The Fallow Season of Hugo Hunter

by Craig Lancaster

  “So Frank never found out?” she said.

  “No.”

  I’d filled her in on the aftermath of Hugo’s horrifying act, about going back to my room, unable to breathe, trying to pretend like I had no idea what was happening three floors up, what Frank was discovering, what machinations had been set in motion. Frank bought the story that Hugo had tripped and fallen, and the compound fracture and necessary medical attention had served to keep us in London for a few extra suffocating days before we came home.

  The fight, of course, was canceled. Rhys Montrose held a press conference and praised Hugo, said he would be more than happy to give him another shot when he healed up, but that never happened. Three months later, Montrose made a mandatory defense against Mozi Qwai and lost by a second-round knockout—nice guy though he was, Montrose was surely a pushover—and Qwai went on to seven successful defenses of the belt before moving up in weight and capturing that title, too. Meanwhile, Hugo dealt with the myriad problems that were only just coming into view.

  It’s strange to think of that. Had Hugo beaten Montrose (as we surely knew he would) he’d have been compelled to face Qwai at the peak of his powers, not as the compromised but capable fighter he was seven years later, when they really did go the twelve rounds.

  What I hadn’t told Lainie, and what dug at me now, was what London did to me. Or, rather, what I did to myself in London.

  She poured the eggs into the melted butter in the pan, and a sizzle went up.

  “I’m a fraud,” I said.

  She ran a spatula through the eggs, beginning the scramble. “Don’t be silly.”

  “I am. There are lines you don’t cross, Lains, and I crossed all of them that night. I became part of the news, and then I helped bury a story.”

  “You tried to do right by someone you care about.”

  “Caring is a crossed line, too.”

  She put a wicked stare on me. “See, when you say things like that, I’m just not sure what to think.”

  I flushed with stupidity. I was beginning to find in Lainie a strange dichotomy. As my love for her grew, so too did my recognition that she wouldn’t let me get away with blatant overstatement without showing my work. There would be no unsettled resignation from her. Accountability sucks.

  “What I mean is, it’s a slippery slope, getting that close to someone you’re covering. Feeling the way I did—I do—about Hugo paved the way for me to compromise myself in a moment like that. I didn’t do him any favors, and I discredited myself, even if I’m the only other one who knows.”

  Lainie slid the eggs onto my plate and then pushed a cup of coffee across the bar to me. “You helped him avoid humiliation.”

  “But I didn’t do him any favors. It wasn’t a one-time thing. A year later, Frank pulls him out of a crack house in LA—”

  “You couldn’t have known that would happen,” she said.

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  She came around the bar and sat next to me with her own plate. She leaned in and nuzzled me under the chin, and I slipped an arm around her back and pulled her in. It was just her and me and the Aqua Velva leavings of her dead husband.

  “It matters,” she whispered. Then, a little louder, this: “You can make yourself crazy, refiguring it all after the fact. You did what you thought was best at the time. You helped a friend. That’s what matters.”

  Just before six a.m., as the neighborhood began to stir, we crawled back into bed. Lainie had a day off that she pronounced fit for all-hours sleeping. I had one hell of a tequila-induced headache I needed to burn off before reporting to the Herald-Gleaner in the afternoon.

  I made like a cocoon around Lainie, our naked bodies fitting together as if our symmetry had been a grand design. I grew hard even at her casual touch. She felt me and said, against the current of onrushing sleep, that she’d be ready in a few hours. Not more than a minute later, I listened as she purred in slumber, and I nestled my chin into her neck and breathed her in.

  It’s not that she didn’t make sense. She always did. But her sensibility was underpinned by a practical way of looking at things that just didn’t have much currency in the house-of-mirrors realm of journalism. I’d been conditioned to not express opinions on politics, not cheer for a good sports play, not take sides—indeed, in some endeavors I was compelled to present the dissenting side of incontrovertible facts. This is the folly of objective journalism as practiced at most newspapers, and certainly at unsophisticated rags like the Billings Herald-Gleaner. It attempts to subvert human nature.

  And yet, even if I give myself a pass on all that, I can’t say that what I did in London came entirely from a place of pity and affection for Hugo. Were that so, I might have assimilated it and moved on, in my own head, years earlier.

