The Fallow Season of Hugo Hunter

by Craig Lancaster

  No. No. No.

  I opened the door and removed the box, and I held it in my right hand as I consulted my watch.

  4:34.

  The hum of a motor, the squeal of turning wheels, and I dashed across the room in my high-sheen lace-up shoes to the bedroom, where I gathered the jacket. My right arm hung up in the sleeve as I tried to shimmy into it, and the ring tumbled from the box to the floor at my feet.

  The slamming of a car door.

  I knelt as gently and as quickly as I could and swept up the ring.

  The sound of steps on the walk.

  I ran a hand over my hair.

  The key in the door.

  I ran back to the front room and positioned myself on the linoleum in front of the door.

  4:35.

  I smiled. I think I smiled. I’m pretty sure I smiled.

  I pulled my cummerbund up.

  A crack of sunlight in the darkened room, and then more than a crack . . .

  I asked Marlene Morley to marry me on September 12, 1985. We’d driven down to Denver to see, God help us, Ratt in concert at McNichols Arena. In fairness to us, Ratt was just an accessory to our hair-metaled crime. We’d really gone down there to see Bon Jovi, the opening act that in just a couple of years would be the hottest thing going. I can’t really defend our being there on artistic grounds, but I can say this: we were young, we were in love, and we liked loud music.

  We’d taken midweek days off—Marlene from her nursing job at Deaconess, me from the Buttrey’s on Thirteenth where I worked in the produce department until the Herald-Gleaner brought me aboard—and had headed for Colorado in my Datsun 720 pickup, which was making its final brave stand a year before that name would disappear and Nissans would multiply across the earth. When you’re in love, you can conquer anything, even Wyoming, but we were no match for a blown water pump that left us stranded along northbound Interstate 25 on the return trip, in that great gaping maw between Cheyenne and Wheatland.

  I could have sooner walked to the moon than to the next town. I wouldn’t own a cell phone for nearly fifteen more years. Marlene and I sat on the tailgate, making halfhearted attempts at flagging down some help, and we talked. We had prospects, and we were well aware of them. My family liked her. Her family liked me. We were hot for each other. Neither of us could see into the future, but it didn’t seem beyond our dreams to expect a house and some kids and a vacation to Disneyland or maybe Six Flags. We could hope for all of that.

  “I want to marry you,” I told her. I was twenty-two years old, full of certitude.

  “I want you to,” she said.

  We sat there awhile longer and made moony eyes at each other, and we talked about our eagerness to get home to Billings and find a ring and tell our folks and let our friends shower us with their good wishes and envy. Before too long, a Wyoming Highway Patrol officer rolled up on us and asked what we needed. We asked for a tow truck, and he tipped his hat and put in the call.

  Through everything that followed—every fight, every moment I knew I’d made a mistake, every moment I wished I could have spared Marlene the affliction of me, every year that marched on in emptiness, and, yes, every moment when things seemed like they might be OK—my feelings about that afternoon in Wyoming never changed.

  It was one of the glorious days of my life.

  Lainie stood before me, agape. Understandable. To see me there in her living room, midday, wearing a monkey suit, must have been like coming home and finding the US water polo team in the hot tub. A little hard to figure.

  I held out the ring, unboxed, between trembling fingers.

  “What have you done?” she said.

  I cleared my throat. “I had this idea—”

  “This isn’t . . .”

  I pulled the ring back, just a little. “Yeah.”

  “Oh, Mark.” Her face had gone white first, then red. Vermillion. Her name.

  “That’s not—” I sputtered. I hadn’t vaguely imagined this reaction.

  “Oh, Mark, no . . .”

  “No?” Shit. Oh, shit.

  “I mean . . .” Her eyes went to water. “Shit,” she said. Exactly.

  I slumped.

  “Lains, I . . . I . . .” I couldn’t muster more than a stammer.

  She reached for my hand. “Sit down.”

  The evening I stepped onto Bim Morley’s porch and told him I’d like to marry his daughter, after first telling him that I’d already floated the proposition to her, he called me out on my procedural error.

  “You should have come to see me first,” he said, and my heart sank just a little, which must have been evident to him, because he quickly paved things over. “Don’t get me wrong, son, we’re glad to have you in the family, but I just pictured it a little differently. Forgive an old man for his illusions of chivalry.”

  And then he gave me the only piece of advice I ever got from him, and the advice I abandoned early and often.

  “Put her first,” he said. “She’ll always believe in you if she knows she’s first.”

  I can’t account for why something like that sticks even when you’re not listening. I think about those days now, and it’s as if I was finishing a checklist: Ask her father, check. Get the ring, check. Find a reception venue, check. All the while, I was missing the things I really should have paid heed to.

  I thought about all of that in the hotel room in Sidney, as the idea of marrying Lainie went from far-off prospect to immediate hunger. The excitement ran so thick and deep that I had to remind myself that I’d felt these things before and that it had all gone to hell. I talked to myself about lessons learned and wisdom gained, and how hard it had been.

  I fell asleep vowing to remember this time.

