The Kudzu Kid

by Darrell Laurant

  “Jesus!” Farrar said out loud.

  The rubber wiper blades had literally melted.

  That wet frontal system had not seen fit to christen the red-clay fields of Southside Virginia, however. It hadn’t rained there in weeks, and Zoe Vaden felt pangs of sympathy for the Mexican workers extricating the last leaves of tobacco from her father’s fields.

  For Zoe, the farm was like a former lover, a mix of good and bad memories. As she looked out the kitchen window, she remembered the small pleasures—how her mother would freeze big thermoses of water in the ice box at night so they would stay cold and waiting at the end of every tobacco row the following sweltering afternoon; the way she and Andy used to invent games to ease the boredom as they perched on the tractor and planted seeds. Even the thrill that always came over her, in spite of herself, when the plants invariably appeared.

  “Damn,” her brother would always say, “I was kind-of hoping they wouldn’t come up this year.”

  Most years, Zoe regarded the Mexican imports who helped with the harvest as little more than animated pieces of equipment. Few spoke English, so communication was limited to a nod of greeting, or perhaps the swipe of a hand across a sweat-soaked forehead, followed by a long-suffering smile.

  Rafael was different. He was just in his early twenties when she was sixteen, and spoke more than passable English in an accent she found alluring. It didn’t hurt that he was good-looking in an exotic sort of way, but what really drew her to him was his constant smile, as much a part of his face as his Roman nose.

  Rain or drought, hot or cool, easy days or hard, Rafael greeted the world with a grin. At the same time, he was knowledgeable about the outside world to an extent that surprised Zoe, and he quickly taught her that his fellow Mexicans weren’t ignorant just because they spoke another language.

  Yet she missed the knowing looks that these co-workers exchanged whenever the two of them were together. They had seen Rafael in action before.

  It was 1970, at the apex of summer. The insects provided a constant soundtrack to life on the farm, turning up the volume at night so that the woods seemed to vibrate with their communal song. The air was like syrup.

  One night when Zoe couldn’t sleep, she went to the outbuilding where Rafael was staying and woke him. He brought a bottle of cheap wine from under his cot, grabbed a blanket, and the two of them made their way to a tobacco-drying shed further away from the main house.

  She was wearing only a nightgown, and after the wine was gone, Rafael put his hand on one of her smooth legs and slowly slid it upwards. She hesitated for only a moment.

  It wasn’t until years later that Zoe heard from a subsequent group of Mexicans that Rafael had a wife and three kids back in Cuidad Victoria, and she was just one of his many extramarital conquests.

  She almost convinced herself that it didn’t matter, but it did. And part of her, the emotional part, shut down.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  LEAKS

  Like most other residents of the planet Earth, the citizens of Randolph County produced an astonishing volume of trash.

  Besides the normal household food waste, there were tons of newspapers and waste paper, battalions of discarded tires, mounds of grass clippings, ungainly tangles of brush and limbs, and glistening hillsides of crushed beer and soda cans. The trucks that eased up to the main Randolph County landfill southeast of Jefferson Springs and the transfer station in far northwest Bonifay also came bearing discarded lumber, tarpaper, old appliances, and auto parts.

  Of course, landfill inspector Millie St. Claire was required to turn away some other items if she spotted them. No human or animal sewage, no chemical drums—unless empty, cut open at both ends and crushed—no solvents, paints, pesticides, herbicides, gasoline, or kerosene. Millie kept that list on a yellowing sheet of paper taped to the wall of her booth.

  “You can see the problem, though,” Millie said to Fogarty one day as he researched the unavoidable nearly-full landfill story. “It’s just me here. I got the right to look in anybody’s truck, but it’s pretty easy to hide things under tires or brush or whatnot. If I got down there and went through every pickup that comes in here, they’d be backed up all the way to Farmville.”

  Heavy-set, prematurely gray, and slow moving as a thundercloud, Millie had been faithful at her post—a small outbuilding that overlooked the entrance to the landfill—for nearly a decade. And for almost that long, Les Kinsley had been piloting his scarred old bulldozer over the lumped piles of garbage, crushing them under its rotating treads and entombing them under tons of earth.

