The Fallow Season of Hugo Hunter (16 page)

We ended up a few blocks away at Guadalajara, a hole-in-the-wall place on the edge of downtown jammed between a casino and what used to be an Army-Navy store. The restaurant, with its stomped-down industrial carpet, plaster walls, and Naugahyde chairs, drew a cross-strata of Billings—carpenters and bankers and lawyers and hair stylists, all in snug quarters, eating mountains of old-style Mexican food. We took up residence at a corner table and got a couple of nods but nothing more. It was the kind of place you could go and not be hassled, no matter who you were.

“God, I’m hungry,” Hugo said. “I think I’m going to have one of the
supremas
.”

“What are you weighing these days?” I asked.

He chortled. “Hey, screw you, Westerly. I should ask you the same thing. You’re looking a little thick around the ribs.”

I had put on a good deal of weight, thanks to Lainie’s work in the kitchen and my increased appetite after ditching the cigarettes. “The love of a good woman,” I said.

“Love, huh? She’s a nice lady.”

“She speaks well of you, too, Hugo.”

We loaded up big corn chips with salsa and ate like w
e’d
skipped a few meals, and then we jostled over the last chip. Not having anywhere to go later, I nursed a cerveza while Hugo filled me in on the production. The curtain was set to go up in two days, and nerves had gone to work on him.

“You ever seen the play version of
Requiem for a Heavyweight
?” he asked me.

“No, just the Anthony Quinn movie.”

“Yeah, I didn’t even know there was a difference. I guess in the play my character is Mountain McClintock, not Mountain Rivera. We’re doing the movie script. Director said there’s more action in the movie version.”

“Interesting.”

“Yeah. You know I’m going to have to wear a headdress?”

“I think I remember that,” I said.

“I wonder what Grammy would think of that.”

“She wasn’t Native, was she?”

“No, but my grandpa was.”

“Does it bother you?”

“A little.”

I knew even less about Hugo’s granddaddy than I did his mother, just that h
e’d
come home from Korea, started a family, and died suddenly in his midthirties, a congenital heart thing that went undetected by the medical knowledge of the time. He left Aurelia with a house and a child and a stack of obligations, and as time went by, it was like she walled off that part of her life. I can’t imagine that there weren’t men who made their play for her—anybody who knew Aurelia knows what a beauty she was—but I never saw any, and Hugo never talked of any. She just carried on. You wonder sometimes how much loss can afflict one family.

“Are you going to wear it?” I asked him.

“Yeah, I think so. I think I can see my way clear.”

“You know,” I said, “I always admired how you didn’t trade on your heritage when you were fighting.”

Hugo perked up at those last few words. I tried to walk them back. “It is past tense, isn’t it?” The moment took on a tension that hadn’t been there previously. I mentally backtracked over the past few months, trying to catalog the news stories and the whispers and the declarations, and I realized that Hugo had never said, definitively, that he was done.

He leaned in, his voice low. “The doctor said I might end up with dementia or something if I keep fighting.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah. He asked me how many concussions I’ve had.”

“What did you say?”

“I don’t know. Nobody ever counted them.”

“Shit.”

“You got any other words, Mark?”

I shook my head. I didn’t, really.
I’d
assumed all along he was done, and even so, hearing it straight out left me a little depleted. “So that’s it, then,” I said.

“Yeah. Hell of an ending, huh?”

I sat back and let our server set the food out for us.

“Maybe not,” I said. “Maybe it’s just the beginning.”

We tumbled out on the street, and Hugo said h
e’d
walk to the playhouse, just a few blocks down on Montana Avenue. I told him
I’d
be happy to drop him off. I literally had nothing else to do.

“It’s OK,” he said. “I like walking. Might as well enjoy it before winter comes.”

We shook hands, and then I did something that surprised me. I pulled him in and gave him a hug. Nothing awkward or embarrassing. A bro hug. It felt like the thing to do.

“You need any money?” I asked him.

“Nah, man, I’m good. Thanks, though.”

I watched him ramble off, first a half block to the south, then a left turn. A few seconds later, he was gone around the corner.

“Mark Westerly?” came a voice from behind me.

I turned, and a manila envelope snapped against my chest. A young guy—younger than me, anyway—in black-framed glasses smiled at me and said, “Court papers. You’ve been served.”

His deed done, the guy walked briskly in the other direction. I opened the envelope. Case Schronert had followed through with his threat and filed suit against me—just me, no mention of the
Herald-Gleaner
as a defendant—for libel. I was half inclined to wander down to the newspaper office and raise some hell, but I nipped that thought just as quickly as it occurred to me. Nothing good, for me, could come of that.

I could still see the process server at the north end of the block, waiting for the light to change. He turned and looked at me and got the stinkeye.

“You dick,” I yelled.

30

Lainie bailed on work early to introduce me to a lawyer friend of hers, a guy named Larry Largeman. He operated out of a little rat nest of an office in midtown, in a strip mall that had gone up in the mid-’60s and had been permanently detached from its better days.

We walked into a labyrinthine office. No receptionist. No waiting room. A desk stacked high with papers. A hallway with a low ceiling jutted off to the left and terminated in a room with another desk, also groaning under the weight of paper and absent any sentient being.

“Larry?” Lainie called.

