The Kudzu Kid

by Darrell Laurant

  There can be something sexy about the act of instruction. It’s part of why students daydream about their teachers, and secretaries go to bed with their bosses. Depending upon on the style of the instructor, teaching and explaining can prove quite intimate.

  And so it was with Zoe and Eddie. He had never taken on the role of mentor before, and found it exciting to be able to pour what he had learned about his profession into an eager mind. Zoe, meanwhile, had been searching most of her life for a practical outlet for her love of writing, and now a path was being laid out for her.

  “In high school, nobody ever told me I could make a living as a writer,” she told Fogarty, looking up into his eyes with a softness he wasn’t expecting. “It was just sort of a neat trick I could do, like a back flip. They didn’t take it seriously.”

  Fogarty smiled at that and gently put his hand on her shoulder.

  “You can do a back flip?” he said.

  “Hell, no. That was just an example.”

  “My guidance counselor in tenth grade told me I should join the Army,” Fogarty said, suppressing a laugh. “I couldn’t do a back flip, either.”

  He squeezed her shoulder and removed his hand.

  Fogarty had always been told that there were two types of journalists—writers and reporters.

  “The way it was explained to me,” he said, “was that a reporter will make ten phone calls when he only needs to make five, because he’s never satisfied that he has enough information. A writer will stop after two because he can’t wait to start writing.”

  Zoe was unquestionably a writer, and an imaginative one. And Fogarty knew better than to try and convert her style to his, because she brought a natural liveliness and rhythm—a strong, creative writer’s voice—to the Southside Echo that had long been missing.

  In fact, Fogarty had never liked copy editors very much. To make that point, he told Zoe the old editor/reporter joke that he had first heard as an undergraduate.

  “A reporter and an editor are dying of thirst in the desert,” he began, “when they stumble over a sand dune and see this beautiful oasis, a deep pool of clear water.”

  “The reporter falls down beside the pool and starts to drink. Then she looks up and sees the editor peeing into the water.”

  “‘What in the hell are you doing?’ she asks.”

  “‘I’m making it better,’ says the editor.”

  Zoe laughed boisterously. It struck Fogarty that he liked that sound.

  He had never really connected with Zoe’s poetry, but he could see how it helped her prose. So rather than urinate on any of her work, he simply tried to channel it, while at the same time making sure she included the relevant facts.

  Once, for example, he let her cover a Randolph High School basketball game. Her story was entertaining, except for one glaring omission.

  “You left out the score,” he told her.

  “Oh, Randolph won,” she said. “Does it really matter?”

  Fogarty decided at that point that Zoe wasn’t a sportswriter.

  Another time, he sent her up the road with a camera and orders to photograph highway crews working out on the bypass. When the film was developed, Fogarty couldn’t help but chuckle. She had lined up all the construction workers and taken a group shot, even including a list of names in the proper order.

  “The idea,” he told her, “was to get a photo of them at work.”

  She smiled sheepishly.

  “Rookie mistake, huh?”

  He assigned her to cover Jefferson Springs Town Council and the county school board out of necessity, but mainly used her for features. One day a man in search of publicity brought a one-armed monkey into the newsroom, brushing past Brenda’s feeble attempt at interception. It ran amok, toppling stacks of old newspapers and smashing a coffee cup on the floor. Zoe’s hilarious account of this the commotion wound up being picked up by the Associated Press.

  The night she saw her story reprinted in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, she and Fogarty drove up to Lynchburg and celebrated at the Hill City Pub. There, Zoe told him all about her childhood in Jefferson Springs, her Grateful Dead days, and her failed marriage.

  Something about that conversation made a difference. Zoe was becoming a real person to Fogarty, not just a byline. Or maybe it was that his period of instruction overlapped with the fragrant, flowery spring in Southside Virginia.

  The Wardell Franklin trial was the highlight of the Echo’s news season. Otherwise, the stories and special editions rolled off the cranky press in South Boston as predictably as the flowering of the azaleas; Valentine’s Day, Black History Month, the St. Patrick’s Day issue, the spring fashion issue, Brides, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, and baseball season.