  “It really doesn’t smell that bad here,” Fogarty observed as Kinsley gave him a brief tour around the perimeter of the twenty-five acre site in a green pickup almost as battered as the bulldozer.

  “Hell, no, it don’t smell,” Kinsley replied. “That’s why I’m here.”

  Kinsley was famous among county employees for the dump tours he occasionally gave the high school and middle school students.

  “He’s a pistol, that guy,” Randolph County Administrator Johnnie West told Fogarty. “One of the things he likes to do is slip out before the buses arrive and put a McDonald’s bag with a biscuit or something in it out by a fresh pile of garbage. Then he’ll pretend to find it, take the biscuit out and eat it. The kids just fall out when he does that. Some of them have even tossed their cookies.”

  “Can’t think of a better place to do that,” Fogarty said.

  David West, Johnnie’s younger brother, was the landfill supervisor. Fogarty got off on the wrong foot with him by referring to his fiefdom as a dump.

  “Dump’ is a four-letter word, Mr. Fogarty,” said David, who was as serious as his brother was irreverent. “We prefer sanitary landfill.”

  To Fogarty, the place looked like hell, a wasteland of fill dirt and trash and a few settling ponds. Even worse, a small creek gurgled right through the middle of the place, stained a color unknown in nature.

  “That’s called leachate,” David West told him. “Some folks call it garbage juice. It’s gravity-fed to the wastewater plant over there.”

  A group of vultures hunkered down next to one of the settling ponds, dark emissaries to the place.

  “I see them every morning when I get to work,” West said. “I almost expect them to be drinking coffee.”

  In terms of price, the Randolph County landfill was a bargain—five dollars a ton to dump. But everyone knew that wasn’t going to last, because the county was on a collision course with its own offal, not to mention new Virginia Department of Environmental Quality rules that would have an enormous effect on the next landfill, wherever it was.

  “We’ll have to put in one of those plastic bed liners,” said Clinton Apperson on one of the few occasions Fogarty could get him to talk about it, “maybe even double thickness. We’ve got to find some place to locate the damn thing where the residents won’t pitch a fit, and it’s got to be somewhere with good drainage and no streams. Now, you tell me…”

  The specter of a landfill opening up nearby was enough to turn the most docile citizens into screaming NIMBYs. Landfills, prisons, and mental institutions, Fogarty had discovered over the years, were the unholy trinity. We need them, sure, but not in my backyard.

  As far as his re-election campaign was concerned, the landfill was a topic Apperson would have been happy to ignore. The problem was a leak, not of leachate but of information.

  Melton Veazie, who had come to several supervisors’ meetings and contacted Zoe and Cassie, among others, was a mystery man with a mission. He lived somewhere in the Richmond suburbs, and described himself as a garbage broker. After an initial attempt at subtlety, not one of his strengths, Veazie had finally come out into the sunlight about what he intended to do with the land he was trying to buy. He even consented, grudgingly, to a brief interview with Fogarty.

  “It’s simple,” he said. “I’m the middleman. This county is running out of landfill space, which you know quite well. It’s goin
g to cost y’all an arm and a leg to set up a new dump under the new regulations. All I’m trying to do is find some land and bring in a company to set it up for you, no cost. In return, the supervisors have to re-draw the zoning ordinance to allow for out-of-state waste to come in here.”

  “These companies I’m talking with are not the devil, Mr. Fogarty. They’re reputable firms with good track records. They know the law, and they know what they’re doing. Think about it—the county can take all that money they were going to spend on a new landfill and stick it somewhere else. In the schools, maybe. Whatever.”

  Interesting, said Clinton Apperson, Buddha Booker and Archie Edmonds. Worth a look. Prentice Dixon, as always, was waiting to see how such a proposal might affect his own largely African-American constituency—would it mean jobs or deformed children? Sam Bishop, of course, wanted no part of it.