  The truth is, I did it for me as much as I did it for him. Maybe more.

  Had the full story emerged about Hugo in London, had he faced the shame and ridicule of a positive drug test, his career might well have ended there. Boxing forgives a lot—rapists and murderers are welcomed back if they can still throw a punch—but Hugo’s circumstances were different. Frank, I’m certain, would have quit him on the spot, appalled at the reality that Hugo could undermine all of their hard work in a single night. Back home in Billings, Aurelia’s tentative peace with her grandson’s brutal sport would have been in jeopardy, and among us all, only she had the unilateral power to move Hugo to action—or, in this hypothetical case, inaction. When we found out the extent of Hugo’s problem, when the destruction wrought by it was just as crippling but less collateral, Aurelia marshaled the support that helped him through rehabilitation and recovery. She recognized that the attendant activities of Hugo’s sport—the training, the eating right, the focus of preparation for an opponent—mitigated against idle hands, and she gave her blessing and commandment for him and Frank to continue. A lot had gone by the wayside by then. But in London, a few years earlier? I don’t know. Aurelia might not have countenanced that.

  As for me, I’ve come to the conclusion that I didn’t want it to be over.

  If Hugo had been done, I’d have been forced to trade in expense-account dinners and Las Vegas and London for a grimy desk at the Herald-Gleaner and Friday night football games. I’d have had to listen to Trimear curse his Excel files and watch Landry sleep through a shift and laugh at Raymont’s jokes. I’d have had to sit through interminable conference room meetings with a cavalcade of editors, each one convinced that we were doing it all wrong and that he could fix it, and each one just imposing new and constricting policies upon us. I’d have had to eat sheet cakes marking smarter colleagues’ departures. I’d have had to stand in the newsroom and applaud politely while the publisher handed out logo T-shirts when we came in under budget for the fiscal year.

  I’d already had to do a lot of that stuff, because Hugo wasn’t always in training, but I certainly dreaded the thought of more.

  And now, as I listened to the rising and falling breath of the woman I loved, I could be honest with myself: a sidelined Hugo meant I would be at home more often, forced to confront the emptiness of my life with Marlene and my distance from my son. Marlene often accused me of believing that neglect could solve anything, and my disagreement with her on that point came out in bullheaded ways. Why wouldn’t it? She was right.

  By protecting Hugo that night, I’d protected myself from unpleasantness, from accountability, from reckoning. And now, Hugo’s fighting days surely done and Lainie pulling at threads I’d left alone for years, everything I’d held at bay was coming for me.

  I sank my head into the nape of Lainie’s neck.

  How could she not see that I was a coward?

  26

  A couple days after Cody Schronert was shuffled off to jail, I came into the office after a track meet and headed to my desk to type up my story. A better one was already brewing in the newsroom. Sam Landry
caught me coming in the door and filled me in.

  “Ace Schronert is suing that guy you talked to, that gun-nut homeowner.”

  “Why?”

  “Emotional trauma and distress, he says. He filed a suit saying that the guy—what’s his name? Bisquick or something?—”

  “Bispuppo.”

  “Right. Yeah, anyway, Schronert says that when the guy used that machine gun or whatever, he inflicted emotional distress on his kid. Suing him for three-hundred grand. Can you believe that?”

  It was all too easy to believe, sadly, but that didn’t do much to short-circuit the anger I felt rising in me. Artie Bispuppo didn’t strike me as the most rational son of a bitch in the world, but he was a decent guy who’d done what all of us wish we could do to a petty criminal. He’d caught them in the act and brought humiliating justice raining down. Now Ace Schronert, every bit the thug case his son was, was looking to make a quick buck off him.

  “Who’s writing the Sunday column?” I asked. A prime piece of the biggest sports section of the week went to the Herald-Gleaner’s sportswriters in a rotation—a full length-of-the-page strip of newsprint to make our case for something. All I knew was that I didn’t have the duty this weekend, but now I damn sure wanted it.

  “Raymont, I think,” Landry said.

  I went across the room and settled into my chair.

  “Hop,” I said to Raymont. “What are you writing this week?”

