The Kudzu Kid

by Darrell Laurant

“Yeah,” Fogarty replied. “It’s hard to believe that’s the newspaper I helped put together.”

  “Actually, it isn’t,” Sherry said. “That’s the Altavista Journal, and then we’ve got the Orange County Review, and then us. They’ll run off four papers today.”

  Several people at the far end of the press-beast were stacking the AltaVista Journals as they emerged. Over at a nearby table, another group was combining two stacks with brisk, shuffling motions.

  “Come on,” Sherry told Fogarty. “We’re going to help insert.”

  “The Altavista paper? I don’t even know where Altavista is.”

  “We all work together here. It’s sort of like a commune.”

  As he followed Sherry over to the sorting table, Fogarty looked around at the big shed with its institutional green walls and cement floor and thought about how his father had worked so hard to keep him out of a place like this.

  The work was monotonous, but not overly strenuous, and Fogarty was too tired to care. He just listened to the conversation flow around him as he mindlessly shuffled papers, hearing talk of school starting and babysitters and tobacco harvests. It occurred to him that he was the only man at the table, and he wondered how Whitt had handled that.

  “Okay,” someone said to him when the Journals were finally stacked on a nearby dolly. “New guy goes for coffee.”

  It wasn’t until he was receiving his change from the woman at the Quik-Stop that he realized his hands, too, were purple.

  The press stopped abruptly midway through the Echo’s run, and pressroom foreman was cursing as he reached for the shutoff lever.

  “What’s wrong?” Fogarty asked.

  “I think we might have broken a web. When that happens, the blankets can get pulled, and then your timing’s shot all to hell.”

  “Oh,” Fogarty said.

  Fortunately, the pressman was on intimidate terms with his machine, which sprawled across the printing floor in a series of humps like a mechanical Loch Ness monster. He mounted the back of the beast, tugged and tinkered and banged, and then yanked the lever again. The heartbeat resumed.

  By seven, when the inserting was finally finished, Fogarty felt like death. The fast-food coffee had finally worn off, and he barely had the strength to shove the loaded dolly out to his trailer. He looked at the stacks of Echoes and groaned.

  The trailer was more stable on the way back to Jefferson Springs, but the Blazer strained to reach fifty-five, never mind Fogarty’s usual seventy. Then it took him nearly twenty minutes to back up to the loading dock, the trailer swerving first to one side, then the other.

  And that was just the beginning. The papers had to be unloaded, and 3,500 of them had to have labels attached for mailing. That job belonged to Zoe and Annie and Brenda, who abandoned her phone duties on publication mornings, and required nearly two hours more. Than Fogarty and Daniel and office handyman Gene Kidd reloaded the papers and took them to the post office.

  “Jesus,” Fogarty said, squeezing an aching spot at the base of his neck. “I’m dying.”

  Daniel smiled.

  “Next time,” he said, “you might think twice before you run off the help. Maybe Whitt can’t write too well, but he’s got a strong back.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  FEEDBACK

  Back at the Jersey Progress, Fogarty had been disdainful of the three staff members who wrote opinion columns.

  “I could get the same stuff from the guy on the next bar stool,” he used to say. “You don’t have to check facts, you don’t have to get the other side of the story. Just make it up as you go along. And if nothing’s happening, write about your dog or your old man or some crap like that.”

  But that was before he assumed the mantle of The Kudzu Kid. For weeks, he procrastinated about starting his column in the Echo. Daniel finally stopped asking him about it for fear of getting snapped at.

  “There’s a lot of stuff to write about here,” Fogarty told Zoe one day, “but I haven’t been around long enough to really get a handle on it.”

  “So why don’t you write about yourself?” she suggested. “Let the fine people of Randolph County get to know you—the ones who can read, anyway.”

  Fogarty frowned.

  “Why would anybody give a damn about me?” he demanded.

  “They will if you make them give a damn. Why don’t you start by comparing here to where you came from? Have a little fun with it.”

