The Kudzu Kid

by Darrell Laurant

  “Boy, you just jump right into it, don’t you?” he said.

  “C’mon,” Fogarty said. “He doesn’t want his people to have to deal with a lot of press? What kind of crap is that?”

  “Let me give you a couple of pieces of advice,” Daniel said, avoiding Fogarty’s gaze by keeping his eyes on the thin morning traffic along Main Street. “One, don’t get yourself on the sheriff’s bad side. He helps us out; so if he wants to feel like he’s doing us a big favor, let him.”

  “Two, don’t forget that this is a weekly newspaper. That means we print once a week, on Wednesday. This is going to be hard for you, coming from a daily with a news website, but there’s going to be times when you’ll know about something two days before anybody else, and they’ll still beat you with their Sunday or Monday edition.”

  “So it doesn’t matter all that much if the dispatchers don’t tell us something right away.”

  He looked away from the windshield and stared directly at Fogarty.

  “If you can’t deal with that, you might consider looking for employment elsewhere.”

  This was a big change from Pat Donnelly, Fogarty thought. When Donnelly finished reaming you out, you were either ready to take a swing at him or burst into tears. Daniel was almost pleasant about it—even the part about “looking for employment elsewhere” was delivered more as a helpful suggestion than a threat.

  “I guess I don’t have any choice but to deal with it, do I?” Fogarty said.

  “It’s not all bad,” Daniel told him. “Like we talked about before, the other media doesn’t get in here all that much. They don’t have regular bureaus out here in the boondocks, and most of the time they’ll just pick up on what we write. If there’s a big fire or a tornado or a murder down here, they’ll know—and chances are, we’ll get beat.”

  “You have tornados?” Fogarty asked.

  “Only every couple of weeks,” Daniel said, his smile signaling that the lecture was over.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ARCHIE, BUDDHA AND SUGAR

  Archie’s Place was a country store forced into a shotgun marriage with a modern convenience mart. The parking lot was gravel, the gas pumps modern, and the plump cashier totaled up her sales on a hand calculator before pecking away at an ancient cash register.

  “That came with the store,” said owner and county supervisor Archie Edmonds, noticing that Fogarty was staring at the register. “I’ll bet you don’t see many of those where you come from. My employees—that’s my daughter, my son-in-law and their two daughters—are always after me to modernize, but I can’t bring myself to get rid of that old register. Sentimental value, I guess.”

  The display of in-store items seemed ruled more by chaos than convenience. A large wheel of jaundiced cheese sat out on the counter, with a triple row of movie videos behind it. Cans of collards and mustard greens had been stocked next to Hamburger Helper. Shaving cream an arm’s length from bottles of cheap wine.

  A tall, cadaverous man, Edmonds wore a frayed checkered shirt and gray work pants and spoke in the high nasal voice of an old-time country singer. He looked at his visitors expectantly, as if he were hosting them at his house.

  “Something to eat?” he asked. “How about a big hunk of this cheese? Or…we’ve still got a couple of sausage biscuits made up.”

  “No thanks,” Fogarty said, having noticed a pair of flies not so discreetly mating atop the cheese. “I think I might get a drink, though. It’s hot out there.”

  He walked over to the standup cooler, fished out a Mountain Dew, and returned to the counter.

  “How much?” he asked.

  “Aw, it’s on me,” Edmonds said. “You work for the Echo, your money’s no good in here.”

  Fogarty took a deep breath.

  “I don’t mean to be rude,” he said, “but I never take anything free from anybody. It’s because…well, you know, once you start with something small, like a soda…”

  Edmonds looked startled, and then a smile exploded across his long, homely face.

  “Well, in that case, you owe me four dollars.”

  Now, it was Fogarty’s turn to look startled. Edmonds laughed, a Rhode Island Red cackle.

  “Just kidding,” he said, “Make that fifty cents—and it’s nice to find a man with integrity.”

  Walking back across the gravel parking lot to the Blazer, Daniel sent Fogarty another disapproving stare.

  “I fucked up…excuse me, messed up… again, huh?” Fogarty said.

