Buster Midnight's Cafe (3 page)

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 where 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.

“Push him overboard,” Buster told Pink and Chick when he was finished. “He can sink to the bottom and stay there for all I care.”

“Ah, come on, Buster. He didn’t mean nothing,” one of the Bohunks begged. “If you push him off, he’ll never come up again.”

Buster being the nice person he always was thought it over for a minute, then said, “All right, I’ll leave him there but only if May Anna says so.”

“If I let him live, he has to promise never to talk to me again,” she said.

“Is that a deal?” Buster asked the Bohunks, who nodded. At that, Pig Face groaned and opened his eyes. “Next time, I’ll kill you,” Buster told him, and Pig Face never doubted it.

Pig Face Stenner wasn’t much of a fighter after that. May Anna says he learned to pray while Buster beat him up, and that’s why he turned out to be a priest. May Anna, who was a papist herself, never would go to him for confession. “How can you ask for forgiveness from somebody named Father Pig Face?” she asked.

Buster won that fight, but he was plenty hurt. As soon as he jumped back onto the
Happy Warrior,
May Anna fussed over him, wiping the tomato splat and blood away. “I’m so proud of you, Buster,” she said. She dipped her lace handkerchief, which she carried all her life, into that awful pond water and rubbed off the stains on his chest and his face.

Pink and Chick looked at me and Whippy Bird like they expected us to do the same thing. I said, “Sorry, Pink, no hanky.”

“No knockout, neither,” Whippy Bird added to Chick.

When she was all done, May Anna kissed Buster right on the lips. Me and Whippy Bird had never seen anybody do that except in the pictures, and it surprised us more than seeing Buster without his clothes on. Buster’s eyes really bugged out of his head. It came to me and Whippy Bird then that May Anna had power over men. She could inspire them to protect her and hand out the rewards when they did. We weren’t jealous as you might think we’d be. We always thought May Anna was special. She was one of the Unholy Three, and that meant she was our true friend for life.

Life was hard for most people in Butte, but May Anna had it harder than the rest of us. That’s because of the way her mother lived and because she didn’t have a father.

In the beginning, of course, we thought Mrs. Kovaks was glamorous. We called her The Merry Widow. Our mothers were plain and had long hair that they wound around their heads, and they were as round as saffron buns. Not May Anna’s mom. She was slender and wore rouge and smoked Chesterfield cigarettes. She was the only woman we knew who smoked, except for us, of course. Mrs. Kovaks’s hair was marcelled, like it was set in wet cement, and her skirts came to her knees.

“Your mother’s a flapper,” Whippy Bird told May Anna one day. We thought that was swell, and May Anna took the compliment just the way she did later when all her fans cheered her at movie premieres, tucking her chin down and looking up with her glory hole eyes and that little wisp of a smile with her hand over her mouth. Even though me and Whippy Bird thought Mrs. Kovaks was the cat’s, we thought she was a dumb onion, too, with men always giving her the shove. Still, she was nice to May Anna and to me and Whippy Bird, too, letting us wear her old gardenia corsages and put on her perfume.

When May Anna’s mother cooked, it was never corned beef and cabbage or meat loaf, but things like Oysters in 1920 Sauce. Of course, she didn’t cook much, which is why May Anna ate with me and Whippy Bird lots of times.

Mrs. Kovaks served cocktails when she entertained men. May Anna said her mother got out gin and lemons and a siphon, though she let May Anna chip the ice for her. We thought having cocktails was a lot more elegant than sitting on the front stoop in your undershirt drinking a bucket of beer the way Pop did on Saturday night.

We liked watching Mrs. Kovaks get all gussied up in shiny dresses with fringe that jiggled when she walked. Sometimes she tied little beaded ribbons or rosettes in her hair. She wore real silk stockings, and when she finished putting them on, she always said to me and Whippy Bird and May Anna, “Now, you look, girls, are my seams straight?” We looked up and down her silky legs, but her seams were hardly ever crooked.

When her stockings got too many runs, Mrs. Kovaks gave them to May Anna. “When I get rich, I’m going to have new silk stockings every day of the year and never wear a pair with runs,” May Anna told us. She did, too, only by then they were nylon.

We liked to be there when Mrs. Kovaks’s dates came to take her out. They were snappy, just like Mrs. Kovaks, and wore two-tone shoes and fedoras. When they drove up, they tooted the horn and called, “Come on, kiddo. Shake a leg.” Sometimes she went uptown to meet the traveling men who set up their displays in the Sample Room at the Cash Saloon. Later on, of course, we realized most of Mrs. Kovaks’s men friends were married.

May Anna’s mom worked at the Finlen Hotel as a maid, cleaning rooms and changing sheets. She told us the sheets and pillow cases were starched as stiff as a bone, and they snapped when she shook them out to make up the bed. She said it was the best-paying hotel job in town, but me and Whippy Bird think the real reason she liked to work there was she met men.