  He took off his headphones. The guy listened to Johnny Cash continually while at work. Better than listening to Trimear, I supposed.

  “I don’t know, Mark. Maybe something on the redistricting in Class C.”

  “Can I take your spot?”

  Raymont looked relieved by the request. One more thing he wouldn’t have to do. He nodded at Trimear at the adjacent desk, across from me. “Ask Gene.”

  “Gene?” I said.

  “I’m more interested in your story tonight.” He glanced at the clock above my head. “Getting late.”

  “Fifteen minutes and it’s yours,” I said. “Can I have the spot?”

  He sighed. His head bobbed on that spastic neck of his. “Sure.”

  I turned my track story around in twelve minutes, a story I’d written a thousand times before. Only the names and the numbers change. Once I got the all-clear from Trimear that it was on the page, I set to writing the Sunday column that Raymont had gracefully ceded to me, and I zeroed in on my targets: Case “the Ace” Schronert and his boy, Cody.

  Before I commenced with ripping, I considered whether I ought to acknowledge that Cody Schronert and I had some history, a past that informed how I viewed him and gave me all the reason I ever needed to consider him a mindless little punk. A few years earlier, when he was still attending Billings Senior, I’d been at a practice to talk to Mack Hargroves, the football coach, for a story on the prevalence of wing-T offenses in the state. I remember that specifically because we were talking about Schronert—Hargroves going on expansively, the way he tended to, and me with my head buried in my notebook, taking down his dripping bits of wisdom—when a thrown football hit me in the back of the head. I wheeled around, dumbfounded, while Hargroves fetched the ball, pitched it back, and said, “You guys be careful now.” I looked at the group of kids, and there was Cody Schronert, staring at me with this shit-eating grin on his face.

  I turned back to Hargroves and tried to pick up our conversational thread, and bam—I’m hit again, behind the knees.

  This time, Hargroves was pissed. “Damn it, Cody, I told you to be careful.” I stared at the kid, and he just looked back at me, that grin never leaving his face. I knew. He knew I knew. And he didn’t give a good goddamn.

  It bothered me. It still bothers me. I took it because—here’s that conditioning thing again—that’s what I do. I’m not the story, and I don’t intend to become the story by amping up a tense situation. I’ve had athletes stand as close as possible to me, lean in, breathe on me, and tell me I’m shit. Scream at me. It happens to all of us, eventually. In every case, I just delivered my words a little flatter, a little more monotone, a little quieter. I’m not the story.

  But I’m also not some punk-ass kid’s plaything.

  I wondered if I should acknowledge, in print, that I hated Cody Schronert. And then I decided the hell with it. If I wrote this thing the way I intended, there’d be little doubt about my feelings on the matter of Cody or his bottom-feeding daddy.

  27

  If I’m going to call Gene Trimear a ham-handed hack—and I am, because he is—then I also have to give him credit where it’s due. He wrote a corker of a headline for my Sunday column. Everything else related to it turned out to be a disaster, of course, but the headline was a thing of beauty.

  A Dummy and His Dad: Misadventures of Cody, Case Schronert

  By MARK WESTERLY

  Herald-Gleaner Staff

  If you’re looking for a good example of the difference between class and crass in sports today—indeed, in any walk of life—you could do no better than one right here in Billings.

  Back in February, we all got quite a jolt when Cody Schronert, a former Billings Senior High School running back, beat Olympic hero Hugo Hunter in a boxing match at the Babcock Theatre. Hunter hasn’t fought since, and it seems a better-than-even bet that he never will again.

  But let’s take a look at where those two are today:

  Cody Schronert, 21, sits under house arrest, charged in a three-day vandalism spree that did wide property damage across Billings and gripped the city in fear.

  Hugo Hunter, 37—and believe me, that 37 matters, as the 21-year-old version of him would have had no problems with the likes of Cody Schronert—can be found most any night of the week at Feeney’s, the pub owned by his former manager, Frank Feeney, where he entertains diners with tales of his life in the ring.

  Affable despite a career’s worth of heartache and a fortune lost, Hunter has the good sense to know that he was given an athletic gift, and though he certainly squandered some of his opportunities along the way, he is proud of what he’s done and willing to share it with the people of this city he loves.

