The Kudzu Kid

by Darrell Laurant

  But that was before he made himself a one-man newspaper staff by default. Five months into Fogarty’s tenure as editor, the formerly placid rhythms of the Southside Echo were beginning to seem more like an assembly line run amok—meeting upon meeting, sports event after sports event, the deadlines flying at him until they blurred together. Typically, Fogarty was working ten-to-twelve hour days, six days a week. On Sunday, he only worked half a day.

  Thus, the November election was upon him almost before he realized it. He had planned, in part out of sheer devilment, to set up a round-table discussion of county issues with candidates Clinton Apperson, Prentice Dixon and Cassie Ledbetter. The board of supervisors’ room was tentatively reserved, and Tucker agreed to provide coffee and donuts.

  Rev. Dixon, never one to pass up a captive audience, readily agreed. The sticking point was Clinton Apperson, the incumbent from the Bonifay District, who wanted no part of sharing a table with Cassie.

  “She’s just a write-in candidate,” he told Fogarty. “She couldn’t even get enough names on a petition to be on the ballot officially. If I debate her, it will give her credibility she doesn’t deserve. And you know what she’s going to be yammering about that whole time—the damn landfill.”

  “It’s not a debate, Clinton,” Fogarty explained repeatedly. “It’s just a forum to talk about issues.”

  But Apperson was adamant. And thus Cassie was largely marginalized, like a shrill barking dog tied up in the backyard. She attacked Apperson at every opportunity, badgering anyone who would listen—mostly Fogarty, until he finally stopped taking her phone calls—about Apperson’s meeting in Richmond with Melton Veazie.

  “Cassie, we’ve been over all this,” Fogarty told her a week before the election. “This isn’t Watergate. It isn’t against the law for this guy to sell land to the county for a landfill, as long as it meets the DEQ specs. Give it a rest.”

  For his part, Apperson appeared to have made some sort of truce with Prentice Dixon, who also allowed the subject to drop.

  Fogarty did try in vain to hype the Apperson/Ledbetter race in advance, calling it “The Irresistible Force vs. The Immovable Object.”

  And turnout that Tuesday was heavy, since Randolph Countians were also selecting their governor and the other statewide constitutional officers. As it turned out, however, Cassie had no more effect on the conservative, bovine local electorate than a whining gnat—eighty percent of them, for whatever reason, voted for the immovable Apperson.

  “This isn’t over,” snapped Cassie in what passed for a concession speech.

  The Randolph County High School football team also kept winning, finishing its regular season as the undefeated Southside District champion. The Wildcats then beat Charlottesville High School and Grundy in the playoffs, leading to a state semi-finals matchup with Turner Ashby of Harrisonburg.

  Jefferson Springs was delirious with football fever, every portable roadside sign along Main Street—almost a dozen—proclaiming some variation of “Go Wildcats!” One, outside the black-owned C&P Market, read Go Ernest! Get ‘em, Tyrone!”

  Despite his new feelings about Randy Akers, Fogarty knew this story was worth riding. He even got Andy Leggett’s overseas phone number from Zoe and included him in a piece quoting members of the last Wildcat team to make the playoffs.

  As luck would have it, Daniel happened to walk through the building just as Fogarty hung up with Andy.

  “Who was that?” he inquired absently.

  “Oh, some guy from Germany,” Fogarty told him, sending Daniel into a fit of phone-bill anxiety.

  Meanwhile, student newspaper editor Jason Magruder had replaced Cassie Ledbetter as the primary bug in Fogarty’s ear.

  “Coach Akers dumped Betsy, you know,” Jason told Fogarty the day before Randolph County beat Grundy. “I think he realized that word was getting around. She took it pretty hard, I hear.”

  “How do you find out all this stuff?” Fogarty asked.

  “I have my sources,” Jason replied.

  On the Wednesday night before Saturday’s game at Turner Ashby, Fogarty climbed his ladder to the roof to take advantage of a freak warm spell. The latest edition was out, and that fleeting period of fulfillment gave him permission to celebrate with a six-pack.

