Buster Midnight's Cafe (14 page)

Chick said he thought Pink would go crazy. Pink said he had to be with me, but the army wouldn’t let him come to the funeral. He threatened to come anyway, but Chick told him he’d be in a jail instead, and that wouldn’t do me any good. Pink blamed himself because he’d joined the army when he didn’t have to. He thought if he’d been there, he could have taken care of me, but nobody could have done a better job than Whippy Bird. It wasn’t meant to be.

We had a funeral with just family. Little Maybird was in the tiniest coffin I ever saw, lined with pink silk. May Anna ordered it, and she told Father Pig Face to light candles for Maybird though Whippy Bird said it wasn’t necessary. A baby as sweet as that would go straight to heaven. Whippy Bird said the candles were for May Anna herself since it was the closest she ever came to being a mother.

When I got home, I sat down in the rocking chair in the living room. Moon crawled up in my lap and said, “I love you, Aunt Effa Commander,” and he went to sleep with me holding him. Whippy Bird sharing Moon with me like that made it easier. Pink got over it, too. When he found out I was all right, he said we’d have other babies, though we never did.

May Anna never forgot. Every year on the day little Maybird died, there was a notice in the paper under “In Memoriam.” It read: “Beloved Maybird. Sadly missed. MAK.”

When the boys left for Europe on the troop carrier, me and Whippy Bird remembered about that fight on the raft at the pond when we were kids. “Funny, isn’t it? Buster and Pig Face were the toughest boys in the gang, and they’re not going,” Whippy Bird said. We didn’t blame Buster, of course, but it did seem strange that the United States government thought Pig Face lighting candles was an “essential industry.”

Maybe it was the praying that was essential. Me and Whippy Bird didn’t need Pig Face for that, though. We did enough of it for Pink and Chick and every other soldier from Butte, Montana. There were other things we did, too, like saving bacon grease for the war effort and planting a victory garden. Moon collected newspapers in his little wagon and took them to the paper drive at school. It wasn’t so bad when the boys were in camp. Then all we had to worry about was them getting into trouble from too many drunks. It was them being shipped out that really mattered to us.

They came home before that, though. We celebrated at the Pekin and at the Rocky Mountain where we ordered Shawn O’s and bottles of red, but it wasn’t the same. We knew the boys were going to war. Me and Pink were still in mourning, too. I took Pink to the cemetery to show him Maybird’s grave the day before they left. We sat on the grass for a long time, just holding hands. I knew Pink was crying inside though he wasn’t the kind to show it. Afterward we picked out a stone with a little lamb on it for her grave. I waited for him to come home so we could choose it together. Pink had to order the writing by himself, though, because I was too torn up to say Maybird’s name out loud to a stranger. I sat on a bench with my arms wrapped around me trying not to cry while Pink finished up. The stone was installed after he left, and I cried when I saw that it read
MAYBIRD EFFA VARSCOE.
Since I didn’t have a middle name, I never thought about giving our baby one. But Pink did, God bless him.

We didn’t know where the boys had gone; the army wouldn’t let them tell us. But we found out from May Anna. She saw them in North Africa at a USO show.

May Anna was one of the brightest stars in the Hollywood Sky by then, and one of Warner Bros.’ biggest money-makers, too. Me and Whippy Bird thought she was getting a little long in the tooth to play gangster molls, but May Anna said Sing Sing didn’t want to mess with a winning formula.

You surely could not argue about May Anna drawing them in. Every picture she made was a blockbuster. Millions of people went to see her getting killed or sitting around a cocktail lounge drinking martinis and or pushing gangsters down the elevator shaft.

We always knew what to expect in her movies because they were always the same. They started out with May Anna working in a nightclub, and they always included a scene where she walked down a dark street that was lit by a flashing neon sign. Then she had to run because somebody was after her. The audience would hear her high heels clicking on the street and the sound would get fainter and fainter as she disappeared in the fog. Sometimes she stood on top of a hill in the wind, wearing a white dress that blew up around her, but she would always be looking off to the Pacific Ocean and not notice. Then there were the bedrooms, which were always draped in satin, with a quilted satin headboard and satin sheets and white phones. May Anna never talked on anything but a white phone.

May Anna even had her own fan club with members from every state in the union, and it personally requested me and Whippy Bird to write an article about May Anna as a little girl. You bet we were proud! Lots of people knew May Anna in Butte, but May Anna’s fan club turned to us when they needed a true picture. Hunter Harper listed that article in the back of his book, though he said it was folklore and not fact. A damn fool like that wouldn’t know a true fact if you served it to him with syrup and butter, Whippy Bird said when she read that. If only we had stayed with our literary career after me and Whippy Bird wrote that piece, we would not have such a hard time writing about May Anna now.

