The Fallow Season of Hugo Hunter

by Craig Lancaster

  “What did the little jerk say?”

  “Said he couldn’t talk unless Frank said it was OK,” Landry told him.

  “What did you say?”

  “Said I couldn’t get hold of Frank.”

  Trimear handed his phone across the partition to me. “Call Feeney.”

  “Is this my story now?” I asked.

  “Just call him.”

  I dialed the South Side gym. Squeaky answered. I asked for Frank, who picked up in short order. He must have been sitting right there.

  “Hi, Frank.” I cupped the receiver and mouthed, “What do I say?” to Trimear, who whispered back, “Ask him why he’s been holding out on us.”

  “Um, Frank, my boss wants to know—that is, he sent a reporter over to talk and—”

  “Put him on,” Frank said.

  I handed the phone to Trimear, who couldn’t even choke out a hello. I watched his face turn about seventeen shades of crimson. After about twenty seconds, he said, “Got it,” and he hung up. His head bobbed like that of a walking pigeon. He motioned me into the adjacent conference room. Once we were in there, he drew the curtains on the three sides that looked out on the newsroom. It was just the two of us.

  “It’s your story,” he said, moving up on me. “I find out you’re behind this or connected with it in any way, I’ll can your ass. I’m not kidding.”

  I tamped down the urge to laugh at him. Truth was, I hadn’t said a word to Frank or Hugo, so I was safe there, but I also knew that this was a tricky situation with Trimear. No matter how wrongheaded he’d been, we were in a situation where his authority was being directly contravened. An angry boss is a dangerous boss.

  “Thank you, Gene,” I said. “I’ll make you proud.”

  He stepped back. “Another thing: I don’t like your title for the series. The Fallow Season of Hugo Hunter. What does that even mean?”

  “Well, he’s facing this year of—”

  Trimear held up his hand. “I know what fallow means, numbnuts. I’m just saying, it’s all la-di-da. We’ll go with something simple, like Catching Up with Hugo Hunter.”

  “That’s real good,” I said. Placation became me.

  “Damn right it is.” Trimear opened the door and ushered me out. “Get to work.”

  Excerpt from Hugo Hunter: My Good Life and Bad Times

  I can’t be anyone’s paragon of knowledge about love. What love is, how to get it, how to hold it, how to live with it, how to get over it—I could point you to a million works of art that would address the subject better than I can. I’m not going to waste your time here.

  I will say this: The first time I fell in love, with Seyna, was the best. I’ll say that even knowing what I know about how it unraveled. She got the best part of my heart, before it was beaten up and bruised and made to hide from love. Everything in the world was a wonder then, something to be discovered. I was seventeen years old and in love for the first time, and it seemed then that every day had dawned for me. That’s the way to be in love. It doesn’t last, of course. Life eventually kicks you in the teeth and makes you start dealing with it on its terms. But for that brief moment in my life when all I wanted to do was love Seyna? God, yes. I’d relive it in a second. Just to feel that way again.

  I wonder sometimes if it’s a cruel cosmic joke that first love comes when we’re too young and too immature to handle the ups and downs. Seyna and I were just kids when we got married; I hadn’t even had my first professional fight. And then, in short order, we had a kid and I had a fight career that was taking off, not to mention the attendant fame and how that pulled me in all directions, including away from her. I don’t blame her for the unhappiness that resulted, nor do I blame myself for how I reacted to that unhappiness. We weren’t old enough to realize what we were throwing away, or old enough to realize that if we hunkered down together, things might change.

  Sometimes I wonder if I met Seyna today, without knowing her or the baggage of our past, whether we’d get along. Would there be a spark that, for us as teenagers, turned into a passionate flame? Would we even give each other a second glance? There’s no way of knowing, which is what makes the questions so intriguing.

  Our marriage produced a son, Raj, who makes us both proud. If he’s the only thing that came of it, that’s enough for anybody.

  But we could have had so much more.

  19

  Frank Feeney managed to pack the place Saturday night. Lainie and I squeezed into a corner spot at the bar, and I flagged down Amber, Frank’s niece, and asked her to bring us a couple of Slumpbusters.

