Buster Midnight's Cafe (7 page)

Whippy Bird says shut up, Effa Commander, you’re bragging, and I surely am. She says we weren’t that cute, but I distinctly remember we were. She says May Anna looked like a goddess, and we looked like Mutt and Jeff in knee garters.

The setup for the fight wasn’t much. Toney and the other manager put a bunch of folding chairs on the floor of a meeting room. The hall was decorated with flags and streamers left over from some dance, and there were stuffed animal heads around with the hair falling out. The ring itself was just a platform raised up about a foot or two off the floor, with ropes about as thick as clothesline. There were two little rickety stools with the paint coming off for the fighters. I remember when Buster stood up once to start a round, there was a big paint chip sticking to him that looked like a hole in his pants.

The hall was already filling up when we got there. We were so late, the boys thought we were lost, though the truth was we’d stopped at a soda fountain. I ordered a black cow, Whippy Bird got a muddy river, and May Anna had a lime rickey. Whippy Bird says how can you remember what you ordered fifty years ago, Effa Commander. But you remember the things that are important. Besides, I have been a professional food person all my life, and my mind works that way. Then we got to flirting with the cowboys and forgot the time.

Pink and Chick saved us places in the front row. Of course, May Anna just naturally sat in the middle.

“Where the hell have you been?” Chick asked Whippy Bird.

“That’s for me to know and you to find out,” she snapped. You never could fence in Whippy Bird. When I heard that song “Don’t Fence Me In,” I said they wrote that one for you, Whippy Bird.

The boys were puffed up, acting like they were big-time Butte prize fight fans who blew in especially for the match. They talked in loud voices about this new fighter, Buster Midnight, and what a natural he was. The boys put down quite a bit on Buster, who didn’t look so good by the odds. It took me and Whippy Bird a long time to learn the big money in prize fighting wasn’t the purse but the bets. Of course, you had to bet right, which is something we never thought about. We just bet on Buster. But then that meant we always came out right.

I gave Pink five dollars and told him to place it on Buster for me, but Pink said he’d give me a piece of his bet, if I was good to him. Pink was always saying things like that. I just told him I’d rather put out five dollars than put out for him, if you know what I mean. Whippy Bird says I put out plenty in my time when Pink and I were going around together, but that is not any of your business.

This being the first professional fight of Buster Midnight, we all felt important. The boys had cigars that they kept chewing and lighting, and then chewing again. Me and Whippy Bird and May Anna chain-smoked the Camels, leaving little bits of red lipstick on the ends, which we thought looked swell. May Anna had learned to hold her cigarette between two fingers so that her nail polish showed, and she used her little fingernail to pick the bits of tobacco from her tiny crooked teeth.

After everybody sat down and the hall filled up with a cloud of cigarette and cigar smoke as thick as the Butte sky, the referee climbed through the clothesline and called everybody’s attention. First he introduced the Billings fighter, who fought under the name the Finnish Cowboy. He was big, of course, and blond, and dopey-looking. He had a face that looked like it was made up of little blocks of stone stuck together.

Everybody clapped and cheered The Pride of Southeast Montana, which was another thing the Finnish Cowboy was called, and people stamped their feet and whistled while that Finn ox-lumbered down the aisle and into the ring. If size could win, Buster would have been dead right there.

Then the announcer said the second fighter was the Dynamite King of the Butte Mines—Buster Midnight. I don’t know where they got that dynamite business because Buster never set charges. He was just a mucker.

There were some boos from the Billings crowd, but we cheered and hollered, and so did some other people. That’s when me and Whippy Bird realized we didn’t own Buster Midnight. That night we discovered Buster Midnight had fans. In fact, right there, with Buster running down the aisle to the ring in Toney’s old purple silk shorts, Whippy Bird turned to me and said, “Remember I told you this, Effa Commander. Buster is going to be a famous person.” I did remember because I almost never knew Whippy Bird to be wrong.

We all yelled and made a nuisance of ourselves, but Buster and Toney weren’t paying attention. They tended to business. They never even looked at us. Even Buster never looked at May Anna. Toney whispered things to him, and Buster nodded. Then Buster did a funny thing. He stood up tall, raised his arms over his head and smiled at the crowd. Then he made a couple of little punches at people in the audience and grinned. The crowd loved it.

“Buster learned right at the beginning that boxing is show business. That’s why he was always so popular,” May Anna said later on. “Buster McKnight was just a shy, nice guy, but Buster Midnight was a showman.” Who in the state of Montana would ever dispute a fact about show business with May Anna Kovaks-Marion Street?

The Finnish Cowboy looked at Buster like he was a nitwit. Then he glanced over at his trainer in a way that said, “This is going to be easy.” You couldn’t blame him for underestimating Buster, who did look a little dopey himself. The Finn would find out about him soon enough.

The bell sounded, and Buster and the cowboy came into the ring, skipping around and making little swipes at each other. For a man as big as he was, the cowboy had a funny way of fighting. He crouched over and kept his head down and his shoulders hunched up, like a turtle. Every now and then his head poked out of the shell and he punched at Buster. For a couple of rounds, though, neither one connected.

You have to give the cowboy credit. He was a lot better than the Butte Bomber, kind of tricky, and faster than you’d think for all that size. Finns never struck me as fast dodgers, but maybe Finn cowboys are better than Finn miners. Buster sparred, trying to find a weak spot. Toney taught him to learn all about the other fighter before he tried anything, which was why Buster was a slow starter. He told Buster nobody was perfect, that if a fighter had fists like sledge hammers, he likely had a jelly belly, too. There were plenty who could dish it out but not take it—or could take it but couldn’t dish it out. Toney told him to spend the first round or two figuring out the fighter.