  The Randolph-Henry basketball team, led by Tyrone Fuqua and Ernest Dixon, played reasonably well but lost by a point in the second round of the conference tournament to a bad call at the buzzer when Fuqua’s basket was disallowed. The county supervisors and school board members were agonizing in public over what might be the status of the county budget if the private landfill didn’t come about. Randy Akers’ trial was postponed twice, as he remained on suspension as a teacher and coach.

  Through it all, the biological tension between Zoe and Eddie compounded. He became acutely conscious of the way her breasts brushed against his back when she leaned over his shoulder to see a story, and he realized he was always watching the languid side-to-side movement of her hips as she walked across the newsroom. Zoe, for her part, began touching him more—a hand on his cheek, a quick massage of his shoulders. Sometimes she winked at him, something nobody had done since high school. It felt good.

  The primary obstacle to any sort of consummation was Eddie’s shyness, hidden but nonetheless very real. Part of him still felt like that fourteen-year-old who couldn’t get a date, and his experience with Marcie in Baltimore had only heightened his almost paralyzing fear of rejection. This was the dam holding back his physical desires.

  That dam finally broke on a warm night in early June. Eddie and Zoe were working late, she pasting up pages and he finishing the week’s editorial. It was so quiet that the insect noise outside was clearly audible through a half-opened window.

  Fogarty’s lead story was not going well, and Zoe heard him muttering from across the room. She put down her X-Acto knife, left the page she was working on and walked into his office.

  “This is frustrating as hell,” he said. “I know what I want to say here, but I just can’t say it.”

  She put her hands on his shoulders once again, but this time the contact was different, deeper. Eddie felt it as a low-intensity electric shock. Then she leaned over, at last breaking the divide between them, and kissed him on the neck. He gasped audibly and she felt it.

  Fogarty turned around and stood up facing her. They looked at each other for a moment, then fell into an embrace. The softness of her lips turned his primal fear into primal lust, and she could feel it in the way he returned the kiss.

  Without a word, she took his hand and led him to the elevator. On its slow, creaking passage to the third floor, they kissed deeply again, and he grasped the seat of her jeans with both hands and squeezed. She sighed.

  When they stepped off the elevator, he started to move her toward his cot, but she tugged in the other direction and guided him to the ladder. They climbed up, Zoe first, and she ducked behind the heating vent on the roof and came out with a small mattress, covered by a plastic tarp. She laid it down on the rough surface, and then she casually shrugged out of her t-shirt and stepped out of her jeans.

  “Don’t you believe in underwear?” said Fogarty, finding it difficult to talk.

  His eyes poured over her like warm water, soaking in every inch.

  “Not tonight,” she replied.

  The mattress was narrow and springy, but they made it work. From the bushes far below, the night bugs urged them on.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  THE PITCH

  The caller’s name w
as Mike Ledford, and he sounded highly caffeinated. “Got a news flash for you, Mr. Hamer,” he said when Fogarty answered the phone.

  “He’s not the editor anymore,” Fogarty replied. “That’s me. Eddie Fogarty.”

  “Oh, sorry,” Ledford said. “Calvin Hamer is the name on my Rolodex.”

  “He’s dead.”

  Ledford barely missed a beat.

  “Too bad. Anyway, I work with Thaxton-Klein, and I wanted to let you know that three of our people are coming down to Jefferson Springs next week for a presentation and a public hearing with the local citizens. Is this something that would interest you?”

  “It’s just about the only story we’ve got right now,” Fogarty replied. “Sure, I’m interested.”

  Whether by design or by accident, Ledford’s timing was perfect. It was a Monday morning in early June, and Fogarty had been sitting at his desk, grappling with the realization that he didn’t have a lead story for Tuesday. Before Ledford called, the frontrunner was a recent trip to the Holy Land by the adult Sunday school class at Conway Baptist Church, complete with bad photographs.

