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Buster Midnight's Cafe

Page 24

by Dallas, Sandra


  “Square like your head. I haven’t lost you yet. I could still go first,” I told her.

  “No you won’t, Effa Commander, and you’ll have to plan the funeral. No cremation either. That’s because no matter where you scatter my ashes, they’ll blow into the mine pit, and I’ll end up as a copper pipe in somebody’s bathroom.”

  “You want a Pig Face service?” I asked. Pig Face gave a nice funeral for Toney when he died, even though he wasn’t Catholic. But I wouldn’t let him touch Buster.

  “No, but I think it would be real nice if you lobbed a tomato at him. You can put in the paper that instead of flowers, people should throw tomatoes at BS. You know, Buster beat up Pig Face because May Anna got a tomato in the face, but I must have got a dozen, and he didn’t do anything.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” I told her.

  I was with her at the end, me on one side and Moon on the other, holding her hands, just like me and Whippy Bird were with May Anna. The last thing she said to me was: “It’s not dying I mind, Effa Commander. It’s leaving Butte.”

  “What she means is leaving you,” Moon said.

  I knew that. Because we were one person. Losing Whippy Bird was like the ore vein in me had pinched out. I can’t remember when she wasn’t my best friend. We were closer to each other than we were even to our husbands. Part of me died with Whippy Bird that day.

  Not long after we buried Whippy Bird, I was having a sandwich in Pork Chop John’s Uptown, when Pig Face sat down on the stool next to me and ordered one loaded. “We’re the only ones left, Effa Commander,” he said. “We’re the last of a great era.” I nodded. We were the same era, all right, but Pig Face wasn’t privileged to be part of the gang of me and Whippy Bird, Pink and Chick, Buster and Toney, and May Anna Kovaks.

  Those memories kept me going during the terrible days after I lost Whippy Bird. I tried to go on as I always had, watching television at my little house on West Broadway or listening to Oakie O’Connor and other Butte people I knew on Buster’s old Emerson radio. There was the Senior Center for when I wanted to go out. And every week Moon invited me for dinner with his wife and the boys.

  A few months later, after I’d begun feeling better, Moon came by with a big cardboard box for me from Whippy Bird. Inside were the things May Anna left her along with Whippy Bird’s snapshot album of when we were kids and Toney’s collection of Buster Midnight stuff. There was the scrapbook Toney kept on Buster throughout his career, and some posters of Buster as the champ. They’re worth about a hundred dollars each now, but you’d never get me to sell them. “I will surely enjoy these, but you made an extra trip for yourself,” I said. “You’ll have to come back and pick them up when I cross over.” After Buster died, I drew up a will leaving everything to Moon.

  “That won’t be for a long time,” Moon said. Then he invited me down to the Jim Hill for a cup of coffee. “You have to get on with your life, Aunt Effa Commander,” he said.

  “You are just like your mother, telling me that,” I said wiping away a tear. “She told me that every time something of serious importance happened to me.” Like when Buster and Toney died, ten years ago, only a few months apart. Once more, we were widows together. We grieved for a time, just as we had before, with me refusing to step foot inside the restaurant after we sold it. Then one day Whippy Bird said “Effa Commander, we have to get on with our lives. It’s time me and you had lunch,” and she marched us right into Buster Midnight’s Cafe, only they’d changed the name to the Kopper Kamp Kafe by then. We ordered a BLT and an iced tea. From then on, I didn’t have any trouble walking inside.

  The new owners asked to buy all Buster’s photographs and trophies and ribbons and even Toney’s old purple silk trunks that Buster wore when he fought at Columbia Gardens. Me and Whippy Bird said no. They should go to the history museum as a memorial, which is where they are now, in the Buster Midnight Room. We wouldn’t let them use Buster’s name on the restaurant either. We thought the people might not buy the cafe when we told them that. Then they decided the location was good, and if they kept the old menu, people would keep on coming in.

  There’s a room at the museum for May Anna, too, which also has things we donated, like the fur scarf she gave Ma and the dresses she sent us during the war. Also the Brown Jug sign, though I am the only one left who knows it’s true historical significance for Buster Midnight and Marion Street. She’s a big tourist attraction in Butte these days. The city council wanted to name a street for her until they found out there already is a Marion Street.

  Some people think the sculptor used May Anna’s face on the “Madonna of the Mountains,” the statue they put up outside Butte, but me and Whippy Bird knew it didn’t look anything like May Anna. We like the “Madonna” anyway. “Work of art,” Whippy Bird said when she saw it gleaming in the sun. “Work of art.”

  Moon was right. It was time to go on with my life and visit the Jim Hill once more, though it was hard knowing I’d never see Whippy Bird behind the counter again. So one morning I woke up and said today’s the day, Effa Commander. I waited until 11 A.M., too late for breakfast and too early for lunch. Just the regulars were there along with a few tourists. I waved to Joe Mapes who was sitting in his office, then I sat down at the end of the counter.

