The Kudzu Kid

by Darrell Laurant

“Do tell,” Zoe said, staring down the long asphalt tunnel through Southside fields. “And what brings you to that conclusion?”

  “It’s got to do with the way men and women tell stories,” Fogarty continued. “Women always want to start at the beginning and leave the best part for the end.”

  “Well…yeah,” Zoe said.

  “Guys are the other way around. They usually come right to the point. That’s the way you write a newspaper story, with the end of the story first.”

  Zoe moved smoothly into the passing lane and accelerated past a panel truck.

  “So you write a newspaper story backwards,” she said. “I get it. I could do that. It’s weird, but I could do it.”

  “Sure, you could,” Fogarty said. “I’m not saying you couldn’t. It’s just an observation.”

  They were on the other side of Amelia, closing in on the Capitol of the Confederacy. Zoe drifted into thought, reached down and turned up the Grateful Dead on her tape player. As the music rose, the conversation died.

  Fogarty glanced over at Zoe as she drove. He liked the way she was all business behind the wheel, liked her hair, the range of expressions that came and went in her blue eyes. He could imagine how that Mexican tobacco picker would have been attracted to her, even when she was jail bait.

  Zoe, meanwhile, was wondering how to drag Fogarty into the real world that was pulsating all around him.

  “Don’t you ever talk about anything but the damn newspaper?” she said finally.

  Fogarty pondered the question. Traffic was beginning to thicken as isolated farmhouses gave way to clusters of trendy townhomes just west of the city. Zoe took a hard right onto the Powhite Parkway, a name that made Fogarty smile inwardly.

  “Sure,” he said finally. “What else do you want to talk about?”

  Zoe could think of a lot of things, most of them personal, but she knew better.

  “Let’s try music, for starters. Is it okay if I keep playing the Dead, or do you want something else?”

  Fogarty shrugged.

  “Dead are OK, I guess,” he said. “I always liked the harder stuff, like Aerosmith and Foreigner.”

  “AC/DC, I’ll bet, too,” Zoe said, her voice goading. “’You Shook Me All Night Long,’ All that macho crap.”

  The new tone of hostility snapped Fogarty’s head around.

  “AC/DC? No, they’re mindless. I like good lyrics.”

  “Like what?”

  “I dunno,” Fogarty said. “Maybe Talking Heads. Bruce Springsteen. He condensed the whole Vietnam War into one line in ‘Born in the USA,’ about a guy getting killed over there fighting the Viet Cong. ‘They’re still there, he’s all gone.’”

  “Yeah, but most of his stuff seems to be about car racing and hanging out on the boardwalk. Who cares?”

  Fogarty, who had been semi-slumped in the passenger seat, slid upright, warming to the challenge.

  “Oh, and I suppose Jerry Garcia puts great insights to music, huh? Those guys are self-indulgent jerks. Who wants to listen to them wander off on two-hour jams? Jerry could come out playing a kazoo and those Deadhead morons would go crazy.”

  “Watch it,” Zoe said, her voice teetering between anger and amusement. “I’m one of those Deadhead morons.”

  “I’m sorry,” Fogarty said.

  “Sorry for saying that?”

  “No, sorry you’re one of them.”

  Zoe chose to laugh.

  Stacy, Zoe’s friend from the carefree Richmond days, still lived on Monument Boulevard, where residents gave directions based on their proximity to the battalion of Confederate heroes rising from the median strip on rearing marble horses. Her place was about two blocks from Stonewall Jackson.

  Parking was still at a premium in the Fan, and Zoe and Fogarty had to walk about five blocks through the late afternoon chill to the looming stone house Zoe remembered so well. Stacy shared the first floor with a small, Benji-like mutt and a large, shaggy boyfriend. The dog took an instant dislike to Fogarty when he and Zoe appeared on the doorstep.

  “He’s got a good instinct for people,” Zoe said as Stacy carried the writhing, snarling Baxter to a rear bedroom.

  “I think it’s your pants,” Stacy said when she returned, eyeing Fogarty’s gray corduroys. “Baxter doesn’t usually see anything but jeans. When you’re that size, that’s your perspective.”