  Ledford gave him the phone number of the company spokesperson and promised to overnight a packet of information on Thaxton-Klein to Jefferson Springs.

  Of course, Fogarty had already done his homework. Based in Philadelphia, Thaxton-Klein Environmental Services had been in the waste disposal business for more than thirty years, and its record with various environmental watchdogs was so clean you could eat off it.

  “Our goal is for the people in a community not to know we’re around unless they want to use our services,” Ledford said. “We keep a low profile.”

  “That won’t keep the folks down here from getting antsy,” Fogarty said. “Most of them have heard about organized crime in your industry in parts of the Northeast, and that happens to be where you’re located. You might do better telling them you’re based in Alaska.”

  Ledford laughed.

  “We’re too clean for the mob to have anything to do with us,” he said. “They can’t turn a dollar working with someone who follows the rules.”

  The only flaw in Thaxton-Klein’s record involved a landfill in the remote Catskills where inspectors found high levels of naphthalene, the chemical best known for mothballs but also used in household pesticide sprays and in the production of other chemicals. Even worse, it was part of a liquid used to wash out containers that have held other hazardous materials.

  According to what Fogarty had read, naphthalene was a possible carcinogen that also caused a drop in red blood cells, jaundice, and diarrhea. It killed lab rats rather quickly, and migrated with a vengeance through an affected water supply.

  So Fogarty called Ledford’s boss, a woman named Ellen Huning who functioned as chief spokesperson, and asked her about this unfortunate blemish on her company’s report card.

  “That was a mess,” Huning said. “We didn’t have that particular site staffed around the clock, so apparently somebody else snuck in late at night and made a few unauthorized deposits, shall we say. They never determined where the naphthalene came from, and there was no proof that we had anything to do with it being there.”

  “We keep meticulous records at all our sites, and after this incident, we volunteered to keep that New York landfill well-guarded 24/7. We were never penalized or fined.”

  Huning would be one of the Thaxton-Klein emissaries to Southside Virginia the following week, she said, along with two other company officials.

  “Does your town have a Sheraton, in case we decide to spend the night?” Huning asked.

  Fogarty couldn’t help but laugh.

  “The only thing we have is the Randolph Motel,” he said. “I’d give it half a star. If I were you, I’d stay in Richmond. It’s not all that far away.”

  At any rate, Fogarty had his Tuesday story, headlined “Philadelphia Company to Pitch Landfill to Local Citizens.”

  The next day, he got a call from Cassie Ledbetter, owner of the land on one side of the 300 scruffy acres that Roland Winfrey sold to Thaxton-Klein.

  “I understand we’re getting some important visitors,” she said. “Are you sending a photographer to the barbecue they’re planning as well as to the public hearing?”

  “Claude will probably be there,” Fogarty replied. “Or Zoe and I will take a camera. Why?”

  “Because you’re going to see something very unusual at the barbecue. It will make a good photo.”

  Something in her voice prompted Fogarty to make a mental note; be camera-ready.

  The trio of Thaxton-Klein representatives—waste manager Stan Caulfield, assistant vice president Rex Thaxton, grandson of the founder, and Huning—arrived in Jefferson Springs early the next Wednesday morning.

  The bad news for Fogarty was that this effectively meant a lag time of a week before getting that story into the Echo. On the other hand, never one to pass up an opportunity, he made arrangements to send a next-day story to newspapers in Richmond and Lynchburg.

  “Fine with me,” Daniel said when Fogarty asked him about double-dipping. “Anybody in our circulation area who cares will be at that public presentation, anyway.”

  It seemed he was right. The informational meeting was held in the Randolph County High School gymnasium, the only venue in the county capable of accommodating more than fifty people. The visitors set up what Ellen Huning cheerfully referred to as “our dog and pony show” underneath one of the basketball goals, including a table with brochures and a screen for a video presentation.

