The Kudzu Kid

by Darrell Laurant

  “I did tell you,” he said. “I left a press release.”

  “First I’ve heard about it,” Fogarty said.

  “Shit!” rumbled Inge, an expletive that covered his broken romantic evening, his annoyance with his deputies and his even greater annoyance that this…upstart…had the gall to barge into his private life and home

  “So how about it?” Fogarty said, his voice lowering a bit. “What can you tell me about what happened today?”

  Inge snorted.

  “You gotta be kidding,” he said. “You think you can come out here unannounced and get any information from me? Who the hell do you think you are?”

  “The public,” Fogarty said firmly, “has a right to know.”

  “And I’ve got a right to shoot anybody that comes out here in the middle of the night and scares me half to death,” Inge said. “You’re lucky I didn’t take advantage of that right.”

  Peering up on the porch, he saw Zoe for the first time.

  “Zoe Leggett?”

  “Yes sir?”

  “Can I ask what you’re doing here?”

  “I, uh, showed Mr. Fogarty here where you live. He seemed really disturbed about the story on TV, and I thought it might help.”

  “TV?” Inge said. “Oh, Christ!”

  In the end, though, Fogarty got nothing.

  “If you’re not gone in thirty seconds,” Inge bellowed, “I’m charging you with trespassing. And you can put that in your newspaper!”

  After driving back to the office as fast as he could on unfamiliar roads, saying little or nothing to Zoe, Fogarty burst through the front door of the Echo office. It was after midnight, and he only had time to type in a few paragraphs stolen directly from Susan Barnes’ story, lay a dark border around them, and perch that story high on the front page.

  “Sheriff W. W. Inge declined comment,” was the last sentence.

  Looking over his shoulder, Zoe saw that and giggled.

  “Good thing for us he also declined to blow our heads off.”

  “I wonder what he was doing in there,” Fogarty said. “He seemed pretty wide awake.”

  “Probably getting laid,” Zoe said.

  Fogarty sighed.

  “He’s never going to talk to me again,” he said. “You think he heard me call him a ‘fat bastard?’”

  Just then Annie Thompson began gathering up the pages and the photographic negatives, moving quickly and looking worried.

  “We’re just going to make it,” she said as she hoisted the stack and scuttled out the back door, Zoe behind her.

  Fogarty, suddenly left alone in a silent building, walked over to his freight elevator shaking his head. Whitt Scruggs, he thought, was going to have some explaining to do.

  He was still angry the next morning, but he had to wait until almost noon before Whitt came in. On some Wednesday mornings, early, Whitt would drive his pickup to South Boston and haul the papers back so they could be addressed and sorted.

  “Did you hear they had a murder yesterday?” he said when he finally walked in the door. “Some nigger got dumped over on the bypass.”

  Obviously, Whitt had never even bothered to look at the front page of the paper he was hauling in the back of his truck. Somehow, that made Fogarty even angrier.

  “Yeah, I heard,” Fogarty said coldly. “I heard it on TV, as a matter of fact, because my police reporter apparently spent the day with his head up his ass.”

  Whitt stiffened, like a dog realizing it has wandered into another dog’s territory.

  “Hey,” he said, “what am I supposed to do? I’m not a fortune teller. I thought those guys on the force were friends of mine, and I thought they’d tell me about stuff like this. So I was wrong.”

  “What about the scanner, Whitt?” Fogarty asked.

  “Never heard a word on it,” he replied.

  “Bullshit!” Fogarty said. “How the hell could there be nothing on the scanner? Where were you all day, anyway?”

  “As long as I get my stuff done, that’s none of your goddamned business!” Whitt shot back.

  The only other people in the office were Brenda and Tucker. Fogarty could tell from Brenda’s hunched posture that she was flinching from the rising voices, and Tucker was hanging up the telephone and rising from his desk. Fogarty stared back at Scruggs again.

  “I’m making it my business,” he said. “From now on, I want you to check in at least twice a day. And I want a schedule from you, what you’re doing. Starting today.”

  Whitt put his hands on his hips.

