The Fallow Season of Hugo Hunter (18 page)

32

I awoke in the frayed gray tapestry of morning on Lainie’s sectional, Hugo’s socked, stinky feet in my face. Raj sat erect in the recliner across from me, his head thrown back in slumber.

“Raj.”

I tried to blink my eyes into focus. They hurt. He didn’t stir.

“Raj.”

Hugo’s son swatted a hand across his face and turned his head away from me.

“
Raj
.”

He shook his head now and blinked awake. “What?”

“What happened?”

“You don’t remember?” Our voices were whispers. Hugo flopped over and ground himself into the back of his part of the sectional.

“Hugo,” I said. “I remembe
r . . .
my fucking head.” I passed the fingers of both hands under my eyes and found the welt. “Did Frank punch me?”

“That’s what that lady said.”

“Lady?”

“You know, your lady.”

“Lainie.”

“That’s what I said.”

“No,” I said. “Never mind.”

“Here’s an idea,” came Hugo’s voice, a low hum. “How about both of you shut up?”

We all broke into giggles at that. Hugo rolled again on the couch and then sat up. I did the same, and the rush of blood to my head set off a new round of pain.

“What are we doing here?” Hugo said.

“My question exactly,” I said.

Here came Raj with the answers. “Well, let’s see,” he said, pointing at his father. “You were drunk.” He moved the finger to me. “And you got punched out by an old man. Me and your lady got you both in the cars and brought you here. We’re the brains of this crew, apparently.”

“Stop saying ‘your lady,’ dude,” I said. “This isn’t the ’70s.”

Raj just grinned at me.

“Frank took a swing at you?” Hugo said.

“I think the fair thing to say is that I took a swing at him first.”

“Why?”

“He insulted my lady.”

We all cracked up again.

“I just wanted to tell Amber I missed her,” Hugo lamented.

“She didn’t get that message, Pop,” Raj said.

I touched the lump under my eye, and pain shot through me again. “I can’t believe Frank punched me.”

“How’s it feel?” Raj asked.

“Like I got hit by the right hand of God.”

“Impossible,” Hugo said. “Frank fights at a much higher weight than God.”

We cackled loudly at that one, until I shushed us. “Don’t want to wake up Lainie. Which reminds me: What the hell am I doing out here with you whipdicks? I’m going to bed. You guys need anything?”

Hugo lay back down on the couch. “We’re good, Mark. Sleep tight. Keep your chin tucked next time.”

By the time Lainie and I awoke four hours later, the Hunter men were gone, leaving just the two of us for breakfast. I got my first good look at the dent Frank had put in me. The lump was about the size of a robin’s egg, a grotesque, angry purple.

Lainie, behind me in the bathroom, draped her arms across my chest and kissed my ear. “That’s the most chivalrous thing anyone’s done for me.”

“Well, you know me.”

“Maybe the dumbest, too,” she said.

I grabbed one of her hands and pretended to bite into it. “Don’t mess with me, lady. I’m dangerous.”

She clapped my shoulders and stepped back. We watched each other in the mirror.

“I like those guys,” she said.

“Yeah. Me, too.”

“Three men, each of you an only child,” she said. “Interesting.”

She smiled at me in that warm, knowing way of hers, a way that suggested she didn’t have anything more to offer than that oblique observation. It was only later that I figured it out, that Hugo, Raj, and I had imposed our own dynamics on our disparate existences. There’s family you’re stuck with, and family you choose. For us, it was the latter course.

Those guys mean everything to me.

33

The night before I went back to work, Von came to see me in my slumber. We were all together again, me and Marlene and our boy, and Von talked to me about a brother he had on the way. It didn’t compute, in the dream or in the immediate aftermath, when I jolted awake and lay there next to Lainie and her woodcutter snores, trying to make sense of it.

Marlene never got pregnant again. It was an unspoken understanding that a child had done little to improve things between us, save for sucking some of the uglier exchanges out of the air. We weren’t good partners, but we weren’t monstrous to each other, either. We weren’t going to subject a child to that. And when we lost Von, that was the end for us. The indifferent hand of circumstance had taken away our hearts and given us the final shove.

And yet, between the folds of sleep, my son had come to me and talked to me of family. He appeared as he had the last time I saw him alive, that moppish brown hair, those sturdy, steady eyes that gave him the mien of someone much older. He talked to me of commitment and of follow-through, of the notion that anyone can live with anyone else when times are good, and that the measure of things is taken when it’s easier to walk than to stay. He didn’t tell me
I’d
failed him and his mom. His manner was gentle, advisory. But I knew. He knew. It was inescapable.

In my dream, I sat still for the comeuppance, becaus
e . . .
because he made so much damn sense. Because his twelve-year-old mouth yawped out the wisdom of elders. Because I think sometimes maybe I’m forgetting what he looked like and sounded like, and h
e’d
come to remind me.

And then he was gone, and I was awake, and the night spilled into the window above our heads, and I shook Lainie awake and told her I needed to tell her something. And Lainie, God love her, came flying into that sudden moment. “Tell me.”