A muffled voice emerged from behind a closed door at our backs. “In the can, honey. Hold on a sec.”

I leaned into her and whispered, “What is this?”

“Don’t worry,” she said. “He’s good. Different. But good.”

We heard the whoosh of a flushed toilet and the running faucet, and then Larry Largeman opened the door and sidled into the hallway. Largeman was not a large man—shorter than Lainie, in fact, who stood about five seven. He wore a business-issue short-sleeved white dress shirt, good-for-any-era brown trousers, and a pair of loafers that had worked the corners. I could see the ruins of a handsome man among the burst nose capillaries and bagged-out eyes.

He walked up to Lainie as if I weren’t there and wrapped her in a hug. He nuzzled his mug against her neck and growled. Lainie laughed, and firmly pushed him away. A good move, that, so I didn’t have to do it.

“You’re Mark, then,” he said, turning to me and offering a handshake. “Don’t worry. I washed it.”

I gave him a cursory shake and let go. He clapped a hand against my shoulder and said, “Come on in. Let’s let the legal healing begin.”

I gave Largeman the summons and hoped h
e’d
make himself a copy before the original washed away in the sea of paper already swamping his desk.

“You’ll have to excuse the mess,” he said. “Secretary has been out since 2004.”

He laughed. Lainie did, too. I ground my hands into little skin meatballs while Largeman read the paper.

“It’s a sham,” he said.

I blew out a blast of breath. “Well, that’s good news.”

“Of course, it’s going to cost you a hell of a lot to identify it as such.” At this, he laughed again, sounding like a strangling horse.

“How much?” Lainie said.

“You want me to handle this?” he said. I started to say no, but Lainie said, “Yes.”

“OK,” Largeman said, “if I figure in the prettiest-girl-in-Billings discount, the getting-to-know-you-Mark offset, and the fact that not too much work is coming through that door, I’ll do it for two thousand to start, which I’ll need today. Cash is preferred, but I’ll take a check, since I know where you live.” The horse laugh again. “That should do it, unless Schronert
really
hates you, in which case it might be more.”

“Unbelievable,” I said.

“I know,” Largeman said. “Lawyers are scum.”

I dug in my pocket for my checkbook. As I wrote the check out, Largeman leaned across the desk. “That’s
L-A-R-G-E-M-A-N
. Largeman. Think thickness, not length.”

Jesus.

I tore off the check and handed it to him. I’m a frugal guy, a function of my modest wages and my upbringing, and
I’d
managed over the years to tuck a fair amount away. I hated to see the money flowing the other direction, and for something so damnably stupid.

“OK, now, let me tell you what’s up,” Largeman said. “Schronert’s going to have a hard time making the case for injury against you when he’s been made right by the paper. They expunged this article, right? Probably gave him some ad space to sweeten the deal. That’s what
I’d
do.”

“Yeah.”

“OK. I suspect this lawsuit was filed because he knew yo
u’d
be down here, or somewhere, today writing this check. I’ll make a motion to dismiss. The thing is, these judges are so backed up—really, it’s like constipation—that it may be a while before somebody looks at it close enough to see what a mockery it really is. In the meantime, maybe Schronert files a few amendments or add-ons, and we’ve gotta answer to those. He can play that game a lot longer than you, I suspect.”

“Brilliant deduction.”

Largeman didn’t get the gibe, or didn’t care. “Hey, it’s what I do. You’re gonna get the best representation two grand can buy.”

The tension on the drive home should have imploded the windows. I drummed fingers on the steering wheel at stoplights. I worked my jaw at double speed, chewing on my trouble.

“What?” Lainie said.

“I’m supposed to feel better after that?” I didn’t want to look at her. I hadn’t thought Case Schronert was really going to go after me, and now that he had, I had some dingleberry carrying a torch for my girlfriend as a lawyer. I should have walked out of there.

“No. You’re supposed to feel like a guy who’s getting sued.”

“That guy’s a joke. I’m dead.”

She reached for my arm, but I drew back.

“You are not dead,” she said. “And Larry is not a joke. He’s a lot of things, but he’s not a joke. He’s the real deal.”

I smoldered on. “You don’t seem like an objective source on that. What’s the story with you and him?”

“Really, Mark? Jealousy?”

“I just want to know.”

“Yeah, OK, you got me. I burn for Larry Largeman. It’s so intense that I married Delmar and loved him and buried him and fell in love with you, but Larry Largeman is who I ache for.”

“Jesus, Lains, I was just—”

“You’re a dope.”

We headed up into the Heights, toward Lainie’s place, suffocating in silence.

“Larry was my boyfriend in high school,” she said at last. “If
I’d
cast my future when I was sixteen, maybe I would have married him, but I didn’t. He’s brilliant, Mark, but he’s a mess, too, and I think I always knew that about him and couldn’t allow myself to get in too deep. But he’ll do this, and he’ll do it right. I promise.”

I pulled into her driveway, next to the RV with the pellet-gun dents in the side. She and Delmar had bought it for an eventual retirement, and then he up and died before they could enjoy it. Life’s a damn gamble, every day.

“I trust you,” I said.

Lainie squirmed against the console and set her head into my shoulder. I pulled her into a hug and teased her hair with my fingers.

Above the roofline of her house, I watched a gathering storm.