The Fallow Season of Hugo Hunter

by Craig Lancaster

  “I will.”

  I ended the call, considered my options, and realized I’d run out of them. I’d ignored the line between objectivity and activism with Hugo for years. To do what needed to be done, I’d be obliterating it. I had to give myself some room to work. I called Lainie and told her what I intended to do, that I had some cushion to ride things out for a while. God bless her, she said, “Hugo’s the priority. Do it.”

  I placed another call, this time to the office, and caught the Diploma off guard.

  “Hey, Bill, it’s Westerly. Listen, no other way to say it but this: I’m not coming in again. No, not ever. Can you have HR draw up the paperwork? I’ll come in and sign it this week.”

  By quarter after nine, after repeated attempts to reach Hugo on his cell phone, I stood in Frank Feeney’s living room and swallowed a double portion of his truculence.

  “Sounds pretty thin to me,” he said. “Guy says he’s heard something, but he’s not sure what or where.”

  “It’s not just some guy, Frank. It’s my goddamn stepson.”

  “Still.”

  “So you’re not going?”

  “No. I have things to do here.”

  I couldn’t believe it. There’d been a time, years ago, when Frank had gone to Los Angeles on a flyer to get Hugo out of trouble. That took the better part of a month, everything on hold, everything uncertain. I was asking for a few hours just to go make sure Hugo was OK.

  “You know what this means, right?” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s his head, Frank. His brain. He’s had trauma. If he’s fighting, he’s in a lot of trouble.”

  Frank’s eyes stayed on me, solid, resolute. “If he is, it’s trouble he’s brought on himself.”

  “What’s with you, man? You sat there in the bar and told him you wanted him alive—”

  “I do.”

  “—and you went on and on about football players. Jesus, man. Don’t you know this is worse? Don’t you care?”

  “I’ve got stuff to do here.”

  “I wish I was as above it all as you,” I said. “I wish I could just not give a shit.”

  He didn’t say anything, and I didn’t have anything left. I went out the door and headed for the car. I sat there for a couple of minutes, arguing with myself over whether to push this thing with Frank just a little further. I could see all the arguments, but I couldn’t see the one that would make him say, you know what, I’ll go. I backed out of the driveway and was just about to throw it into drive when Frank came jogging out, motioning for me to lower my window.

  “What?”

  “Meet Trevor at the McDonald’s in Lockwood. He’ll go. More use than me anyway.”

  45

  We were about thirty miles east of Billings, making plodding progress in the snow, when a call came through. I motioned for Squeaky to turn off the radio, and then I answered.

  “Heya, Bobby.”

  Olden’s voice came back at me. “Mark. I heard you’re leaving us. I don’t know what’s going on, but I hope it’s a good thing for you.”

  “Thanks for that.”

  “So, listen, I’ve got kind of a weird question for you. Can I talk to you real quick?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Well, it’s a little bit of bad news, I guess. You talked to Hugo lately?”

  I covered the mouthpiece. “Herald-Gleaner,” I said to Squeaky.

  “A couple of weeks ago, I think. Why?”

  “You on the road?” Olden asked.

  “Just heading home.”

  Squeaky looked at me, and I shook my head.

  “What’s going on, Bobby?” I said.

  He cleared his throat. He wasn’t sure what to do. “Been hearing stuff about some bare-knuckle fighting in the Bakken, that Hugo’s involved in it. Gene wants me to go out there and check it out, but—”

  “Shitty day to drive to North Dakota,” I said.

  “Yeah. I’m just wondering if you’ve heard anything.”

  “Gosh, no, Bobby. Shit. Bare-knuckle fighting?”

  “That’s what we’re hearing.”

  “What is this, 1890? That’s awful.” I cringed. I was laying the dumb act on too thick.

  “You wouldn’t know where he is, would you?”

  I tried to pull up my scant knowledge of western North Dakota. If I was going to do this thing—this thing being a lie the size of cannon ordnance—I needed to get the geography right.

  “Last I talked to him, he was in New Town.”

  “New Town? Really? I’m hearing this is happening around Stanley.”

  “No, he started there, but he moved to a rig in New Town last I heard.”

  “OK, thanks, Mark. I’m glad I called. I really owe you one.”

  “Let me know what you find out, OK?”

  “You bet,” he said.

  I ended the call. “Jesus.”

  “What the hell was all that?” Squeaky said.

  I was worried, worried as all hell. Bobby was green, but he had real promise as a reporter, much more than I had at the same age. I hoped I’d sounded convincing.

  “Mark?”

  “That was the last of Hugo’s dignity if we don’t get to him first,” I finally said. “We’ve got a forty-minute head start, and I maybe just bought us another forty, and the weather’s getting worse, thank God.”

  Squeaky looked at me quizzically, and then the notion kicked in and he smiled.

  “You want to go faster?” he said. He mashed down on the accelerator, and his big Ford pickup did a little shimmy, and we were out of there.

  We turned hard north at Glendive. The Yellowstone, my guide just a few months earlier on my work trip to Sidney, stretched out, frozen, but we caught a break. The westerly storm blew through a narrow corridor along Interstate 94, and once we’d put about fifteen miles down toward Sidney and Fairview and the upper Dakota border, the snow stopped sliding across the windshield, visibility spread out, and Squeaky was able to put more horsepower on the case.