  At some point during the fall, the Big Three drew straws and chose Clinton Apperson as an emissary to meet with Veazie. They did not mention this to the other two supervisors. “Why complicate things?” Buddha said. Nor was this something that fell within the scope of Eddie Fogarty’s radar.

  So Apperson and Veazie sat at a rear table on the third floor of the Tobacco Company in Richmond and talked. Veazie told Apperson that he was almost ready to close a deal with Roland Winfree, who also lived in Richmond and owned three hundred-plus acres of vacant land between the Leggett farm and the property occupied by Cassie and Breeze. That land had become an albatross to Winfree, no longer farmed and badly overgrown. He made just enough to pay his property taxes by charging to hunt deer and turkey there.

  Apperson, for his part, expressed concern that three hundred acres wouldn’t be enough to meet the county’s trash needs for the next generation. Veazie assured him that if a landfill were placed between them, it wouldn’t be long before the adjoining landowners would seek greener pastures. Between drinks and dessert the two men also discussed zoning, damage control and publicity—or the preferred lack of it. Melton Veazie picked up the check, more than sixty dollars.

  Of course, only those two men knew what was actually said at the Tobacco Company that rainy afternoon. But someone found out that they had met, and passed along the information to Cassie Ledbetter, and what had seemed to be a lopsided election enlivened only by Cassie’s eccentricity suddenly turned into rich column fodder for Eddie Fogarty.

  Apperson issued a clumsy and unconvincing denial that he and Veazie ever met. Then, backed into a corner, he issued an even clumsier denial that the other Big Three members had been behind it. Dixon and Bishop were outraged, and the unopposed Dixon used his stump time to verbally pummel Apperson.

  “Damn, this is getting to be fun,” Fogarty told his boss.

  “Instead of working out a solution to the county’s trash problems,” he wrote, “the Randolph County supervisors are spending all their time trashing each other.”

  He just finished that column and was leaning back in his chair to savor it, a feeling similar to the completion of a good meal, when Brenda appeared in his office doorway.

  “There’s a Jason Magruder here to see you,” she said.

  “Who?”

  Brenda shrugged and walked away, leaving Fogarty no option but to receive his guest.

  The first word that popped into Fogarty’s head when Magruder appeared was wiry. He wore wire-framed glasses and had wiry hair. Moreover, he seemed wired in manner, shifting his weight nervously from one foot to another as he stood in Fogarty’s office. His introductory handshake was only the brush of a touch, as if he was too rushed to spend any more time on it.

  “We’ve got big trouble, Mr. Fogarty,” he said.

  “We?”

  “The school. The high school. It’s about Mr. Akers.”

  “Randy Akers?”

  Jason nodded.

  “What I’ve been hearing is that he’s been seeing a girl named Betsy Taylor. She’s only a sophomore—real cute. A couple of people have seen them together over in Farmville. That’s against the law, isn’t it, Mr. Fogarty?”

  A queasiness invaded Fogarty’s stomach.

  “I guess it depends on what you mean by seeing.”

  “She told one of her friends that she’s screwing him.”

  Fogarty took a deep breath.

  “That, uh, would be against the law, yeah.”

  Jason, a junior at Randolph County High School and editor of the school newspaper, The Wildcat, was wondering whether to put this revelation in print.

  “Could I get sued, Mr. Fogarty?” he asked.

  “You’d never get that far,” Fogarty said. “The school administration would go nuts, never mind Coach Akers. And even if you could get it printed, you don’t have any proof, do you?”

  Jason returned to shifting from foot to foot. Fogarty felt a sudden urge to slap him.

  “Everybody’s all excited about the football team,” Jason continued. “We’ve got a chance to win the state. I’m scared that if I did spread this around, some of the football players would beat the crap out of me.”

  Fogarty flashed back to Jim Kolar, his muscle-bound adversary at Syracuse. He envisioned Tyrone Fuqua standing next to Jason.

  “I see your point,” he said.

  “So,” Jason continued, the pace of his words slowing down for the first time, “I was thinking maybe you could write about it. About Mr. Akers and Betsy. They wouldn’t beat you up.”