I started with that morning at the clinic, when I first saw her and I couldn’t think of anything else. I started with the kindness in her face that drew me in, and the tartness that leveled me, in a good way. The best way.

“I don’t know what you thought of me—”

“I thought you were adorable,” she said.

“—but I knew I had to talk to you, and then once I talked to you I knew that I had to see you again.”

“Yes.”

“And it’s been everything, Lains. Everything. I don’t know what these last few months would look like if it weren’t for you.”

She slid against me. “I know.”

“You’re smart like that.”

She smiled. “You’re lucky to have me.”

“I am, at that.”

I wrapped myself around Lainie and kissed her neck as she fell back into the sleep that I knew wouldn’t be coming for me again. Once the wheels start turning, that’s it. My day begins. I’ve heard that the difference between real life and fiction is that things happen in fiction because of other things, while real life is just a series of human events, some related, some spontaneous. I don’t know. I’m a chronicler, not a philosopher. I try to leave it to other people to make cosmic sense of it all.

I’d
had two families in my life, the one I was born into and the one I tried to build. Dad was gone. Mom, too. Von. Marlene had taken her $8,000 and the remainder of her dignity and lit out for God-only-knows-where. It would have been easy enough, lying there next to Lainie and holding on for dear life, to wonder why so much loss should be visited on me, but self-pity wasn’t in my viewfinder.

And then my scattered thoughts shifted, coagulated, and I wondered if Von wasn’t telling me about another duty I had. I thought of Hugo and those who had been taken from him. More than that, I thought of the losses he didn’t even know about. I remembered the day Ted Stanton died—it had to be four or five years back now. It was big news in Billings, and I read the story in the
Herald-Gleaner
the next morning about his bombast and his political acumen and his wealth, and I remember wishing I could call up Hugo and talk to him about this man who had supplied half of his genetic material. I couldn’t, of course, because
I’d
made a promise to a woman who a year later would also be gone and who loved Hugo more than anyone.

But there was more than just that. The obituary mentioned a son, an Edward Stanton Jr., and that same son came to work at the
Herald-Gleaner
not much later. He was a nighttime maintenance man, a bit odd, kept to himself—unless something was broken, and then he was unfailingly reliable. I couldn’t remember a single conversation with him, not a single interaction, but when he was in the same room with me, I would steal looks at him and try to find Hugo inside him—a damned difficult proposition given his height and his girth, much more in keeping with his old man’s dimensions than those of the famous half brother he didn’t know.

I never managed to shake the unfairness of it all, that I should know such things and Hugo should not—and that I should know only because Frank Feeney got a little loose-lipped one night, prompting him and Aurelia to swear me to secrecy.

So, great, I knew. I remember once being proud that I knew, that
I’d
been confided in. That’s the juice for a newspaperman, being in the know. That means you’re good. That means you’re trustworthy.

It was all bullshit now.

I shook Lainie again. I had more to say.

From page two of the
Billings Herald-Gleaner
Local section

The Billings Playhouse stage production of “Requiem for a Heavyweight” has hit a snag: Olympic medalist Hugo Hunter, who plays the lead role of boxer Mountain Rivera, has dropped out of the cast.

“He didn’t say much,” said director Joelette Carson, who had the idea of casting the former boxer. “He said there was another opportunity he had to take now. It’s OK. We have a capable understudy and will move forward.”

Hunter’s deft performance, his first onstage, came as a surprise and helped establish the production as a hit. Drawing on his own past as a professional boxer who never quite made the big time, Hunter packed an emotional wallop with the role, just months after his career ended, seemingly for good, in a loss at the Babcock Theatre.

34

I dragged through the front door of my house Monday morning after seeing Lainie off to work. Sh
e’d
twisted my arm and kept me at her place with the promise of a late movie and a later breakfast, and hey, I’m not made of stone.

The work cell phone
I’d
left plugged into the wall after my curt one-week dismissal blinked urgently. I dropped the newspaper on the countertop, fetched the phone, and punched up the voice mail. I was surprised to hear Larry Largeman’s whiskey-sour voice.

“Hey, bud, give me a call. I think we’re home free.”

The “we’re” threw me a bit. I still wasn’t sure if I was ally or dupe. I dialed the number.

“Largeman,” came the answer.

“Westerly.”

“Hey, bud. I took care of your case.”

Still with the vagaries. The only words I wanted to hear were “it has been dismissed” or “Case Schronert has dropped it.” Everything else was just a possible variation on bad news.

“What’s that mean?” I asked.

“It’s over. It’s done. No more lawsuit.”

That was more like it.

“What happened?” I asked.

A gargle came through on the other end. “Listen, Mark, do you suppose you can come in today so we can talk about this at more length?”

“What? Why?”

“There are ears in the cornfield.”

“Huh?”

“Eyes in the potato patch.”

“Are you having a stroke or something, Largeman?”

