The Kudzu Kid

by Darrell Laurant

  This was bad—and expensive—news for the companies that had to dispose of such inconvenient substances as solvents, paint sludge, transformer fluid, caustic chemicals and battery acid. But as far as the unscrupulous waste haulers were concerned, it was Prohibition all over again.

  “It’s gotten so it costs about a hundred bucks to get rid of a fifty-five gallon barrel of some of that stuff,” Castelli said. “A big tank truck? Ten grand. Nobody’s gonna pay that. They’ll just say ‘screw the EPA.’ But they’ll pay us twenty five per barrel and two grand a tanker—and trust me, that adds up. We can make ten tanker runs an hour, round-the-clock, we find the right place to go with them.”

  The crucial angle was always how to dump the evidence without getting caught. Some drivers hauled it south, down where the word hadn’t gotten to the yokels yet and they’d take anything into their landfills. Even that, though, was changing.

  “They’ve got this one dump around Richmond with these goddamn scanners,” Dom Davila said. “You take a load in, and they’re all over it with those things. It’s like going through an airport. Bring them some bad shit, and they’ll nail you. They’re handing out penitentiary time for this stuff now.”

  Everyone agreed that this was a golden-feathered goose with a limited life span, but one well worth plucking for the moment. They also agreed that the thing with Marty Ventura was a complete fiasco.

  “Should Marty, you know, answer for this?” a bull-necked soldier named Tony Ross asked.

  “Nobody feels worse about it than Marty,” Castelli replied. “It’s not his fault, really. Somebody went behind his back, and we’re thinking it might have been that Cuban gang or somebody like that. Not for any real reason, just for the pure joy of taking the legs out from under us. We’re gonna find out.”

  “We can’t blame Marty, he did his part. Of course, if anything like this happens again…”

  “We’ll make him buy a TV from Denny,” came a suggestion from the back of the store.

  The general laughter told Castelli that he’d kept them about as long as he could. In twos and threes, a few minutes apart, the group filtered out the back door and into the night. “Hey, Leo, you remember that newspaper guy, Fogarty?” somebody said. “The one who did the story on Marty that the DA leaked to him.”

  Castelli nodded.

  “I hear he got fired over it.”

  “Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy. What’s he gonna do now?”

  “Geez, I dunno, Leo. You wanna offer him a job?”

  “I hope the little prick hangs himself.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE PENTHOUSE

  It was obvious to everyone around him that Tucker Daniel no longer enjoyed running a weekly newspaper.

  Maybe he’d never enjoyed it, but he was too busy learning the business at first to think about that. The newspaper had been part of the package when he married Sarah Pitt Pearson, and it had been understood that she would pursue her art career and he would assume the day-to-day operations of the Southside Echo.

  That thought had appealed to him at first. A non-practicing attorney who had drifted into real estate, Daniel had done little to satisfy his wealthy Richmond parents’ expectations for him. A proud place on a newspaper masthead—even as the publisher of a four thousand-circulation weekly in backwater Randolph County—would be seen as a step forward.

  What he soon discovered, though, was that publishing on this level had little to do with addressing issues or shaping public policy. Certainly, it had little to do with making money. It had to do with hiring and firing advertising reps, scouring the dregs of the Randolph County labor pool for people capable of stamping labels and mailing out papers, repeatedly arranging for repairs to a decaying building and engaging in humiliating negotiations with utility companies and suppliers to avoid cutoff.

  Most days, Daniel was bored. Other days, he was harassed.

  He and Sarah rented one of those big houses on Jefferson Springs’ Main Street, but they also clung to their townhouse in Richmond’s West End. Since Calvin died, they had been returning there less and less.

  The newspaper repeatedly and cruelly sabotaged Daniel’s attempts at escaping on long weekends. It crept into his dreams and followed him to First Presbyterian every other Sunday, the grocery store and favorite restaurant.