  “Hi, honey, you want a cheese sand?” Alta asked me. That’s what she says to everybody, and sometimes it works. You go in there to get a cup of coffee, and you end up having a sandwich, too. I tell her just the regular. I don’t have to tell her no decaf because she knows. “Here you go, kid,” she said putting down the cup on the counter. Since I was there the last time, Joe Mapes bought new cups with two green rings on them, a wide ring at the top, and a narrow one below it. I missed the old china mugs where you could feel the scratches with your tongue.

  Everybody was watching Hunter Harper talking to a pair of tourists. Not much has changed, I thought, except that everybody got a little older in the six months since I’d been there. That, and the fact it was Hunter Harper entertaining the tourists instead of Whippy Bird. Alta doesn’t like to talk to people she doesn’t know. Once me and Whippy Bird heard a reporter try to get her to say something he could put in his newspaper, so he asked, “How’s tips?”

  Alta leaned against the counter, took a puff on her Kent, which she put back in the ash tray in front of the reporter so the smoke went in his face, and said, “They’re worse than the shits, honey.”

  So now Hunter Harper was the geyser of information. I didn’t pay any attention to him, just sat there and tried to think about Whippy Bird standing behind the counter, making pancakes, wondering if I ought to order some for old times’ sake even though I already had my breakfast. I nodded down the counter at Jimmy Soo, who was a cook at the West Park when I ran it and at Buster Midnight’s Cafe, too. Jimmy’s mind wanders these days, and sometimes when things get dull, he dumps his food on the counter and eats his ham and eggs right off the Formica. Whippy Bird claimed there was nothing wrong with him when he did that since the counter was as clean as the plate. It was when he put a tea bag in his coffee that you knew his mind had gone.

  I heard a tourist ask about Marion Street and smiled at my coffee while I waited for Hunter Harper to say that Marion Street sounds like an ay-dress. That’s what Whippy Bird would have said. I heard her say that hundreds of times and laughed at every one. He didn’t, though. Hunter was not a wit like Whippy Bird.

  Little bits of Hunter Harper’s story came down the bar to me for a few minutes, but I was too wrapped up in my memories to pay much attention. I started to listen, though, when I heard him say my name.

  “There were three of them. Two of them were good friends of mine. Marion Street, whose real name was May Anna Kovak,” which wasn’t true. As you know, it was Kovaks with an s. Then he said, “The other two were Whippy Bird and Effa Commander. God knows what their real names were.” He stopped so the tourists could laugh. “They called themselves the Holy Three.”

  “Unholy Three,”
I muttered. The man on the next stool glared at me like I was older than God and moved his coffee away.

  “You know, Whippy worked behind this counter until she died a few months ago.” I curled my lip when I heard that, since only people who didn’t know Whippy Bird called her Whippy.

  “Effa Commander’s in a rest home, God bless her soul,” he continued. I glanced at Alta, who blew smoke at Hunter for that. I wasn’t any more in a rest home than he was. I was only seventy-five, though like May Anna, I liked to shave the years a little.

  “Three peas in a pod, they were,” he continued. “All worked in Venus Alley, which is what we called the red-light district here in Butte. That’s how come they knew Buster Midnight. He was a real ladies’ man.” He stopped, and one of the tourists asked him a question I couldn’t hear.

  “No, Marion Street was just a working girl. I think Whippy was the madam. I’m revising my book, and I’m going to include that.”

  I was used to people making up lies about May Anna and even Buster. They were legend, and there wasn’t anything I could do about it. But not Whippy Bird. And not by a jackass like Hunter Harper.

  I put down my coffee, real slow, so I wouldn’t spill it because I was so mad I was shaking. Then I got down off the stool. Joe Mapes heard what Hunter Harper said, and he came out of his little office to shut him up. Jimmy Soo stood up, too, being the gentleman your Orientals always were in Butte, but I shook my head at them. Nobody had to fight battles for me and Whippy Bird. And nobody was going to talk about Whippy Bird like that when Effa Commander was around.

  I walked down the counter to Hunter Harper and tapped him on the shoulder. He turned around and blinked at me like he didn’t know who I was.

  “I’m your old friend, Effa Commander, escaped from the rest home,” I told him. Then I saw everybody watching me, and I remembered May Anna losing her nerve at the end of the charity tea with the food basket ladies, when she’d started to tell them she’d moved to Venus Alley but said Hollywood instead. May Anna chickened out, but I wasn’t going to back down. I was the defender of Whippy Bird. “Put this in your damn fool book,” I told him. Then I smiled a little, looked away, wound up, and decked him with a Buster Midnight.

 

 

 


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