  Even at this mid-morning hour, the crowd filled one hundred or so folding chairs on the gym floor and spilled over into the bleachers. Looking around, Fogarty noticed a lot of county residents who should have been at work.

  The video opened with an almost comically sped-up collage of garbage on the loose—people tossing bags into trash cans, trucks picking up the cans, and more trucks taking it to a landfill.

  “Garbage,” intoned a male voiceover. “Who needs it?”

  Then, after a pause, “We do.”

  The short film went on to explain, in strikingly non-technical terms, what Thaxton-Klein did with everyday trash. It then moved into the industrial side of the operation, which would generate the outside garbage earmarked for Randolph County—all harmless, of course.

  A graphic illustrated the layers of plastic sheeting necessary to maintain the integrity of a landfill, and how it was capable of stopping leachate from invading any water supply.

  Thaxton then spoke for a few minutes, tracing a bit of a proud company history that began with his grandfather, and Huning stepped forward to open it up for questions.

  The first came from a tall, red-haired man whom Fogarty knew as the chief tire changer at a local garage.

  “This all sounds nice, but how do we really know this stuff ain’t gonna kill us?” he asked.

  Rex Thaxton smiled, having fielded this question dozens of times before.

  “It’s all about the lining, Mr.…?”

  “Skinner.”

  “Mr. Skinner. As the video showed, the technology for landfills has developed quite a bit over the years. Yes, they used to leak, and bad things happened. Those things don’t happen anymore.”

  “Next question?”

  That came from Jessica Grant, who lived out on Bonifay Road en route to the proposed landfill.

  “I’ve got two small children and a houseful of pets,” she said, “and I’m worried to death about the idea of these big garbage trucks from New York or wherever barreling down my little two-lane road on their way to the dump. I never had to worry about my kids playing outside before, or letting my dogs run. Now, I will.”

  This was one Ellen Huning would take.

  “We will make it very clear to our drivers that they drive even below the posted speed limit on your road,” she told the anxious mother. “I have children myself. I understand how you might be worried. We’ll also make sure that the telephone number for our corporate office is posted
in stores and in the local newspaper. If you see a truck driving too fast, make that call.”

  The question period took about half an hour. Someone asked what the user fee would be for county residents, and Thaxton told him, “Absolutely nothing, if you live within the county. It’s those people up north that will pay through the nose.”

  If he’d hoped to draw a laugh from this, he was disappointed. The assembled Randolph Countians simply stared at him.

  Caulfield, the technician, never said a word. He was there, Fogarty decided, to parry a possible question from some local college professor or engineer. No danger of that in Randolph County.

  Fogarty also noticed that Cassie Ledbetter and her sister, the most vocal landfill opponents, were missing. He remembered her phone call from the previous week and made sure his small camera was still riding in the breast pocket of his sport coat.

  At the end, Thaxton invited the crowd to a free barbecue being held on the former Winfree land.

  “If we’re going to be your neighbors,” he said, “we want to act like neighbors.”

  A catering crew had been busy setting up the food—big metal pans with pork, chicken barbecue, coleslaw, and baked beans, set up on long tables. Coolers were filled with iced tea and several varieties of soft drinks, chocolate chip cookies marched across a large platter.

  Because Winfree had been an absentee landowner, his Randolph County acreage hadn’t been tended to in years. There was a small patch of older growth forest, but most of it was just scrub pines and undergrowth, allowed to run wild like mischievous children.

  At this point, the only path into this wilderness was an unpaved road separating the Winfree land from the Ledbetter property and shared by both. A bulldozer had been brought in the previous week to clear a small section next to that road, and all the pine stumps were removed to make it as level as possible for the barbecue crowd.

  By noon, the temperature was above ninety, and the three Thaxton-Klein reps were sweating when they arrived. The two men wore suits, although both quickly removed their ties. Ellen Huning was equally uncomfortable in a long-sleeved, tan business blouse with matching skirt, and her high heels were not the best footwear to negotiate the still-bumpy area carved out by the bulldozer.