  A nasty grin sprang to Fogarty’s face, and Zoe realized immediately what she had unleashed. But it was too late. That night, Fogarty sat hunched over his computer terminal in the empty building and poured his frustration and alimentation into what would be a front-page piece.

  Where am I, anyway? It began. And what am I doing here?

  “Sweet Jesus,” Zoe muttered when she read it.

  The printed debut of The Kudzu Kid was like some evil concoction churned up in the blender of Eddie Fogarty’s unhappiness, all his complaints with the Randolph County way of life tossed into the spinning blades until they merged into something rancid.

  Fogarty started with the vague idea of making the column funny, but it didn’t turn out quite that way. Its humor was fierce, a primal howl protesting against small-town minds and old-time religion, the Virginian fixation with the Civil War and Thomas Jefferson, the slow pace of doing business, the addiction to brick buildings, the accents, the climate, everything. In the back of his mind, Fogarty may have been hoping Daniel would reject it.

  And he almost did. As he scanned the printout Fogarty had handed him, the words No way in hell! leaped to the publisher’s lips before he swallowed them again. For Tucker Daniel was a thoughtful man, and he had long ago decided that his cocky new editor needed a stiff dose of reality. The column logo over this rant identified it as Fogarty’s and Fogarty’s alone. It wouldn’t libel anyone, just infuriate them.

  “Sure, Eddie,” he said finally. “Let’s go with it.”

  “You really think so?” Fogarty replied, his bluster temporarily replaced by eagerness. “Do you think I should run a picture with it?”

  “Oh, absolutely,” Daniel said. “I think people need to know what you look like.”

  The telephone calls began around mid-morning on the day the Where Am I? column appeared, and didn’t stop for a week. Their theme was so pervasive and predictable that Fogarty finally reprogrammed his answering machine to say, “Hi, this is Eddie Fogarty. Why don’t I go back where I came from?” Somebody sent him a blown-up Virginia map with Randolph County circled in red and the words: “You’re right here, asshole!” scrawled across it. More than two dozen readers said they were cancelling their subscriptions.

  “Great idea,” Fogarty said to Zoe. “You’ve ruined my life.”

  To Daniel’s dismay, however, the storm of protest didn’t chasten Fogarty at all. Rather, it seemed to energize him. He cackled as he read the hate mail, then turned the letters into paper airplanes. When Brenda suggested telling callers that he was on vacation, Fogarty told her, “Nope. I want every call.”

  Some of those people merely spit out a sentence or two and hung up on him. Others slandered New Jersey at length, or rhapsodized on the virtues of Jefferson Springs and its pastoral surroundings.

  Fogarty listened to them all, if not always respectfully. Some, he hung up on.

  “What’s your name?” he demanded of one particularly obnoxious critic. “I’m cancelling your subscription.”

  Then he had a brainstorm. He gathered all the letters, had Brenda laboriously retype them into the computer system and printed them on a full inside page in the next Echo. In the middle of all the letters—not one of them complimentary—was Fogarty’s smiling face, framed by the concentric circles of a target.

  “Nice touch,” Daniel said. “I’ll bet Whitt Scruggs will put four or five of these up on his shooting range.”

  Indeed, the target page triggered another flurry of calls and letters. Then, just when the swarm of hornets Fogarty had disturb
ed seemed finally to be returning to its nest, he received a call from Barbara Grubbs.

  “Mr. Fogarty, I’m the chairman of the United Way fund drive in the county this year,” she said, “and your column gave me an idea.”

  “Let me guess,” Fogarty said. “You’re going to have a lynching, and charge admission. It’ll be just like the old days.”

  Barbara Grubbs paused, taken aback, then forged ahead.

  “Well, not exactly,” she said in a syrupy Southside drawl. “But as you know, the county fair is next week, and we thought you’d be a natural for the dunking booth. You’re a local celebrity now, after all, and it’s one of our biggest fundraisers.”

  And that—who’d have thought it?—proved the turning point for Eddie Fogarty in Randolph County.

  He drank four beers up in his apartment to steady his nerves on Booth Night, chewed an entire pack of breath mints as a countermeasure, and put on his best dress pants, a white shirt, and tie.

