The Kudzu Kid

by Darrell Laurant

  Daniel was quiet for a moment. He, like Fogarty, was from somewhere else, and he had no illusions about the Echo’s quality. At the same time, his countless conversations with local readers had given him a sense of what Randolph County wanted in its newspaper, and it wasn’t even close to what Eddie Fogarty wanted.

  “Weekly newspapers,” Daniel said slowly, choosing his words as if he was in court, “are orphanages for news. A lot of what we print will never see the light of day anywhere else. A lot of it is trivial, most of it is mundane. We try to get lots of folks into our photographs and lots of names into our stories.”

  “What you’ve got to understand is that people around here love to see their names in the paper. They love to see their friends’ names in the paper. Sure, they already know who visited whom for Thanksgiving, but when they see those names, it makes them feel important—if only for a minute or two.”

  “So our goal is to make everybody feel good?” Fogarty asked.

  “That’s part of it,” Daniel replied.

  “Why do you even need me, then?” Fogarty continued, his voice rising into that upper octave he always hated. “Why don’t you just run lists of names every week?”

  “Because that’s not our whole job,” Daniel said. “We also have to tell people what’s happening.”

  “Watch out for head lice this fall?” Fogarty asked, reprising a headline in the latest Echo.

  “Sometimes. But we also have murders here, Eddie, and political double-dealing, and elections. We have car wrecks, and births, and deaths, and people graduate from high school and join the Army and play sports.”

  Fogarty was silent.

  “Here’s the way you’ve got to look at it,” Daniel continued. “Think of the local correspondents and the bad pictures and the deeds and permits and the Letter from Washington and Zoe as ads. You can’t get rid of them, so you just work around them. What’s left is yours, Eddie. It’s your job to make it something special. I think if people here began reading a real newspaper, they’d discover that they like it.”

  “Do you think Whitt and Regina want to work for a real newspaper?” Fogarty asked. “What are you paying them, anyway?”

  “About $250 a week,” Daniel said.

  “Christ, Tucker—that’s not much more than minimum wage.”

  “I thought it more important to be able to pay you,” Daniel said, looking at Fogarty eye-to-eye. “Besides, they haven’t complained.”

  “What do they want to do, Regina and Whitt?” Fogarty asked. “Do they want to write for bigger papers?”

  Daniel stopped just short of laughing out loud.

  “Regina wants to get married and have two kids,” he said. “Whitt wants to shoot a sixteen-point buck.”

  “I’ve read their stuff,” Fogarty said, “and it’s pretty bad.”

  “Yup. They’re definitely not writers. But Whitt knows sports and hunting and fishing, and he’s friends with most of the deputies and a couple of the supervisors. And Regina knows just about everybody in the county.

  “Actually,” Daniel continued, “Your best writer might be Zoe. The reason I included her as a member of the staff when we talked before is that she also checks Whitt’s and Regina’s copy for typos and helps with layout sometimes.”

  “What layout?” Fogarty thought to himself.

  And what about Tucker himself, Fogarty wanted to know. Had a month of covering county government given him a sudden appetite for journalism?

  Daniel snorted with laughter, a startling sound coming from someone so dignified.

  “I’m a lawyer, Eddie,” he said, “and I’m a real estate man, and I’m beginning to learn how to run the business end of a newspaper. Everything I write sounds like a legal brief. Believe me, I can’t wait to turn all this over to you.”

  The following Tuesday morning, Fogarty came in at seven and wrote his pig farm story in the empty office. Brenda arrived at eight bearing chocolate chip cookies, Annie Thompson who arranged ads at eight thirty. Daniel showed up at nine.

  “When do Whitt and Regina come in?” Fogarty wanted to know.

  “It depends,” was all Daniel would tell him.

  Whitt’s rusted red pickup finally crunched into its gravel parking space around the side of the building just before eleven. As soon as he walked in the front door—a stocky fellow who looked to be in his early thirties, wearing a flannel shirt and jeans even in the heat—Fogarty walked up and shook his hand.

