Buster Midnight's Cafe Page 8

  Some of the whiskey in Butte during Prohibition came down from Canada, and that’s the business Toney McKnight was in. He sneaked across the border to Canada at night, filled up with a load of real Canadian, then drove the back roads to Butte or Anaconda. Sometimes he was chased. Buster said Toney never knew if the guys after him were federal agents or other bootleggers out to steal his haul, but they never caught him.

  Toney didn’t talk much about it. He was involved with a big-tim gang then, and you didn’t go around shooting off your mouth. Sometimes those men killed each other. There are still bodies down in the old mine shafts today that nobody ever found.

  With those connections, Whippy Bird says, Toney would have been under pressure to get Buster to throw fights. I think you have to give Toney credit for not selling Buster out.

  May Anna said she met Dashiell Hammett, the mystery writer, in Hollywood one time, and he told her he once was a Pinkerton man, and he got sent to Butte. When somebody offered him money to kill a man, he got out of there fast. May Anna asked Mr. Hammett who the man was, but he couldn’t remember. We probably knew him. Hell, May Anna probably went to bed with him.

  With all that hooch, there were saloons and roadhouses and blind pigs, which your outsiders called speakeasies, in every block in every town in Montana and out in the country, too. You went into the bars in Meaderville and Centerville and Dublin Gulch and ordered a Shawn O’ straight out. Even if you were a stranger, you got it unless you had on a coat and a tie and a badge that said US revenue agent.

  Some of those places were so dangerous that you wouldn’t want to go there and order anything at all. The boys refused to take us. Sometimes they wouldn’t even go themselves unless they were with a gang. Pink went into a bar in Finntown and saw a man he thought was passed out on the floor drunk. “I stepped over him, ordered a beer, and got to talking to Pug Obie, who told me that fellow wasn’t drunk, he was dead,” Pink told us. “He got shot an hour before. Pug said the bartender was too busy to carry him out, so he just shoved him up against the wall until closing time. His pockets were turned inside out, and while I was standing there, somebody took his pants and vest. You can bet I got out of there fast.”

  Me and Whippy Bird and Pink and Chick used to go to a joint over by the Hot Springs called the Brown Jug that sold good liquor and had a dance floor. It was a nice place with a live band and a singer, and it did a good business. They had the first jukebox I ever saw, a Wurlitzer with a wood front just like a big console radio, and yellow and red lights. We played “Little Brown Jug” so often we wore it out. That song always makes me think of Pink.

  You saw lots of cars out front, jalopies and roadsters and coupes and big touring cars with side curtains. Sometimes we saw Toney’s big Reo Wolverine that he bought at Truzzolino’s after he crashed the Studebaker, parked out back, so I suppose he was one of the suppliers.

  Once a waiter came over with a bottle of champagne for us and said, “Compliments of Mr. Toney McKnight. Bottled it last night.”

  A few minutes later, Toney swaggered out, looking like the head waiter at one of those Hollywood restaurants May Anna took us to later on, and said, “You folks doing all right here?”

  “You sure are classy, all right,” Chick said, “sending us the aged stuff.”

  “Nothing’s too good for my friends,” he said, all puffed up, not knowing Chick was joking.

  Pink had a little Marmon back then, yellow I think it was, though Whippy Bird says they didn’t make them in yellow. We usually danced for a while then went out in the Marmon and drank. Whippy Bird says that’s not all you’d do, Effa Commander, but that’s none of her business—or yours either.

  A girl got all kinds of offers in those days. Sometimes me and Whippy Bird went out by ourselves, and there was always somebody ready to buy us a drink or to ask would you like to go outside to where there was some real good sipping whiskey. You had to be careful. Maybe they wanted to share the whiskey and snuggle up a little, or maybe they wanted something else. Every now and then you’d see a girl slink back into the Brown Jug with her hair messed up or nursing a black eye. You had to watch out for yourself, and that’s why me and Whippy Bird always stuck together.

  May Anna was different. She went with us sometimes, but right off, she looked the men over. Every now and then she took off with one of them, and we wouldn’t see her again that night. She said she had a talent for sniffing out money, which was surely true, but she never did have much of a head for taking care of herself. Sometimes, we saw her looking like she’d been beat up, but she didn’t volunteer any information, and we never asked.