  Lainie sat me down on the couch next to her. She never let go of my hand. The tux jacket stretched uncomfortably across my shoulders. Such a fool I was.

  “I love you,” she said.

  “I love you.” I wasn’t ready to look at her.

  “I—” She squeezed my hand. “I’m surprised. It’s not that I haven’t thought about this. But I thought we’d talk about it, come to it gradually.”

  I said nothing. I hadn’t stopped to think that seven months together wasn’t enough.

  She pressed me. “What are you thinking?”

  I found patterns in the carpet. “I messed this up.”

  “Look at me.”

  I didn’t.

  “Look at me.”

  I did.

  “You could never”—her free hand moved back and forth between us—“in a million years mess this up.”

  “Then why won’t you marry me?”

  “I’m not saying I won’t. But—”

  “What?”

  “I’ve been married.”

  “So have I.”

  “It’s only been two years since I lost him. He was supposed to be here forever, and he’s not, and I get that, and I’ve moved on. It’s just—”

  “Tell me.”

  She sniffled and drew up her hand, the one that held mine, to wipe her nose. She didn’t let go.

  “I’m scared,” she said.

  “Of what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “That doesn’t help.”

  “I know.”

  I let go of her, and she grabbed me back. “Hold on,” she said.

  The night before I married Marlene, Joe Oldegaard, my best man and best friend since elementary school, walked me away from the party with my groomsmen at the 17 Club and suggested that we have a cigarette. The outside air that evening, heart of spring, still had a bite. We had to give each other hand cover to get blazed up.

  “People will understand,” he said.

  “Understand what?”

  “If you call it off. Yeah, it’ll be inconvenient
and embarrassing, but they’ll get it.”

  I was dumbfounded. “Get the fuck out of here.”

  He shrugged. We finished our cigarettes in silence and went back inside.

  Twenty-four hours later, I was married and holed up in the Stardust with Marlene, a long weekend in Vegas awaiting us before work and the drudgeries of marriage called us back home. I told her what Joe had said.

  “Cass said the same thing to me,” she said.

  “Last night?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you think they planned it?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “They looked pretty chummy at the rehearsal dinner.”

  I stared into the ceiling. Marlene went rigid beside me.

  “Why would they do that?” I said.

  I left Lainie’s and went home, to my bed. I pounded my pillow, as if some bedside violence would stop the motion inside my head and let me find sleep.

  Lainie had asked me to stay. Begged me, really. I couldn’t do it. By the time I left, I wasn’t angry. I wasn’t even hurt—at least not too much. Her reasons for caution, when she finally expressed them, made sense. Distance from her life with Delmar. Not wanting to one-up Tony and his fiancée, who were in the full flurry of planning their own nuptials. Time. Just more time.

  I got it. I got it, but I couldn’t stay. The downside of my elaborate proposal theater is I’d left no room for any answer other than yes. No would have been devastation. Let-me-think-about-it might well have turned me into a huckster, babbling anything to close the deal. She didn’t say either of those things. She said, “I love you, and I’ll always love you, and I’ll always want you,” and I kissed her forehead, her cheek, her lips. I had to go home, where I didn’t want to be, and try to figure out why it wasn’t yes.

  After Dad was gone and before Mom slipped into the depths of the dementia that took her, I would sit at the little kitchen table in the house where I grew up, and I’d spend a few hours with her every Tuesday morning. Those hours made a slow reveal of the crevasses opening in my marriage. I told Mom one time that I didn’t see how she and Dad had done it, how they’d managed to stay in tune all those years, and she laughed and said, “Mark, there were years at a time when we could barely stand each other.” That surprised me. It shouldn’t have. I’d come to know such years with Marlene. In any case, I don’t think that dose of perspective helped me, because it gave rise to my most mulish impulses. It made me view my marriage as something to be conquered.

  I got out of bed and paced the floor, wore a groove into the carpet between my room and the den. Each time I passed Von’s door, I ran my finger along it.

  I’d spent a lot of time with this subject, before Marlene found the gumption to go and long after, and all that thought had made a few things clear. I no longer hated Joe or Cass for what they’d done. The friendships hadn’t survived their last-ditch efforts to save us from ourselves, but they’d made those decisions knowing the risks. They had accurately diagnosed our underlying trouble, and you can’t hate someone for being right. I’d also come to be well in tune with the hesitations I felt before we said “I do,” the many times I’d wanted to run and hadn’t, and I could tell myself, categorically, that I felt none of that where Lainie was concerned. My delivery of the question had left me open to feelings of foolishness, but I’d get over that. I had to. My desire to ask again—and again, if I needed to—remained.

  I returned to bed and crawled into the sheets. I lay my head down and sleep came for me, at last, in measures too heavy to resist. The blackness came on in full and I was gone, and it wasn’t until after Lainie had let herself in with the key I’d given her and found me in my room and slid into the bed next to me and kissed my ear that I awoke again. Not with a start, but as if she had been there all along.

  “Yes,” she said.

  Excerpt from Hugo Hunter: My Good Life and Bad Times

  On the whole, I will never feel anything but gratitude for Frank Feeney and what he’s done for me.

