The Kudzu Kid

by Darrell Laurant

For several weeks, Fogarty brooded about this assignment he earned by default, sometimes waking up before dawn with scenarios in his head. Then, late one night, he got a call from Richie.

  “Lucy Cegelski is down here at the Orange Crush,” he said, “and she’s pretty tanked. She’s sitting with Gina and me, and if you happened to come down…who knows?”

  Fogarty found Lucy glassy-eyed and slumped in a booth, and Richie invited him to join them. Fogarty tried small talk for a moment or two, eliciting little response.

  “Haven’t I seen you with Jim Kolar, the lacrosse player?” he asked at one point.

  Lucy just mumbled something, and Fogarty’s heart sank.

  “I feel like doing some shots,” he said finally. “Anybody interested?”

  Lucy lifted one hand.

  “A shot of Cuervo and a shot of Southern Comfort,” Eddie told the hovering waitress. “No, make those doubles.”

  A few minutes after her shot went down, Lucy laid her blonde head on the table.

  “Nice going,” Richie whispered to Fogarty.

  Then Lucy’s head came up again.

  “Jim Kolar is a son of a bitch,” she said. “I’ll tell you why.”

  The next day, Fogarty called the Syracuse head lacrosse coach, who seemed genuinely surprised to hear what had happened. Actually, what he said was, “Oh, Christ!”

  A friend who worked in the college infirmary found a record of Lucy’s visit there. The X-rays on her ankle proved negative, and her facial bruises were superficial.

  “P reports falling on ice,” the report said. “Simultaneous contusions to face and injury to R ankle somewhat inconsistent with that. P denied physical abuse, negative to calling police.”

  As for Jim Kolar, he was halfway through a twelve-pack and relatively unconcerned when Fogarty called him in the athletic dorm.

  “You’re who?” he demanded. “With what?”

  Fogarty told him again.

  “Go to hell,” Kolar said, just before hanging up.

  Although Lucy’s benefactor remained a mystery, he had erred badly in not providing equal time and money to Chuck Heinzel, Kolar’s other victim. “How did Lucy get her car fixed?” Fogarty asked.

  “What do you mean?” Heinzel shot back.

  “Her car was broken, under a tarp. Dead. Then it was running. Where did she get the money?”

  “I don’t know. Where?’’

  “Someone paid her to keep quit,” Fogarty said.

  “I didn’t get shit….I don’t want my name on this,” Heinzel said warily. “Lucy would be pissed, and Kolar would freaking kill me.”

  “Off the record, then…”

  To Fogarty’s relief, the DO ran the story. A few nights later, Fogarty and two friends were walking out of Hungry Charlie’s when a large, menacing figure appeared in front of them. It was twenty degrees, but Jim Kolar was wearing a short-sleeved t-shirt, his biceps bulging.

  “Are you Fogarty?” he asked.

  Eddie nodded, suddenly terrified despite his buzz.

  “You’re a little scumbag,” Kolar snarled, his breath a visible plume in the cold air like an avenging dragon.

  As his friends watched in horror, Eddie found himself lifted off the snow-slick sidewalk and hurled to one side. He landed on his right knee, his face skidding sickeningly across the frozen pavement. Before he could even realize that his nose was bleeding, Kolar was upon him again. Fogarty tried to roll over on his back to offer some defense, but Kolar grabbed him again and shoved his face into a soot-encrusted snow bank.

  By then, some other people in Hungry Charley’s, including two of Kolar’s teammates, heard the commotion and dashed outside. It took four off them to pull the middy off Fogarty, whose face by now was a mask of red.

  In the long run, though, the trauma was worth it. Fogarty hadn’t been hurt badly, except for a five-stitch cut over one eye and a slow-healing scab on his nose, and the Syracuse Post-Standard had picked up the story and fed it to the Associated Press. After that, Jim Kolar was through at Syracuse.

  Besides the stitches, there was only one other unpleasant side effect for Fogarty. He was sitting in the Varsity pizzeria one day at lunch, pondering his next lead, when Lucy Cegelski walked over to his table and hurled a glass of iced tea in his face.

