The Fallow Season of Hugo Hunter

by Craig Lancaster

  By winter, he was just gutting it out, trying to break through to graduation and into the clear.

  One of Hugo’s few outlets was the movie theater. He took to rolling up late, after the previews had started, and quietly buying a ticket. He’d stand at the back of the theater during the show, then walk to the front and out the door before everybody else tumbled out. Two, three times a week, that’s how Hugo Hunter moved unseen among the people of Billings.

  And that’s also how he met Seyna Wynn.

  At Feeney’s, Hugo told us that it started with a wisecrack from Seyna, who was in the ticket booth when he arrived for a late showing of The Bodyguard. “I wonder how much I can get from National Enquirer for telling them that the great Hugo Hunter watches wussy movies.”

  “I probably fell for her right there,” Hugo said. “All the girls at Billings Senior who wanted to date me, they were kissing my ass. I hated that. Seyna, she got tough with me. She had some moxie to her.”

  Soon enough, Hugo wasn’t buying movie tickets anymore, just waiting on a bench outside for Seyna’s shift to end so they could do what a goodly number of Billings kids have done for as long as a town has spilled out below the Rimrocks. You drive up to the top of the butte, overlooking the city lights below, and you find yourself a spot that belongs only to you, at least for a night, and you get busy being young and reckless.

  Seyna was a smart girl—a smart-ass, yes, but well educated, too. What she lacked was some direction. A year older than Hugo and already out of high school, she worked a mindless movie theater job as a protest against her father’s idea that she go east like her mother before her, pull down a degree from Smith College, and go on from there to the corporate world. The Wynns were, and remain, big movers in Billings. Samuel, her father, owns the Mercedes dealership and sits on a half-dozen boards that touch on damn near every aspect of civic life, and Barb, her mom, runs the city’s preeminent public relations firm. Seyna, following the playbook of disaffected youth clear back to time’s beginnings, rejected all of that. In Hugo, she found someone to tweak her old man, who was downright apoplectic at the idea of his well-groomed daughter ending up with a bastard son of the city’s gritty South Side. In Seyna, Hugo found someone who valued him outside his tightly controlled sphere of school, home, and boxing.

  “We were good for each other,” Hugo told us, and it struck me that he probably still believed this, despite everything that followed. Even so, Seyna and Hugo weren’t good for anyone else who cared about either of them.

  Frank’s reaction proved typically blunt: a girl could mess up everything. She could take Hugo’s mind, his legs (Frank, an old-school man if there ever was one, equated sex with depletion), his hunger, his edge. “I remember Frank telling me, direct quote, ‘The goddamn Beatles weren’t shit after Yoko came along,’ ” Hugo said. “And I told him, hey, at least John was getting some trim.”

  “You womenfolk do kind of ruin everything good,” I said, nudging Lainie.

  “I’ll remember that tonight when we get home,” she said.

  We all chuckled at that—even me, the guy who stood to lose the most—and then Hugo turned serious. “The first time Sam and I were alone, he offered me money to leave her be. Ten grand.”

  It sounds like something out of a bad TV movie, which I suppose is why it happens in real life. People see that kind of thing and then lean on it when their own sense of control is threatened. I’d never heard of the first offer of cash—it amazed me how, even now, new information about Hugo came to light—but I knew well the second one, a decade later, when Hugo was penniless and in recovery, and Sam Wynn dangled cash in exchange for his abdication of parental rights. I’ve taken a few trips around the sun and seen that people are mostly good and bad, rarely pure either way, but that move was unadulterated evil. Sam Wynn took what Hugo loved the most and needed the most and forced him to choose. When Hugo asked me what he should do, I told him that he needed money now but would want to know his boy forever. I told him that it sickened me that he even had to ask.

  “I can’t even—wow,” Lainie said.

  “I laughed at him,” Hugo said. “I laughed right in his face. I had these endorsements kicking in—I didn’t have the money yet, it was all in this trust for me, waiting till I graduated from high school. That was my deal with Grammy, but it was mine. I told him, ‘Dude, I’m going to make a million dollars. What do I need with ten grand?’ ”

  “Mark says you didn’t finish high school.” Damn, Lainie could be direct. Hugo couldn’t hide the wound, and she scrambled to set it right. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to make it sound so harsh.”

