Buster Midnight's Cafe Read online

  Whippy Bird started to reply, but she stopped and thought it over. “Do you think she’s right, Effa Commander?” she asked me.

  It sounded like it made sense to me, I told her.

  “I never saw no Chinamen around this hole.” Whippy Bird took some convincing.

  “I didn’t say they came out of this hole. I said they came out of a hole, and I was wondering if it was this one. Any damn fool knows most of these holes are from mining.”

  Me and Whippy Bird liked that. May Anna was real quick in picking up our style.

  Whippy Bird stuck out her hand and said, “Hi, my name’s Whippy Bird, and this is Effa Commander.”

  “May Anna Kovaks.”

  “That’s a funny name,” Whippy Bird said after she thought it over. “How come it’s not Anna May?”

  “What kind of a bird is a Whippy Bird?”

  People were always asking her that, even when she was five years old. I expect Whippy Bird’s been asked that five thousand times. She told me once, the reason we were good friends from the first day we met was I never asked her about her name.

  All the Birds had odd names. For instance, Whippy Bird’s brothers were Stinky Bird and Bummer Bird. But the worst of the lot was Myron Bird. Who’d name a kid Myron and expect him to amount to anything? Which is what happened. He left the union, voted for Ronald Reagan twice, and used to pay money to get his shoes shined.

  Another thing about names while I’m on the subject, we always called each other by our full names, Whippy Bird and Effa Commander. I don’t know why. Nobody ever called Whippy Bird “Whippy” unless they didn’t know her, like Hunter Harper and the tourists. So when May Anna became our friend, it just sounded right: Whippy Bird, Effa Commander, and May Anna. Only most people called us the Unholy Three.

  May Anna said, “OK, I won’t ask you about your name if you don’t ask me about my dad.” So right away we did, but she wouldn’t say anything except he died in a mine accident in Arizona, so they moved to Butte where her mother came from. We knew May Anna a long time before we found out there never was a Mr. Kovaks. Some people said that was one of the reasons May Anna turned out, but there were better reasons than that.

  May Anna wasn’t a looker back then. She had skinny legs and hair the color of mine runoff. Later, of course, she changed it to platinum blond, and she claimed it was natural. Funny thing, people around here got to believing that. Not me and Whippy Bird, though.

  Sometimes when people remember May Anna, they say what beautiful blond hair she had when she was a little girl. Me and Whippy Bird laugh at that since we know for sure she wasn’t a blonde. That’s because we were the ones who helped her peroxide her hair the first time, and we put on so much bleach, it almost fell out. That sure would have ruined her career. Who ever heard of a hooker with no hair?

  Still, May Anna had a pretty face when she was a girl, with that Greek goddess nose everybody wrote about and eyes that looked like two glory holes. They were that dark and that deep. Some writer in Photoplay said they were like “twin pools of moonlit water.” Maybe so, but I never saw May Anna’s eyes except that they reminded me of two mine pits.

  May Anna’s teeth weren’t much either. She’d already gotten her second teeth when we met her, and they were slantways and black, which is why she smiled with her lips closed and put her hand over her mouth when she laughed.

  She did that even after she went to Hollywood and got china caps on her teeth. Everybody thought May Anna putting her hand over her mouth was sweet, but me and Whippy Bird knew the real facts. After she got the caps, May Anna had to be careful about what she ate or her teeth would break off.

  Of course, in the beginning, when we were all five years old, she was just like anybody else. You could look at a picture of the whole grade school, and you never would have picked May Anna as the one to become famous. Or Buster McKnight, either.

  Maybe you’d of picked Whippy Bird because she was as cute as a button with her red curls. Those curls she has now when you see her at the Jim Hill aren’t a perm. They’re natural. What’s more, unlike May Anna Kovaks, Whippy Bird always had nice straight teeth.

  Whippy Bird was little. Me, I’ve always been tall and skinny. People we didn’t know called us Mutt and Jeff. Being little didn’t mean Whippy Bird wasn’t tough, though. When we got older and Buster got famous, we laughed about how Whippy Bird used to beat him up. Buster laughed about it, too, claiming he could have won their fights only he didn’t want to hit a girl. But he couldn’t fool us. We knew that wasn’t true.