  Couples and single drinkers held a line against the bar. In the middle of the room, at the tables, larger groups rumbled in laughter and chatter. I dug it when Billings got this way, in that sway between winter’s frozen blasts and the coming heat of summer. People were ready for some action, some fun.

  Lainie leaned into me. “Loud.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So much for talking.”

  “Overrated anyway.”

  I slipped a hand to the small of her back, and then lower. I couldn’t keep my mitts off her.

  “Where’s Hugo?” she said.

  I swept the room but didn’t see him. Didn’t see Frank, either. I tugged at Amber’s cuff when she passed.

  “Where’s your uncle?” I hadn’t seen her in a while, long enough to not remember the last time, anyway. She was like so many other people these days—a marker against which I measured how quickly the days passed me by. The braces and scatterings of acne I remembered had ceded to a lovely young woman and, it was now obvious, the de facto manager of Feeney’s.

  “In the back room. Birthday party.” Amber pointed the way.

  “Hugo here?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “He’s in there, too.”

  I took Lainie by the hand and pulled her through the obstacle course of tables toward the pub’s north side. Before Frank bought it, the building had housed an insurance office. The contractor he’d hired had suggested tearing out the walls of the conference room and expanding his floor space, but Frank decided to keep it. He had this idea that he could rent it out as sort of a downsized ballroom, but Feeney’s never became that kind of place, much to Frank’s bemusement. Instead, his pub took on the flavor of downtown and brought in a clientele that was a little bit of everything—bankers, surgeons, ditch diggers, college students—sitting side by side and disappearing into their suds. Frank’s grand ballroom sat mostly unused, except for a monthly poker game that I didn’t frequent, what with my need to hold tight to my scant salary as a small-time sports reporter.

  A red felt curtain, heavy and dust-laden like one you’d find in an old movie theater, separated the ballroom from the hallway. I tugged back a corner and peeked in.

  “Hey, Mark Westerly.”

  The voice and the face startled me, the familiar in an unexpected place, like finding a zebra in your backyard. The editor of the Herald-Gleaner, a twenty-eight-year-old interloper I and the rest of the newsroom knew as the Diploma. “Hey, William Pennington.”

  Frank sat to the right of my boss. Hugo, in a too-small sport coat that I recognized from the Qwai news conference, stood off to the side of Pennington. Pennington’s wife and twin six-year-old girls looked at me, smiling.

  “Come on in, Mark,” Pennington said.

  I clenched my hand tighter around Lainie’s wrist and brought her inside the curtain with me. I nodded at Frank and Hugo. “Fellas.”

  “Who’s this?” Pennington asked.

  Jesus, it’s like I was a little kid with no manners. I introduced Lainie, and everybody did the “so nice to meet you” bit, with names being exchanged all over the room, until Hugo snapped his fingers, pointed at Lainie, and said, “You’re the Billings Clinic lady.”

  “I am,” she said.

  Hugo feigned a couple of punch
es at me. “You old dog.”

  “Listen, we didn’t mean to intrude,” I said, pointing to the half-eaten birthday cake on the table. “We’ll let you get back to your party.”

  “Nonsense,” Pennington said. “Have a seat. Hugo here was just telling me about the old days. You’re part of the story.”

  I am not part of the story—not the way Hugo told it that night, anyway.

  After Lainie and I crashed into the room, Hugo picked up the thread. It’s 1997, London, where we went for his first chance at a world title. Five long years—interminable, in their own way—had gone by since the Olympics in Barcelona, and Hugo had been chafing for nearly two of them, threatening to dump Frank if he didn’t get a title shot, and they were damn near at a breaking point. But Frank had followed a plan, a precise formula that kept Hugo’s workload small but steady and allowed him to grow into a fully realized man, not the flashy teenager he’d been in Spain. At twenty-two years old and with a 20-0 record, all of them knockouts, Hugo was ready. We all were. And the guy standing between him and the championship, a light-hitting Brit named Rhys Montrose, didn’t have much of a chance of stopping Hugo. The week of the fight, Hugo stood as a 5–2 favorite on the Vegas boards.