The crowd didn’t figure it that way, though. They thought Buster was scared. They decided he was chicken. They also thought the fight was fixed. Or at least some of them did. We found out later that the sheriff took all the ticket receipts, saying if it was a fair fight, he’d give them back, but if it wasn’t, he’d return the money to the ticket buyers.

Me and Whippy Bird think Toney wouldn’t blink an eye about fixing a fight for himself, but he was grooming Buster to be a champ. Letting Buster lose, especially his first fight, didn’t make sense. Besides, Buster wouldn’t ever agree to a fixed fight.

For a while it surely did look like all Buster was doing was trying to stay on his feet for a few rounds. The Finn thought so, too. He got overconfident. He let go with his right and forgot to defend himself, and Buster let him have it in the belly with a one-two from his hard-rock fists. That took the wind out of that cowboy. He collided with the ropes. Lucky for him the bell rang.

The Finn was plenty mad when the next round started. He charged out like a bull, which was just what Buster wanted. Angry fighters are stupid fighters, was another of Toney’s sayings. The cowboy lunged at Buster, and Buster hit him in the jaw. That’s the way it went for four or five more rounds. Buster just punished him. The cowboy landed a little blow, then Buster crashed into him with a fist. But every time Buster knocked the Finn down, the bell rang, and they had to start over at the next round.

We saw from the little smile on his face that Buster was having a good time. Maybe he was too confident, because the cowboy hit him with a haymaker, and Buster went down for the count of six. When he got up, we heard Toney yell to him, “OK, kid, show time’s over. You ain’t setting charges. No need to tap ‘er light. Just finish off the cowboy.” Buster got up, and headed for the Finn, but the round ended, and he went over to his corner.

Toney talked to him, but Buster wasn’t paying any attention. He looked straight at May Anna and grinned. “What’ll I do with him, honey?” Buster yelled.

“Put him right here, Buster,” she screamed, pointing to her lap.

When the next round started, Buster came out smiling, but it was his fighting smile, the one that meant the next time you take a poke at me, you damn fool, you are on your way to hell. The Finn felt pretty good about knocking Buster down before and charged again. That was all Buster needed. He started with that little smile, looked away, wound up then hit the cowboy with a punch that came all the way from the middle of his back, a punch that was as fast and as solid as a hard-rock drill. The Finn couldn’t stop it. Nobody could ever stop it. The best you could hope to do was get out of the way. That punch alone made Buster famous.

We heard it crunch into the cowboy, heard it echo back and forth through the Elks hall, heard the Finn let out all his air as he went back through the ropes and landed with his head in May Anna’s lap. He didn’t get up for ten minutes. By then Buster had been declared the winner, Toney had picked up the receipts from the sheriff, and May Anna had dumped the cowboy on the floor.

What people saw in Billings that night was the premiere of the strongest punch in the history of fighting in Montana. And maybe the world. Later on, when Buster was well known, every fighter in the USA tried to copy it. Radio announcers watched for the windup to predict over the airwaves that it was coming. Sports writers called it Death in Mitts and the Concrete Glove and the Widow Maker. But anybody who follows prize fighting knows that punch has just one true name. It’s still being used after all these years. Last month, in fact, Whippy Bird found an article in
Time
magazine about a boxing match that ended with a knockout. She cut out the story and put it on the wall at the Jim Hill and underlined one sentence with a red Flair pen: “The fighter let loose and connected with a regular old-fashioned Buster Midnight.” Me and Whippy Bird think the Buster Midnight will go down as the most famous punch in boxing history.

Lots of people ask me and Whippy Bird when May Anna turned out. They want us to give them the month and the day. The time would be good, too. But who remembers something like that? I guess they think we should have known it was a historic event. Maybe there was a light bulb over May Anna’s head like in the funny papers, and we should have jumped up and down and written, today May Anna Kovaks became a hooker.

Well, it’s nobody’s business. Me and Whippy Bird always laugh at people, the women especially, who come into the Jim Hill and want to know everything about old-time prostitutes but would die before they’d sit down next to a live one. Some of them have, too, right there in the Jim Hill, where your retired women from Venus Alley come in for the senior citizen breakfast.

We probably could come up with the day May Anna joined the line, but as for the first time she got paid, how in the hell do we know? I’ll tell you one thing, me and Whippy Bird weren’t surprised. May Anna had been leading up to it for a long time.

Butte was wild in those days. Everybody was wild, not just May Anna and Buster. I guess me and Whippy Bird were a disappointment to our folks because we ran with a merry crowd. In fact, we were wilder than May Anna, but who’d know it to look at us now, both of us in our pants suits and members of the American Association of Retired Persons with a card that gives us a discount at the House of Sofas.

Whippy Bird was the wildest of the Unholy Three. She says you don’t remember anything right, Effa Commander, but she was, and she’s proud of it today, aren’t you, Whippy Bird? You told me plenty about you and Chick, but I’m not going to tell because this is May Anna’s story, not yours.

It may have been Prohibition in the USA, but you’d never know it in Butte. Butte was wide open. There were stills all over the mountains, and more money came out of those old gold mines after they’d been turned into distilleries than ever came out in good ore. Bootleggers knew what they were doing. Illegal whiskey was big business, with your better operators turning out hundreds of gallons a day.

They hauled the liquor into Butte and sold it to the joints for anywhere from three-fifty to fifteen dollars a gallon. The saloon keepers diluted it two-to-one, water to booze, added a little coloring, and sold it by the drink. You made good money on liquor in those days what with cheap costs and no federal taxes to pay either. Mostly, it was quality stuff. You didn’t go blind on Butte hooch. In fact, after Prohibition was over, people got nostalgic for the good times when whiskey was twice as strong as the legal stuff. You could buy bootleg by the bottle, too, of course.

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 bruised. 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.