  “What are you doing tonight?” he had asked Zoe earlier in the day.

  “Going to see you get what’s coming to you,” she replied.

  “You wanna go out afterward?”

  “There’s nowhere to go. This is Randolph County. Plus, I’m too old for you.”

  “Okay, how about I buy you a ticket for the Ferris wheel?”

  “You’ll be drowned by then.”

  By the time Fogarty arrived at the fairgrounds—a couple of fallow fields just outside of Jefferson Springs, their red dirt still slightly slick and sticky from a rain the night before—the line for the dunking booth was already half a football field in length.

  “What do I do?” he asked the gray-haired Ruritan Club member who was taking tickets.

  “Just climb up on that platform,” the man said, looking amused, “and hope everybody’s aim is bad.”

  Fogarty immediately regretted dressing up as he ducked through a low opening in the rear of the contraption and crawled laboriously onto his perch, where he sat with legs dangling. Through the wire mesh screen, he saw the line growing even longer.

  A target was painted on the front of the booth, and the object of this exercise was to hit it dead center with a thrown baseball. Through some process unclear to Fogarty, this would plummet him into the tank below with a satisfying splash. The water looked dark and swamp-like.

  The first dunk was the hardest for Fogarty, tipping him forward unexpectedly with his mouth open in surprise. The water tasted like chlorine and went up his nose, and as his face broke the surface again, he heard the entire line of Fogarty-haters send up a collective whoop of delight.

  Yet it was a warm night, and the tepid bath actually felt good.

  “This saves me from having to do my laundry,” he announced as he climbed back onto his perch.

  “How come you hate Randolph County?” asked a burly tobacco farmer wearing a white undershirt and a cowboy hat.

  It came out as a grunt, because he was already hurling the first baseball.

  Whap!

  “I don’t hate it,” Fogarty replied. “I was just trying to wake everybody up.”

  Thunk!

  “Well, what do you think now?”

  “I think you throw like a girl. And what’s with that stupid hat? You from Oklahoma or something?”

  Thud!

  His stint lasted two hours, and Barbara Grubbs was ecstatic.

  “You want to come back tomorrow?” she asked. “It’s a great way for you to meet people.”

  “No thanks,” Fogarty said. “I think I’ve met enough to last me a while.”

  He and Zoe walked around the fairgrounds afterward. Fogarty’s curly hair was plastered to his head, and his shoes squished.

  “You didn’t bring a change of clothes?” Zoe asked incredulously.

  “I didn’t think anybody could dunk me,” he replied.

  A traveling carnival company brought the fair to Randolph County for four days every September, and there wasn’t much to it—a Ferris wheel, a Tilt-A-Whirl, a few other rides manned by scruffy-looking carnies, a row of rip-off booths. On the weekend, there would be competition among livestock owners and fruit preserve canners—Fogarty had already been warned that all the results would have to be published in the next week’s Echo—and performances by Elmo’s Racing Pigs and some third-rate country singer.

  Fogarty had promised Zoe a Ferris wheel ride, though, so he handed two tickets to a middle-aged man with a limp and two days growth of beard, and they lifted off with a shuddering jolt and a groan from the ancient machinery.

  “I can’t believe this,” Fogarty said into the wind. “I’m trusting my life to a guy on the Ten Most Wanted List. When people get killed on this ride, he probably eats them.”

  Zoe just closed her eyes and smiled, her blonde hair loose and unfurled, her legs emerging long and tan from a pair of shorts. She was wearing a t-shirt from some long-ago Grateful Dead concert.

  “What did you mean, you’re too old for me?” Fogarty asked, somewhere during the fourth revolution. “How old are you?”

  “Old enough to remember the ‘60s,” she said. “Well, part of them, anyway.”

  “You’re not, like, forty or anything, are you?”

  “No comment.”

  As they walked to their cars in the parking lot, several fair-goers looked at Fogarty and grinned.

  “You gonna write about this?” one of them asked.