One time, Mrs. Kovaks took me and Whippy Bird and May Anna to lunch at the Finlen Hotel for May Anna’s birthday. Mrs. Kovaks said we’d have a jolly good time, and we surely did. “Jolly good” was something one of Mrs. Kovaks’s boyfriends said. We had creamed chicken on toast and peas and ice cream and cake. When they brought in the cake, everybody in the place sang happy birthday to May Anna. We all said it was the jolliest time we ever had.

After May Anna became a star, she told us that she celebrated her birthdays in the most expensive restaurants in America. Once Tyrone Power even came to one of her parties. But she always said her all-time favorite was the one with her mom and me and Whippy Bird in the Finlen Hotel. Me and Whippy Bird were proud when she added, “That’s because it was family.”

Mrs. Kovaks’s boyfriends brought her presents all the time, like a bottle of perfume or a heart-shaped box of candy with a satin ribbon. Sometimes, they sent her stuff that she kept on a little whatnot in the corner of the living room, which May Anna dusted every Saturday. It was filled with the most interesting knickknacks, like a big seashell that was pink and smooth as a baby. When you held it up to your ear, you could hear the ocean roar (that’s what Mrs. Kovaks told us anyway, but Whippy Bird said that was as damn fool an idea as digging to China, which we had come to realize was a con that May Anna pulled the first time we met her). There was a little blue glass shoe with bumps all over and a sterling silver spoon with an Indian and
HOT SPRINGS, ARKANSAS
on the handle. Also, an ashtray with melons painted on it that said
MELON PILE, ROCKY FORD, COLO.
Mrs. Kovaks had quite a collection of picture postcards, too, that she pasted in a book so you couldn’t read the writing. That was OK because mostly they said dumb things like “Keep your shirt on till you see me, Toots.” And they all ended in “Ha! Ha!”

If she was going to be out late, Mrs. Kovaks sent May Anna over to our house to sleep. Sometimes she stayed for three or four days before Mrs. Kovaks came back. May Anna said her mother liked to go to Helena or Billings on the train, and once she went to Ogden for a week. But mostly she went out just for the evening to one of the roadhouses around Butte. She liked to drink whiskey and dance.

When May Anna was twelve, Mrs. Kovaks kept company with a man named Straight Back Billy Higgins, who had a little black Ronald Colman mustache, real silk handkerchiefs, and a battered old Maxwell. Me and Whippy Bird thought he was handsome in a mysterious and evil way and we liked to sit on the running board of his car and make up stories about him. May Anna told us he was a railroad bookkeeper, but me and Whippy Bird knew better. He was a bootlegger. You could tell right off because of his pink hands and his oily hair parted in the middle. What’s more, he gave Mrs. Kovaks a bottle of hooch every time he came to town. Sometimes he offered May Anna a drink of it.

Straight Back called May Anna “snooks” and “girlie,” and tried to hug her or make her sit on his lap. He brought her dumb jewelry like a Scottie dog pin, which her mom made her wear to school. May Anna lost it. “I guess the clasp broke,” she told us.

“It’ll do that when you throw it down a glory hole,” Whippy Bird told her.

Once, Straight Back sneaked up on May Anna when she was home alone. He walked right in the house calling for Mrs. Kovaks, though he went into May Anna’s bedroom, and he surely knew that was not where Mrs. Kovaks slept. May Anna was asleep, but when the bed-springs creaked, she woke up to find Straight Back, buck naked, climbing in beside her. “I got a real nice surprise for you,” he said, but it was Straight Back that got the surprise.

May Anna screamed only once before Straight Back clapped his hand over her mouth, but that scream was loud enough to bring the one person who would walk through fire to save her, and that person was Buster McKnight. May Anna said it was just her good luck that Buster happened to be passing by. Hanging around like a lovesick dog is more like it, Whippy Bird says.

The next thing Straight Back knew, he was rolling backward down the Kovaks stairs into the street. Standing over him was Buster with his fists up and May Anna holding him back. “You come here again, I’ll kill you, you creep.”

“Let me get my stuff,” he whined.

“You hear me, sap?”

Straight Back was so flustered, he shook his head no. Buster started for him, so he shook his head yes and scampered into the Maxwell, still naked as the day he was born, and drove off. May Anna threw his clothes on the porch in case Straight Back decided to come get them, but he never did. Mrs. Kovaks gave them to a tramp.

After that time with Straight Back, Buster always had this way of knowing when May Anna was in trouble. The two of them didn’t date then. None of us did. We were too young. We went around in a gang together. But Buster was always next to May Anna. Even when he wasn’t, May Anna knew Buster could come out of nowhere to protect her.

I guess all the women in Centerville knew how Mrs. Kovaks got by. There were plenty that gave her the cold shoulder, who turned the other way when she walked into the Nimble Nickel grocery. They were even rude to May Anna, which wasn’t fair because she couldn’t help the way her mom was. Me and Whippy Bird laughed at how the women who snubbed her were the ones who claimed they were like a second mother to May Anna when she became famous. I know the way they treated her hurt May Anna, but she never let on.

Sometimes Buster got even for her. “Here, give this to your mom,” he’d say, slugging some poor kid whose mother stuck up her nose at May Anna.