  Now I hear you saying to yourself, where was Buster McKnight when this was going on, and that surely is a good question.

  Buster was busy making a name for himself as Buster Midnight. Toney got him fights up in Great Falls and Missoula and Helena and even down in Ogden. Then Toney took Buster on a tour to Denver and Pueblo. Buster wasn’t in Butte much, and when he was, May Anna didn’t like him hanging around her all the time. She got mad and told him to give her some room, which he had to do.

  “As soon as me and Toney get some big fights, I’ll have plenty of dough, and we’ll get married,” Buster promised her.

  But May Anna wasn’t interested. “So who wants to get married, Buster Midnight? I want to have a little fun. I’ll make my own money, thank you just the same,” May Anna replied.

  “I should have put my foot down,” Buster told us once.

  “Yeah, and get May Anna’s high-heeled slipper right in the middle of your instep,” Whippy Bird said. There was nothing Buster could do.

  Of course, Buster never liked May Anna being a hooker. You could see him watch her sometimes and know it was eating his heart out. Especially if May Anna was out on a date with a customer. If Buster ran into her then, he sat and watched out of the corner of his eye, hoping for the john to get fresh so he could step in and save May Anna. Even with May Anna giving him the shove sometimes, he felt responsible for her. May Anna, on her side, knew if she needed him, Buster would be there.

  Buster McKnight was no shining white virgin himself. There were lots of girls who followed boxing, and Buster could have his pick, and he did. He always was a handsome man. Back then, there was nobody better to look at. He was big, of course, and he had black curls and his nose hadn’t been broken yet. He had the best eyes, too, deep blue like the sky gets before sunset. Buster McKnight’s eyes were the prettiest color I ever saw in my life.

  Toney was glad May Anna turned out because he didn’t want her to get her claws into Buster. As if May Anna would! He was afraid she would interfere with Buster’s fighting. So he encouraged Buster to see other girls, and some of them were hookers, too. Sometimes you saw Buster’s picture in the paper with a pretty blonde hanging on his arm, and May Anna would always know which cathouse she worked in.

  May Anna knew them all because she had her pick of the houses in Butte. She surely had turned into a beauty and might have become a movie star on her own without being a prostitute first. She didn’t have any choice in it though. She became a prostitute because of her mother. Her mother didn’t tell her to do it, of course, but she was the cause of it just the same.

  By the time Buster turned into a fighter, we had it figured out about Mrs. Kovaks. Things were hard for her by then. She drank all the time, and she started taking laudanum. The Finlen fired her, so she had to work in some crummy little hotel down near Venus Alley. Then she lost that job, too. So May Anna went to work after school as a waitress at the Pepsin Drugstore soda fountain, but that didn’t bring in much. She figured if she could just hold out until she graduated, she would get a job at Hennessy’s selling gloves or maybe as a receptionist in a doctor’s office because she looked so good in white.

  Then things got worse at her house. Mrs. Kovaks kept on bringing men home that she picked up, and me and Whippy Bird heard a lot of fighting and yelling over there when we passed by. Sometimes May Anna came to school with her face bru
ised. Chick said you’d think May Anna was big enough to keep her mother from beating her, but me and Whippy Bird knew it wasn’t Mrs. Kovaks that hit May Anna. She never said anything to us, but we knew those men weren’t coming home because of Mrs. Kovaks.

  In fact, one day we saw a big Packard stop in front of the house, then heard the driver honk two or three times. “Hey, toots,” he yelled. “Come on out.” Poor Mrs. Kovaks came running with her hat and her pocketbook, but the driver waved her off. “Not you, honey. I want the young one.” A few minutes later May Anna came slowly down the stairs and got into the Packard. It might seem like she was two-timing her own mother, but the truth was, those men were generous, and the Kovaks were desperate. Sometimes men gave May Anna money for going out on dates or jewelry that she could pawn.

  Another time, we saw May Anna jump out of a car with her blouse mussed up and her lipstick smeared. When she saw us, she said, “Why, I don’t know what got into him. He said he was taking me out for ice cream so Mom could take a nap. Men!”