  “I’d had a bad year,” Hugo was saying now, with everybody else paying rapt attention and with me trying to keep a poker face as I parsed his words, trying to figure out how he was going to finesse a tale I knew he didn’t want to tell completely. “Got divorced. That was tough. But I’m telling you, Mr. Pennington, I was in the best shape of my life. It was my time.”

  As strained as things were between Frank and Hugo on that trip, I’d never felt closer to him. Seyna’s leaving had left him wounded, and her taking Raj had poured salt in it. But Hugo still got visitation with his boy, and in the run-up to the London trip I’d taken to inviting them to our place for Sunday dinners so Raj and Von could play in the yard while Hugo and I talked sports and Louis L’Amour books, the only two things other than family either of us cared much about. By that time, Marlene and I had found a chilly détente in our marriage, a place where we experienced little strife and no joy, and Hugo’s regular presence in our home warmed up even that, at least for a little while. She enjoyed the buffer between the relentless white noise of living with me, and he treated her with kindness, just as you’d expect from a man raised by women.

  “How long were you married, Hugo?” Pennington asked.

  “Four and a half years, sir. Seyna always said it felt like no less than fifteen. I guess I’m pretty hard to live with.”

  I squeezed Lainie’s hand under the table. She might get her story yet.

  “She was pretty hard to live with, too, just for the record,” Frank threw in, correctly.

  “I’m sorry,” Pennington said. “Go on.”

  “Right,” Hugo said. “So we’re there in London—me, Frank, Mark, everybody—and we do all the press conferences and the weigh-in. There was a lot of interest, wasn’t there, Mark?”

  “I’d say so.”

  “Anyway,” Hugo continued, “we get to the night before the fight, and I usually sleep like a baby, but I’m up and down, up and down, all night. I can’t get to sleep. My mind, it’s going, all the time. I don’t know if it was the time change or what, but I’m just wired.” I wondered, at that last word, if anybody else picked up the same connotation I did. It was damn near a Freudian slip.

  “Long story short,” Hugo said, “I’m going back to bed, trip over a rug in my hotel bathroom and try to stop my fall, and I break my arm on the marble floor. Cracked it through the skin. I’m done. No fight.”

  “Oh, wow,” Pennington said. “You know, I remember hearing about that at the time. I was in my freshman year of high school, I think. I don’t know. I’m sorry to say I wasn’t paying that much attention. But I sure loved watching you in the Olympics.”

  Hugo bowed with magnanimity. “I appreciate that. It got a lot of attention, just because of how long I’d been waiting. I guess I was a little snakebit there. When I look back on it, that was the crucial moment. I had some troubles after that, some of them my own fault, but I think, if that fight had gone off and I’d won, things might have gone a lot differently. What do you think, Frank?”

  “No doubt about it.”

  “Mark?”

  “Well, you know, Hugo, ifs and buts.” At that, Lainie pinched my leg under the table. I brushed it away. I had my reasons to be dismissive.

  “So what are you doing now?” Pennington said.

  Hugo shrugged. “You know, still punching. Frank’s letting me talk to people here at the pub about the boxing days. I might do some coaching. Something will come up. Might even fight again.”

  “Really?” Pennington said. “Even after that stuff a couple of months ago?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know.”

  I looked at Frank, and Frank looked at the floor.

  Pennington stood, and his family followed his lead. “Well, in any case, I wish you luck. Seems like boxing’s heyday is a thing of the past. I keep hearing about this mixed martial arts stuff.”

  “You can’t help what you love, sir,” Hugo said.

  “Indeed you can’t.” Pennington shook Hugo’s hand, then came over and shook mine. “See you in the office, Mark. Don’t get used to these Saturdays off.” He laughed, more to let me know I’d been stung than to suggest he was kidding.

  “See you, Bill.”

  We sat around awhile after that, just the four of us, while Amber stopped by a few times to keep us stocked in beer. Lainie, not knowing the terrain and the fault lines the way the rest of us did, charged right in on Hugo.

