Free The Fallow Season of Hugo Hunter by Craig Lancaster

thicket of lanes below us, his hair blown back by the wind. What happened is that I went back to the house and lingered in the front yard, burning through my smokes and waiting for Von to come back to us. What happened is that he never did.
    “He got hit by a car,” I said. “Three days in the hospital. No brain activity. I wouldn’t let them let him go. I told the doctor I would fucking kill him if he let my boy die.”
    I sniffled. I stared at the ceiling in some futile hope that my filling eyes would drain back into my head. The rest came in a whisper. “You know how that goes. Calmer heads prevailed. They didn’t do anything I hadn’t already done.”
    Lainie squeezed my hand. “Mark, no. It’s not—”
    “Yes,” I said. “It goddamn sure is.”
    She moved into me, her hips and her hands and her head taking up the spaces adjacent to mine, until there was nothing between the end of me and the beginning of her. She cupped my neck in her hand and brought my head to her shoulder and I breathed her in, and then I broke down.
    The skateboard was fine, not a scratch on it. That night, my son lay crumpled and broken on some poor bastard’s lawn. We never brought him home, but the skateboard came back and got propped up in its usual spot in the hallway, because we were too overtaken by our grief to do anything else. Someone who divines meaning from mundane action might suggest that we put it there in some desperate hope of turning things back to that last moment when Von might have decided to stay, or I might have decided not to scold him the way I did, or Marlene, shouted into silence by me, might have intervened and saved us all. I have enough guilt and shame about all of that on my own. I didn’t need to objectify it.
    It was, simply, something he loved, and we loved him, and he was gone and it was still here. It was something h e’d left us. The same thing with his bedroom, just across from ours. In those blurred days after Von’s funeral, I’d find Marlene in there, sitting on the edge of his bed, staring at the walls. The sour stink of our adolescent boy lingered in that place. Sh e’d sit on the bed. I’d stand in the doorway. And silence and memory and the perpetual parsing of the things we should have said but didn’t or the things we shouldn’t have said but did—all that taunting shit gathered between us and carried us away from each other.

14
    Hugo rang my doorbell early on the morning of my next day off. It’s weird to say so, because Billings with its hundred thousand souls isn’t a particularly large town in the scheme of things, but seeing him there on my porch threw me for a loop, as if h e’d ventured into a foreign zone. He hadn’t been out this way since Von was still with us, since before Marlene left, and I realized I’d managed to put him in a box. If I were downtown or on the South Side, Hugo fit into the picture. Here, not so much.
    “Ho w’d you get here?” I asked him.
    “A buddy dropped me off. It’s cold, Mark. Can I come in?”
    “Christ, yes. Come on.”
    Hugo pushed into the living room, a place he knew well in some distant, other time. There was a rawness to his movement, an agitation. He didn’t sit. Instead, he ground a path into the carpet with a fast-twitch walk.
    “I don’t have much in the fridge,” I said. “I can scare up some coffee.”
    “No, thanks.” He didn’t look at me, but the pacing continued.
    “Have a seat,” I said.
    “In a minute.”
    I sat down. I thought maybe that might induce him. No dice.
    “Mark,” he said at last. “You know anything about books?”
    “Paper, binding, glue. Haven’t cracked one in who knows when.” I pointed at my bookcase, a static piece of furniture in my house these last few years.
    Hugo stopped and looked at me. “Huh?”
    “I’m just kidding.”
    He came over and sat down on the couch opposite me. Now I had his full attention, his eyes bearing down on me, sharp and focused. Intimidating, if you