  “I was drunk,” she hissed, “and you took advantage of me. You raped me, you bastard!”

  Fogarty looked up at her, rivulets of liquid streaming across his nose and cheeks.

  “At least I didn’t hit you,” he said.

  Fogarty was managing editor by his junior year, and the newspaper was his life. Editors at the Daily Orange normally worked from three in the afternoon until eleven, but Fogarty would be there by ten on light class days and rarely left before one the next morning. On one occasion, he fell asleep on the couch in his office and got himself locked in.

  The editor in chief was elected every March by the outgoing seniors. It was a grueling process that involved three or four hours of questioning on the third floor, the part of the DO house that was condemned, in a room that was hot and suffocating.

  In Fogarty’s junior year, however, there was very little suspense.

  “We were scared Fogarty would hunt us down and kill us if we didn’t pick him,” one of the seniors said.

  The EIC chose the managing editor and the other members of the editorial staff the weekend after his or her selection. The new staff then got to put out the final edition of the year, which the outgoing editors tried to sabotage by pasting pictures of ducks everywhere in the paper.

  It all ended, riotously, with the “transition party.” When everyone was feeling their drinks, the outgoing editors would present an enormous old wing-tip shoe to the new EIC, a felt “press” hat to the incoming managing editor and a jar of marshmallow fluff to the new features editor.

  Eventually, Fogarty graduated from Syracuse, but barely. His parents, divorced for several years, flew in from separate cities to watch him march in cap and gown, and one of his journalism teachers had gotten him an internship at the Baltimore Sun.

  Before he left town, though, Fogarty stopped by Hungry Charley’s for a final beer. It was a subterranean place, no windows, the walls and ceiling painted black. He sat at a long table, next to the stairs where Daily Orange staffers would congregate to drink until closing time.

  Glancing around to see if anyone was looking, Fogarty took out his car keys and gouged his name into the old wooden table. Underneath it, he wrote Baltimore Sun.

  In Baltimore, something new happened to Fogarty. Her name was Marcy Gladdin, she came from the University of Pittsburgh, and she was also an intern. More importantly, she was the first reporter Fogarty had ever seen who matched him in single-mindedness.

  Marcy was pleasant to look at, but not beautiful. There were flaws in her features—thin lips, eyes too close together—and her permed hair was more anarchic than stylish. But when she and Fogarty talked about the stories they’d been assigned—mostly the fluff generally dumped on interns—and where they hoped to go when their serfdom, as they called it, was over, her hazel eyes would glow with an inner fire. Fogarty was in love.

  They went to Memorial Stadium to watch the Orioles a few times that summer and had dinner on paydays at the Inner Harbor pubs. Mostly, they just talked.

  Eddie and Marcy never slept together. The way he felt, that was almost unnecessary, an oversight that would be corrected in time. They became like twins, and part of their long conversations at lunch revolved around how they could somehow find jobs at the same newspaper.

  Late in the internship, however, as July faded into August, Marcy began begging off from seeing Eddie at night. He might have been concerned, but the next day she would be every bit as attentive to him, and the inner fire still glowed. He thought.

  Until she leaned toward him one afternoon as they sat in a park near the newspaper office and said softly, “I don’t know exactly how to tell you this, but I’ve got a job.”

  Fogarty was
genuinely shocked.

  “Where?” he demanded. “I thought we were going to do this together?”

  “Here,” she replied. “At the Sun.”

  A silence lowered itself and hung between them.

  “Uh, and there’s one other thing,” Marcy said. “You know Don Gernert, one of the assistant ME’s? Tall guy with blond hair?”

  Fogarty nodded numbly.

  “He and I are sort of, uh, going out. He’s the one who got me the job here. Do you want me to ask him if they have something for you? It’s the least I could do. I feel so bad.”

  But Fogarty had already risen from his bench and started walking away. He called in sick the next day and spent it in an Irish pub a block from his apartment. And when the Jersey Progress called him for an interview two days later, he didn’t hesitate. He would have gone to Afghanistan if it had meant distancing himself from Marcy.