  “Men!” Whippy Bird agreed.

  May Anna might have made it if Mrs. Kovaks hadn’t gotten so sick. We always thought she took the laudanum to keep from remembering Jackfish, but that wasn’t so. She took it to cover up the pain. One day me and Whippy Bird and May Anna walked into the Kovaks house and found Mrs. Kovaks all curled up on the floor, just crying from pain. I ran the block to our house for Ma, who didn’t even take off her apron. The minute she saw Mrs. Kovaks, she shoved me and Whippy Bird out the door and said, “Minnie, dear, I’m sending the girls for the doctor. Did you fall?”

  “Don’t bother,” Mrs. Kovaks whimpered. It took her a long time to get it out. “It’s the cancer.” I could see the tears that came to Ma’s eyes. Me and Whippy Bird had tears in our eyes, too. Ma put a hand on May Anna’s arm then turned to me and Whippy Bird and asked what the hell were we doing there when she’d told us to get the doctor.

  Mrs. Kovaks was right about what was wrong. We didn’t know how long she knew about the cancer. Maybe she just guessed. May Anna said Mrs. Kovaks’s mother died of it, that it just seemed to pass down in the family.

  The doctor wanted Mrs. Kovaks to go to the hospital, but she said they didn’t have the money. So he gave May Anna a prescription for medicine and promised to stop in every day, which he did. Ma fixed their dinner every night. She slipped in and set it on the table. When May Anna thanked her, Ma replied, “Why it’s a pleasure to have a family to cook for now that Mr. Commander’s traveling on union business and Little Tommy’s on the night shift. You know I never did learn to cut back recipes. You’re just keeping the food from going to waste.” Ma surely was a wonderful woman.

  Sometimes she made special things for Mrs. Kovaks like beef tea or custard, then pretended she’d fixed them for everybody else. She told May Anna she had a little money put aside for emergencies. “I want you to take this, May Anna, since you’re family. It would relieve my mind. Just pay it back when you can. There’s no hurry at all. You know if you don’t take it, Effa Commander will just pester me to spend it on pretties.”

  May Anna said thanks to you, Mrs. Commander. “We’re doing just fine. We don’t have any need of money, but we thank you just the same.” May Anna wouldn’t take it, even as a loan. She was too proud. I asked Ma why didn’t she just pay the Kovakses’ rent or the doctor bill herself, but she said there was a limit to how much you could interfere in other people’s lives.

  Me and Whippy Bird know the final straw was the food basket. Some ladies from the Blessed Sacrament Church found out about Mrs. Kovaks and brought a food basket. They didn’t just leave it on the porch and slip away. No, they got all dressed up and bustled up to the front door where everybody could see them. Me and Whippy Bird were there with May Anna when they rang the bell and handed the basket to her like she was supposed to fall on her knees and pretend they were the Doublemint version of the Virgin Mary.

  One of them said, “My dear, we like to do this for those less fortunate. We hope you appreciate it and are grateful to the Lord. The Lord is only punishing her for her sins, but He will be merciful.”

  Then the other woman looked May Anna up and down like you do a used car and added, “I’m looking for a kitchen girl and might consider you.”

  Me and Whippy Bird were so mad, we could have knocked them down the stairs. The Kovakses needed that basket. We thought May Anna would either say thank you very nicely or else scream at them to get the hell out, but she did something me and Whippy Bird would never have thought of.

  “Why, ladies, whatever is this about?” she asked. “Mother and I have no need for a food basket. You must be mistaken. But won’t you sit down? My friends and I were about to have tea.” So those women had to sit right down there in May Anna’s house and drink tea and be in her debt then slink back out with their basket. Even in The Sin of Rachel Babcock, May Anna was never as gracious and as much a lady as she was pouring tea for those two busybodies that day.

  When they left, May Anna stood there clenching her fists, her face white. “I’ll never take charity,” she said. “Never! Never!”

  Later on, when we saw Gone With the Wind, Whippy Bird asked, “Do you think Scarlett O’Hara would take a charity basket before going hungry again?” It wasn’t more than a week after those two biddies called that May Anna was working out of a house in Venus Alley.