  “Eddie,” Daniel said patiently, “this isn’t New Jersey. People are friendlier here. Just because somebody offers you a soda doesn’t mean you’re on his payroll. You’ve got to relax a little bit.”

  “What did he mean, our money’s no good in there?” Fogarty asked warily

  Daniel laughed.

  “That’s another Southern characteristic,” he said. “People say things they don’t really mean, just to be sociable. You’ll have a lot of folks telling you, ‘Come on by the house and see us any time,’ but you’d better call them first. And I guarantee if you went into Archie’s and wanted to buy something over a dollar or two, your money’d be just fine.”

  At least Fogarty was beginning to get a sense of Jefferson Springs’ physical layout, if not its curious and alien culture. The main road, US 58, veered north of town by a mile and a half, but was lined with businesses, including a Hardee’s. Anything out there was “out on the bypass.” The main business district was only about five blocks long, Main Street. How original, Fogarty thought. Serving as its spinal column, Lee and Randolph streets bisecting it at two-block intervals. Behind the row of buildings that included the Echo was the Norfolk Southern tracks. Jefferson Springs Town Council held its meetings in a small brick structure one hundred yards from the right-of-way, Daniel told Fogarty, and meetings had to be interrupted whenever a train went past.

  “They even write it into their minutes,” Daniel said. ‘“Brief recess,’ it will say, ‘for train.’”

  Brick was the building material of choice in Southside Virginia—dark-red or tan, depending upon its origin. The soil was brick-colored, as well, and the area was numbingly flat.

  “How hot does it get here in July and August?” Fogarty asked as they passed from the eighty-five degrees of late morning to the chill inside Booker Motors.

  “You’ll get used to it,” Daniel said, adroitly dodging the question.

  H. T. Booker owned Booker Motors, and he was quick to tell Fogarty that he sold more Fords than any other dealership in three counties. He was also a county supervisor—the chairman, as it turned out. Fogarty took an instant dislike to the man, who had three chins and rumbled, “Just call me ‘Buddha.’”

  Unlike Archie Edmonds, who seemed content to chat with Daniel and Fogarty all day, Buddha Booker was more interested in maintaining his three-county supremacy. After a fifteen-minute meet-and-greet interrupted by three phone calls, the big man told Daniel, “Tucker, I’d love to spend more time with y’all, but I got cars to sell.”

  “Well, I just wanted to introduce you to Eddie,” Daniel said, “and maybe find out what’s on the agenda for Tuesday’s meeting.”

  Booker made a face that was truly unpleasant, and ran one hand over his close-cropped black hair.

  “Same ol’ horseshit, Tucker,” he said. “Additions to the school budget. The sheriff wants another patrol car. And the gawdamned landfill. You ain’t getting any big headlines out of us this week.”

  “What about the landfill?” Fogarty asked.

  “Tell you what,” Booker replied. “You come by and see me any other time, and I’ll fill you in. Maybe we can have lunch. But right now…”

  “You’ve got cars to sell,” Fogarty said.

  “You damn right,” said Booker, waddling off in the direction of his next quarry.

  Finding County Administrator Johnnie West, Commonwealth’s Attorney Barney Knight and Randolph County attorney G. W. “Grits” Hinton proved easier than Fogarty had im
agined. They were all at Sugar’s, in the same rear booth, when Fogarty and Daniel walked in.

  Sugar’s, Calvin Hamer’s former haunt, sat diagonally across Main from the Echo office. It was where Echo employees got their morning coffee, breakfast biscuits, lunch, and sometimes their supper. And since it was within walking distance of the county office building, it also fed many of the people whom Eddie Fogarty would be writing about.

  County Administrator West looked up from his hot roast beef sandwich, saw Daniel standing uncertainly near the doorway—it was twelve-fifteen, and every booth and table were taken—and waved him over.

  “Why don’t you squeeze on in here, Tucker?” West said, shimmying across the cracked leather of his booth. “And your partner can pull up a chair.”

  West looked to be in his mid-forties, with a ruddy complexion and graying-blond hair swept back on top and curling defiantly down his neck. His nose had been broken at least once and there was scar tissue over one eyebrow, but the county administrator had been described by at least one female county employee as “ruggedly handsome.”