  Gradually, he came to believe in the Southside Echo’s amiably self-effacing slogan: Nearly Everybody’s Community Newspaper. There were between fifty-eight hundred and six thousand county residents, and Daniel distributed twenty-five hundred Echoes every Wednesday. Considering that many of these copies were passed around among multiple readers, Nearly Everybody wasn’t too far off.

  Of course, some of the listed subscribers were dead, and Daniel had no idea what happened to those papers that were mailed off in their names. Other Echoes went out of state, to former residents who would presumably clip out items of interest. And then there had always been those who would buy the paper just so Echo Editor Calvin Hamer could elevate their blood pressure.

  “I like to read Calvin,” the owner of the video store up the street once told Daniel, “because he gets me so damn agitated.”

  But Calvin was gone now, and that left a gaping space in the Echo’s editorial content.

  The longtime editor had been an antidote to the horrors Randolph Countians saw on the nightly news, a boulder of conservative skepticism. The phrase that appeared most often in his columns and editorials was “Excuse me, but I just don’t understand…”

  And often, he didn’t. He didn’t understand why governments had to raise taxes—ever. He didn’t understand why the state highway department spent the time and money to build a bypass around Jefferson Springs. He didn’t understand why kids felt the need to take drugs, and why people in movies felt the need to remove their clothing. He didn’t understand environmentalists or feminists or affirmative action.

  Calvin felt that drug dealers should be executed and taxes should be rolled back and women should stay home instead of working. His editorials hummed with indignation whenever Congress seemed to threaten the tobacco industry, which was to Randolph County as coal mining was to West Virginia.

  Most weekday mornings, Calvin would spend several hours greeting his public at a table in the back of Sugar’s Restaurant, running a coffee tab with Sugar Davis, plying local citizens with cup after cup until they began to talk freely. He would lean back and smile when people congratulated him on his column or an editorial, the grin slowly overtaking his gaunt features, and he would tell them: “Well, I know y’all probably feel the same way.”

  Calvin Hamer had been the editor of the Southside Echo since 1943. That longevity alone gave him credibility among journalists across the state, and even the smug, patrician Richmond Times-Dispatch and the brash, citified Norfolk Virginian-Pilot would occasionally call him for advice or insights on matters concerning the remote Southside.

  Daniel had liked the old man, even as he fought frequent battles over some outrageous statement Calvin would insist on inserting into his Calvin’s Comments column. Yet in the five years Daniel had been involved with publishing the Echo, there had been four actual lawsuits and eleven legal threats, all but one aimed directly at the paper’s editor.

  The problem with Calvin was that age began to blur the line between what he said during his marathon coffee-fests at Sugar’s and what he said in print. If he thought a local government official was acting from crass self-interest, he would say so. And if he didn’t understand how that same official could suddenly afford a new car or an addition on his house, he would say that, too. Once, he turned his column over to a local fundamentalist preacher who speculated—complete with appropriate verses from the Book of Revelation—that the county school superintendent might be the Antichrist.

  “Freedom of religion,” Calvin told a stunned Daniel on that occasion. “Read your Constitution.”

  Calvin had been an English major at nearby Hampden-Sydney College, an all-male liberal arts
school, and he wrote with a primitive elegance. What he lacked, especially in his later years, was perspective. There were three kinds of people in Calvin Hamer’s world—crooks, Communists, and those who felt as he did.

  Week after week, Tucker Daniel would pick up a copy of the Echo on Wednesday morning with a feeling of dread. It didn’t matter that he may have argued successfully the day before against something Calvin wanted to write. As often as not, the old editor would have talked to the wrong person at Sugar’s soon afterward and rushed back across the street to type the inflammatory passages back in.

  His bond with the community had been tested by fire in the 1960s, when Calvin took some surprisingly liberal stands on race relations. For the most part, though, he had made his living by stirring the smoldering coals of Randolph County—its fears and dreams, all the old resentments. Daniel was more concerned with image and advertising.