  “You never know,” Fogarty said.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  BUTTING HEADS

  In his mind, at least, Clinton Apperson was running unopposed for his Board of Supervisors seat. But it never hurt to do a little campaigning, and he was anxious to see whether the new Echo editor would prove to be pliable or prickly.

  Office-seekers on the local level rarely spent much money on campaigns in rural Virginia; no TV ads, no rallies, no free food. For an incumbent, the next term was generally like a car waiting out at the curb—all he or she had to do was climb in come November and turn the key.

  “It’s harder to get a badger out of his hole than to pry a Virginia incumbent out of his seat,” Calvin Hamer once wrote.

  In fact, most sitting local office-holders tried to avoid attention instead of seeking it. Unfortunately, from Apperson’s perspective, the timeworn adage “Let sleeping dogs lie” didn’t apply to the ugly newspaper building down the street. He would have to encounter Eddie Fogarty eventually, so he invited him over to his place of business for a mid-morning chat early in the election season.

  “Even though I don’t have an opponent,” Apperson told Fogarty as they sat in his pine-paneled rear office at Apperson Construction, “I still like to get out and meet people, shake their hands, listen to what they have to say about the issues. After all, that’s my job.”

  He intertwined his fingers behind his head and rocked back and forth, obviously pleased with this statesmanlike pronouncement. Apperson’s cheesy public smile beamed down from his office walls in half a dozen places, photographs of the supervisor standing next to various state government officials. His attire on this particular morning was a curious mix of working man and important person, a white shirt and tie worn with drab olive-green work pants. A yellow hard hat rested upside down on his desk.

  Fogarty took a sip of Apperson’s coffee, which tasted slightly burnt.

  “Aren’t you forgetting about Cassie Ledbetter?” he asked. “She seems to think she’s your opponent, anyway.”

  Apperson paused, glancing over at Fogarty’s notebook as if seeing it for the first time.

  “Oh, sure,” he said. “I didn’t mean to ignore Miz Ledbetter. But, you know, this is her first time running for office, and I don’t think very many people know her.”

  “Seems to me a lot of people know her,” Fogarty replied, enjoying the chance to tweak his sanctimonious host a bit.

  Apperson paused again, looking even more uncomfortable.

  “Well, uh, they probably do, but not as a public official. More as, well, yo
u know…”

  “A flake?”

  “I didn’t say that,” Apperson said, a smirk coming to his lips in spite of himself. “You said it.”

  The rest of the conversation was washed in the pious milk of politics—how Apperson cherished the responsibility his fellow citizens had given him, how they resonated with his conservative principles, how he would never raise their taxes.

  Fogarty couldn’t understand why anyone would want to be on the board of supervisors of a place like Randolph County, anyway. At the second meeting he’d attended, the main topics of discussion had been the ongoing negotiations for a new sewer line in the Conway section of the county and complaints from residents of a small subdivision on the outskirts of Jefferson Springs that unleashed dogs were leaving deposits on their lawns.

  “You know what?” Buddha Booker said to Fogarty afterward. “Ninety percent of this job is about shit in one form or another.”

  Fogarty laughed.

  “Now, don’t you go puttin’ that in the paper,” Booker added quickly.

  “I was thinking maybe a bumper sticker,” Fogarty said.

  But then Daniel dissected the board over lunch one day, giving Fogarty what seemed like plausible motives for the civic participation of each.

  “Sam Bishop wants to change the world,” Daniel said. “Or maybe he just wants the world to stop changing. Either way, he has this misguided idea that he can have an impact on this little corner of society just by being more pissed off than anyone else.”

  “Rev. Dixon is a good man, but he’s stuck somewhere around 1968. He’s still wearing his civil rights suit, still convinced that black people aren’t getting a fair shake and are looking to him to stand up for them. Of course, there may still be some truth in that.”

  “Archie Edmonds? I think he just uses being on the board as an excuse to get away from his wife a couple of Tuesday nights a month.”

  “But Buddha Booker and Clinton Apperson were a different breed,” Daniel continued, his voice lowering until it was almost lost in the hum of conversation at Sugar’s.