  Fogarty wondered how long Baxter would last with Cassie Ledbetter’s sixteen cats. The thought pleased him.

  Stacy had not aged as well as Zoe. She was also blonde, but from a bottle, and stockier. Crow’s feet surrounded each of her dark eyes, as if the eyes were tiny holes sending spider web cracks across a windshield. She wore a Virginia Commonwealth sweatshirt and jeans with rips in the knees, and was barefoot.

  “Beers?” she said. The accent wasn’t Southern.

  “Do you even have to ask?” Zoe replied.

  Stacy looked at Fogarty.

  “Yeah, sure,” he said. “Absolutely.”

  She fished three Millers from a refrigerator decorated with Grateful Dead stickers and set the cans on top of the linoleum-covered kitchen table.

  “I’m kind of a kitchen person,” Stacy said. “Anybody mind if we sit here instead of the living room?”

  She was already seated, making the question moot. She lobbed a couple of routine inquiries in Fogarty’s direction but didn’t really seem interested in the answers. “Where ya from?” “How d’ya like Virginia?” After that, the conversation slid first to catching up between the old friends, then into the past. Fogarty became conscious of his face, and then his hands, tell-tale symptoms of boredom. The two women just talked around him, as if he were the cab driver who had delivered Zoe to Stacy’s door.

  Feeling useless and alien, Fogarty glanced around the apartment, which seemed stuck in the early ‘70s. Jim Morrison leered down from a framed poster on the living room wall. The furniture was second-hand and lumpy. Stacy had found an Oriental rug from somewhere, and it dominated the front room, fraying badly at the edges. Baxter continued to whine and snarl from the depths of the house.

  After about an hour, the boyfriend, Perry, came home from work at a record store, which was no surprise to Fogarty. He was very large but soft-looking with a beard and longish hair, belly lapping against the shoreline of his belt. Zoe thought he looked like a biker, but Fogarty was reminded more of the Wookiee from the Star Wars movies.

  “Sorry we didn’t clean the place up a little more,” he said. “The time just kinda snuck up on us.”

  Perry’s right hand swallowed Fogarty’s for a moment by way of introduction, and then he moved to the refrigerator as if it had summoned him subliminally.

  “I think we ought to go out tonight,” he said as he popped the tab on his Miller. “We don’t really have anything to eat here, and maybe…uh…”

  “Eddie,” Fogarty offered helpfully.

  “…Eddie…would like to see the town a little bit. It ain’t much, compared to New York, but it’s ours.”

  “I couldn’t help but notice those concrete guys on the boulevard,” Fogarty said. “The people here do know the war is over, don’t they?”

  Perry laughed, a deep rumble.

  “Aw, hell, they’re just trying to feel better, is all. I’m from Tennessee, but Stacy here grew up in Baltimore, and nobody’s burned any crosses on our lawn.”

  “We don’t have a lawn, hon,” Stacy said. “Besides, Maryland was a border state.”

  Perry wasn’t a Deadhead, it turned out, but tolerated Stacy’s eccentricity.

  “I still smoke pot, though,” he said. “We’re fresh out, or I’d offer you guys a taste. That shit costs an arm and a leg now.”

  Stacy drove, an old Volvo, and there was a brief moment of uncertainty outside the car. Then Zoe climbed in the front seat with Stacy, and Perry heaved his bulk into the back.

  “Thought we girls could talk up here,” Zoe said.

  The Volvo started with a cough and a wheeze, as if it were
suffering from asthma. As they cruised slowly up Monument toward Broad, Stacy glanced back over her shoulder at Fogarty and said, “These statues are a trip. If the guy was killed in battle, the statue faces north. If he died a natural death, like Robert E. Lee, the statue faces south. That’s what I’ve been told, anyway.”

  Fogarty felt a sudden, overwhelming need for another beer.

  Stacy took them down Broad Street, the vast main artery of Richmond, starting at the Jeffersonian state capitol and passing the decaying old buildings west of the new Marriott. Just a few blocks from the Capitol, storefront signs declared Checks Cashed and Downtown Pawn.

  “Pretty, ain’t it?” Perry said.

  “Reminds me of Newark,” Fogarty said.

