AFTER SCATCHERD LEFT Bellows’ office, the archivist took a few minutes to regain his composure. He hit the intercom button and said, almost somberly, “Please come into my office, Miss Finch, and close the door behind you.”
IT WAS THE evening of the dust up with Bellows and Leonard Scatcherd was certain that he had been followed – not just that night but at lunch and even into the men’s room at the Torpedo Factory. As he hurried down North Union Street along the Potomac River, walking awkwardly over the uneven red bricks that formed the ancient sidewalk beneath his feet, he knew that if he went faster, he might land on his face. Had the sidewalk been smoothly-paved, Scatcherd’s pronounced limp would have given him away immediately to whomever might be in pursuit.
He turned sharply and looked back at the looming Torpedo Factory but saw nothing in the darkening shadows. “Am I getting paranoid?” he said to himself. He quickly entered his apartment building and, peeked out through the window next to the front door. The street was empty. “Calm down and keep your wits about you,” he said aloud, half-laughing but still trembling.
CHAPTER THREE:
Pudge McFadden’s Saloon
TIMOTHY JAMES McFADDEN was a short, stocky 4th grader when he was first taunted with the name Pudgie by some ruffians in the upper grades. They were mistaken when they assumed he would not fight back. When a truce was called, the more dignified Pudge was settled upon and the nickname stuck.
Pudge grew up in a family of policemen and factory workers in an area of South Philadelphia near the Schuylkill River known as Devil’s Pocket. As Pudge was fond of saying, there were no “lace curtain Irish” in his neighborhood but honor prevailed and everyone looked out for the other guy.
While it was not unusual that generations of families never left Devil’s Pocket, Pudge was by nature a nomad and a self-educated young man with eclectic interests. He delved into the history of his neighborhood and another Irish enclave in West Philadelphia where some relatives had settled. Known as Corktown, it’s predominant population was immigrants from County Cork, hence its name. Pudge had developed a deep love for the poetry of William Butler Yeats and dreamed of being the “wandering Aengus” that the poet wrote of so elegantly. The more pedestrian side of Pudge indulged W.C. Fields, the Philadelphia-born comedian/philosopher – and that’s how Pudge viewed him – who he defended to whomever would listen, insisting that he was more than a drunken clown with a vaudevillian schtick.
Pudge’s peregrinations eventually brought him south to the Old Town section of Alexandria where he chanced upon a dive owned by an aging Irishman looking to cash out. Within a year, the run-down bar with the sawdust floor was transformed into Pudge McFadden’s Saloon.
Pudge loved to recite both Yeats’ shorter poems and Fields’ bon mots, as the occasion demanded. To one patron, he might narrate Yeats’ “He Wishes For The Cloths Of Heaven” or “The Coat” while for another he might, with tongue in cheek, solemnly quote Fields saying, “I drink therefore I am.”
The centerpiece of Pudge’s saloon and the image that kept him grounded, was a picture of an early Irish shebeen hanging over the bar. The shebeen had always been a refuse for poor Irishman to partake of cheap whiskey and ale. It was usually a ramshackle structure such as a converted barn or a sod-covered hut. The shebeen was illegal in Ireland and was often a temporary shelter one step ahead of the tax collector.
Pudge was an egalitarian who welcomed the low brow “shot and beer” crowd as much as the bureaucrats who came in from the Torpedo Factory to sip wine. And while he was a compassionate man, he would not countenance rowdy behavior. He tolerated sots jumping on and off the wagon, barflies, even inveterate drunks who hit bottom and were struggling to bounce back. If you were genuinely down on your luck, Pudge had a soft spot for you. He felt sorry for those who looked down in their glass of beer and saw nothing but misery and could not resist lending them a sympathetic ear. And then there were a few determined ones like Nigel Longstaffe who came to Pudge McFadden’s with a singular purpose – to drink and die.
WOODY MEACHAM SAT on a bar stool at Pudge McFadden’s, leaning forward on his elbows. When he took a long draught from the frosted mug, he reflexively reached up with his right index finger to flick away the foam clinging to his drooping mustache.
He looked over to his left and saw a small, sallow-faced man with a shock of thick gray hair, perfectly quaffed, staring at him. The man tipped his wine glass to Woody and mumbled something unintelligible, most likely a foreign language, before looking down at the bar, as if suddenly deep in thought. Woody was in no mood for a dialogue with a stranger and was glad that their interaction seemed to be over.
Old Town Alexandria was starting to show signs of gentrification along its historic Potomac River waterfront, just a few miles downstream from the nation’s capital. Young professionals from all over the area still flocked to the bars and restaurants in the Georgetown section of Washington, DC but Woody felt comfortable where he was, sitting on a stool at Pudge McFadden’s. It reminded him of his hometown of Parlor City in Upstate New York.
Woody hunched forward on his stool and reminisced about those early years in Parlor City. As a child, he had been at least tangentially involved in two murder cases that rocked the town and, years later, right after his graduation from Thorndyke College, he had been mistakenly arrested for murder while vacationing at his family’s summer home in nearby Parlor Harbor. In all those instances, his stepfather was instrumental in solving the first two murder cases and exonerating Woody in the third. Billy Meacham, Jr. was still Police Chief in Parlor City and took it hard when Woody announced that he would not be coming home to follow in the family tradition. But after serving as an MP in Saigon, Woody had seen enough murder and destruction to last him a lifetime and so, when he received his military discharge, he decided to find a new path forward.
Woody made it a habit to read several newspapers as he tried to get a sense of the country’s mood and how it had changed, if at all, during his years in the Army. Locally, a bunch of flim-flam artists were preying on the elderly and a ring of heroin pushers had just been broken up. In other news, militant doves – wasn’t that an oxymoron, he wondered? – were demanding that President Nixon simply stop the war even while hundreds of POWs were being held in Hanoi. And the horror of the My Lai massacre was back in the news as Democrats in Congress warned Nixon not to pardon Lt. William Calley, Jr. who had been convicted and court martialed for his 1968 war crimes.
Woody dropped the newspaper onto the bar, discouraged and disgusted. He felt like it was a good time to be out of the fray, living in a small town where nobody knew him. He would lay low for a while before making any life-altering decisions. Old Town Alexandria seemed like the ideal place to figure things out.