We talked about the article for a long time and decided it wasn’t necessary to mention that May Anna’s mother never got married. We also decided to leave out Jackfish. Since they wanted us to tell about May Anna as a little girl, we skipped over the part about Venus Alley.

Me and Whippy Bird must have used up two of Moon’s Big Chief tablets working on that article. It took us almost a month to finish. Then Whippy Bird took it down to the Anaconda office and typed it on her lunch hour. We thought it was real good. It started out:

The first time we saw May Anna Kovaks, our friend who became the famous Marion Street, star of radio and motion picture fame, she was standing at the edge of the Little Annie glory hole looking like Merle Oberon in
Wuthering Heights,
and we saved her from falling in.

Maybe the fan club didn’t like us taking credit for saving May Anna’s life because it changed the story to say: “We always knew our friend Marion Street would be a star.” Then they took out the rest of what we sent them and wrote a lot of other stuff they made up. They left our names, though. We gotten free copies of the newsletter where the story was printed so we mailed one to Pink and Chick. Pink wrote back, asking how come we never told him we knew May Anna would be a famous star. He said he’d put his money on Effa Commander to be the world-famous beauty, but then Pink always did flatter me.

May Anna was a major supporter of the war, which was why she volunteered for the USO tours for the soldiers overseas. She said the tours were organized like vaudeville shows—one singer, one comedian, one pretty girl, one famous athlete, and one singer. May Anna was the pretty girl because she surely was not the singer. The comedian was the master of ceremonies, and May Anna wrote us he always introduced her by announcing, “Why, look who’s here! It’s that lovely actress of stage and screen, Miss Marion Street!” just like he forgot she was part of the show and he’d been putting the make on her for three weeks.

Whippy Bird said what stage was May Anna ever on, but I think stage-and-screen is just a saying.

May Anna didn’t do much except walk around in a bathing suit or a strapless sundress and look sexy and pout and tell dirty jokes. But she liked doing it. May Anna said she had a lot of respect for those boys in the service. She didn’t think so much of the officers, who were always trying to get her to go to bed with them, though. May Anna said she didn’t go to Europe to get laid on an army cot.

But May Anna liked being with the soldiers, and they knew it. She was in big demand because she made them laugh and took their minds off the war.

“Are any of you boys from my home town of Butte, Montana?” she always asked. Anybody who said yes got a kiss. She said she was surprised how many soldiers said they were from Butte.

It was when May Anna was strutting around a wobbly stage in Tunisia, sweating in the heat even though she was wearing a strapless dress and high-heeled sandals when she found Pink and Chick. Or they found her. “Hey, May Anna!” she heard somebody yell over the heads of the crowd. She said she almost fainted.

“Is there somebody here from Butte, Montana?”

Whippy Bird said she bet every soldier in the audience yelled, “I am!”

She heard her name called again, and saw, way at the back, a hand waving at her. “You there, come on down here!” she called. When she saw it was Pink, May Anna rushed to the edge of the stage and held out her arms and squealed, “Pink Varscoe! I can’t believe it! You get right up here on this stage!”

Pink jumped up on the platform, and May Anna dragged him over to the microphone, where she hugged him and kissed him while the soldiers cheered. “This is Pink Varscoe from Butte, Montana. He married my best friend. Now, I’ll bet Chick O’Reilly is out there, too. Chick, where are you?” About five hundred men raised their hands, but Pink told her Chick was on duty. So May Anna looked down at a colonel sitting in the front row and told him, “You go get Chick O’Reilly! On the double, soldier!” Everybody laughed and clapped while the colonel’s aide ran to get Chick.

While they waited for Chick, the comedian made a few cracks about May Anna having a soldier in every port. “Two in this port,” she said as Chick ran up on the stage where May Anna hugged and kissed him, too. Then she introduced him, saying he was married to her other best friend. “You boys want to see something pretty, you ought to see the two girls these boys left at home. Real pinups, I’ll tell you.” Pink and Chick liked that a lot, especially the catcalls. Me and Whippy Bird thought it was nice of May Anna to say even though it wasn’t true.

Pink wrote that being with May Anna was the best time they had in the army. He said seeing her was like being back at the Brown Jug. It pleased me to think she had brought a little bit of Butte to our husbands oversees. Later on, of course, me and Whippy Bird were especially glad that if we couldn’t be there, they at least had time with May Anna. She stayed with them the whole day, even took them to the lunch the officers held for her. Pink said that some of the big shots wanted to meet her so much they pretended they were personally acquainted with him. Even after May Anna left, Pink and Chick got special treatment.

