The Fallow Season of Hugo Hunter

by Craig Lancaster

  “I look through her stuff sometimes,” he said at last, after he’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 he’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.”

  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 we’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 he’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, hi
s 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 he’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 he’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 you’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.

  Excerpt from Hugo Hunter: My Good Life and Bad Times

  In a span of about three weeks in the spring of 1993, these things happened:

  I dropped out of high school.

  I took Seyna to Las Vegas and married her.

  I signed the contract for my first professional fight.

  I had that fight at Caesars Palace, on a card full of other 1992 Olympic boxers—Cordero Montez, Jimbo Duggins, Maxie “Rerun” Robbins, and a few other names you probably remember.

  To say that I was intimidated would be, perhaps, to devalue the word. Rationally, I knew that I was set up for success. I hadn’t been in the ring for real since Barcelona, and my opponent that night, an earnest if overmatched fighter from San Bernardino named Leland Briggs, had been handpicked for me. That’s how it is when you’re a hot young fighter making your debut. You get red meat served up for your four-round opener. In the second fight, it’s another opponent on the descent and six rounds, and so on. Somewhere after the first dozen, you start fighting guys who know what they’re doing and can put some damage on you if you’re not careful. Leland Briggs posed no danger to me.