You could always be guaranteed a fight if you went in. That’s toughness. Maybe we should put a time factor into the equation. Whadya think?”
“Art’s Diner on West Boylston street. The Huns hang out there.”
“The Brass Helmut on Main Street–--Hispanic gangs.”
“Any place on Green street. Vietnamese gangs all over the place there.”
Waldo objected, “We need more work on the standard. On criteria. Give me criteria.
Something to sink our teeth into. Something the lunchpails will understand.”
Waldo tended to regard those who worked for a living as “lunchpails,” although the term disappointed and discouraged Walter Jelliffe.
“I still think we need a time constraint,” Waldo said. “You have to engage in actual fisticuffs within, say, nine minutes of entry. How does that sound?”
“You’ll need a time keeper,” Lewis Walling said, the most senior of the interns. There was a trace of whining sarcasm in his tone.
Waldo looked carefully at him, then finally said, “And a nifty stop watch, I suppose.”
“And a hostility quotient,” Walling continued, “maybe made up of equal parts rage, envy, insecurity, belief God is on your side.”
“Lunch pail,” Waldo answered.
“And we’d need bodyguards, people to do the actual fighting–either that or a year of combat training before we start the crawl.”
Waldo and Suzan had no children, and Waldo had the habit of adopting one of the interns as the son he was convinced he didn’t want. Lewis Walling was the latest in his adoptions–three previous adoptions had migrated to graduate school or Rhode Island papers. One became an editor in New Haven.
“Look, Walling, you like to throw log jams on the fire. I know that, but we can easily find a few thugs to back us up in testing the hostility. You probably know some yourself–-football players or Rugby freaks.”
“I do.”
“Good, then let’s not lock down over trivia. We need criteria–perfect criteria. A fight in nine minutes is a good start, but just a start.”
“The first thirty seconds is crucial. True toughness signals itself right out of the gate. If you can’t find a hostile phrase, look, gesture in 30 seconds, the place fails. We need a play book of gestures and phrases–that can be part of the article.” Walling said, warming to the task.
“What about ethnicity?” Waldo asked.
“Meaning what?” Walling answered.
“Meaning should we stipulate a certain homogeneity as key to hostility. It’s a Latino bar and we walk in and there’s looks and so on. Does that qualify? Does the toughness have to go beyond resentment of outsiders? Isn’t that natural? And therefore discountable?”
“So it has to be a WASP bar?”
“Don’t be stupid.” Waldo said. “We’re looking for an add-on factor – something that can begin in ethnic resentment but quickly boils over into generalized hatred, a pure viciousness aimed out of the soul of bile.”
“The soul of bile,” Walling repeated. “The soul of bile. Something that comes out of generations of repression? The end product of remembering that this town once was the center of New England, a palace of wire manufacturing –the barbed wire kingdom of the world and then, and then, the ugly descent as Swedes gave way to Italians and Irish and then to southeast Asians–wire to plastic, to gutted factories, abandoned mills, thence to boutiques and finally to plywood–so that everybody carries around a longing for some imagined time of prosperity. What begins as resentment for skin color ends as boiling rage and blame for loss of autonomy–all over some local IPA or Miller lites? Is that it?”
“You catch on quick,” Waldo laughed. “And always measured against the imagined slugfests at the old Valhalla.”
“We seek the new Valhalla,” Walling answered.
“Exactly!” Waldo said, “That’s our title–‘Seeking the new Valhalla’. Get us gladiators.”
“I can get Singleton, Navy ROTC cadet commandant at Holy Cross–lots of rage just below the bellowing surface, and five or six Rugby players Singleton knows.”
“Not five or six. One. One from the scrum. One large one from the scrum. Singleton plus one. Just adequate to get us out alive.” Waldo smiled.
2.
The Spy’s offices were on the sixth floor of a restored building on Front Street overlooking Worcester Commons. The freshly sand blasted facade of the building was directly across from the parched earth commons, grassless and flecked with grey scraps of winter snow. There was a large reflecting pool, utterly empty save for residue clumps of ice/snow and several half- crushed soda cans. Beyond the empty pool was a small graveyard with slightly twisted or turned headstones from the 18th century. And beyond the graveyard was a mammoth horse and soldier statue for the Spanish American war, prancing upward, kicking its hooves toward the plywooded and abandoned downtown aptly named Commons Fashion Outlet Mall.
When Walling and Singleton entered the Spy Building, along with Ralph (the one from the scrum) they all hurried past the little lobby area with its matching leather loveseats. Singleton had honed in on the marble sheathing over the three elevators beyond the lobby and seemed intent on reaching the seventh floor before anyone else. Walling admired Singleton’s focus in this and all matters–no time to lose, no enemy too strong to be confronted, the perfect protector on any search for the toughest bar anywhere.
But Waldo from his leather loveseat headed Singleton and the rest off: “We’re here ready for the charge, way ahead of you,” he said, standing up and motioning to the woman still on the loveseat. “Suzan, meet our bodyguards.”
Singleton, a gangly fellow probably 6 ‘2” or 6’ 3”, with a military brush cut and very thick black rimmed glasses was non-plussed by Suzan’s appearance. How could you find boxing action with a woman in the entourage? The new Valhalla, a term Singleton cherished when Walling told it to him, might not have even a spot for visiting women. And on a mission women would only prove more vulnerable and difficult–didn’t all his commanders acknowledge as much, although publicly they might speak quite contrarily about the admission of women into combat.
Suzan Jelliffe stood up, a delicately coiffured woman of 50, still quite thin with a longish face, too large a nose, and disturbingly vacant look to her face as if she were constantly imagining something beyond the apparent focus point of her eyes. A doorway perhaps through which would come something more interesting than things at hand. Waldo took her hand and said, “She’s brought the camera.”
“The camera?” Walling asked.
“Of course,” Suzan said, suddenly present, “to record these events that alter and illuminate our time, together. Our little voyage into places where no one else has ever gone.”
“The frolic spaces for the lunch pails,” said Waldo, taking Suzan’s hand.
“I thought we were hitting bars,” Ralph the rugby player said.
“You’ll