  His sneakers crunched across the gravel on the rooftop as he walked over to the lounge chair he had set up near the edge. It was already dark, and the breeze was not unpleasant when filtered through a light jacket, and he was halfway through his third beer when he saw the winking red lights of the Sandy Level Rescue Squad moving west along the bypass. They’d be going to the Danville Emergency Room, he thought, listening to the siren as it faded.

  Fogarty sighed, stood up and headed back down the ladder to the police and fire scanner he kept in his bedroom after hours. He usually gleaned more information from its garbled, grainy transmissions than he did by calling the sheriff’s department dispatchers later.

  Pushing buttons until the scanner settled on the rescue squad band, Fogarty recognized the nasal voice of squad member Rooster Campbell. He was reading off vital signs and estimated time of arrival at the emergency room some forty miles away, and then he said, “The patient is a fifteen-year-old female. Elizabeth Michelle Taylor. Possible overdose.”

  Elizabeth Taylor the actress? Fogarty laughed, then caught himself. Betsy Taylor?

  Bill Kirkland was his first phone call.

  “I’m surprised it took you this long,” Kirkland told Fogarty. “Well, the shit has officially hit the fan. That means I’m officially off the record.”

  “Is she gonna be okay?” Fogarty asked.

  “Betsy? Oh, yeah. From what her father told me, she just took enough to make herself real, real sleepy and then real sick. She did it in her room at home, over-the-counter sleeping pills she had picked up somewhere, and her dad heard her throwing up. When he saw the pill bottle, he called the rescue squad.”

  “So where does that leave Randy?”

  “In deep doo-doo,” Kirkland continued. “Betsy left a suicide note that mentioned their, uh, relationship, and her old man had just gotten off the phone with the sheriff when he called me. He was highly pissed, as you might imagine.”

  “I can’t believe you’re telling me all this,” Fogarty said, “even off the record.”

  Kirkland laughed, in spite of his agitation.

  “Because, homeboy, you won’t be writing anything about this until next week. Remember?

  “By then, it will be all over town and all over the Danville paper. And maybe Richmond and Lynchburg. High school coach arrested for statutory rape? You’d have to agree that’s a pretty hot piece of news.”

  “Small favor?” Fogarty said.

  “Maybe. What?”

  “Don’t tell those idiots from TV anything if they call?”

  “Hell, no, but it won’t do any good.”

  “Do you think Randy would talk to me?”

  “You’ll probably have to take that up with Watkins Reese, his attorney. Last I heard, Deputy Spady was on his way to read Coach Akers his rights.”

  Fogarty whistled softly.

  “So how about the game Saturday? You still playing?”

  “We don’t have any choice,” Kirkland said, “but we’re gonna get our asses kicked. Win one for the coach? Somehow, I don’t think so—not when he snaked the second-string quarterback’s girlfriend.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  A FOOTBALL SEASON UNDONE

  Except for the computer system, which was second-hand and crashed frequently, Daniel’s only concession to modernity in his Southside Echo operation was a portable phone he purchased for Fogarty’s third-floor office.

  “Most of the time, I can’t hear the phone when it rings late downstairs,” Fogarty complained, “and even if I did, how the hell could I get down there in time to answer it? Who do you think I am, Batman?”

  The publisher put up a half-hearted defense, arguing “But who’s going to call you after eight or
nine anyway?” before finally conceding defeat.

  That was the phone that shrilled in Fogarty’s ear around two on the morning after Randy Akers’ arrest.

  Fogarty had long since jettisoned his uncomfortable cot for a mattress he dragged up on the elevator. The phone lay not far from his ear, but he struggled to find it and push the appropriate buttons.

  “Eddie?” The voice on the other end was almost indecipherable.

  Still groggy, Fogarty grunted into the portable.

  “Eddie, this is Randy. Sorry to wake you up, but you got a minute to talk?”

  “What, is this your one phone call?” Fogarty asked, then realized how harsh that sounded.

  There was a pause, and for a minute Fogarty thought the unreliable phone had cut off again.