  “That won’t be necessary,” he said with a sudden dignity that sounded strange coming from him, “because I quit. As of right now. I’ll just go to work for my brother-in-law, where I don’t have to put up with all this crap.”

  “C’mon,” Fogarty said. “You deserve this, but it doesn’t mean you have to quit. I thought you had more balls than that.”

  Fogarty stood his ground when Scruggs moved toward him, but he wasn’t prepared for the shove. It sent him stumbling backward, and he tripped over a trash can and ended up on top of the paste-up table.

  “That’s what I think of your shit-ass little newspaper,” Whitt said, turning his broad back on Fogarty and stalking toward the door.

  “I ought to get you for assault!” Fogarty yelled after him as the door slammed and the bell attached to it jangled insanely.

  “You okay?” Daniel asked quietly from behind him.

  “Yeah,” Fogarty said, breathing heavily.

  “I can see you’ve learned to make good use of modern management skills,” the publisher said dryly.

  “Did you hear what happened?” Fogarty asked.

  “Not really. But I have a pretty good idea you’re going to tell me.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  MAKING SAUSAGE

  In the August 15 edition of the Echo, Zoe wrote a My Space poem comparing Southside Virginia at harvest time to a woman about to give birth, filled with references to ripeness and body changes and the pulsing of the thing ready to emerge.

  “Something you’re not telling us?” Daniel asked her.

  “It’s a metaphor,” she replied, making a face. “You know about metaphors?”

  As of the first of the month, Zoe’s part-time status had expanded to include helping out with paste-up and copy reading. She and Annie Thompson began eating lunch together, although Zoe stoutly resisted Annie’s not-so-subtle efforts to pair her off with some of her husband’s friends.

  Something in Zoe felt drawn to this place, with its pervasive untidiness. The broad wooden tables on which the copy was cut and pasted were hacked and scarred like restaurant cutting boards, and little scraps of waxed paper adhered to everything—the faded red carpet, the walls, the soles of visitors’ feet. Those visitors wandered in and out constantly, reminding her of the communal apartments in which she had lived back in the Richmond Fan.

  More than anything else, though, Zoe liked gluing her poetry column onto the large page dummy and thinking about it multiplying four thousand-fold down on those big loud rollers in South Boston. It was as though her single small voice was being amplified into a shout.

  “Be careful,” Daniel told her when she said something about that to him, “or we’re going to make a reporter out of you.”

  “Poet,” she corrected. “You won’t find my little butt at some boring Board of Buddha meeting. Besides, I’m just a butterfly, passing through. I’m allergic to Randolph County, and it’s not all that crazy about me.”

  Flashing a cocky grin over her shoulder as she walked away, she added, “Jefferson Springs can’t handle me, man.”

  Still, she was no closer to selling her parents’ house than she’d been before, although she had received an odd phone call from a man named Melton Veazie.

  “I don’t really want the house,” he said, “but I’m kind of interested in the land.”

  “For what?” she asked.

  “I’d rather not go into that right now,”
he said. “I’ll be in touch, Miz Vaden.”

  He left his phone number. A few weeks later, she recognized the same number in an Echo classified ad that read, “Farmland wanted in Bonifay area. We pay cash.”

  “I’ll tell you, there’s some weird shit going on,” Zoe told Fogarty. “My parents’ house shouldn’t be all that hard to sell. I mean, they kept the place up really nice. Course, it’s going downhill by the day with me living in it, but the well’s nice and deep, it’s got good fencing and a gravel drive.”

  “I’ve kind-of had an offer for the land, but I’d really like to see somebody move into the house. Unfortunately, nobody around here seems to want to touch it. It’s almost like they know something I don’t.”

  Fogarty simply grunted. These days, he had problems of his own.

  While Whitt Scruggs’ exit was no great loss in many ways, he still needed to be replaced. Daniel, however, seemed in no hurry.

  “To tell you the truth,” he told Fogarty one day, “I used part of the money that Whitt’s leaving saved me to pay Zoe, and I’m going to use the rest of it to fix the roof this fall.”