  Cody Schronert has never wanted for anything. He was a child of privilege and is now a man of low character—and that’s true regardless of whether he’s found guilty of the crimes with which he’s charged.

  He’s a bad apple. And if you want to know why, look at the tree.

  Schronert’s father, Case “the Ace” Schronert, is this city’s most aggressive personal-injury attorney. If you see an ambulance in Billings, you’re unlikely to have to look long before you see Case Schronert’s Mercedes in tow, chasing down another payday. It’s hard to move around this town without seeing one of his billboards. And that’s fine, as far as it goes. It takes all kinds to make a society, and Case Schronert is happy to be a bottom-feeder, so we’re probably all better off letting him be just that. I suspect we can all agree that it’s a little unseemly to profit from others’ misery, but if this guy weren’t doing it, no doubt someone else would.

  The problem is when Case Schronert flexes his ill-formed legal muscles on behalf of his immature son, and in so doing targets someone who is a productive member of our society.

  By now, you’ve surely read about Case Schronert’s $300,000 lawsuit against Artie Bispuppo, the Billings homeowner who brought Cody Schronert and his accomplices (alleged) to justice with his own legally purchased and legally fired gun. If that lawsuit doesn’t make you sick, on a basic level, then I don’t want to know you.

  Let’s be clear: Artie Bispuppo did what any of us would have done under similar circumstances. Have you ever come out of a store to find your car keyed by some miscreant? What did you say to yourself when that happened? Oh, if I’d only been there. Yes. It’s what we all want: to hold someone accountable for his bad acts.

  That’s what Artie Bispuppo
did. This city ought to celebrate him for it.

  Instead, Case Schronert wants to take $300,000 from him. For inflicting “emotional distress” on his conscience-less son.

  It’s a travesty.

  As for Cody Schronert, I’d suggest an immediate change of behavior and an infusion of humility and grace.

  If he needs lessons, he can wander down to Feeney’s and consult with Hugo Hunter.

  After the case is resolved, of course. Until then, he can’t leave the house.

  Billings has never been so fortunate.

  I’ll cop to it: that last line gave me pause. Even for a bona fide critic of Cody Schronert, which I certainly was, it seemed a bit of undue celebration of someone else’s bad circumstance. In the end, I left it for two reasons. First, I wasn’t able to achieve objectivity where the Schronerts were concerned (interestingly enough, a point the Diploma would soon be making to me). Second, I figured if it struck Trimear badly, he’d just cleave it out of there. He’d certainly had no previous compunction about manhandling my work.

  The morning the column hit the streets, my phone started ringing, and it didn’t stop for more than a few minutes until early afternoon. Lainie came over with a box of doughnuts and coffee, and then she let me take her in the bedroom and do as I would—not a bad way to mark a Sunday morning. My e-mail in-box was jumping, too. The only dissent came from Case Schronert, who suggested, in a way that was just lawyerly enough to not be construed as an overt threat, that he would even things up. The key phrase he used was “assassination of character,” and let me tell you, it was no easy trick to keep myself from making an observation about needing the presence of character first.

  About the only person I didn’t hear from was the Diploma, and that’s how I knew I’d landed myself in a spot of trouble.

  It was worth it.

  Sure enough, just before noon on Monday I was summoned to the Herald-Gleaner for a chat with the Diploma and managing editor Mike “the Drone” Lindell. The Diploma’s response was a terse “no” when I asked if Trimear would be there, and strange as it sounds, that scared me as much as anything. Trimear was a mostly useless human being, but he did have some value in explaining to overly curious executives just what it was that the sports department did, our rituals and idiosyncrasies. I’d lost count of the number of people who’d occupied the Diploma’s office and wanted, among their first acts, to abolish the annual NCAA basketball tournament pool. Something happens to a journalist when he’s elevated into executive-level leadership: it’s as if he forgets all the irreverent humor and grab-ass that goes on in a newsroom and suddenly wants to run the place like a damned bank. Trimear had talked a succession of executives out of acts that would have obliterated morale even more than the general tenor of the business was already managing to do. I probably should have been more grateful for that.