  “No,” Akers finally continued. “I got bailed out. Bill Kirkland, although don’t tell anybody. I just couldn’t get to sleep, and I was just wondering…what you’re going to write about this.”

  “I’ve got to write something,” Fogarty told him.

  “I know. But I just wanted to, you know, explain how this happened.”

  “Jesus Christ, Randy, the girl is fifteen,” Fogarty said. “I know there aren’t a lot of available women in Jefferson Springs, but couldn’t you have found one that was legal? I mean, you being the high-flying coach and all.”

  “Was the high-flying coach,” Akers said sadly. “Bill said the school board is holding an emergency session today to fire me. My career just went down the shitter.”

  “That’s not a surprise. So what’s going to be Watkins’ defense?”

  “Eddie, I had no idea Betsy was that young when I met her. Swear to God, she told me she was going on nineteen.”

  “Randy, you coach and teach at the high school. Obviously, you know she’s a sophomore. Did you think she got just held back a few grades?”

  “It wasn’t like that. I met her this summer, down at Kerr Reservoir. Her parents had just moved into the school district. She didn’t know I was the football coach, either. We just hit it off, and she told me she was going to college at Longwood. Have you ever seen Betsy Taylor, Eddie?”

  “No, I can’t say I have.”

  “When you do, you’ll understand how I could think she was older. We went out a couple of times between the end of June and the time football practice started, and yeah, we did sleep together a couple of times. Then school started, and she told me her age, and I almost had a freaking heart attack, Eddie.”

  “But I couldn’t get rid of her after that. She was practically stalking me. Those times people saw us in Farmville, I was just trying to talk some sense into her somewhere nobody we knew would see us.”

  “What about Kyle?”

  “That was too weird, Eddie. They started going out, sure, but she was still obsessed with me.”

  “Boy, you must have been good in the sack.”

  “Eddie.” Akers’ voice was anguished. “This isn’t one bit funny.”

  They talked until four. The next morning’s Lynchburg and Danville papers both covered the story, albeit on their inside local pages. Richmond mentioned it on the sports page, since Randolph County was in the playoffs.

  A journalistic truth had come home to roost for Eddie Fogarty, an irony he remembered Tucker Daniel mentioning in one of his discourses about weekly newspapers.

  “The higher you go, the bigger paper you write for,” Daniel had said, “the easier it gets to say bad things about people. You cover national politics for the New York Times, you can feel pretty safe that Ronnie Reagan isn’t going to show up in your office, no matter what you write about him.”

  “Down on this level, you pay a price for everything you say. You meet these people on the street, in the grocery store. Or they come to see you. You lose friends. It hits you right in the gut sometimes.”

  Now, Fogarty knew what Daniel was talking about. He genuinely liked Randy Akers, a native Georgian who had served good-naturedly as Fogarty’s interpreter of, as he put it, “all things red-neck.” Randy had bought Fogarty his first red-eye—beer and tomato juice—dragged him to a Pittsylvania County honky-tonk one night, regaled him with stories of Southern college football traditions, asked Husky Howell to take him coon hunting. And now, because of what seemed a reasonable error in judgment, Fogarty would have to chronicle his professional demise. He felt more than a little queasy.

  As usual, though, Zoe had a suggestion.

  “Get that kid to do it,” she said. “What’s his name? Jason. Tell Garland you’ve got a conflict of interest.”

  Fogarty was still pondering that when Zoe wandered back into his office.

  “It’s not always what it seems, you know,” she said softly. “I did that once.”

  “Did what?”

  “Screwed an older guy. I was sixteen, he was, I dunno, twenty-one or two. He worked on my dad’s tobacco farm, summer help. From Mexico. He was hot.”

  “How did that make you feel?” Fogarty asked her.

  “It felt great,” she said. “I knew what I was doing, and I’m guessing Betsy Taylor did, too.”

  Fogarty called Jason that night, interrupting his homework, and asked him to write about Randy Akers’ arrest for the next Echo.

  “I’ll give you twenty bucks” Fogarty said.

  “Make it thirty,” Jason replied.