  Fogarty knew he would feel Whitt’s loss more acutely when school started and football season began. In the meantime, a more pressing aggravation was the state of his relationship with Sheriff Inge.

  When Fogarty found out what really happened the night Theo Moore’s body appeared in Randolph County, he tried to contact the sheriff and apologize. Inge refused to call him back, and the dispatchers soon became even more uncooperative. Even Daniel failed to make peace.

  The only thing that gave Fogarty hope was a chance meeting with Deputy Henry Massenburg.

  “Fogarty, you got to tell me something,” Massenburg said, sidling over with a sly smile.

  “Shoot.”

  “Was the sheriff and his wife really doing the wild thing when you went over there? Way I heard it, you banged on his bedroom window and caught him right in the middle of the act.”

  “God, no,” Fogarty said quickly. “I never got past his front door.”

  Massenburg grinned again.

  “Too bad,” he said. “I thought maybe you’d gotten some pictures.”

  But that conversation was an aberration. Inge’s latest decree was that press releases from his office could only be picked up by Claude Kizer, who was considered an honorary member of the department and thus someone to be trusted. Even at that, though, they didn’t tell Claude much.

  Meanwhile, Randolph County continued to hold Fogarty at arm’s length. He still didn’t go out except for interviews and meetings and lunch—especially now, since he’d heard from Claude that Whitt Scruggs still carried a grudge—and he had no one he could really call a friend.

  Daniel came close, but there was an unspoken distance between them. Daniel was bluegrass and gospel music and iced tea—with the occasional cup of bourbon from his drawer. Fogarty was rock ‘n’ roll and Budweiser. Daniel was married to Sarah, Fogarty was married to his job. Daniel had come to like, or at least tolerate, Randolph County. Fogarty still hated it.

  Regina tried to be nice to him, but Fogarty was too irritated by her bland writing and casual approach to her job to reciprocate. Besides, she wasn’t his type.

  He found himself strangely drawn to Zoe, but a defense mechanism kicked in whenever he was tempted to act on that feeling.

  Randolph County began to come alive near summer’s end. That quickening of pulse was first evident in the tobacco fields that surrounded Jefferson Springs for miles on all sides. Fogarty began seeing a lot of small, dark-skinned men in town—Mexicans, mostly, with a sprinkling of Guatemalans, who’d been brought in by a Halifax County labor contractor to harvest Randolph County’s prized tobacco crop.

  Randy Akers had his Randolph County High School Wildcats hitting in pads now, the harsh thwack! of sweat-soaked bodies colliding echoed across the practice field. That, too, was a sign of life.

  And two of the supervisors were up for re-election—Rev. Dixon, who was unopposed in his district, and Clinton Apperson, who was being challenged by a rather strident woman named Cassie Ledbetter. No signs or bumper stickers yet, but Cassie had already begun working the Elks Club bingo parlor and the parking lot at the recreation complex.

  “We have to talk,” she said to Fogarty when she passed him in the doorway of Sugar’s one day.

  “Closer to election,” Fogarty told her. “I’m going to do a profile piece on the candidates.”

  Cassie stared at him belligerently, her long red hair and multiple freckles seeming to glow with indignation.

  “You haven’t written the first word about that private landfill that’s coming in here, have you?” she said.

  “What do you mean, coming in here?” Fogarty said, slightly irritated by the woman’s aggressiveness. “All I’ve heard is that they’re running out of space in the landfill they’ve got. I’m supposed to talk to Buddha Booker about it someday.”

  “That’s like talking to a cat about the welfare of the local mice,” she snapped as she walked away.

  Fogarty asked Daniel about Cassie, and he smiled and shook his head.

  “Cassie Ledbetter,” he said, “has written more letters to this newspaper than anyone in Randolph County, except maybe Sam Bishop. Most of them don’t get in, because they’re way over the word limit. Others don’t get in because they really don’t make sense. Cassie is what I’d call an environmental fundamentalist. I’ve also heard that she practices witchcraft. At the very least, she’s a strange woman.”

  “She did say something about a private landfill.”