  “Whippy Bird was too fast for you,” I kidded him once.

  “Only with her mouth,” Buster replied.

  Whippy Bird claimed she was the one who turned Buster McKnight into a fighter, that he was so embarrassed at being beat up by a girl that he learned to fight to save face. I think she was wrong, though I don’t often go against Whippy Bird. Growing up in Butte, you just naturally learned how to protect yourself, so he had something going for him to start out with.

  The real reason Buster became a fighter, though, was to impress May Anna. He fell in love with her the first time he saw her, and he was always sorry it was me and Whippy Bird that saved May Anna from falling down the glory hole instead of him.

  Butte may have had sulfur fumes and smelter grime, but it still was the best place in the world to grow up in. You had to be tough to make it, and we were tough all right. Boys had a better time of it in Butte than girls, who had to spend their vacations tending kids and washing clothes. Boys like Pink and Chick, who were as close as me and Whippy Bird, ducked out of the house the minute they finished breakfast and didn’t come back until suppertime and maybe later. They never helped out at home. They just spent their time raising hell’which they did a good job of until the day they died, and maybe even after that. Me and Whippy Bird being the youngest in our families and May Anna being an only child, we had more time to play than most girls.

  Buster liked having May Anna around, but she wouldn’t run with his gang unless we could go along. She told us it wasn’t proper. May Anna always had standards, even after she turned out. She was a member of your high class of hookers. Me and Whippy Bird and May Anna wouldn’t do a lot of things the boys did, like we never stripped down and went swimming naked or pledged the oath, which means you had to pee on somebody’s foot. And me and Whippy Bird and May Anna refused to step barefoot in cow pies—even though we knew that if you did, you could go barefoot all summer without even getting a blister, not to mention lockjaw and die.

  We did other things like run along the railroad tracks and hang around the livery stable and the garages, since by then there were more cars in Butte than horses. And we made money. We collected maggots from the dump at the slaughterhouse and covered them in cornmeal and sold them to fishermen.

  There were days when we went over to the smelters with a bucket to pick up coal that we took home to use. Sometimes a workman on top of a coal car threw down a bucketful because he understood about hard times. If nobody was around, one of the boys climbed on top of the railroad car and tossed the coal down to us on the tracks. Looking for coal just kind of became second nature to kids in Butte. Even now, when I see a chunk of coal lying someplace, I’ll lean over to pick it up if I don’t think to stop myself.

  When he got older, Buster organized a raffle for a ton of coal with the money going to the gang, and we all sold tickets. The first year, May Anna’s mother won, which surely did please May Anna because they could use that coal. The second year, by “coincidence,” May Anna’s mother won again. After Buster fixed it so she won the third year, too, people stopped buying tickets, and the gang had to find another way to earn money.

  One summer when my pop worked up top at the Badger, we would take his dinner over to him almost every single day. We’d bring two buckets, one for him and one for us, then we’d sit outside on the old slag heap and eat in the sun. That was one of the nicest times in my whole life, sitting there on the slag pile, me and Whippy Bi
rd and May Anna and Pop. Sometimes we had sandwiches, but mostly we ate pasties, which is what the Cornish people always ate for lunch.

  You can order pasties at the Jim Hill, but they come with canned gravy, and unless Whippy Bird makes them, you might get hamburger inside. Real pasties—that’s “pah-stees” with the emphasis on “past”—are little piecrust envelopes filled with meat and vegetables, leftovers mostly.

  Sometimes the tourists at the Jim Hill who don’t know any better ask for “paste-ees,” which is what strippers wear. If Whippy Bird’s behind the counter, she says, “Honey, you’re in the wrong place. You want me to give you directions to the red-light district?” If the tourist has a sense of humor, she gets another two-dollar tip.

  I expect you know there was another reason for taking two dinner buckets to the Badger. Like most of the other miners, Pop did a little high-grading. Pop picked up a chunk or two of high-grade ore in the morning, then slipped it into the dinner bucket before we left. Some people think that’s stealing, but we thought of it as part of your pay.

