The Kudzu Kid

by Darrell Laurant

  “That’s not bad for a newbie,” Fogarty said, reading over her shoulder. “Now, tomorrow, you can come in and cut your story in half.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHRISTMAS IN NOWHERE

  Fogarty considered driving up to Bucks County to spend Christmas with his mother, but only fleetingly. Given the bare bones staff situation at the Echo, his leaving would essentially amount to abandonment. The Daniels’ had already made holiday plans elsewhere, and Zoe wasn’t even close to ready to put out an edition.

  The last pre-Christmas paper was scheduled to be printed just two days before the holiday, and so there was no reprieve for Fogarty, Zoe and Annie Thompson, part of whose job was serving as advertising sales rep when Tucker was away.

  “I think Sam Meeks is going to drive me bat crazy,” Annie muttered to Zoe, who was standing nearby at the paste-up table. “Whenever we get really busy, he decides he has to get some last-minute changes into that damned grocery store ad from over in Amelia. There’s six newspapers around here who hate his guts.”

  She had just returned from Sugar’s with lunch, which included a bacon cheeseburger that Fogarty frowned at, turning it over gingerly in his hands as if it might explode.

  “What the hell is this?” he asked of no one in particular. “It looks like the burnt piece of another hamburger.”

  “I believe that’s the bacon,” Annie said.

  As always, the Echo office had been filled with comings and goings on that Tuesday. Johnnie West, the county administrator, wandered in at one point, talking about a proposed prison that may or may not be coming to Randolph County. Shortly after he left, the front door opened again and a lean, haggard fellow ambled past Brenda and into the inner sanctum.

  “Can we help you?” Fogarty asked.

  The question came out somewhat warily, because the new visitor wore a camouflage shirt and hat and had a large hunting knife protruding from his belt. He was also carrying a bottle in each fist.

  “Aw, that’s just J. W.,” Annie said. “He’s harmless.”

  “Let me get you alone in that back room and I’ll show you how harmless I am,” J. W. replied in a raspy voice.

  “J. W., you know I’m married,” Annie told him.

  “Yup. And you know I’m kidding.”

  J. W. actually wasn’t seeking carnal knowledge of Annie, just the use of the Echo’s venerable copy machine.

  “I need to make me a few copies of a deed,” he said, sliding a badly creased sheet of paper out of his back pocket.

  “These should take care of it,” he continued, brandishing the two bottles in Fogarty’s direction.

  “Is that moonshine, J. W.?” Zoe asked.

  “Naw, I don’t make shine. I just drink it. This is plum wine and grape wine; 1983 and 1984, I believe. Those were good years.”

  Intrigued, Fogarty unscrewed one of the caps, then made a face.

  No one had seen or heard Deputy Henry Massenburg walk in. Things were slow in the holiday season, and he was looking for a diversion.

  “You know how Brewster Faulkner has been trying all season to get a deer?” he said to J. W.

  J. W. nodded.

  “Well, today, he finally got one. The bad news is, he got it with his pickup.”

  Massenburg cackled. Then he spotted the two bottles sitting on a table.

  “That moonshine, J. W?” he asked.

  “Wine.”

  “Damn. There’s nothing like shine for the holidays, especially with my mother-in-law coming in to visit.”

  “So what’s the crime news that you aren’t telling us?” Fogarty asked.

  “You know, not much,” Massenburg replied. “We did have a bust over at the high school last week. Two kids were caught with the evil weed in a bathroom stall, along with the juvenile delinquent who sold it to them.”

  “Thank God you caught them,” Fogarty said. “I’m gonna sleep a lot better tonight knowing they’re off the street.”

  Massenburg cackled again.

  “Another kid told on them,” he said. “When I asked him how he knew that what they were smoking was marijuana, he said, ‘Because I took a hit off it.’ The one we arrested said he was selling pot for a nickel a bag. I told him, ‘Son, you’re gonna go broke that way. You’re way behind the curve.’”

  The final visitor of the day was Commonwealth’s Attorney Barney Knight, who said he just stopped in to wish everyone a Merry Christmas.

