him, he knew as deep in his bones as he knew anything.

Now, Hugo shuffled through ahead of me, nimbleness and athletic youth gone and not coming back. The order Aurelia imposed on things was gone, too, replaced by dust and papers and unpaid bills, the detritus of a life that Hugo claimed to be pulling under control. I didn’t see it.

“Black?” he said.

“You know me better than that.”

He poured the coffee, leaving plenty of room in the cup for doctoring. A three-quarters-empty jug of creamer followed, and I damn near drained it.

“Enjoy your nonjava,” he said, toasting me.

“It’s more a matter of color than taste,” I said.

He leaned against the Formica counter. “You want to know why, don’t you?”

I took in the first lukewarm mouthful and smacked my lips. “I’m always the guy who wants to know why. You know that.”

“It’s my mom.” He cast his eyes down at his bare feet.

“What is?”

“The reason I’m doing the play.”

I set my coffee down. Helene, cut down in her relative youth, was the great loss in his life, more so than even Aurelia, I think. In more than twenty years of knowing Hugo,
I’d
talked about so many things with him, it would be nigh impossible to catalog them all. But Helene—we only glanced off the topic of her, so profound was his yearning, so overwhelming the memories, so devastating the emptiness. I gave him my full attention and hoped h
e’d
talk.

“I look through her stuff sometimes,” he said at last, after h
e’d
fought a silent battle in front of me to keep his emotions in lockdown. “She didn’t throw anything away, I don’t think. She kept old scripts from high school, playbills from college, letters she got from people she admired. She got one from Al Pacino.”

“Pacino? No kidding?”

“Seriously. She wrote to him about
The Godfather
, and he wrote back, thanked her for her interest. There’s all this stuff she loved, and I feel like I didn’t get a chance to talk to her about it. So I’m doing this thing, because it makes me feel closer to her.”

I wasn’t going to argue with him. How could I? I couldn’t plumb the depths of his yearning for his mother. All I could offer was perspective that perhaps he hadn’t considered.

“Did you tell Frank and Amber about this?”

Hugo looked like h
e’d
swallowed something sour. “He told you about me and Amber?”

“Yeah.”

“No, I didn’t tell them. I didn’t really have it all worked out in my head. It’s just something I felt like I had to do.”

I stepped closer to him. “Well, maybe that’s why they’re confused and hurt. You know? They gave you a job, and Amber, she obviously cares about you, and they feel abandoned. Frank said everything new for you is shiny and irresistible, so—”

“Yeah, probably.”

“See? I don’t know, Hugo. I think maybe you just need to talk to them.”

“Maybe.”

“What are you doing for money?” I asked.

“I have a little. Something will come up.”

“Well, let me buy you lunch, anyway.”

I waited downstairs while Hugo showered and dressed. Being in the house, left on my own to wander a bit, was like randomly firing off my own synapses. I perused the bookshelf and came across a row of old
Reader’s Digest
almanacs from the ’70s, and in my head, I was back in 1993, looking at these very books in this very spot while I waited for Aurelia to get off the phone and come in and talk with me.

That year, a big national magazine had commissioned me to write a profile of Hugo, less from a sports angle and more from who he was as a person. This was after he met Seyna, so finding time alone with him proved a significant challenge.
I’d
started at the periphery and worked my way in. Aurelia made the digging easier.

That day, and deep into the afternoon, I got my first extended insight into where Hugo came from and who his mother was. It made me wish
I’d
known Helene. It also lent credence to my theory that nobody really gets what they deserve from this life, that it’s all a question of what you can take while you have the time. How else do you explain how a woman of thirty-two, her whole life spread out before her with a boy who needs her, is taken by pancreatic cancer, as good as dead before anybody even knows something’s wrong? Aurelia sat there, even-keeled through the most harrowing details, and talked about how you just pick up the remnants of what you once had, you go on, you keep living. Although I knew she was right, even then, before I found out on my own that there’s no other way, I kept thinking of Von. He was just a few months old then, and I fixated on how devastating it would be for him to lose his mother.

It was my most general question—“What was she like?”—that brought the deepest insight into the son Helene had left us.

Aurelia got this far-off look, as if she could see beyond the walls of her house and to the great world outside.

“She got every bit of living out of every minute she was here, and it didn’t seem like she was even trying,” Aurelia said, the only time in the many hours I spent with her that she teared up even a little. “She was like the Pied Piper. If she was around, you wanted to be with her. You might not know why, and she seemed unaware of the effect she had, but you did. When you’re that open, and when people come to you like that, you don’t always make the best choices.” I knew, of course, what she was speaking of with that last phrase: Hugo’s father. I also knew that topic was off-limits. The subsequent questions that I would ordinarily ask remained in my quiver.

Now, I ran my finger along the row of books, leaving a dusty trail in its wake. A thought, not fully formed, bubbled in my head. Something about cosmic juxtaposition, about how some things stand in place while the rest of the world changes all around. It was out of my usual range. I shook my head and tried to rejoin the moment.

Hugo, trampling down the stairs in a T-shirt and jeans, moved matters along.

“Don’t just stand there playing pocket pool,” he said. “Let’s go get some enchiladas.”