  Fortunately, the publisher was able to retain a lawyer with a style that fit the Randolph County Way. Watkins Reese had extricated his employer from most of these “Calvin situations” not by force of legal argument, but by knowing something about the complainant that allowed for pre-emptive blackmail. If that didn’t work, he settled out of court. Once, he talked a particularly belligerent farmer into giving up his lawsuit in exchange for a year’s subscription.

  “But I want Calvin to deliver it personally,” the man added.

  So every Wednesday afternoon around four, Hamer would get up from his splintered desk and ancient typewriter—he defied modern technology until his dying day, getting secretary Brenda Peel to transcribe his typed copy into the Echo’s computer—and take a newspaper out to his former antagonist. Within a month, the two were friends.

  Calvin never married, maintaining his work and drinking habits into his late ‘70s. He died still protecting the flag and flue-cured tobacco and flailing out against Gorbachev, NOW (the National Organization of Witches), taxes, abortion, Asian cars, taking money out of the county’s general fund, and some said progress.

  And now, apparently, there was Eddie Fogarty. A Yankee. A young man in his twenties whose politics were unknown, whose past was a mystery, and whose relationship with the moss-backed good ‘ol boys populating Randolph County’s politics would be problematic, at best.

  As for Fogarty, he was tasting a cocktail mixed of anticipation and fear. He sensed a vacuum within which he could move at will, but he also knew Daniel was right—he didn’t know the landscape. It was as though he had been washed up on some unexplored island, and he felt an immediate need—despite his tiredness—to reconnoiter.

  “Staff of four, you said?” he asked Daniel at the conclusion of their interview.

  The publisher nodded.

  “Not counting Brenda, right?”

  Brenda Peel had been the first person Fogarty met in Jefferson Springs. She sat in the outer lobby area, fielding incoming phone calls, leaving often-unintelligible messages for absent employees and eavesdropping on conversations. A large, amorphous woman with blonde-gray hair and distinct rouge spots on her cheeks; she was wearing a plaid dress and spoke in a braying voice that scraped across his nerves.

  All the time Brenda was waiting for Daniel to emerge from the bowels of the old building, she was shifting her glance between Fogarty’s face and his empty ring finger. She looked hungry, which made Fogarty shudder.

  “No, Brenda has her own valuable function,” Daniel said. “Her job is to disconnect people who call in, and she does it very well.”

  Now that Fogarty had agreed to work there and Daniel had agreed to hire him, the publisher’s voice had changed from wary and distant to a long-suffering, one-of-the-boys tone, as if he were discussing a bad round of golf. It may have been meant to make Fogarty feel at ease, but it only made him feel trapped.

  At least I’ll find out the real story, Fogarty thought.

  “So, who are the four?” he asked again, growing slightly impatient.

  “Would you care for a drink, Mr. Fogarty?” Daniel asked. “I’ve got some bourbon in the drawer.”

  Fogarty hadn’t sipped room-temperature liquor from a paper cup since he was fifteen and underage in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, but he found himself saying: “Well, maybe just a little.”

  “You were saying, about my staff?” Fogarty asked again after he’d taken the first swallow.

  His staff. It sounded bizarre, as if the two men had just completed a deal to transfer the ownership of slaves.

  “Well, the one who’s been here the longest is Claude Kizer, the photographer.”

  “Is he any good?” Fogarty asked.

  “Claude has been here a long time,” Daniel said. “He really knows his way around the area.”

  “Then…he’s not any good?”

  “Claude is…experienced,” Daniel said. “He has his moments. You’ll see.”

  His new boss would make a good politician, Fogarty decided.

  “Then you’ve got Whitt and Regina and, uh…”

  He seemed to be thinking. Fogarty found that ominous. How hard could it be to remember four people?

  “…and Zoe. How could I forget Zoe?”

  Daniel took a drink of Jim Beam and was silent, as if Fogarty’s question had been answered in full. This was like interrogating a suspect, Fogarty thought.

  “What do they do?” Fogarty wanted to know, almost belligerently. He, too, returned to the bourbon cup.