  One time we got searched—me and Whippy Bird did, that is. We were carrying one dinner bucket, and May Anna had the other. That old boy took our lunch bucket apart, but he never even looked into the one May Anna was carrying. It didn’t bother us since we didn’t have any ore that day, but after that, whenever we did, we made May Anna carry it. She never did get searched.

  Sometimes, we collected frogs at the swamp and sold them to Frenchy’s down near Venus Alley for frogs’ legs. He gave us fifty cents a dozen. May Anna said it was the first money she ever made in the District, and that’s how she got started—hooked on frogs’ legs.

  Whippy Bird said “hookered” on frogs’ legs was more like it. As you can tell, Whippy Bird surely is a card.

  In the beginning when we tried to sell those frogs’ legs, me and Whippy Bird caught the frogs while May Anna pulled off the legs, but Frenchy wouldn’t buy them. He threw them on the trash heap and said we had to bring in whole frogs. Whippy Bird said that was so he could keep the legs in pairs. “Those customers don’t want a big right leg and a bitty left one like a crippled-up frog,” she explained to us. As usual, Whippy Bird was right.

  The first day we became aware of the power May Anna had over men was a day we were hunting down frogs. We were nine or ten. It was summer, one of those good summers you like to think back on like you were Tom Sawyer in the book, when the air was warm and yellow from the sun. Like a lot of places that are winter most of the year, Butte summers were special, and we lived every day of them.

  We’d already learned to hate school. Our teacher that year was Illa Vedshmik, and May Anna said she was older than God. Me and Whippy Bird had never heard anybody say that before, and it became our favorite expression all summer. May Anna picked it up from one of Mrs. Kovaks’s boyfriends, the one that drove around in the Reo and played golf.

  May Anna used to imitate that teacher, wrinkling up her nose the way Old Lady Vedshmik did when she smelled something bad. May Anna was good at imitations. One time Motion Picture said if she hadn’t been so beautiful, May Anna could have been a great character actress. That was early in her career, and as you know, she did go on to become one of your all-time most highly respected personages of the screen.

  Anyway, we’d gone after frogs’ legs to the pond where the boys kept their rafts. It wasn’t much of a pond, because it was mostly filled with water from the mines, but the boys liked it because it was dangerous and they’d been told if they ever drowned, their bodies would be lost forever. Whippy Bird claimed that’s because the pond really was a glory hole, and it went down a thousand feet. Maybe even to China, May Anna said. The boys also liked that pond because it was used as a garbage dump, and it stank to high heaven, which kept most people away. Kids had to be tough to go there.

  The rafts weren’t much. They were older than God, built by some boys who were grown men by then, and every year new gangs claimed them.

  When me and Whippy Bird and May Anna showed up at the pond, Buster and Chick and a bunch of the gang had taken one raft, and they were diving off it into the water—J. Bare Nuddy, as the fellow says. They didn’t notice us for a while, so we stayed there and stared at them. All of a sudden Pink Varscoe spotted us, and he yelled, and all those boys dove for their clothes. All except Buster, who stood there staring straight at May Anna. I never did know whether he was too surprised to move or was just showing off. Whatever it was, May Anna was impressed. Me and Whippy Bird turned away, but May Anna kept looking. “He sure looks swell standing there with that thing hanging out,!’ she said.

  Me and Whippy Bird just giggled, then May Anna yelled, “Hey, Buster, you going to let us come on board?”

  “Sure thing!”

  “You going to get your clothes on or you got other ideas?” Buster’s brother, Toney, asked. Buster jumped down at that, and Whippy Bird always said he didn’t even know he was stark naked. He was just so happy to see May Anna that he stood there like a statue. After all the boys were dressed, they pushed over to us, and we got out on the raft, which Buster and the boys named the Happy Warrior. We must have been there two hours, sailing along through the dump singing “Red Wing” and smoking Fatima cigarettes, happy as the queen of England. Toney passed around a fruit jar with whiskey in it, though he wouldn’t let the girls have a taste. He wouldn’t let Buster have any either since Buster was the captain of the raft and had to keep a clear head. That was OK with Buster. He always did what Toney said.