  “Morning, Whitt,” he said. “I’m Eddie Fogarty, the new Calvin.”

  Scruggs eyed him warily.

  “Howyadoon?” he mumbled.

  Fogarty herded Scruggs into his office.

  “What are you working on this week?” he asked.

  Scruggs looked even more wary.

  “Well, y’know, it’s kinda slow right now. School’s just let out, so there’s not much sports. Circuit court doesn’t sit ‘til next month. I guess I’ll just type up the list of arrests the sheriff gives us and maybe a little something about the Little League baseball playoffs. And the high school had its spring sports banquet the other night.”

  “Did you go to that?” Fogarty asked.

  “Naw. But they’ll bring a list of awards over today.”

  Scruggs was still standing, squirming uncomfortably like a high school kid in the principal’s office. He had coarse, greasy reddish hair half-covered by a Red Man baseball cap a pug nose and thick glasses. Red Man was Whitt’s nickname, Fogarty would discover.

  “Garland says you do features,” Fogarty said. “Got any for this week?”

  Scruggs looked stricken.

  “Like I was sayin’, it’s kinda slow and all, and I…”

  Fogarty, battling his basic instincts, raised his hand and forced a smile that came off more like a grimace.

  “No problem, Whitt,” he said. “I just wanted to know what’s going in the paper today. We can have a talk later about what I’m going to expect from you.”

  “I hear you went over to Walter’s pig farm,” Scruggs said, trying to change the subject.

  “Yeah,” Fogarty said. “You want to smell my notebook?”

  “That’s okay,” Scruggs said, taking an instinctive step backward. “I’m, you know, allergic to pigs.”

  “So I hear,” Fogarty said dryly.

  Scruggs scratched behind one ear, like a dog, and squinted across the desk at his new boss.

  “Mind if I ask you a personal question?” he said.

  “Shoot.””

  “Well, I was wondering…uh, what you were doing here? I mean, this ain’t exactly the Times-Dispatch.”

  “I wanted to find out what it’s like to be an editor,” Fogarty said, “and I felt better starting out kind of small.”

  “Oh,” Scruggs said, losing interest. “Mind if I ask you something else?”

  “Sure. What?”

  “Well, Calvin always gave me two weeks off in November for deer season, a week off in April for spring turkey season and a week off for the Sailor’s Creek re-enactment in July. I’m into Civil War stuff.”

  You’ve got to be kidding, Fogarty thought. What he said, though, was “We’ll talk about it, Whitt.”

  Still looking puzzled, Scruggs turned around and shambled over to his desk. He walked like a bear, with a sort of rolling gait, and Fogarty couldn’t help but notice that the older man outweighed him by forty pounds.

  He’s probably got lots of guns, Fogarty thought.

  By the time he had finished with Whitt, Regina was already in and on the phone. She was giggling a lot, and it didn’t seem to be a business call.

  “Hey, nice to meet you,” she said when she finally hung up and walked into Fogarty’s office.

  Regina was tall and thin, and her teased brown hair bore streaks of blonde coloring.

  “I just wanted to tell you I’ll be glad to help you all I can,” she said. “I’ve lived here all my life, and I know pretty much everybody. I’ll bet it can be hard coming into a new place li
ke you’re doing. It’d be like me taking a job up in New Jersey? I’d be scared to death.”

  “You’ve never lived outside Randolph County?” Fogarty asked, somewhat taken aback by this gushing freshet of Southside-accented words.

  “Not really,” Regina said, “but I go to Richmond sometimes, and up to the mall in Lynchburg.”

  Unlike Whitt, Regina seemed at least competent. She had already written her Cook of the Week feature. Miz Ernestine Hamlett over in Bonifay, locally famous for her cornbread and chili and planned to cover the school board that night. She and Annie would also spend the late morning and early afternoon typing in the remainder of the myriad briefs that were scattered through the Echo like dandelions on a lawn.

  “Tuesdays suck,” she said brightly, “if you don’t mind my sayin’ so.”

  Fogarty had one more question for her.

  “What would you say is the lead story this week?” he asked.