  “It’s OK.” Hugo was quiet now, his jovial retelling reduced to the stark realities of what actually happened. “No, I didn’t finish school. Only promise to Grammy I never kept. I had my eighteenth birthday in March, and we found out Seyna was pregnant in April. She made it clear that she’d keep the baby, which is what I wanted, too, and her folks told her that she wasn’t welcome if I was part of the deal.” His eyes drew back their focus, as if fixated on a spot miles from where we sat.

  For Lainie, and hell, for me, I finished the story. There was no way to get from there to where we were now without the last details of Hugo giving up on being a boy and facing up to being a man.

  “I got a call from Frank—it had to have been the first week in April, because I remember I was wrestling with our tax return—and he said, ‘We’re going out to Las Vegas to sign the contract on Hugo’s first fight.’ So I called Trimear and told him, and that was that. I started following this guy around.”

  I smiled at Hugo. He spread his arms wide as if to take in the whole room. “And look where it’s led us,” he said in that happy, booming voice of his. And then, just like that, he grew quiet and looked at the table.

  Lainie reached out and took Hugo’s hand and held it, her thumb working the grooves between his knuckles.

  21

  Night covered us on the drive back to Lainie’s place.

  “His life is a tragedy,” she said.

  I turned left on Main and headed for the Heights. I think a lot of people might skim the surface of Hugo Hunter and end up where Lainie did. Hugo inspired bleeding hearts. From where I sat, it was hard to be definitive about cause and effect. After a while, the disappointments—those of happenstance, and those of his volition—tended to run together.

  “In some ways, I suppose,” I said.

  “In every way. That story about her dad offering him ten thousand—”

  “Lainie, he took the money.”

  “Wait a minute. What? He said—”

  “Not the first time. Later. He was broke and in rehab, and Sam offered to pay his debts if he gave up his right to see Raj. So he did it.”

  I broke off what I wanted to say further about that subject in particular. It pissed me off at the time, and it sure as hell pissed me off later, when I’d have given anything to have a son I could bargain over. To talk about it would only introduce anger and confusion that I’d spent a good number of years burying. I instead made a straight line toward generalities.

  “Look, it’s just hard to be in the business of feeling sorry for Hugo,” I said, “because every piece of bad luck—and there’s been a lot—can be paired up with an instance where he just made a dumb decision for the wrong reasons, or made the right decision at the wrong time. I think Frank has him pegged right. He’s the kind of guy you’ll do something for again and again, because you genuinely love him, even when you know you’ll end up being disappointed eventually.”

  Lainie let go of my hand. “That’s pretty cynical.”

  I reached for her, but she was having none of it. Failing placation, I defended myself. “Well, I am cynical. Mark Westerly, cynic, glad to meet you.” I laughed. She didn’t. “And in Hugo’s case, it’s well earned.”

  “Show your work, then.”

  “Lains
, this is silly,” I said. “I’ve been around the block a few times with this guy. I probably got too close to him, to tell you the truth. He’s my friend. So’s Frank. I probably never should have let it come to that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I should have kept some distance, some detachment. I can’t be objective. Not about Hugo.”

  She stepped into that opening. “See? That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I interrupted, “but you’re not objective, either. You look at him and you see this lost kid, or maybe you see some chance to fix him. This kid, Lains, is thirty-seven years old, and he is where he is mostly because of his own screwups. But you—you think you can make it better somehow.”

  I bit the inside of my lip. I’d said too much, too harshly. I gripped the steering wheel hard and pulled into her subdivision.

  “I’m sad for you,” she said.

  “Oh, Jesus.”

  “No, really, I am. Aren’t you lucky that no one holds you to the standard you have for him?”

  “Oh, Jesus.”

  “Stop saying that.”