  “No,” Fogarty shot back, “but a lot of lawyers would. Jason, you can’t use second-hand information like that as proof.”

  “One of Betsy’s friends is a good friend of mine,” Jason said, “and she said Betsy really has a thing for Coach Akers. She even broke up with Kyle Sessoms, the guy she was dating, because of him.”

  “Does Kyle know?”

  “He’s pretty clueless. He’s so into this football season that he’s probably forgotten Betsy is even alive. There’s another thing, though.”

  “What’s that?”

  “According to her friend, Betsy thinks she might be pregnant.”

  After Jason left, Fogarty laid his head on his desk for a few minutes. Then he called Bill Kirkland, the Randolph County High School principal.

  “What’s up, homeboy?” Kirkland said, his usual reference to their shared Yankee roots.

  Fogarty stalled for a few minutes, complaining about the continuing lack of social life in Randolph County and filling Kirkland in on an upcoming Bruce Springsteen concert in Richmond.

  “Wait a minute,” Kirkland said finally. “This is your work time. You never call to shoot the shit during your work time. What’s up?”

  “You’re not going to like it,” Fogarty said. “Have you heard any rumors about Randy Ayers and an underage girl?”

  Kirkland sighed deeply.

  “I’m going to have to go off the record here,” he said. “I mean, like, way off the record.”

  “No problem,” Fogarty said. “I’m just trying to track down something I heard.”

  “Just between you and me, there might be something to it,” Kirkland said. “As soon as football season is over, I’m going to find out for sure.”

  Fogarty stopped for a moment, trying to balance indignation with friendship.

  “Bill, I like Randy, too,” he said. “We’ve split a few six-packs together. He’s doing a hell of a job with that team, and he seems like a good guy, for a redneck. But what he’s doing is against the law.”

  “What you think he’s doing? You mean…?” Kirkland’s voice suddenly brittled. “You don’t have any proof, and I don’t have any proof. I even asked the girl, Betsy, about it, and she got indignant on me and started tearing up. Said she didn’t know how I could say such a thing about her.”

  “She’s probably lying,” Fogarty said.

  “Yeah. She probably is. Damn it, though, this football season is the best thing to happen to this school in twenty years. The way the Commonwealth of Virginia hands out school funds is a crime, and a lot of the burden falls on th
e counties. You’ve been in Randolph County long enough to know there’s not a lot of blood left in this turnip. We do the best we can, but we consider ourselves lucky if we can just get kids out the door, never mind into college.”

  “This place is in the middle of freaking nowhere, and kids grow up thinking they aren’t worth a shit because they don’t have a mall they can go to. Then they all leave after they graduate, because there’s no jobs.”

  “At the risk of pissing you off even more,” Fogarty said, “you can spare me the speech. If Akers is banging this girl, and she’s fifteen that’s a felony. What do you think that’s going to do to the school’s precious self-esteem when that story hits the fan? It has to come out, Bill.”

  “I know,” Kirkland replied softly. “Hell, we’ve already clinched our conference. We’ve got one more game, then the playoffs. Randolph County hasn’t even made the state playoffs since Andy Leggett and that bunch were here. We’ve already cleared out a big spot in our trophy case, just waiting. I mean, what else can happen in three or four weeks that hasn’t happened already?”

  “It’s up to you, Bill,” Fogarty said. “I can’t write about this until charges are filed, you know that. I can’t even tell you how I found out about it.”

  “But you could go to Sheriff Inge, and he could start asking questions.”

  “I could,” Fogarty said, “but I guess I won’t. Not now, anyway.”

  “Betsy Taylor is really mature for her age,” Kirkland said quickly. “She can handle herself.”

  “Sure,” Fogarty said. “Go Wildcats.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  HITTING THE FAN

  Eddie Fogarty had expected time to drag down in Dixie, the minutes thickening like chilled corn syrup, then oozing into lost hours that would leave him catatonic with boredom. He thought he might fill these unwelcome spaces with books he’d always wanted to read, or perhaps long periods of sober contemplation about his future.