  These were some of the things Fogarty thought about as he sat sweating on the third floor of the Southside Echo building. He knew that this job, like the one at the Jersey Progress, wouldn’t recapture the feelings he’d had in the basement lair of Hungry Charley’s, or walking with Marcy around the Inner Harbor.

  He also knew that his patience with Whitt Scruggs was wearing paper-thin. Some days, he wished he were Jim Kolar.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  EDITOR IN THE FIRST PERSON

  Eddie Fogarty was not a tolerant person, and Whitt Scruggs scraped across his nerves like an off-key fiddle bow.

  There was, first of all, the Red Man habit.

  “I think it bothers him that I chew,” Whitt told Daniel.

  More to the point, it bothered Fogarty that he spit—constantly—in empty cans placed strategically around the Echo building, in trash baskets, out the back door. Fogarty was convinced that Whitt used spitting as a convenient excuse to interrupt conversations that were going badly for him. The more cornered he felt, the farther he went to expectorate.

  Then, too, Fogarty was genuinely baffled by Whitt’s preoccupation with the Civil War.

  “You know how long we study the Civil War up in Pennsylvania?” he asked after their initial attempt at mutual civility had worn off. “About a day. We came, we saw, we kicked your ass. What is there to study?”

  He laughed. Whitt didn’t.

  Fogarty couldn’t understand the curious impulse that occasionally prompted Whitt to pull on a stiff gray uniform, sleep out on the hard Southside clay and be awakened by a bugle.

  “Why didn’t you just join the real army?” he asked him once. “It pays better than this, and you’d have been on the right side.”

  Maybe Whitt spent so much time in the past because he had no future. He had settled for a cul-de-sac job with fast-food pay, and he wasn’t very good at it. He drove a ten-year-old Chevy truck caked with last year’s mud and wore camouflage pants to the office, and the deepest joys of his life seemed to be shooting animals and pretending to shoot people.

  Fogarty owned little in the way of a religious philosophy—Catholic elementary school never took. And his blunt pragmatism left no room for such odd notions as reincarnation. Still, he wondered, given the instant antipathy between him and Whitt, it seemed almost possible that they had once squared off in some Southern field back in the 1860s, muskets raised.

  Now, as the 1980s wound down, Whitt’s weapon was disinterest. If working at the Echo became too inconvenient, he would simply spit out the job like a soggy hunk of chew and find somewhere else to feed his habits.

  “You know, I really don’t give a shit about this place,” he would sometimes tell Fogarty when his new boss annoyed him.

  “I can tell,” Fogarty would reply.

  Regina Judkins was different. While probably no more ambitious than Whitt in terms of a journalism career, she seemed to like Fogarty and wanted to please him. Of course, Regina seemed to like most of the single men—and even a few of the married ones—with whom she came in contact.

  She had actually taken a journalism course at the nearby community college, but it had done more harm than good. Some well-meaning instructor had embedded the straight lead-inverted pyramid approach so deeply in her brain that it could not be excised. Every story, to her, was as formulaic as a Cook of the Week recipe. But at least Regina was literate. Whitt’s stories had to be almost entirely rewritten.

  Whitt let Zoe have her way with his grammar, though, and even smiled about it. She had an almost maternal way of looking over his copy, as if she were cutting his hair or washing his face.

  Fogarty, on the other hand, found it hard to conceal his contempt. Whenever he read one of Whitt’s disjointed monstrosities, he felt an inner Pat Donnelly fighting to break out.

  “What’s this guy charged with, Whitt?” he would ask.

  “What guy?”

  “This story you did about that arrest in Conway. The deputy pulled this person over and now he’s in the county jail. What did he do?”

  “Dunno. Turbyfill never got back to me.”

  Nevertheless, the thought of firing Whitt—a man who possessed numerous weapons and obviously didn’t like him—made Fogarty queasy. Whitt’s apathy would probably override any violent impulses, but Fogarty couldn’t be sure.

  Beyond that, getting rid of Whitt would be the worst possible public relations move at a time when he desperately needed to connect himself to Randolph County.

  Whitt may not have covered his beats very well, but he knew the people on them—just as Daniel said. Whitt served on the Sandy Level Rescue Squad with two sheriff’s deputies and was in the same re-enactment regiment with town police chief.