  “I understand you’re the new Calvin,” he said to Fogarty—not a question, but a statement.

  “You got it,” Fogarty said. “A lot of people have already told me I look like him.”

  West and his dinner companions all laughed.

  “I’d say you got a little more hair,” said Grits Hinton, whose own head was covered by a rather obvious toupee, “and you’d have to kill a fifth of bourbon a week for the next ten years to get the proper number of red veins in the nose. Right, Johnnie?”

  “I take it Calvin was no stranger to John Barleycorn?” Fogarty said.

  “Actually, Jack Daniels,” Hinton said. “But he was a good man, and a good newspaper man.”

  “The most principled man I ever met in my life,” West said. “Calvin’s word was gold, and he wasn’t scared of nobody. Get Daniel to tell you the story about the night the Klan paid him a moonlight visit.”

  “Mr. Fogarty’s got principles, too,” Daniel said. “He wouldn’t let Archie buy him a soda today.”

  “I guess you can’t be too careful, can you?” Barney Knight said. “First a soda, and the next thing you know, Archie will be sending a hooker over to the Echo office.”

  “They have hookers in Randolph County?” Fogarty asked, intrigued.

  “Only one,” Knight said, “and she’s booked until next February.”

  Again, general laughter swept the table.

  This was a table Sugar Davis would wait on personally. A tall woman with hair a color of red unknown in nature, she had been standing by with her order pad, listening to the conversation.

  “Barney, you’re gonna give this young man the wrong idea about our town,” she told Knight. “You’ll get his hopes up, and then he’s gonna be disappointed.”

  She turned to Fogarty.

  “I do have a barbecue special that’s sinfully delicious, though,” she said.

  “She doesn’t tell that to just anybody,” West said with a grin. “I’ll bet she’s offering you some from her private stash.”

  Fogarty ordered a cheeseburger, instead, hoping to stay on familiar ground—only to be startled when the burger arrived a few minutes later laden with lettuce, tomato, mayonnaise, slaw and a dollop of chili.

  “That’s a Sugarburger,” explained Barney Knight. “I hope you have access to bathroom facilities for the rest of the afternoon.”

  As they ate, Daniel looked around the room and pointed a few of the other diners out to Fogarty.

  “There’s Dolan Sawyer, the town mayor,” he said, “and Bobby Hobbs, the animal control officer…”

  “Better known as ‘Schnauzer Hobbs,’” Knight chimed in, “because an animal of that breed once bit him in a rather embarrassing place while resisting arrest.”

  Fogarty made tentative arrangements to meet with West and Knight at another time. “After eating that burger, you’re going to be too busy to meet with us today,” Knight said as they got ready to leave. Daniel laid a small wad of bills on the scarred wooden surface of the booth and headed for the door.

  “It’s okay if I buy you lunch, isn’t it?” he said to Fogarty.

  “Any time. My principles don’t apply to employers.”

  The other three supervisors weren’t in when Daniel and Fogarty stopped by to see them. The Rev. Prentice Dixon, a black minister was out visiting the sick. Clinton Apperson, who ran a construction company, was in Richmond for the day, and Sam Bishop was picking worms off his tobacco plants.

  “Booker, Edmonds and Apperson are a voting block on the board,” Daniel said. “They always, always vote together, and Rev. Dixon almost always votes the other way.

  “Sam Bishop is the wild card. He’s a little weird—I’ve heard rumors that he’s into that survivalist, American militia stuff—but he actually gets along pretty well with Rev. Dixon. Or seems to, anyway. The thing is, Sam is opposed right down the line to anything that feels like government intervention. Which, to him, is pretty much any suggestion another board member makes.”

  “How does a guy like that get elected?” Fogarty wondered.

  “He tells people he’s going to lower their taxes,” Daniel said. “He hasn’t, yet, but it’s worked twice for him.”

  The scenario for every supervisors’ meeting was pretty much the same, Daniel explained. Dixon and Bishop would deliver mini-speeches—Dixon’s reasoned, eloquent and sermon-like, Bishop’s rambling on subjects that might or might not be connected to the debate at hand. Then either Buddha or Archie would call for a vote, and The Three Musketeers, as Calvin Hamer used to call Booker, Edmonds and Apperson, would vote their conscience. Or their whim.