My mother wasn’t like the other women. Neither was Whippy Bird’s. “You play the hand you get dealt, and Minnie Kovaks makes the best of what she has, which isn’t much,” Ma said. Besides, she added, it was hard being without a man. After all, Mrs. Kovaks tried to be a good mother to May Anna, and you couldn’t ask for more than that.

Ma sent up saffron cake and potato soup when Mrs. Kovaks was sick, and she told her to send May Anna to stay with us any time she felt like it. Ma was always sewing on buttons and letting down hems for May Anna or cutting down Mrs. Kovaks’s frocks for her. Whenever she made my underwear out of Lyon’s Best flour sacks, Ma made a pair for May Anna, too.

Ma wouldn’t hear a word against either May Anna or her mother from the other women. I remember once when Ma was hanging out wash, Mabel Molish next door remarked that she didn’t know why Ma would do laundry for the daughter of a fancy woman, and they ought to run her out of the neighborhood. “You got inside information about fancy houses?” Ma asked her. Mabel Molish always got into other people’s personal business. She hinted to Ma that Pop was stepping when he was out of town on union business. Ma finally told her, “If he don’t step, he’s a fool. If he does, he’s a son of a bitch, and if I catch him, I’ll kill him.” She put the clothespins into the bag she kept hanging on the line, then added, “I’ll also kill anybody who tells me he steps.”

Even after May Anna turned out, Ma kept an eye on her. When May Anna took sick with pneumonia one time, Ma sent a note to her saying she was to take a taxi to our house and stay with us so Ma could look after her. May Anna did, and not once did Ma say a word about what she was doing for a living. In fact, when my brother, Little Tommy, kidded her that somebody might take us for a hookhouse, Ma told him he could get out if he didn’t mind his manners with a guest. What gets me is how Ma knew May Anna had pneumonia. Even me and Whippy Bird didn’t know that.

May Anna wasn’t the type of girl to forget a kindness. Once, for no reason, she sent Ma an ermine scarf from Hollywood with a nice note that made Ma cry. Ma never wore the scarf, of course. Where would she go with it? Instead, she kept it wrapped in tissue in a box along with a
Photoplay
picture of May Anna wearing that exact scarf at a movie premiere. Ma nearly wore out that fur taking it out of the box to show people. Every Mother’s Day, May Anna called Gamer’s and had them send Ma a five-pound box of candy, wrapped in copper foil with a picture of Butte on it.

As she got older Mrs. Kovaks’s looks started to go, and she got thick around the middle. She wasn’t as careful about her appearance, going around with messy lipstick and chipped nail polish. Whippy Bird says she was always sort of hard-looking, but we just didn’t see it that way when we were kids.

The men she picked up then weren’t as nice as they used to be. Sometimes they smacked her when they got drunk, and her face was red and swollen for days. Or they took her out then ditched her, and she had to beg for a ride home. She took to drinking during the day and sitting around in an old bathrobe with a cigarette stuck on her lip. Finally, she lost her job at the Finlen and got to hanging around bars, picking up just anybody. By then, we knew what was going on, and we felt bad for May Anna. But that was much later—after Jackfish Cook. When Mrs. Kovaks met Jackfish, she was as spiffy as any woman in Butte.

Jackfish—Mrs. Kovaks’s boyfriends always told me and Whippy Bird and May Anna to call them by their first names—set charges at the Neversweat, which was a mine on the Hill. It was cool as a cucumber in the ‘Sweat, which is how it got its name. Jackfish didn’t work there all the time. In the summer he hunted for gold, since his true calling was being a prospector. When he met Mrs. Kovaks, he’d just come down out of the hills.

At first, we didn’t see that Jackfish was different from her other boyfriends except he had the brightest red hair I ever saw, brighter than Whippy Bird’s. He was Irish, and he got drunk and whooped it up on Saturday nights so that he always woke up on Sunday mornings with a damn fool hangover. He had to have a couple of beers before he even got out of bed to get ready for church. Jackfish always made May Anna go to church with him. He said Mrs. Kovaks was a grown woman and could make up her own mind about religion. If she wanted to be an atheist, that was all right with him. “If May Anna’s going to be an atheist, it has to be her choice. That means she has to know what she’s turning down,” he explained.

Jackfish did it right, too. He went to Hennessy’s and bought May Anna a Bible and a rosary, and every Sunday he took her to the Blessed Sacrament Church, which Whippy Bird called BS. Whippy Bird always has been a cutup. If Jackfish was nursing an especially bad hangover on Sunday morning, he would sneak out to the Pekin Noodle Parlor for Chinese food. He claimed Chinese food was the only true cure for a hangover. Even better than the body of Christ. Me and Whippy Bird never noticed that Chinese food helped our hangovers much, and we never tried the body of Christ.

A few months later, May Anna had her first communion. Her mother bought her a white dress and a veil. May Anna, being thirteen, was a head taller than any of the other girls walking down the aisle to kneel by the altar, and she looked silly in that white dress with the bow in the back. She didn’t mind, though. It was one of the proudest days of her life. Me and Whippy Bird were there, and we prayed we could become Catholics, too.