  “Are you up for election next year?” Fogarty asked.

  He and Knight talked briefly about the upcoming trial of Wardell Franklin, who had been arrested in Richmond and charged with the murder of Theo Moore. Since the Richmond police had no firm evidence to link either B. D. Dawkins or Eugene Brown to Theo’s demise, they were more than happy to settle for a case that would feature an eye witness. Wardell was now a resident of the community jail in Lynchburg, which was fine with Sheriff Inge.

  “I think we’re looking at March for the trial,” Knight said. “Damn, but those Richmond attorneys can stall. And these aren’t even the legal eagles—Mr. Franklin has been forced to rely on court-appointed assistance.”

  “I’m kind-of looking forward to this,” Fogarty said. “It’s been awhile since I’ve covered a murder trial.”

  “I guess the last big one we had here was about a dozen years ago,” said Knight. “It involved a star football player over at the high school, Michael Stokes, who was convicted of killing his girlfriend. They never did find a body, but there was a lot of circumstantial evidence. Because he was black and she was white, it got kind of ugly, and the two families—the Stokeses and the Mabrys—have been at each other ever since.”

  “But not this week, I hope,” Fogarty said. “Peace on earth, and all that stuff.”

  Knight shook his head.

  “Three years ago, we had a shooting at seven on a Christmas morning. When Massenburg asked the victim who shot him, he just said, ‘A friend,’ and refused to say anything more.”

  “Maybe somebody got a new gun for Christmas and wanted to try it out,” Zoe said.

  After Knight left, Fogarty let Zoe write a headline for her Christmas parade story. It led the front page, surrounded by slightly out-of-focus Claude Kizer photos of little girl queens and rescue squad vans and Santa Claus—Otho Mosby, for the 10th straight year.

  “And I get my name on it?” she said.

  “Absolutely,” Fogarty said.

  The next day, Zoe went down to Richmond to spend the holiday with some old friends. Annie invited him to Christmas Eve dinner with her and her husband and two kids, but Fogarty met her kids once, and that was enough. Wild at the best of times, they would be uncontrollable waiting for Santa.

  Instead of the usual six-pack, Fogarty bought a fifth of vodka and a quart of orange juice and sat up in his quarters pouring down drinks until he finally fell asleep in his one ragged chair. His last thought was of Santa Claus. Was Randolph County even on his list?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  BLACK RANDOLPH

  The Greater Zion Baptist Church was perched on a hill just outside of Jefferson Springs, its skinny white steeple raised like a beckoning finger.

  Inside the weathered old building, the sense of welcoming heightened. A thick red carpet covered the floor, part of the interior walls and even the seats of the pews, making Fogarty think of verdant psychedelic moss. A huge velvet painting of a smiling Jesus, hands upraised, filled the wall behind the altar. The place smelled strongly and sweetly of perfume and cologne.

  There had been no carpet in the Catholic Church where Fogarty spent his childhood Sundays, just a stone and tile floor that eerily echoed the high-heeled footsteps of women. Instead of velvet paintings, there were stained glass windows, and the ceiling seemed to a child to extend up to heaven itself. Greater Zion Baptist was the opposite—all the soft edges muted, the carpeted walls closing in like an embrace.

  Fogarty had never before been the only Caucasian at a gathering. The thought of it made h
im nervous, but he was greeted like a prodigal son. Well-dressed black men shook his hand earnestly, black women wearing long gloves and hats hugged him.

  “Rev. Dixon told us you might be coming,” one man with a deep voice said to him. “Where do you usually go to church?”

  “I, uh…nowhere,” Fogarty stammered. “I haven’t been here that long. I was brought up Catholic, though.”

  “Don’t have many Catholics around here,” the man said. “I guess you’d have to go over to Farmville to find a Sunday service. But, anyway, welcome.”

  Rev. Prentice Dixon, the pastor of Greater Zion for twenty years and the conscience of the Randolph County Board of Supervisors, had approached Fogarty after a supervisors meeting to ask if he planned to do any stories on Black History Month.