  There we were, having the best old time, me and Whippy Bird even then sitting next to Pink and Chick, when all of a sudden a gang of Bohunks across the pond climbed on another raft, called the Pirate, and took out after us. They were big boys, too, fourteen or fifteen years old. Their leader was Pig Face Stenner, and me and Whippy Bird and May Anna were scared.

  There was good reason for that. Those Bohunks hated our guts because we were Cornish. They were always ambushing us and lobbing ore chunks at us. Once they hit Chick in the head with a brickbat that made such a bad cut, his mom had to sew it up with a needle and thread. He had that little bare place on his head for the rest of his life. “Chick sure is tough. He has more fight scars than Buster,” I told Whippy Bird once.

  “Tough or dumb,” Whippy Bird said. “He never learned footwork.”

  May Anna had an extra reason to be scared of Pig Face. He was not only a drip, he was mean. Buster was sweet and worshipful, but Pig Face would hit May Anna on the arm to get her attention at school or spit on the floor right next to her feet. May Anna said once when she was walking along down the street by herself, he jumped out at her from behind a fence with his pecker in his hand. Instead of running, May Anna just stood there as cool as could be and said, “I never saw anything so teeny-weeny.” Being little girls didn’t mean we didn’t know about boys.

  After that, I guess, Pig Face had it in for May Anna. Once, when May Anna’s mom put her hair in long curls for a special program at school, Pig Face cut one of them off. If it’d been me, I’d of cried my eyes out, but May Anna never, never cried unless she wanted to.

  Buster surely must have known about that long curl because there wasn’t much about May Anna he didn’t know. I suppose he was just itching for a fight, and here was Pig Face—with May Anna there to watch.

  Pig Face and his gang pushed their raft out into the middle of the pond and challenged us. So our boys pushed our raft over toward the Pirate. When we got to the middle of the pond, right up next to them, we didn’t know what to do. Were we all supposed to jump on their raft and fight or just sit there and yell insults? “Why the hell did you have to let the girls get on?” Toney asked Buster, which was what I was wondering, too.

  “May Anna wanted to,” Buster answered. That was reason enough for Buster to do anything.

  Like I said, this pond was a garbage dump, and Pig Face’s gang had found a whole crate of rotten tomatoes somebody had thrown away. We didn’t know that, of course. But once we got out in the middle w
here we were defenseless, Pig Face let loose with a tomato that hit Buster and squashed on his bare chest. “Bull’s-eye, chump!” Pig Face yelled. Before Buster could move, he got hit with half a dozen more. We didn’t have anything to throw back, so we called a retreat and tried to maneuver the Happy Warrior back to the bank where we could at least make mud balls. That was Pink’s idea, and he usually had a pretty good noodle.

  No matter how fast we pushed toward the bank, the Pirate staved right alongside us, with those boys throwing tomatoes. Me and Whippy Bird and May Anna were scared.

  “You get behind me, Effa Commander. I’ll protect you,” Pink said, sounding big, but he forgot I was there, and when he moved, I got pelted. The boys got the worst of it, though. With their bare arms and legs covered with tomatoes, they looked like spaghetti drowning in sauce. The only thing that saved them was that Pig Face’s gang ran out of ammunition. That and Buster McKnight.

  What set Buster off was Pig Face when he wound up and threw a huge rotten tomato that hit May Anna square in the face. That was the first hit on her. Pig Face threw it so hard, he knocked May Anna flat on her back.

  Buster took one look at her, then growled, “You’re dead, Stenner!” Shrieking like a wild Indian, he leaped off the Happy Warrior onto the Pirate and lit into Pig Face. It wasn’t a pretty fight like you came to expect from Buster later on when you could watch him dancing around and almost see him planning his next hit. Buster hadn’t even developed his special punch then. All he did was plow into Pig Face like an ore car. He hit Pig Face with a right to the stomach, then a left to the head. Buster kicked Pig Face in the knee, then hit him with another right to the stomach. Pig Face keeled over. You have to understand Buster had not got his full growth like he did later, and he was a foot shorter than Pig Face and twenty-five pounds lighter, but that didn’t bother Buster. He was a regular Jack Dempsey. He fought from the heart that day like he always did. It was his first knockout.