  “That’s Randolph County democracy,” Daniel said.

  “I can hardly wait,” Fogarty replied.

  CHAPTER SIX

  HOG HEAVEN

  As anyone who knew him would have predicted, easing in gradually began to chafe on Eddie Fogarty very quickly. Midway through his third morning in Jefferson Springs, he told Daniel. “Look, I’ve got to get started. I’ll read the back issues and all that on my own time, but I’m already going nuts. It’s like I just bought a car and can’t drive it. You got any PTA meetings? Giant vegetables? I don’t care.”

  “Ever been to a pig farm?” Daniel asked him.

  A local man named Walter Vance had recently been named Virginia’s Pig Farmer of the Year, and Daniel thought a feature story might be timely.

  He had proposed this to his staff the previous week and received the expected reaction. Whitt Scruggs made a face and claimed he was allergic to hogs. Regina Judkins said she was afraid of them. Both had offered to do the story over the phone, and that was where Daniel had left it for the moment.

  Fogarty used Daniel’s phone to call Walter Vance, who chuckled and said: “Hell, there’s nothing I’d rather do than talk about hogs. You got a time in mind?”

  “How about two this afternoon?” Fogarty said.

  “Must be a deadline story, huh?” Vance said. “Well, according to my social calendar, my hogs and I happen to be free today. This’ll be a big deal for us—it’s not the Times-Dispatch, but it’s something. I never could get ol’ Calvin to come out and look at my place. Claimed he had a weak stomach.”

  Fogarty hung up the phone, looked over at Daniel and said: “Exclusive pig interview is a go. Save me a spot on A-1.”

  “Good…I think,” Daniel said. “I’ll send Claude over for photos later, since we haven’t had the chance to teach you the camera yet.”

  As Fogarty left, Sarah Daniel looked over at her husband with a half-smile. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

  “Hey, he asked,” Tucker replied. “Besides, it’ll be a broadening experience.”

  Walter Vance’s farm was six miles out of town on VA 652. Directions to anywhere in rural Virginia, Fogarty would come to discover, always sounded like the combination to a safe—”Turn right on 634, left on 611, and right again on 726.�
� He wondered why they didn’t name their roads like everyone else.

  The dirt track connecting 652 to Vance’s award-winning pigsty, for instance, could have been named No Muffler Road. Fogarty aimed the Mazda down it at fifty miles an hour, only to have the humpbacked rise between the ruts begin tearing at the car’s undercarriage. After stopping to check for damage, he continued at a safer pace, dust trailing behind the car like a parachute.

  Vance’s farm may have been the best in the state, but it was nothing much to look at…or smell. The odor reached Fogarty’s nostrils while he was still a few hundred yards away, and he noticed two squat pigs nuzzling some grass outside one of the metal buildings.

  “Welcome to Hog Heaven,” Walter Vance said as he walked out to meet his visitor.

  He was stocky and white-bearded, and known around Jefferson Springs for his occasionally bizarre sense of humor. He always introduced his wife as Miss Piggy, and it used to amuse him to don a pig mask on Halloween and wander Main Street until Sheriff Inge informed him politely one year that masks in public places—especially in the vicinity of convenience stores—were against the law.

  “Did those two get out somehow?” Fogarty asked, looking warily at the two loose pigs, whose snuffling and rooting seemed to be bringing them closer to him.

  “Nah, those are our house pigs,” Vance said. “They’re for our own table.”

  He looked at Fogarty, who was wearing corduroys, a dress shirt, and loafers.

  “You’ve never been to a pig farm before, have you?” he asked.

  “Is it that obvious?”

  “Well, yeah. Kinda. But you’re in luck today—you’re gonna see some piglets born.”

  Vance told him a little about his business as they walked around, Fogarty trying to scribble in his notebook and maintain eye contact at the same time—a reporter’s trick that sometimes backfired.

  “Crap,” Fogarty blurted out as his right loafer found something soft and yielding.

  “Exactly,” Vance said.