  Bill Kirkland was, of course, right about the Randolph County football team. They liked Husky Howell, but they had all but worshipped Randy Akers. A former defensive back at Virginia Tech, he was almost young enough to be their older brother, still athletic enough to beat at least the linemen in the daily practice sprints. He charmed the black kids by getting into their music; chest-thumping heavy bass of rap usually reverberated through the locker room after a home victory. Coach Akers could also discuss the latest Tim McGraw or Travis Tritt single with the rural white kids. He was a disciplinarian, but he did it with a sense of humor. He never singled out one player for ridicule in front of the rest of the team.

  Looking back on it later, Akers told Fogarty he realized it might have helped if he’d gone to the Turner Ashby game up in Harrisonburg, even as a disgraced civilian. Husky Howell told him as much. But he couldn’t do it. He spent three years patiently building a relationship with his players, not just as a group but one-by-one, and now he had clumsily toppled all that with his own stupidity. The embarrassment sagged heavily upon him, flattening him helplessly on the couch in his apartment. The buses left without him.

  Randolph County made it a game for a while. The Wildcats even scored first, Ernest Dixon lofting a sweet 10-yard touchdown pass into the enormous hands of Tyrone Fuqua. But the Turner Ashby players were tapping into the energy from their home crowd—and except for the Tyroneosaurus, they were larger at almost every position. Randolph County had achieved its unbeaten season not so much from talent as from sheer manic intensity, a craziness fueled by their young and half-crazy coach that made them faster and tougher than they should have been.

  Standing down on the field, Fogarty could almost hear the air seeping like a punctured tire from the Wildcats’ unbeaten season. In contrast to the Turner Ashby fans, the visiting stands were quiet. Randolph County was down two touchdowns at halftime, and Turner Ashby was doing an excellent job of double-teaming and frustrating Tyrone Fuqua.

  Then, it got worse. Somebody missed a block, and a blue-and-gold streak flew through the opening and hit Ernest Dixon from behind as he set up to pass. The little quarterback seemed to fly apart, flopping to the turf like a rag doll, and lay there for several minutes. By the time they got him off the field, it was obvious that he wouldn’t be back. A local rescue squad took him off to the emergency room, where he was diagnosed with a mild concussion.

  So Kyle Sessoms trotted onto the field, prompting more than a few Randolph County fans to look at each other and half-smile despite their discomfort. They were well aware of the irony.

  And Kyle did his best, but the team had fallen apart around him. Desperate
to do something right, the backup quarterback tried to force a pass to Fuqua even though Tyroneosaurus was surrounded by three defenders, hoping that the monstrous end could manage one more superhuman play. But the ball fluttered from his hand rather than zipped, the usual tight spiral gone awry, and one of those three defenders stepped in front of Fuqua and returned the interception eighty yards for a touchdown.

  There was no rap music in the Randolph County locker room afterward. Tyrone Fuqua was actually crying—a startling sight for someone so large and fierce. Then the three yellow buses loaded up and headed down I-81 like a funeral procession.

  “Geez, I had already planned to go to the championship game next weekend,” Fogarty told Zoe. “It was the only thing that made spending Thanksgiving in Jefferson Springs bearable.”

  Zoe seemed lost in thought for a moment.

  “I’m leaving Wednesday to see some friends in Richmond,” she said. “Wanna come with?”

  Fogarty looked startled, then mumbled, “I dunno. I’ve got a lot of work to do.”

  Zoe stared at him reproachfully.

  “If you don’t take a break now and then,” she said, “you’re going to freak out on us. Fogarty, you need to get out of here. The mice can live without you up there for a couple of days.”

  Fogarty smiled then and looked at Zoe in a new way. She frowned.

  “Get one thing straight,” she said. “We’re staying with a friend of mine, and you’re sleeping on the couch.”

  “That’s cool,” Fogarty said. But the new look didn’t go away.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  INSULTING STONEWALL

  I think guys take to newspaper writing more naturally than women,” Eddie Fogarty told Zoe as they headed down US 360 toward Richmond in her pickup.