  “No, look.” I pointed dead ahead, at her car sitting in her driveway. Broken glass sparkled on the concrete, put there by holes blown into the back and side windows. I reached into my glove box and pulled out a flashlight, and we exited the car for a closer look.

  The front window of the house, a checkerboard of small panes, was dotted with entry holes. Lainie fumbled with her keys, trying to get the door unlocked. Once we were in, we found pellets scattered across the front-room carpet. Little lead pellets, like the ones for the air gun I’d bought my son on his eleventh birthday.

  “What the hell?” I said.

  Outside, it became obvious that the whole neighborhood had been hit. Lainie and I walked up and down her street, finding some of her neighbors outside in their pajamas, assessing the damage, as perplexed as we were. Others, we woke up when we saw what had happened to their cars.

  The knowledge that Lainie’s house wasn’t alone closed the case on one pressing question—who the hell had it in for her?—while inspiring another: What kind of jackass drives around shooting out car and house windows? There are some real knuckleheads in this town.

  I put in a call to the Herald-Gleaner and told Gregg Eddy, our nighttime cops reporter, that we’d counted in the neighborhood twenty-five car windows and about half that many houses shot up. Similar calls were coming from all over town, he said—West End, South Side, the central business district. Whoever was doing this, or the many whoevers, had gotten around that evening. “Quiet night up until about an hour ago,” Gregg said. “I don’t know if I can get up there, but mind if I use your numbers?”

  “Sure, go ahead,” I said. “Could be more damage on other streets, too. We haven’t been anywhere else.”

  “Cops’ll know. Thanks, Mark.”

  We sat on the front stoop, waiting for an officer to get to Lainie’s place. I told her I’d stick around to talk to the police. She told me to go home.

  “It’s been a long night,” she said. “I’d just as soon be alone.”

  “Look, if this is about—”

  “My heart hurts a little, Mark. I just need some time to think.”

  “What about the mess in the house? I’ll help you clean it up.”

  “No,” she said. “It’ll keep. The police might want to take a look. Go on home. OK? I’ll call you.”

  Fear took hold of me. I regretted my nonchalance about Hugo. She could see it didn’t reflect well on me. “Don’t shut me out. Not about tonight.”

  She smiled, only I couldn’t tell if it came from warmth or pity. My guts were playing Twister.

  She leaned over and kissed me. “You just need a little more work,” she said. “A little more time with me, and you’ll be a damn good man.”

  22

  I saw Marlene one time after she left. Her eminently fair division of the household left nothing to contest. We simply had to show up a single time in court to affirm that our wish was to not be married anymore—and in the absence of so many other wishes I’d have preferred, I didn’t see how I could deny Marlene that.

  She showed up early. I showed up early, too, because I knew she would, and I didn’t want to disappoint her again. We had a few minutes alone, together, in the anteroom. She clutched a small blue purse on her lap. I fiddled with my tie. I hate ties. She looked beautiful—just a little eyeliner and blush, something she rarely put on for me, enough to notice without being stopped in your tracks. I liked it.

  “You look nice,” I said.

  She choked more life out of that purse. “Thank you.”

  I didn’t say anything else. When it was time to enter the courtroom, we went in silence until compelled to speak. We said yes—or, rather, we said no to each other—and we signed our names and we left. She took the elevator. I took the stairs. She went out the north doors and to her car, I presume. I went out the west doors, crossed two streets, and poured myself into a seat at a bar. Frank and Hugo came around to check on me, and to buy me a few. Good friends, those guys.

  There’s the occasional night—it’s almost always a night—when I’ve had too much beer and not enough recent companionship, and I pull out the tattered memories of life with Marlene and rearrange them and almost convince myself that we had a chance. We didn’t, of course. The fights between us, from the start, exceeded all reasonable concept of proportion. They never turned physical. It might have been a relief if they had. Instead, we bypassed the usual ramping up—minor disagreement yields to raised voices yields to bitter recrimination—and proceeded directly to the ugliest, most damaging things we could say to each other. At times, it felt like a crazy-making game to me. Could I take away her will to battle me, then save everything by reversing course and telling her I loved her? Could I say I was sorry and make it stick? Whose feelings would be trampled first? Who would come home in the nastier mood and inflict it on the other? It was such an ugly brand of brinkmanship we played that each of us, on the eve of the wedding we had planned just so we could double down on our dysfunction, faced the concern of our respective best friends—but we insisted that yes, we wanted this marriage. We would be better. We would do better. That was the lie we told ourselves, and the lie we believed for a long time.