  Shockoe Slip was better, a line of neon-hued bars and restaurants that bordered the James River. Sometimes, according to Stacy, they wound up in the James River.

  “This floods every few years,” she said. “Once, the water got halfway up the sides of these buildings. They’ve even got a club down here called the Flood Zone.”

  They also drove past the Tobacco Company, site of the infamous meeting between Melton Veazie and Clinton Apperson.

  “Nah, I got a better place in mind,” Stacy said when Fogarty suggested going in.

  “You’re not working tonight, Fogarty,” Zoe said. “Clinton Apperson doesn’t exist tonight.”

  Eventually, the quartet wound up in McReilly’s, a faux Irish pub. Dark beer came in enormous glasses, a burly musician was picking out Celtic ballads atop a low stage, and the crowd was raucous.

  “Fogarty?” Stacy half-shouted above the noise when they were seated. “Isn’t that Irish or something?”

  Fogarty nodded.

  Indeed, he instantly felt at home in this place, feeling the sound pummeling him like a rough massage, savoring beer that hadn’t been purchased at the Quik-Mart.

  It took an off-hand remark from Stacy to dampen his brief sense of serenity, sending regret washing over his defenses like the James overrunning its flood wall.

  “This reminds me of a place called Brogan’s in Baltimore,” Stacy said. “The same beer, the same chaos. Why are Irish people in Irish bars always so fucking loud?”

  Fogarty didn’t answer. Brogan’s was the pub where he and Marcy Gladden, his fellow Baltimore Sun intern and the love of his life thus far, spent much of their time talking about their now-separate ambitions.

  For nearly half an hour after that, he sat watching the Celtic musician, although a thick wooden post partially blocked his view of the stage, and staring at the printed drink list as if it held the secret of redemption. Maybe it did.

  “You guys ever try Baileys Irish Cream?” he said finally.

  They had.

  “What about if I buy a round?”

  Stacy demurred, citing her status as the driver. “You’ve gotten so responsible,” Zoe teased her.

  The next morning, as always when he violated the rules of buzz management, Fogarty couldn’t remember the precise point at which he’d crested the bell curve and tumbled into oblivion. He awoke on Stacy and Perry’s lumpy sofa, fully clothed except for his shoes, with Baxter, the kinky-haired mutt, barking in his ear and the smell of a roasting turkey heavy in his nostrils. He heard Stacy’s hoarse whisper from across the room, “Baxter! No! He’s sleeping.”

  Why do people always talk to their dogs as if they can understand them, Fogarty thought?

  Then his stomach began to roll over, and he vaguely remembered getting sick. Jagged pieces of the previous evening stabbed his memory, but the whole remained elusive. He sat up with great effort before a tidal wave of nausea slammed him back down again.

  “I’ve got aspirin,” Stacy called over from the kitchen table, where she, Zoe and Perry were having breakfast.

  That helped, along with a couple of cups of coffee.

  “Man, you were messed up,” said Perry in his Knoxville drawl. “It was funny, because one minute you seemed okay, the next…”

  “Yeah, that’s how it happens with me,” Fogarty mumbled. “I shouldn’t drink liquor.”

  Zoe was watching him with mingled amusement and concern.

  “Do you remember peeing on Stonewall Jackson?” Stacy asked.

  Fogarty snapped his head up.

  “Huh?”

  “The statue, or at least the base of it. You said something about being a Yankee and marking your territory. Then you threw up on old Stonewall. Tough night for him.”

  “Tough night for me,” Fogarty replied. “If Stonewall can handle pigeons, he can handle that.”

  He looked at Zoe.

  “Was I a complete moron?”

  She returned a Mona Lisa flash of teeth.

  “Only part of the time,” she said.

  “We had a hard time getting you on the couch,” Stacy said. “You kept wanting to sleep in with Zoe.”

  Fogarty felt his face burning.

  “Oh, my gosh—he’s blushing,” Zoe said. “I didn’t think that was possible.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  ZOE CROSSES OVER

  Since he’d arrived at the Southside Echo, Fogarty had grown almost comfortable in his office.