  Ma tried to talk her out of it. She went to see her and invited the Kovakses to live with us until May Anna finished high school. May Anna shook her head and said her mother was her responsibility, and she’d made her decision. Then Ma hugged her and said she loved her and she was always welcome at our house, anytime. May Anna told her that was the nicest thing anybody ever said to her, and it probably was. May Anna said Ma was a saint. When Ma died, May Anna sent Pig Face money for enough candles to burn down Blessed Sacrament.

  A few days after she’d gone to work for Nell Nolan, who was the biggest madam in Venus Alley, me and Whippy Bird ran into May Anna on the street. It was over by where the Ben Franklin is now. She worked all night, then she came home during the day to be with her mother. Or sometimes she worked the day shift so she could be home at night. “You know what I’m doing now,” May Anna said. “You can pretend you don’t know me. I’ll understand.”

  Me and Whippy Bird looked at her like she’d gone crackers. “See here, kid,” Whippy Bird said, “just because you’ve got a job don’t mean you’re better than me and Effa Commander. We’re still the Unholy Three whether you like it or not.”

  May Anna laughed and laughed and said she was the luckiest girl in the world to have two best friends like me and Whippy Bird. Then she got serious and said, “Whippy Bird and Effa Commander, you’ve got to help me out.”

  We told her we surely would though we didn’t have much money. Then she said, “Not money. A name. I need a new name. All the girls have them.” She thought maybe a movie star name. Since we’d just seen Rio Rita, we thought Bebe Daniels would be nice, but she said there already was a Bebe Daniels who worked up the alley. I liked Mary Miles Minter, who was also a movie star, but May Anna asked what drunken miner could say Mary Miles Minter and make himself understood? Barbara La Marr was another favorite, but May Anna didn’t think men would want to go to bed with somebody named for a dead person. That was when me and Whippy Bird looked at that street sign and before you knew it we had named the woman who would someday be one of the brightest stars in Hollywood.

  After May Anna turned out, the Unholy Three was mostly me and Whippy Bird. We still saw May Anna as much as we could, and she was always our friend. Sometimes when she was working at Nell Nolan’s during the day, me and Whippy Bird walked down Venus Alley just like it was any other street. If May Anna spotted us and she wasn’t busy, she tapped on the window, which was a signal she would meet us at Gamer’s in five minutes for a coffee break. Even during the day, the street that ran along Venus Alley was as busy as Broadway after shift since the high school boys liked to cut through there on t
heir way to the football field and bang their helmets on the doors.

  Mrs. Kovaks died six months later, which Ma said was a blessing and we thought was a relief. She sure wasn’t pretty to look at, and at the end you could hear her screaming at May Anna all over Centerville. Ma said she was just crazy from the pain.

  There weren’t many at the funeral, just May Anna and Buster and the Birds and us. May Anna saved up her money to buy a nice stone that said REST IN PEACE MINERVA EVANS KOVAKS. Then after asking Ma to give Mrs. Kovaks’s things away to a poor family May Anna gave up the house and moved into Nell Nolan’s full time.

  In May, me and Whippy Bird graduated from high school. I went to work for Gamer’s as a waitress, and Whippy Bird got a job at the power company as a professional secretary. She came into Gamer’s two or three times a week for lunch. Gamer’s, which had its own bakery, was one of your better Butte establishments. I remember one Saturday we baked twenty wedding cakes. We made our own candy, too. Babe Gamer ran a confectionery in the basement with seven girls making candy and packing it to mail all around the world. At Valentine’s and Mother’s Day you’d have your miners lined up five deep in front of the counter to buy those big copper-foil boxes.

  We ran into May Anna on the street sometimes or in the store. Or May Anna came into Gamer’s with some of the other girls from Venus Alley. They were always real nice and left good tips, too. Sometimes at night, the girls called and asked would we bring over a pastie or a chicken potpie, and if I wasn’t too busy, I’d run it over.

  You read about your hookers being mean or else having hearts of gold. I suppose there were both, but the ones me and Whippy Bird knew in Butte were like anybody else. Unless you knew they worked on the line, you never guessed it. They weren’t all hussies with low-cut dresses or thick makeup. In fact, me and Whippy Bird always wore more makeup than May Anna except that May Anna liked bright nail polish.