  Fogarty stared at him blankly.

  “February,” Dixon told him, “is Black History month. Calvin always did an article of some kind about it. They give us the shortest month of the year—a hint of a smile came with that—so we’ve got to make the most of it. I’d love to see you come to church with us next Sunday.”

  As a Catholic, albeit of the fallen-away variety, Fogarty had never given much thought to the concept of black and white churches. His Catholic church had been mostly Irish-American, and he never stopped to think about where the few black residents of Bucks County went to worship.

  College at Syracuse and his intern period in Baltimore had exposed Fogarty to more of what was then being called diversity, but he only skirted the edges of it. Although he knew some black Syracuse students and, later, Sun reporters, they simply blended into his world, more similar than unique.

  Greater Zion Baptist, by contrast, was like another country. No sooner had he escaped the gauntlet of handshakes and hugs and settled into one of the carpeted pews near the back than a group of musicians stepped up on the raised stage area and plugged in their instruments. A shivering organ chord was joined by the heavy thump of a bass guitar and a rattle of drums. A ten-member choir materialized as if by sorcery. Within minutes, they were rocking.

  And so was the congregation, which made Fogarty distinctly uncomfortable. All these well-dressed people who had only moments earlier seemed so formal and dignified were swaying back and forth like pines in a wind, hammering their hands together.

  For half of the first song, Fogarty sat hunched in his seat, a rock amidst a general roll. Finally he stood up and bobbed his head tentatively to the beat, which reminded him of the Motown music his parents used to play.

  The music seemed to go on forever. Finally, the instruments were put down and a tall woman in a white robe climbed up behind the pulpit with some effort and read off a long list of upcoming events and sick church members. Fogarty stole a quick glance at his watch—he had already burned thirty minutes of his Sunday morning.

  This was normally his cherished time to sleep in, and Fogarty never dressed up if he could help it. But he knew that the Rev. Dixon was someone he needed to get to know better, and he couldn’t risk offending him. So he set his alarm for eight-thirty, pulled on a sport coat and slacks that came close to matching, and even added a tie that pinched his neck.

  He might have imagined it, but he thought Dixon caught his eye and smiled when he strolled out, encased in a cream-colored suit and tie very much like what he usually wore to supervisor’s meetings.

  Because this was the centerpiece sermon for Black History month, the preacher began by digging deep into the Old Testament and bringing forth a spiritual and philosophical connection between the followers of Martin Luther King and the followers of Moses, comparing the miraculous cleaving of the Red Sea with the march across the bridge at Selma. As he read, his bass voice edged up an octave and became more urgent.

  Then Dixon left Moses in the desert and leaped ahead, telling his flock that he had heard King speak at a high school in Lynchburg in March of 1962.

  “I was twenty-three-years-old,” he said, “just out of the service, and living in Farmville. I didn’t know much about Dr. King, but I knew enough to want to hear him. To need to hear him. I knew he wasn’t Moses, you understand, because there can only be one Moses.”

  “That’s right,” someone murmured from the audience.

  “Besides, Dr. King probably didn’t look like Moses. Not the pictures of Moses that we see. Not the Cau-casian Moses. Not the white man’s Moses.”

  “Tell it!” said a woman in the third row.

  “And I didn’t have to cross a desert to get to Lynchburg,” Dixon said. “Didn’t need an ocean parted. I just used my thumb, and hitchhiked there—fifty miles. Amen!”

  He went to Lynchburg, Dixon recalled, as a bitter young man. But after listening to King preaching forgiveness and unity, he found himself standing back on the shoulder of US 460 as a changed disciple.

  “I just headed home,” he said. “Didn’t need a place to sleep, because I was so excited. It was late, and there were no rides for a long time, but I just stood out on the shoulder of the road in the freezing cold, thinking about what I’d heard.

  “After a while, a pickup truck stopped, and the driver looked like every picture of the white redneck of that time, like maybe he had a shotgun under the seat and some moonshine in the glove box. Like maybe he had his Klan robes at the cleaners, was the only reason he wasn’t wearing them.”