  That lie carried us, man. It carried us through my early years at the Herald-Gleaner, when we’d bridge the last week of a month with ramen noodles and found pennies, even as we took up battlements in our ceaseless fights about how thin our margins were. It carried us through the belief that a child would somehow bond us in all the ways we couldn’t manage on our own. When the child came and our division only grew, we lied to ourselves and said we just had to figure out how to make it work now that everything had changed. And we believed it anew.

  We couldn’t be saved. That’s the truth I came back to every time I thought about those years, which was far too often. I could rearrange the order of things, fixate on small moments of kindness and laughter and read something bigger into them, but the pathway just wasn’t there. I tried to tell myself that it was no one’s fault, that no one had to take the blame for it, but that was another lie.

  Von changed our marriage. That seems a self-evident point. Two plus one equals three, and the mathematics alone shift the variables. What I mean is that Von made it better, at least for Marlene. He made it tolerable for her, because he was the realization of the only dream she ever asserted for herself in our marriage. Thus, he made our existence together tolerable for me, too, because I was all about the path of least resistance. Where before I hung on out of some warped sense of testing my endurance, as if it would have been some mortal failure to give in and say to Marlene, “You know what, this isn’t working for us,” once Von came burping into our lives I stayed in because it required less effort than being honest with myself, or with her, or with our boy.
/>
  Had Von lived, had he come home that night he was so angry with me and I with him, had he snubbed me on the way to his room and kissed his mother and seen another sunrise, Marlene and I might be married still, living alone in the same bed and the same rooms.

  I still have two pictures of us. One we took in early 1996, when Von was three years old. He sits between us, smiling for the camera with an eagerness he probably never showed again, and Marlene and I sit there, close enough to touch, and we present our son to the world. We’re wearing sweaters, all three of us, but we look good—we’re not the garish families you see on the comedy websites, the ones with costumed dogs and pleather Santa suits. We match our son’s enthusiasm, and if someone were to draw an inference from that photograph, it would be of a happy, contented, growing family. We were none of those things, which just goes to show that you can never assume knowledge of what goes on in someone else’s house on the basis of how things appear from the outside.

  The other picture is just me and Marlene, 1985, the only one of our engagement photos that we had blown up so we could put it on the wall. She left it behind, so either she wanted me to have it or she couldn’t bear to keep it. I hung it in Von’s room so I wouldn’t have to see it, wouldn’t have to think about how different and promising the world looked to us back then. Everything that Von left behind went with Marlene. Where he played and slept became just a room, filled with boxes and items that didn’t fit in a house where I lived alone.

  That night, after I left Lainie at her place, the dream woke me up, and I could still catch the tendrils of it—Von and Hugo, wrestling on our living room floor, with me sitting in the recliner, frowning at them over my newspaper and Marlene in the kitchen, watching them in wonder, every bit of it playing in my head just as it actually happened. I shuffled out to the bathroom and put some water on my face, setting back the haze and emerging more in the moment. I walked down the hall and opened the door to Von’s room, and I flicked on the light. The bulb, in the socket for years and never engaged for most of them, flickered and went dark. I propped open the door and let the illumination from the hallway spill into the room, and then I stood before the much younger Marlene and me. In the half-light, I could make out only the outlines of our forms. Our teeth, though, couldn’t hide in the shadows. Clear as day, I could see the two upturned smiles, beaming and white and youthful. I tried to remember the day of the photo shoot, where we’d gone, the time of year, but the details had ridden out long ago. It was like digging through the morgue at work and reading a forgotten story I’d written years before and being surprised by how active and fresh it seemed. Like it had happened to someone else.