About a week after Pink’s letter arrived, we got an official United States Army envelope. Inside was a picture of May Anna with her arms around Pink and Chick. She’d written across it: “A New Unholy Three Alliance. Love Marion Street (May Anna Kovaks).” We framed that picture and put it over the living room sofa because it was the last picture ever taken of Pink and Chick during their lifetimes.

In the meantime, me and Whippy Bird and Moon figured out a pretty good life for ourselves. I worked weekends at Gamer’s in the kitchen where I did baking. It didn’t pay as good as waitressing since sometimes I could make twenty-five dollars a day on tips. But I wanted to learn to cook so when Pink got back, he would come home to the best damn cook in Butte, Montana. Along with the baking, I had a job two nights a week at Gamer’s as the hostess. Whippy Bird worked days as a professional typist at the Anaconda Company, and that way one of us was always at home if Moon needed us. Sometimes when there was a school vacation day, me and Moon took the Jackpot uptown and met Whippy Bird for lunch at the Creamery Cafe. Whippy Bird didn’t have much time to eat, so me and Moon went in early and ordered. That way, only a minute after she came in, her lunch was sitting right there in front of her.

Moon liked that. We talked about what to order Whippy Bird, and we worried that her lunch might come before she did and get cold, but Whippy Bird always told Moon her lunch was just right. If the weather was nice, we walked Whippy Bird back to the Anaconda office, which was above Hennessy’s. Then me and Moon would stand on the street until she came to the office window to wave good-bye. As a treat, every now and then, I took Moon to the movies in the afternoon, where he thought every one of the blond actresses he saw was May Anna. It wasn’t such a bad way to spend the war, at least, until that morning in November.

I was fixing the peanut butter sandwiches for Moon’s lunch when wouldn’t you know it, I ran out of bread. “No need for you to go for it since I already put my coat on. I’ll just run over to the Nickel for a loaf of Holsum before I go to work,” Whippy Bird told me. “There’s plenty of time.”

So when I heard the doorbell a few minutes later, I smiled, thinking Whippy Bird forgot her key. Then I realized it wouldn’t make any difference because we never locked the door. That’s when I heard Moon open the door and say, “I can take it.” In a minute, he came in with a telegram.

“Aunt May Anna?” Moon asked, handing it to me. There was a big grin on his face because every telegram he’d ever seen came from May Anna, and he knew me and Whippy Bird loved getting them.

“Why I expect so,” I said, wiping my hands on my apron. “Me and you are going to read this now, and you can tell your mother what’s in it when she comes back.”

I ripped open the yellow envelope with my fingernail and read it through. Then I read it again, thinking there was a May Anna joke in there that I’d missed. Sometimes her jokes weren’t too funny. Other times the telegraph office mixed up the words, and they didn’t make sense, but when I read it the second time there wasn’t any joke, and the words were in the right order. Then I looked hard at the envelope. It was addressed to Whippy Bird. Not to me and Whippy Bird. And the telegram said Chick was dead.

I sat there staring across the room with that yellow piece of paper in my hand, letting the message sink in. REGRET …STOP … DIED … STOP … KINDLY WIRE … STOP … DEEPEST SYMPATHY … STOP.

I wondered if the man who sent it knew Chick personally and if he was hurting when he wrote the telegram. For a minute I felt sorry for him having to send Western Union messages like that. But I didn’t think about him for long because it was Whippy Bird I cared about. What was I going to say to Whippy Bird? And Moon? I looked down at little Moon, who had his face turned up to me waiting to hear something funny to tell his mother.

“Oh, honey,” I said, putting my arm around him.

“What’s wrong, Aunt Effa Commander?”

I just shook my head and pulled him to me, trying to keep the tears from falling, hugging him while I tried to think how to tell Whippy Bird about her sorrow. I thought back to the last time Chick was home and how excited he was to see Whippy Bird. He didn’t even wait for the train to stop. When he saw her, he jumped onto the platform and swung her up in the air. Then he picked up Moon and put him on his shoulder even though Moon was almost seven years old. They were the happiest family I ever saw. Tears came to my eyes when I saw them together that wonderful day, just like the tears I was fighting off that awful morning. That’s when I decided to send Moon to the school before Whippy Bird came back. She would need her time alone before she explained to Moon.

“What’s wrong?” I said, pulling myself together. “What’s wrong is you’re going to be late for second grade. You run along, and I’ll bring your lunch up to school later.” Moon looked surprised, but he did as he was told, putting on his little sweater and hurrying up the street. I leaned against the door and watched as he caught up with a friend in the next block, then the two of them squatted down on the sidewalk to look at something. I was glad he could have this day without knowing about Chick. I wished Whippy Bird could, too, and for a second I wondered what would have happened if the telegram had gone to the wrong address. Or if Moon and I hadn’t been home to sign for it? But that wouldn’t make Chick any less dead.