  “What’s this thing look like to you?” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, do you think we’re gonna have to tangle with anybody to get him? Is he on drugs again?”

  “Jesus, I hope not.” I said it, but I could tell Squeaky didn’t see much reason for optimism, and truth be told, neither did I. God, how I wished Hugo had answered his phone, just once.

  “I’m just wondering what we’re in for,” he said.

  “Well, it can’t be very good, you know? I just want to find him and get him home. We can worry about the rest later.”

  “All right.”

  Squeaky has a dead giveaway for his own agitation. He starts cracking his knuckles.

  “What?” I said.

  “It pisses me off.”

  “What does?”

  “This whole thing with Hugo. Man, that guy has had chances I’d have loved to get. He’s a million times better than I ever was, and he has no discipline, no character. Pisses me off.”

  “So what I hear you saying is that you’re pissed.”

  “Yeah. You making fun of me?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll turn right around.”

  “Squeaky—Trevor—I’m not. OK? I get that you’re pissed. I get that he screwed up his chances. I’m just saying, I want to find him and get him home. We’ll have plenty of time to wring everything out if we can just get him home.”

  “Yeah. Right. OK.”

  I chewed on the next bit for a good while, almost to Sidney before I got it right in my head and knew what I wanted to say. The shortness of the winter days cast a pall on the scene, a dour gray that settled over the valley. We still had a long haul in front of us, a little more than a hundred miles, but the rigs on the hori
zon marked this as the territory where we’d find him. A thickness, a fear, spread through my stomach.

  “I’m not lying for him anymore,” I said. “I’m not lying to him, either. I wish your dad had come. There’s some stuff he needs to know.”

  “Tell me.”

  I gathered myself. Somehow, in my imagining of what I’d say, I hadn’t pictured this scene or this particular confidante.

  “London,” I said.

  “What about it?”

  “He was doing coke in London. That story about tripping on the rug? Straight bullshit.”

  “So, what, he just—”

  “Smashed his own arm to get out of the fight? Yeah.”

  Silence moved in. I understood. Squeaky was having to make sense of the nonsensical. I’d been there.

  “How’d you find out?” he asked at last.

  “I was there.”

  Squeaky looked at me, then looked at the road, then back again. Sidney’s lit-up downtown slid past my window.

  “Why’d you do it?” he asked at last. “Why didn’t you say something?”

  I swallowed a couple of times so I didn’t break toward shrill in my answer. “You think I wanted to keep it to myself?” Squeaky started to speak, and I cut him off. We could talk about the meaning of rhetoric later. “You think it did me any good to know that? Shit, man, I did it because he was my friend, and because I’d lost all perspective on things.”

  Silence filled the cab again. We pushed on toward the state line.

  “Dad thought he was using again when we fought Qwai,” he said. “He thought the binge eating was just a cover-up. He was amazed when things came back clean.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe,” I said. I never built out the connections between what actually happened on that trip and what I suspected. It would be a lie to say the fight never crossed my mind. But I’d come to view the entire episode in the larger context of my grief over Von. I just didn’t give a rat’s ass what happened with Hugo. I shouldn’t have been there at all.

  “As long as we’re squaring things up,” Squeaky said, “I’ll tell you what went down that night.”

  I gave him a cockeyed look.

  “Before the fight, I mean,” he said.

  “OK, shoot.”

  Squeaky kept stealing sideways glances at me, an every-few-seconds assessment of my attitude. It was weird.

  “You know how Dad was done with him after that fight? Retired?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You ever wonder how he came up with the money for the bar? A full liquor license is expensive. Even then.”

  I knew what was coming before Squeaky said it, and I wanted to jam my fingers in my ears and rattle off “nananananananananana” so my illusions weren’t shattered. We’d all found ways to separate ourselves from any ethics we had where Hugo was concerned, but Frank, knowing his guy would be depleted after the crash weight loss, had somebody lay a bet on Qwai and got a payoff at 2–1 odds. Whatever contempt and revulsion I felt—and it was plenty of both—Squeaky’s revelation brought the totality of Frank’s actions toward Hugo these past few years into sharper relief. Guilt, and the flailing defiance of it, brings out some mighty odd behavior. For all Frank’s protestations about how Hugo played him, it now seemed to me that he had no high ground in that game.

  “No wonder he didn’t come,” I said.

  “Don’t be too hard on him,” Squeaky said. “He did a lot for Hugo. Maybe he thinks he can’t give anything else.”

  “Yeah, he can.”

  “What?”

  “The truth about what he did.”

  Squeaky considered that awhile and then, at last, said something that was beyond his pay grade in wisdom.

  “On that deal, I think Dad would argue about where the truth of it is,” he said. “That’s what I think.”

  I wasn’t going to argue that point, although I certainly could have my way with moral relativity. I was an expert. In any case, I needed Squeaky’s help on this one, and bad-mouthing his old man wouldn’t help matters.