He coughed, and I held the phone away from my ear. “Goddamnit, I don’t want to talk about it on the phone,” he said. “You’re a lousy hint taker, you know that?”

I ignored it. “I can come by around eleven.”

“That’ll work.”

“See you, Largeman.”

With time to burn, I headed to Hugo’s place.
I’d
read the paper and gone through my usual bit where he’s concerned—surprised, but not really. I needed to find out what was going on. It did me no good to get on the phone. Hugo monitored his calls, and whether he wanted to talk with me was beside the point. I wanted to talk with him. It was an old trick of mine, this ambushing him wherever and whenever I needed to. The thing was, once you got face time with Hugo, he was so exceedingly polite and eager to please that h
e’d
engage on any topic you cared to bring to him. That affability was golden to the newspaperman I was. I absolutely exploited it, which I suppose makes me craven and insensitive. Whatever. It got me stories, and that was the coin of my realm.

I didn’t need anything beyond the small pile of newspapers on Hugo’s lawn to know something was amiss, that he hadn’t been home in a while. I pulled out my phone and queued up a number. A few minutes later, I had a lunch date with Raj Hunter.

Unease scratched at me on the drive to Largeman’s office. In twenty-plus years of dealing with Hugo,
I’d
come to know something about his unpredictability, and none of it was very good. Some of it I had buried deep. In ’98, the year after the disappointment in London, Hugo up and announced that he was moving to Los Angeles to be with his new girlfriend, that Ashley Lane character who made all those well-received period pieces in the early ’90s but was more a straight-to-video vixen by the time Hugo sank balls-deep into her. So there he went, bought himself a house in the hills and a couple of cars, and what could anyone do? He was twenty-three, it was his money and his life. Frank and Squeaky exacted a promise that training would still happen at the place on Flathead Lake, and Aurelia put on a brave face, because that’s what Aurelia did.
I’d
try to call every month or so to play catch-up, but Hugo was hard to reach.

What happened out there, in the end, was no big secret. Cocaine, fights with the paparazzi, drunken car crashes. That’s the stuff in the public record. Fourteen months after Hugo left us, Frank and Squeaky were on the coast, pleading with a judge to let Hugo come home and get cleaned up. All the trappings of a fast-expiring fame, gone. His money, gone. At that point, I was socking money away for Von’s college education, any stray dollar I could catch, and it burned my ass that Hugo could be so cavalier with something I worked so hard to bring into the house.

At Largeman’s office, I sat alone and waited until he emerged in the wake of a toilet flush and running water and offered a handshake. “It’s OK,” he said. “I washed.”

“It’s an old line, Largeman.”

“Yeah, but reassuring people of cleanliness never gets old.”

He signaled me to take a seat, and he settled in behind the desk.

“So, no more court case,” he said, pushing across the document that verified this. “Best two grand you ever spent, right?”

“I guess. Wh
y’d
he relent?”

“He knew a superior legal mind when he saw one.”

“Come on, Largeman.”

He chuckled and tried to pull me into his mirth, but
I’d
have none of it. Finally, he sighed and set his hands on the desk.

“OK, look,” he said. “Your fundamental concern should be this lawsuit, and it’s gone. I’m gonna tell you the rest, but whatever you think of it, remember this: I did what I said I would do. I got rid of it.”

“OK.” Fewer words are better when you’re bracing for literally anything.

“So I was thinking that the best way to squash this thing was to short-circuit it. Do you like to go to court?”

“Never been, other than my divorce.”

“You’re a lucky bastard, other than your divorce. I hate court. It’s boring. It has rules and stuff. I didn’t want to do that. So I started thinking about Case Schronert. If you’re that guy, you’ve got a reputation, people know you, you’ve got some history. And a guy with history is a guy with secrets. That’s just a fact of life.”

“It is,” I said. I started to feel a little squeamish.

“Case Schronert’s secret is that he likes to shack up. A lot. With several women who aren’t his wife. You want to see pictures?”

“Jesus,” I said. “You followed him? You took pictures?”

“Hey! Remember what I said: you’re off the hook.”

My head began to spin. “You blackmailed him?”

“I did not blackmail him.” Largeman was actually indignant. That took some gall. “I convinced him of my superiority as an investigator. I suggested to him that if he did me a favor, I could do some good work for him. It’s called revenue streams, buddy boy. You think I’m going to be able to retire on your two thousand clams?”

“Still.” That’s all I could say amid the mental processing and low-level nausea.

“You’re making me feel bad,” Largeman said, putting on the full pout for his own benefit. “I’m good at this. Finding out information is what I do. We’re not so different, you and me, except that you announce your presence. I’m more comfortable being the fly on the wall.”

“
I’d
say we’re completely different.”

Largeman came around the desk and offered a handshake, which I accepted. He had washed up, after all.

“I can understand why yo
u’d
say that,” he said, “but we’re really not. We’re in love with the same woman. The difference is, my love for her exists somewhere else in time, before I became what I am. You get her now. You lucky son of a bitch.”