  True, it was smaller than even the minimum standards of daily newspaper editors, but still a distinct improvement over the claustrophobic particle-board cubicle that had been his base of operations in New Jersey. Carrying on any conversation with his newsroom neighbors there had been like trying to talk to the person in the next bathroom stall.

  Once, in a spasm of frustration, Fogarty punched the flimsy barrier in front of him and felt his arm go through to the elbow, eliciting a shriek from the co-worker whose space he had so rudely invaded.

  At the Echo, by contrast, Fogarty had actual walls to look at—and occasionally punch with impunity. At first, the lack of a door left him feeling vulnerable, but he gradually began to appreciate being able to ease back in his chair and gaze out into the vastness of the paste-up area, lost in his thoughts.

  He was doing just that a few days after his trip to Richmond when Zoe’s head suddenly appeared in his field of vision.

  “I’ve been thinking about you,” she said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah, and I’ve decided that you don’t have a drinking problem.”

  She said that with such confidence that Fogarty forced a smile.

  “That’s a relief,” he said.

  Zoe made a face at him, then continued undaunted.

  “No, I think you’re just really, really stressed out. How can you keep putting this paper out by yourself; are you nuts?”

  Fogarty pondered that question for a moment. He had, in fact, been preparing to take advantage of Daniel’s Christmas spirit by asking him yet again to hire another reporter. Or, more to the point, to free up enough money to entice someone to actually work there.

  Fogarty had already told Zoe this, but he told her again.

  “Nobody’s going to want to work here for what Tucker’s willing to pay.”

  Zoe brightened.

  “I will,” she said.

  “You already work here,” Fogarty said.

  “I know, but I want to write. Not just poetry, but, like, stories.”

  “Like, stories?”

  “Remember what you said on the way down to Richmond, that I could learn how to write in newspaper style?

  “Well, sure, but…”

  “Then teach me.”

  Fogarty sighed, knowing he had no choice.

  “Okay,” he said finally. “Why not? What I’ll do is give you a test—cover the Christmas parade on Saturday.”

  Zoe looked stricken.

  “Oh, goody,” she said, finally. “But you’re going to have to come, too. I need coaching.”

  Jefferson Springs strung up its paltry supply of Christmas lights on the first Friday of December, the day before the annual Christmas parade. For the next month, the lights dangled precariously from the poles along Main Street, placed there with no more
care than if they had dropped from the sky.

  The parade itself, Fogarty had learned from reading back issues of the Echo, was numbingly predictable. December after dreary December, it consisted of the Sandy Level Rescue Squad’s three vehicles, a couple of customized vans, three or four pre-pubescent girls sporting Little Miss something or other sashes and trying out their languid pageant waves, four of the county supervisors riding in open cars, courtesy of Buddha Booker, who was one of them, and the chilled, rather torpid Randolph County High School marching band.

  “Just let me know when you’re ready to go,” he told Zoe.

  The next morning, she called him at eight-thirty.

  “Get on your elevator and get your ass down here,” she said. “I’m ready. Got my notebook, got four pens, and got my tape recorder.”

  “Tape recorder?” Fogarty mumbled.

  “Sure. I’m probably going to interview Otho Mosby—I mean, Santa Claus—and I don’t want to misquote him.”

  There was a long silence.

  “Zoe, the parade doesn’t start until two,” Fogarty said finally.

  “Yeah, but don’t you want to stake out a good place to see it?”

  Another silence.

  “You realize, of course, that nobody ever goes to these parades.”

  “Then why did you assign it to me?”

  “So all the people who won’t go can read about it.”

  It was close to sixty degrees an hour before the parade began, banishing any hint of Christmas spirit that Fogarty may have nurtured, and he suggested they sit up on the roof of the Echo building and watch the parade go by below.

  “That way, I can have a couple beers,” he added.

  “I’m beginning to re-think that drinking problem thing,” Zoe told him. “I can’t do that, anyway, because I’ve got to get close to people so I can get some quotes.”

  Fogarty started to say something, but caught himself. He hated to dampen his new reporter’s enthusiasm.

  So Zoe interviewed virtually every person at the parade, even down to toddlers, and plowed through several rolls of film. She also filled an entire reporter’s notebook describing each float in detail. Three hours after the parade ended, she was still hunched over her computer terminal.