  As for what he’s done to me, that’s a harder account to square.

  I never knew my actual father, and so I’m not altogether certain how that relationship looks from the son’s end of things. I also wasn’t much of a father to Raj when he was young, so I’m deficient there, too. Frank was my father figure in the absence of anyone else willing to do the job, and I have considered whether that was expecting too much of him. Maybe it was. But that’s where we are, and that’s why his distancing himself from me hurts so much. I’m not saying he doesn’t have a right to cut me out. I’m saying that I would hope a father, a real father, would never take that step. Frank did, and here we are, living in the same town, talking to the same people, but never seeing each other. It’s hard. Damn right it’s hard.

  This is another area where my daily affirmations at my support group really help. I parse through the things I can control and the things I can’t. Frank made his decision where I’m concerned. I can’t change it for him. That duty lies with him.

  39

  I’d barely breached the door at Feeney’s before I said, “I come in peace.” Frank’s plump face, wound up into a ready bark, did a slow unraveling.

  “Have a seat,” he said. The midday lunch crowd had come and gone and it was just the two of us. I tended to have impeccable timing when I wanted to see him alone.

  I settled onto the stool in front of him. “How’ve you been?”

  Frank shrugged. The smell of chili wafted across the bar, and my face must have betrayed my interest. “You hungry?” Frank said, pointing at the slow cooker.

  “Yeah, I’ll have some.”

  He dished it up—ground beef chili, no beans, the way God intended. I could have stood my spoon up in it.

  “Did I do that?” Frank said. He pointed at the mark under my eye that, by now, was on its final, slow fade, a process that was taking its good sweet time.

  “You have a good eye for your own handiwork,” I said.

  He laughed, quick and curt. “Well, I’m sorry. You might remember that you took a poke at me first. I was pretty much operating on instinct.”

  I socked away a couple of bites of chili before I responded.

  “Well, you know, Frank, I’m trying to forget it happened. But you’re right. Just the same, you disrespected my wife, so—”

  “Your wife?”

  I rummaged through my pocket and scared up the simple tungsten ring Lainie had slipped on my finger not forty-eight hours earlier, precisely two weeks after she’d said yes. I held it out to him, and he took it in for closer examination.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” Frank said. “Why aren’t you wearing it?”

  “We’re kind of keeping it quiet. Her kid has a wedding coming up, and we didn’t want to steal his thunder.”

  I held out my hand, and he dropped the ring into my palm.

  “Well, Mark, I’m happy for you. Congratulations.”

  The night Lainie came to me in my bed, she and I talked about the implications of the yes she’d first avoided and then accepted. “I know I love you, and you want this,” she’d said. “I want it, too.” We didn’t want a big wedding. We’d both done that. We wanted to keep things as intimate as possible, to the point where even the justice of the peace was a regrettable, though necessary, intrusion. And we dealt with the immediate baggage that comes with yes. We wanted it done as soon as possible. Before we could give a chance to no or maybe. Before we had to spend a minute longer with how things were now.

  That had taken a bit longer than I’d have preferred, a couple of smoke breaks with Trimear to talk him into giving me three consecutive days off—one to get to Deadwood, a reasonable one-day drive from Billings; one for Lainie and me to approximate a honeymoon; one to get home.

  Trimear can be such an intractable fuckhead. For a day he held me off, whinnying about the inherent unfairness of my request with
football season upon us and our resources so thin. I held my tongue about his poor-mouthing and said, simply, “I really need this, Gene.”

  That first day, he turned me down flat. I said, “Fine. I’ll quit.” I’d threatened to quit any number of times over the years in various temper tantrums. What was one more?

  “Don’t be a sorehead,” he said. “What do you need it for?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “It might.”

  The rat bastard. “OK, Gene, look. I’m getting married. I’m hoping to keep it quiet, you know, so don’t blab about it, OK?”

  “What’s the problem? She got two heads or something?”

  “Shut up.”

  He laughed. It was that irritating horse-wheeze, the one where the implication is that what amuses Gene Trimear should also amuse the target of his nonsense.

  “Are you gonna do this for me?” I asked.

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  A day after that, Trimear posted a fresh round of schedules. Two weeks out, there it was: a Friday-Saturday-Sunday stretch where my name didn’t appear. I’d hoped for something sooner, but hope isn’t something that often gets redeemed by the likes of Trimear. I thanked him, and the inchoate peckerwood actually approximated grace. “Good luck,” he said.

  At the bar, I filled Frank in on Hugo, or tried to. As it turned out, old forms retained their function. There wasn’t anything I knew about Hugo’s retreat to the oil patch that was news to Frank, nor did I bring new information about his stated intentions toward Frank’s niece.

  “He says he loves her,” I said.

  “I’ve heard.”

  “Don’t believe him?”

  Frank punched open the cash register and counted off some twenties, putting them in an envelope and dropping them into the floor safe. “It doesn’t matter what I believe. We’re at showtime, you know? What he says doesn’t really matter, either.”

  I drained the last of my beer. “Yeah. I believe him. I want to believe him.”