  She cocked her head and flashed a grin, like a waitress angling for a better tip.

  “I don’t know,” she said finally. “There isn’t one?”

  Fogarty couldn’t bring himself to argue with her. She may have been right. The Board of Supervisors, or Bored of Supervisors, as Regina called them, was meeting, and the School Board was expected to reveal to the world its choice of Elementary School Teacher of the Year and present a certificate of appreciation to a retiring janitor.

  As for photos, there was only Ernestine Hamlett grinning crookedly behind a plate of cornbread and a group shot that had local insurance agents Roger Spivey and Ned Owens welcoming a new member of their team, Roger’s younger brother Warren.

  That sent Fogarty bolting into Daniel’s office.

  “Did Claude ever take the pig farm photos?” Fogarty asked.

  “I think so,” Daniel said, “but I don’t know where he is.”

  The photos were in the drier, it turned out, and they were awful. There was one shot of Walter Vance that might work as a mug shot and an image of two pigs taken from so far away that they looked like gray rocks with ears. All black and white—the Echo didn’t use color, except for an occasional garish red spot in a furniture store ad.

  Fogarty looked at the pig picture again. These were Walter’s house pigs, he realized, a photo with no relevance to his story.

  “Why do you keep this guy around?” Fogarty asked Daniel. “He’s awful.”

  “He’s also cheap,” Daniel said. “He gets paid by the photo, and in return, he sort of works his own hours. Don’t be too hard on him, though—I think he’s allergic to pigs.”

  Annie Thompson, who was short, dark-haired and winsome and married helped the new editor design the front page. It was something Fogarty hadn’t done since college, but he felt it coming back to him.

  “How about we run my pig story down in the lower left-hand corner,” he said, “and put the cornbread woman down alongside it? Then we’ll put Regina’s school board story in a box, with these little mugs of the teacher and the janitor? The supervisors’ meeting can be stripped across the top.”

  Regina, sitting nearby, overheard.

  “Uh, Mr. Fogarty….”

  “Eddie,” Fogarty said. “We don’t have enough people here to get formal.”

  “Eddie…I promised Roger Spivey I’d run the picture of his brother on the front page.”

  Fogarty fished through a pile, found the grip-and-grin, and frowned.

  “Why?” he asked.

  “Because they do a lot of advertising with us?” replied Regina, who had the annoying habit of forming nearly every statement into a question.

  It was amazing how easy it was to fill the rest of the seventeen pages—the four correspondents were unusually garrulous that week, Congressman Norman Rowe had a lot to talk about—all of it self-serving—and there were fifteen letters to the editor, one a three-page tirade demanding that the United States pull out of the United Nations.

  “Who is this nut?” Fogarty said to Regina, without really looking at the name beneath the United Nations letter.

  “That’s Sam Bishop,” she said. “He’s on the board of supervisors.”

  The paper was largely laid out by five, with appropriate holes left for the supervisors meeting and school board stories, and then Fogarty realized that something essential to the whole operation was missing. He was amazed that he hadn’t noticed it before.

  “Where is your press?” he asked Daniel.

  The publisher gaped at him in amazement, then slapped him on the back with a grin.

  “Eddie, weeklies around here don’t print their own papers. There’s no way we could afford a press. What we do is take the pages over to Sherry Rittenhour in Conway when we get them pasted up, and she takes them down to the Gazette-Virginian in South Boston. They print about fifteen different papers, and ours comes off the press around six in the morning. Then we hire some part-time people to do inserting and bring the papers back. Sometimes Whitt helps out.”

  “Do I, uh…”

  “Nope. Not in your job description.”

  And on this night, neither was writing about the supervisors’ meeting. Despite his antsiness, Fogarty accepted Tucker’s offer to cover the board one more time so that he could lean back and watch, hoping to get some feel for what these people were all about.

  Back in New Jersey, the local board of chosen freeholders met in a vast, modern room with plush carpeting and lighting that looked as though it belonged on the U. S. S. Enterprise.