  “Turn left here,” I said. We’d just whipped through Fairview and across the state line. Darkness was coming on in full now. The low line of trees on the horizon cut a darker outline against the sky, and long sheets of snow billowed across the postharvest landscape. Across the expanse in all directions, the flames from flaring gas wells waved against the deadening sky.

  The road stretched out before us, laying down a path toward the biggest boomtown in the United States. Beyond that, I hoped, waited someone I’d come a long way to see.

  I had this to make right, and a few other things, too. I could do that, for him and for me. I couldn’t do it for anyone else.

  Excerpt from Hugo Hunter: My Good Life and Bad Times

  I envied the guys who got up and went to work, every day, same place, same job, year after year. I didn’t see drudgery in that. To be fair, I didn’t really have any perspective at all, but if I had to classify it, I’d say I saw honor in it. It was keeping the faith, with coworkers, with one’s own set of skills, with an employer, with the family back home, if there was one.

  Professional boxing wasn’t anything like that. It wasn’t an everyday kind of job. It was vast stretches of nothing to do except goof off, followed by a short, intense period of getting in shape, followed by a few minutes of work.

  I was good at the getting in shape. I was good at the work. I was very, very bad at the nothingness in between.

  I would have been better at punching a clock.

  Here’s the hell of that, though: by the time I figured this out, working at an average-Joe kind of job was almost—almost—beyond my reach. I’d spent years conditioning myself to do one thing, and the workaday life was something different entirely. Even if I could have risen to some of the jobs I tried, I don’t know that the people I shared that work with could have accepted that in me. They wanted Hugo Hunter, and I found it nearly impossible to explain to them just how much I didn’t want to be that anymore.

  Like so many things in my life, my breakthrough came when I had no other choices. When I emerged from drug treatment the last time—and it will be the last time—I knew two things:

  First, what I’ve done since Coconut Olson beat me isn’t working and has to change.

  Second, I’m never going through that hell again.

  Sometimes I look at the young man in the picture frames around my house. He’s sixty pounds lighter than I am, his face drawn tight and his eyes like lasers. I look at him and I think:

  Kid, you don’t even know.

  46

  Even in full Bakken-boom bloom, Stanley, North Dakota, isn’t much. A highway shoots through town on its way to other flatland destinations, there’s a capillary system of town streets, and, if your timing is right, you’ll get a good view of the Empire Builder as it moves along the rails between the West Coast and Chicago. Finding the man camp was simple enough. A cluster of single-wide trailers hugged the highway on the edge of town, smartly positioned across the road from an all-night convenience store.

  Squeaky kept the truck idling as I got out to talk to a kid who’d decamped outside one of the trailers to kill off a Marlboro or two.

  “Hey, bud,” I said, “does Hugo live out here?”

  “Who?” The roughneck turned his collar up against the cold.

  “Hugo Hunter. He was working out here.”

  “I don’t know who that is. What do you want with him, anyway?”

  The second sentence contradicted the first. I tried another way in. I racked my weary thoughts, trying to remember the names.

  “What about Sean?” I said.

  “We got three Seans here.”

  “What about Jeff?”

  “Just one of them.”

  I held out my arms, palms up, and gave the kid the look. Everybody knows the
look. The I-ain’t-got-all-day look. The I-need-this-buddy look. He nodded at the trailer across the gravel entry road.

  “Thanks, bud.”

  I broke out in a jog, the snow and ice crunching under my feet, and threw a signal to Squeaky to park the truck and come with me.

  Inside of two minutes, Squeaky and I knew our worst fears about this errand were in play. Jeff recognized me when he opened the door, and the color drained out of him in a way that reminded me of the time my old man made me chew a whole bag of Beech-Nut when he caught me rooting through his stash.

  To his credit, Jeff let us in and was more forthcoming than the kid I’d encountered outside. He talked fast, nervous, but the bigger strokes were clear. Hugo hadn’t been up to snuff out here in the patch—too old, at long last too slow, and too set in his ways to jump when told to, even for the kind of scratch these guys were pulling down. Loath to admit he’d failed again, Hugo had tried to linger on as a sort of camp mascot, a friend to any and all. It had been the thing he chafed against at Feeney’s, sitting around and jawing about the past, and unlike a one-off dinner patron, the guys in the camp eventually grew tired of the stories. They wanted action, danger, something to stave off the boredom.

  “One guy told Hugo he’d pay him a hundred bucks for a swing at him, just to see if he could hit him,” Jeff said. “That’s how it started.”

  “He did it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Was the guy able to hit him?” Squeaky asked.

  Jeff shook his head. “No. Pissed him off. Other guys wanted to try, too.”

  “How many?” I said.

  “Lots.”

  “And he let them?”

  “Yeah. Drugs, money, whatever. They just gave it to him.”

  Squeaky kicked at the carpet. “Goddamnit!” Jeff got quiet. His eyes started moving around the room, looking for escape. I tried to take the pressure down a few notches.

  “Did he get hurt?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Bad?”

  Jeff dropped his head. Kept it there awhile. No words. Nothing. And then, finally, “Yeah.”

  “Jeff,” I said, and he looked up at me. “If you care about what happens to him, tell us where he is.”