  Fogarty felt trapped by this. He could only imagine what Whitt said about him outside the office, but getting rid of him would alienate a lot of useful sources.

  He was, in fact, jealous of Whitt’s connections, for he was having a hard time forging any of his own. Sources were Fogarty’s lifeline, and it had taken him the better part of two years to develop a productive network at the Jersey Progress.

  During his first couple of weeks in Jefferson Springs, he ate so many lunches at Sugar’s that he could already recite the limited menu from memory and name all the animal heads on the walls. He had lunch with Clinton Apperson of the board of supervisors, John Norfleet and Frank Gogel of the county planning commission, town manager Otho Mosby, school superintendent George Kimbrough and high school principal Bill Kirkland. He attended a school board meeting and a town council meeting and spent an evening hanging around over at the Sandy Level Rescue Squad crew hall, taking care to pick a night when Whitt wasn’t on call.

  The only potential allies he discovered through all of this were Gogel and Kirkland, both ex-Northerners who at least spoke with the same accent he did.

  For the most part, Fogarty still felt like an immigrant nearly two months after his arrival. One problem was that Jefferson Springs and Randolph County sat becalmed in the trough between June and August, the residents seeking out air conditioning above all else, the schools empty and the governmental bodies on cruise control.

  It seemed too hot even for misbehaving—the weekly list of arrests that Whitt typed in had shrunk to a quarter of what it was in May. Of course, it was hard to tell what was going on in law enforcement, because the sheriff’s department remained as obtuse as ever.

  “Doesn’t it bother you that they lie to us?” Fogarty asked Whitt one afternoon, just as he had asked Garland earlier.

  Whitt considered the question and spit abruptly into the trash can in Fogarty’s little office.

  “Naw, not really,” he said. “I mean, shoot, nothing ever happens here, anyway.”

  The Randolph County High School football team began its pre-season practice in late July, and Fogarty stopped by a couple of times, out of sheer boredom, to watch.

  The coach, Randy Akers, had directed the team to seven wins and three losses the previous fall and had most of those players back. Quarterback Earnest Dixon was a quick scrambler with a strong passing arm, Henry Aaron Brow
n a powerful ball carrier. The player who most caught Fogarty’s attention, however, was Tyrone Fuqua.

  “How big is that No. 87?” Fogarty asked coach Akers.

  “That’s Tyrone Fuqua. We call him ‘Tyroneosaurus.’ Last time we measured him, he was six-six and weighed two-forty,” Akers said with a smile. “He looks about the same now, but I do believe he’s gotten meaner over the summer.”

  Tyroneosaurus. Fogarty liked that.

  As far as the reading public of Randolph County was concerned, Fogarty felt as though he was launching the Echo out into a void, like some silly paper airplane. Letters to the editor had slowed to a trickle and his phone rarely rang. Even worse, he would occasionally get a call from someone wanting to speak to Calvin.

  “You did run Calvin’s obituary, didn’t you?” he asked Daniel, only half in jest. “People here do realize he’s dead?”

  “Just wait until something comes up that folks feel strongly about,” the publisher replied. “They know who you are, and you’ll be wishing they didn’t.”

  Around the first of August, Fogarty heard from a man who asked, “Would you like a big story?”

  Having just squabbled with Whitt, he almost answered, “No. We only do small stories here.”

  Instead, he agreed to meet his caller the next night at Recreation Park on the outskirts of town. Teams sponsored by Southern States and Wiley Electric were playing slow-pitch softball—the perfect sport for Jefferson Springs, Fogarty thought wryly—on the more distant of three ball fields, raising shouts of encouragement and clouds of red dust. Two cars were parked at the far end of the vast parking lot, so close they were almost touching, and Fogarty started to walk in their direction until he saw that each car was filled with languid teenagers killing another numbing Southside evening. He saw a flash of a beer can in a back seat, and smiled.

  It was getting full dark, and he had almost decided he was being stood up when a gray Jeep Cherokee swung into the lot and pulled up beside him.

  “You must be Mr. Fogarty,” a big man in white pants and red shirt said as he climbed out.