  By contrast, the men who steered the ship of Randolph County convened at the Randolph County administration complex, in a dim basement auditorium that smelled vaguely of mold. The five men sat behind a curving oak table, raised slightly above their audience, joined by clerk Jeanetta Patterson.

  Fogarty watched closely as the five filed in and sat down, matching them with their nameplates. Buddha Booker and Archie Edmonds, he had met. Clinton Apperson was a lanky, ferret-faced man who sat between Booker and Edmonds, who wore a sport coat of a shocking lime hue, and constantly glanced from one to the other. The Rev. Dixon was tall and prematurely graying, his skin a rich chocolate color set off nicely by his light tan suit. Sam Bishop was the only one without a coat and tie, arriving in work shirt and khakis.

  The meeting began with an invocation from Rev. Dixon, who had a deep, vibrant black-preacher voice that Fogarty found vaguely stirring, then launched into prior business. The proceedings were uneventful and confusing to Fogarty, and he was glad he didn’t have to write about it. The dominant figure seemed to be not any of the board members, but Jeannetta Patterson.

  “Jeannetta, has this item come before us before?” Booker would ask from time to time.

  And Jeannetta, who had the institutional memory of a human filing cabinet, would reply, “You tabled that last month, Mr. Booker,” or “We got a letter on it, but it’s never actually come up.”

  For Fogarty, it was like tuning into a soap opera he had never seen. Fulcher was right—he didn’t know the characters, he didn’t know the history, he didn’t speak the language. He was lost.

  Buddha seemed to function as the county dad. Several representatives from various county government departments walked up to the microphone and podium in front of the meeting table and asked for money to cover some unseen emergency, and Buddha would frown in a fatherly manner and suggest tabling the request to a later date.

  Never do today what you can put off forever, Fogarty thought.

  “Until we resolve this business with the landfill,” Buddha kept saying, “we won’t be able to release any discretionary funds. There’s no point in even talking about it.”

  “What’s wrong with the landfill?” Fogarty whispered to Daniel.

  “It’s land-full,” Daniel whispered back.

  But not even the publisher expected the appearance of a man named Melton Veazie. He wore a rumpled suit and said he was a farmer, and he wasn’t on the agenda that had been handed out ahead of time.

  “I can’t say much,” h
e told the supervisors, “but I’ve been approached about the possibility of a private landfill going on some land I’m negotiating to buy out near Bonifay. What I’m asking is, would you gentlemen be interested in maybe using that operation for some of the county waste if this goes through?”

  Buddha Booker, the resident Scrooge, glowered down at him.

  “Mr. Veazie, we would be interested in anything that would get us out of our current situation. But you’ve got to understand, there’s a lot of things that would have to be done first. A permit would have to be issued, zoning would have to be changed, and public hearings would have to be held.”

  “Tell you what—you go see Miz Patterson when you have a little more information, and we’ll find a place to fit you in at one of our future meetings.”

  Fogarty followed Veazie out the back door, inviting a dark look from Buddha, and caught him at the base of the steps.

  “Excuse me,” he said. “I’m Eddie Fogarty of the Echo, and I was just wondering if you could tell me what company has approached you.”

  “I got nothing to say right now,” Veazie told him.

  “Probably just some crackpot,” Daniel said later.

  CHAPTER NINE

  EDDIE

  Fogarty’s quarters on the third floor were ready. Whatever deference Whitt Scruggs may have felt for his new editor had worn off quickly, and he couldn’t stop laughing.

  “I can’t believe this, man,” he said. “they’d have to double my paycheck for me to live up there with the rats.”

  “So where do you live, Whitt?” Fogarty finally asked him.

  Scruggs hesitated.

  “In a double-wide, out past the bypass,” he said finally.

  “I rest my case.”

  Actually, it wasn’t bad. Tucker had found an old bed for Fogarty to use, and Sarah Daniel provided some sheets and blankets. A tattered couch and two forlorn overstuffed chairs were already in residence, giving the new occupant a primitive living room. Fogarty planned to buy a second-hand TV with his first or second paycheck. Maybe later he could talk Daniel into a satellite dish.