  “I’ve been hearing those rumors for a while,” Daniel said. “Some private citizen throwing open a plot of land for the county to dump on in return for the right to accept out-of-state garbage, including toxic waste. Backed by the Mafia, the CIA and maybe the KGB. As far as I’m concerned, those rumors are just that—rumors.”

  “How about that Melton Veazie guy who showed up at the supervisors’ meeting awhile back? He said something about a landfill, and he also called Zoe about her parents’ land.”

  “I’ve done a little checking on him,” Daniel said. “Melton Veazie doesn’t have a pot to piss in, if you’ll pardon the expression. I just think he has delusions of grandeur.”

  He stopped and smiled somewhat evilly at Fogarty.

  “Speaking of which,” he said, “I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news for you. Remember how I told you that Whitt always went down to South Boston and brought the papers back on Wednesday mornings?”

  “Uh, huh,” Fogarty grunted, still not comprehending.

  “Well, Whitt’s gone now. What does that suggest to you?”

  A look of shock crossed Fogarty’s face, but he recovered quickly.

  “You’ve seen my car, Garland,” he said. “I couldn’t get enough papers in there to stock the racks on Main Street.”

  “Right you are,” Fulcher said. “That’s why I’m letting you borrow my Blazer. And that’s also why I just picked up a small second-hand trailer.”

  Two days after that conversation, Fogarty’s alarm buzzed in his ear at three. He stared at the glowing clock face in disbelief, unable to comprehend why he had been abducted from sleep. Not so long ago, he was going to bed at three. Now, the clock wanted him up. But why?

  “Shit,” he mumbled when reality overtook him.

  As he headed toward the freight elevator, rubbing his eyes, Fogarty heard the scurrying of a startled mouse fleeing for the safety of some old boxes in a distant corner. The smell of damp cardboard and dust seemed especially strong this morning, and he sneezed violently.

  Daniel’s Blazer drove easily, a smooth five-speed, but the trailer scared the hell out of him as he careened down US 58. He could feel it wagging behind him like a big metal tail, and sensed the back end of the truck constantly slipping. Fortunately, there was no one on the road at this hour, although he did notice lights on in some of the farmhouses that flew past.

  The pressroom was in the r
ear of the Gazette-Virginian building, and the ugly green press was already thrashing violently when Fogarty walked in.

  He recognized Sherry Rittenhour, who had been in the Echo office a few times, and she grinned at him.

  “Where’s our coffee and doughnuts?” she asked.

  Fogarty stared at her, his whole face a question mark.

  “Whitt always used to bring us coffee and doughnuts,” Sherry said. “That was to pay us back for doing all the work.”

  She was a stocky woman with long dark hair that hung lank and unstyled. Dressed in patched jeans, high-top sneakers and a Dallas Cowboys sweatshirt, she kept grinning, despite a cigarette that slanted precariously from the corner of her mouth.

  “Where would I get doughnuts around here at this ungodly hour?” Fogarty asked.

  “The Quik-Stop in greater downtown South Boston,” Sherry replied. ”It’s open all night.”

  “I’ll remember that next time,” Fogarty said.

  All the mystique of the newspaper business had been squeezed out of this place. This was the newspaper as commodity. This was making sausage.

  Indeed, journalism reversed the usual mass-production process. All the finesse and polishing came at the beginning, with the final stage nothing but brute machine force and mindless machine tending.

  Fogarty noticed that Sherry’s hands had taken on a ghastly violet hue almost to the wrists.

  “The ink y’all use on the Echo isn’t worth a poot,” she said. “I keep telling Tucker to do something about it, and he keeps putting me off.”

  The racket inside the metal building was almost deafening, the “Whump! Whump! Whump!” of the press reverberating off the ceiling and walls like the rapid heartbeat of some great beast.

  In all the time Fogarty had worked at the Jersey Progress, he had never seen that press run. It had never interested him.

  Now, though, he found his eyes being drawn to the webbing at the top of the big machine, watching as the individual newspapers climbed the conveyor belt as one end accelerated into a gray-white blur.

  “Pretty cool, huh?” Sherry Rittenhour said.