  “Okay,” Daniel said. “Whitt handles sports—I guess you’d call him the sports editor—takes some photos, covers police and courts and writes features. Regina does town council, Meet Your Neighbor, Obituaries, and the Cook of the Week. I’ve been taking school board and the board of supervisors and sometimes the planning commission. Everybody uses a camera. You will, too.”

  Great, Fogarty thought glumly.

  “And Zoe? What does Zoe do?”

  “Zoe writes poetry.”

  “Poetry?”

  “Yeah. It’s good, really. Well, sort of.”

  “Does she do anything else?”

  “Sometimes. Not usually, though.”

  Staff of three, Fogarty thought. Four, counting me. But that was okay—the fewer people in the way of his comeback, the better.

  “Where are these people now?” Fogarty asked.

  By this time, Daniel had gestured toward him with the bourbon bottle and he had stretched out his cup for the second time.

  “Let’s see. Whitt’s probably out looking for features, and Regina has her cook interview today. I don’t know where Zoe is.”

  The paper was pasted up on Tuesday nights, the same night the board of supervisors and town council met on alternate weeks. In effect, Jefferson Springs had a dual government—one body for town issues, another governing countywide.

  “Law enforcement?” Fogarty asked.

  “The sheriff’s name is W. W. Inge. He comes across like the old Dodge sheriff, but he’s a smart cookie. Very shrewd. Okay to deal with if you play by his rules.”

  Daniel finished his second cup of bourbon and shoved himself up from the desk.

  “How about the fifty-cent tour?”

  There wasn’t much to see, and it was obvious to Fogarty that nobody here really gave a damn. The ratty red carpet was speckled with random strips of waxed copy, some of which attached themselves to his feet as he walked over them. The paste-up tables were sticky with old wax and scored with thousands of small cuts from Exact-O knives.

  “And here’s your office,” Daniel said, leading him to a room only slightly larger than his cubicle at the Progress. “It used to be Calvin’s. He died in here, in fact. Brenda found him when she came in one morning, then took a week’s worth of sick days.”

  “Thanks for sharing that with me,” Fogarty said.

  His predecessor’s old typewriter had been shoved to one side of the desk, replaced by a computer terminal. The walls were bare, and an unsteady tower of cardboard boxes loomed in one corner.

  “What’s in the boxes?” Fogarty want
ed to know.

  “I dunno. Calvin’s stuff. He didn’t believe in files. One of the things you’ll have to do is to go through all of that.”

  The office was only enclosed on three sides, and there was no door.

  “I guess the door to my office is always open, huh?” Fogarty said.

  Daniel, lost in his thoughts, didn’t smile.

  “We’ll get you a nameplate made up,” he told his new editor. “Let me know how you want it to read.”

  Edward K. Fogarty: Chump, Fogarty thought to himself.

  Daniel occupied one of the other enclosed spaces, and his office did have a door. The third room was occupied by stacks of newspapers and a police scanner, which was silent.

  “Where do you keep your back issues?” Fogarty asked.

  “I’ll show you,” Daniel said, heading toward the rear of the building.

  At the Jersey Progress, a trio of librarians entered every staff-written article into a computer database and then scanned the entire edition onto microfiche. Each clipping was cross-indexed by reporter, date and subject, and the librarians never failed to find Fogarty exactly what he was looking for within minutes. The reporters and editors referred to this library, using universal newspaper slang, as “the morgue.”

  What passed for the Southside Echo’s morgue was more like Potter’s Field. It was another large room, half-filled with stacks of newspapers that appeared to Fogarty to be random. “How do you find a particular story from, like, a couple of years ago?” Fogarty asked.

  “You spend a few moments in silent prayer,” Daniel said, a vestigial smile playing over his lips, “and then you go hunting.”

  When the tour was over, reality settled down upon Eddie Fogarty like tobacco dust from the ancient beams of the Echo office. He was not only going to have to work in this town, he realized suddenly, but live here.