  “I met your son the other day,” she said.

  “Oh?”

  “Raj is looking good,” I told Hugo. “Have you seen him lately?”

  “A few months ago, I guess.”

  “He told us we could find you here.”

  Hugo nudged Frank with an elbow. “Frank’s idea. I’m the entertainment, right, Frank?”

  Frank fidgeted. He’d been fixing a gaze on Lainie that was a little too hard for my taste. Frank’s talents didn’t run toward diplomacy, and clear back to 1992, when Seyna had first shown up in Hugo’s life, he’d taken a hostile view of subjects involving her. The invocation of Raj qualified.

  “I’m paying your bills now. I figure you’ll damn well earn it,” Frank said.

  Lainie jumped in again. “And he lives right here in Billings. That’s a shame you don’t see each other more.” This time, I pinched her knee. She slapped at my hand. “Well, it is.”

  Frank stood up. “I gotta get back at it. Nice meeting you, miss,” he said to Lainie, and he nodded at me as he exited. “Mark.”

  “Did I say something wrong?” Lainie asked.

  “Ma’am,” Hugo said, “when it comes to Frank, it’s not so much what anybody says, it’s just that if you say anything for long enough, he’ll end up getting ticked off. I wouldn’t worry about it.”

  I broke in. “The thing is, Hugo, we ran into Raj, and I was telling her about things with you and Seyna, only I didn’t tell it in the right way—”

  “He is literally the worst storyteller ever,” Lainie said.

  Hugo laughed. “Hey, I’ve been reading him since I was a kid. You don’t have to tell me.”

  “Bunch of damn comedians in here,” I said. “So, anyway, she likes your son—”

  “And I’m wondering why the distance between you, when he’s such a great kid,” Lainie finished. “I’m nosy like that.”

  Damn, she was cute. How else to explain the sheer brazenness of her approach?

  Hugo, perhaps taken in the same way I’d been, didn’t seem fazed. “I can talk about that,” he said.

  Excerpt from Hugo Hunter: My Good Life and Bad Times

  Even before I went to Barcelona, I didn’t have much in common with my pe
ers at Billings Senior High School. I was a poor South Side kid, someone who preferred spending time at my grammy’s house to hanging out at the mall or making out up on the Rimrocks.

  After I came home from the Olympics, I enjoyed more attention, but in an odd way, my isolation from other kids my age simply grew.

  It was easy enough to figure out why adults were suddenly interested in me and my story. It was a vicarious thrill for them to see an Olympic athlete and to hear me talk about what happened there in Spain. Kids my age, by and large, weren’t as interested. I was one of them, and so what if I went to another country and won an Olympic medal? That didn’t make me any better than them, they reasoned.

  It might surprise them to know that I agreed with them. I just wanted to come back, put my head down, and do well enough at school to graduate. I didn’t need or want confrontations over whether I was too full of myself. After I went to a football game that fall and autograph seekers swamped me in the stands, the quarterback of the team confronted me in the hallway at school and demanded that I stay away from the team’s games. I get it. He didn’t want to be overshadowed. I didn’t want to overshadow him. He thought I was the adversary, but I was on his side.

  That’s the thing about fame. If you have it, it’s almost never on your terms. You become what other people—people who don’t really know you—imagine you to be. And if you don’t live up to that, if you disappoint them in some way that you don’t even see, you lose credibility in their eyes.

  It took me a long time to learn that lesson. A long time and a lot of lost friendships and money.

  20

  Unless you’ve lived through something similar, it’s hard to understand what a constrictive place Hugo’s hometown became after the Olympics. The Wheaties people put him on their box of cereal in November of that year, and he couldn’t even escape his own image when he tagged along with Aurelia to the grocery store. He stopped going to football games or any other extracurricular school functions because the attention he received detracted from the other kids—and in fairness to them, they had reason to be upset by that. But if you’re going to give those people a pass under the auspices of kids being kids, you have to give Hugo some credit for recognizing how divisive his presence could be.