  The congregation murmured and chuckled, because they all knew that picture.

  “So I got in, thinking this might be my last ride, and the man reached out and shook my hand and said, ‘It’s too cold for anybody to be out on a night like this.’ And instead of moonshine, he had a thermos of coffee with him and poured me some into a paper cup.

  “I told him I’d just seen Dr. King, and he didn’t bat an eye.

  “‘I was there, too,” he said. ‘I think it’s time we stopped all this racial foolishness and just moved on.’”

  “He drove me all the way to my front door, and I never saw him again. I’ve come to believe he was an angel, helping me to see that we’re all the same here, black or white.”

  Almost automatically, heads turned in the direction of Fogarty. Not knowing what to do, he smiled weakly.

  More music followed Dixon’s sermon, then an offering. Fogarty only had a ten-dollar bill in his wallet, but he swallowed hard and flipped it into the plate.

  He was hoping to get back to the office and work for a couple of hours, but the post-service crowd surrounded him and swept him downstairs into the fellowship hall. There, Fogarty found long tables lined with food brought in by congregation members, and his stomach snarled.

  “Okay,” he thought. “But just for a little while.”

  It turned out to be two hours, but a valuable two hours. As Fogarty sat at the end of the first table, next to Rev. Dixon, eating ham, coleslaw, fried chicken, candied yams, potato salad and hash browns probably left over from somebody’s breakfast, he got a crash course in race relations in Randolph County.

  Randolph was only thirty miles, as Jim Crow flew, from Prince Edward County, a place where the governing board closed the public schools in the 1950s rather than integrate them. Dixon had come along a little later, but not by much.

  “I heard all the stories,” he said, “because I was brought up in that county. The white kids were all sent to these little schools they threw together in somebody’s garage or a church basement. Academies, they called them. The black kids went to Lynchburg or Richmond. Or nowhere. We called them our lost generation.”

  In the end, Dixon said, it was civil rights attorney Thurgood Marshall who brought down school segregation—not through marches and rallies, but dollars and cents.

  “He took it to the courts, and said, ‘Okay, separate but equal isn’t what we want, but we can live with it for now. The problem is, the white schools are so much nicer than the black schools. If this system is to continue, we want the black schools brought up to that level.’”

  The wily Marshall knew that the rural counties in Virginia and elsewhere in the So
uth couldn’t afford to renovate the often dilapidated black schools supposedly under their care.

  “Well, then,” Marshall said, “I guess the only alternative is integration.”

  Dixon chuckled softly after telling the story.

  “It’s not a Christian concept, but I’d call it karma,” he said.

  Fogarty smiled.

  “I guess it’s a little like the choice you and the other supervisors have to make on the landfill later this year, huh?” he said.

  Dixon’s smile faded, and his brow furrowed.

  “I’ll have to think about that,” he said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  SWEET SIXTEEN IN GANGLAND

  Watching Leo Castelli’s twin granddaughters at their sixteenth birthday party, Denny DeBrocco had to wonder.

  Did they know that this man who had spent hours transforming the back room of DeBrocco’s TV Sales and Repair into a fitting stage for their event was also a killer? Were they aware that Papa, with the laughing eyes and scratchy beard, had really been sent to prison for three years in the late ‘70s, rather than on an extended business trip?

  Did any schoolmates ever tell them, mockingly, “Hey, we saw your grandfather on television last night?”

  Probably not. Denny remembered his own school days, when the reputation of his mob-connected father had wrapped itself around him like a bulletproof vest. He was pudgy and tongue-tied and might have been an easy mark for the usual tormentors, except that his father, Frank, had also been on television.

  With two young women as high-spirited as Adrianna and Alessia, however, their ominous family connections were a mixed blessing. Their father, Vince Palazzo, had not yet allowed them to date, but it was already clear that most of the boys at St. John the Baptist Regional School were not likely to ever come knocking on the Palazzo’s ornate front door. Not when Vince had once been indicted—but not convicted—in a murder case where the victim was dismembered.