Buster Midnight's Cafe (2 page)

Me and Whippy Bird met May Anna Kovaks the day we saved her life.

We were always getting May Anna out of scrapes. One time, when we were standing on the sidewalk in Centerville, Chick O’Reilly dared her to put her tongue on an icy sled runner, and she did, and it stuck. Me and Whippy Bird dashed into the closest house, grabbed a pan of soup that was cooking on the stove, and poured it over May Anna’s head. That got her tongue loose, all right. I always wondered what those people thought when they came home to find an empty pot and no supper.

Whippy Bird remembered about that sled runner after May Anna became famous and said wouldn’t it be funny if we hadn’t been there that day and May Anna would have to be a movie star with a sled hanging out of her mouth.

The first time we saw May Anna, she was standing right at the edge of the Little Annie glory hole. The glory hole was fenced off because it was just a big open pit, but the fence never kept anybody out, especially kids. May Anna stood at the edge real quiet, just looking down into the hole.

When we spotted her, me and Whippy Bird were playing on a mine dump. We thought the whole world was made up of mine dumps. We must have been ten years old before we found out other places didn’t have dumps the way Butte did. Butte was just lucky, Whippy Bird said.

On bad days in old-time Butte the smoke from the smelters turned the sky dark, even at noon. Sometimes the town left the street lights on twenty-four hours a day. You’d see the miners coming down off the hill in the middle of the day with their carbide lights like a chain of moving stars. That’s what it was like when we spotted May Anna.

At first, we just stood on the mine dump, watching her in the smoky air. Later when I saw
Wuthering Heights
it made me remember May Anna up there at the edge of the Little Annie glory hole with the wind blowing, and the mist swirling. Only with the sulfur fumes from the smelters that day, it was like
Wuthering Heights
in Smell-O-Vision, Whippy Bird says. It’s too bad May Anna didn’t play in that movie. She surely looked the part that day.

The sulfur made you sick to your stomach and kind of woozy if you weren’t used to it. Of course, it didn’t bother me and Whippy Bird, but as I say, May Anna was new. All of a sudden the sulfur fumes must have gotten to her, and she started to weave like her legs were giving out. If May Anna had fallen into that hole’which goes down about a million feet’you never would have seen Marion Street win an Academy Award for
The Sin of Rachel Babcock.

We were ready for her. We had just ducked under the fence, when Whippy Bird yelled, “Look-it there, Effa Commander. That little kid’s in trouble!” So we scrambled up those rocks as fast as we could, just in time. As she started down that hole on her way to kingdom come, Whippy Bird grabbed one side of May Anna’s dress and I took hold of the other. Together we pulled her out.

“You’re a damn fool,” Whippy Bird told May Anna. We were five and had just learned “damn fool” and liked the way it sounded.

“I was trying to see to China,” May Anna retorted once she collected herself. She wouldn’t admit the fumes got to her.

“Then you’re dumber than damn fool because the Chinamen live over on West Mercury Street, not at the bottom of the Little Annie glory hole. Ain’t you never been down to the Chinese laundry or the noodle parlors?” Whippy Bird asked.

May Anna drew herself up like she did later in
Moon Blood
when she told her husband she was leaving him for another man and said, “China is straight through the earth from Butte, and if you dig far enough you will reach it. How do you expect the Chinese got here—walking across the ocean?”

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 Bird 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.