Buster Midnight's Cafe (16 page)

“What do you need us for, May Anna?” I asked.

She paused a minute then answered. “I need my friends. People out here, well, they don’t really care about you. You can’t trust them. With Toney gone and Buster away so much, I need somebody to talk to. Sometimes I get so lonely, I can’t stand it.”

Me and Whippy Bird knew about being lonely, so we talked it over and agreed it wasn’t right to let May Anna down. We sent her a telegram saying
UNHOLY THREE BACK IN BUSINESS SOON.

Two weeks later on the train to California, I asked Whippy Bird, “Do you think May Anna was acting when she said she needed us?”

“Sometimes you’re a damn fool, Effa Commander,” Whippy Bird replied.

It didn’t cost us one dime to go to California except for our meals in the diner, which I thought were overpriced. Working at a restaurant, I knew what food cost. The train had linen napkins and tablecloths and heavy silverware, though, so maybe their expenses were high. I ordered chicken loaf, which came with a nice ball of mashed potatoes that was dished up with an ice cream scoop, just like we did at Gamer’s.

Sitting there in the diner over our coffee and lemon pie, we felt like queens looking out the windows at people sitting in their cars at the crossings. They always waved, and we waved right back. We liked to listen to the crossing signals as they got louder and louder, then faded away.

The club car was the best part—watching the world go by from an overstuffed chair and reading the magazines that we brought with us. We knew the magazines they sold on the train and even in the depot cost more than at regular newsstands, so we bought ours ahead of time. We also knew you didn’t buy cigarettes from the porter because he expected a tip, so we brought along our own carton of Luckies. We sat there just as elegant as May Anna, smoking ciga-rettes and ordering Manhattans and reading
The Saturday Evening Post
and
Look.

After our supper the second night, we went into the club car again, where a man in a matching suit, the kind that comes with a coat, two pairs of pants, and a reversible vest, bought us a nightcap and asked where we were going.

“To the coast,” Whippy Bird said, just like we went to California every day. She could surely put on the dog when she wanted to.

“Live there?” he asked. He used a cigarette holder, and later me and Whippy Bird bought one. President Roosevelt used one, too.

“No. We’re visiting friends.”

“LA?” he asked.

“Hollywood,” she said, blowing smoke past him. That wasn’t true. May Anna lived in Beverly Hills, but it didn’t sound as fine as Hollywood. “Movie people.”

He looked at her like he didn’t believe her. “Joan Crawford or Hedy Lamarr?” he asked. He thought he was a real card.

“Joan Crawford’s not from Butte,” I told him. “Hedy Lamarr isn’t even an American.”

“Nobody’s from Butte,” he said. I surely didn’t like him.

“Marion Street’s from Butte,” Whippy Bird said, but he only laughed. She looked at me to say something, but I shook my head. We never bragged about knowing May Anna, and I wouldn’t start now with a jerk like that.

“You’re friends of Marion Street’s then,” he said. I could see Mr. Matching Suit couldn’t believe it.

“That’s for us to know, and for you to find out,” I told him, and me and Whippy Bird got up and went back to our compartment. May Anna, being the first-class movie star she was, didn’t just send us ordinary train tickets. She sent us tickets for a private compartment that had its own bathroom, so we didn’t have to wait in line in the ladies’ with your ordinary train people.

We forgot we were put out at that man the minute we opened the door because there was a silver bucket with a big bottle of champagne in it waiting for us. “May Anna thinks of everything,” Whippy Bird said. She took out the champagne while I opened the envelope.

“It’s not from May Anna,” I said. Whippy Bird stopped opening the bottle.

“Not that dumb man in the club car,” she asked, putting the champagne back in the bucket. “I’m not drinking his champagne.”

“Buster,” I told her. “It says right here: ‘Bottoms up to the Unholy Three. Love Buster.’“

So we drank a toast to Buster. Then we drank a toast to May Anna, and by the time we finished we drank a toast to the man in the club car. We drank ourselves to sleep, and when we woke up the next morning, we had arrived in the Land of Sunshine.

May Anna wrote us to get off the train at the Los Angeles depot and stand right by the car so her chauffeur could meet us. I never saw so many people in my life except when we stood outside the newspaper office during the Buster Midnight championship fight. I didn’t know how anybody could spot us until, just like magic, a man in a gray uniform with a little hat and leather boots came right up and asked, “Mrs. O’Reilly and Mrs. Varscoe?” We knew right away he was a chauffeur because we’d seen them in the movies.

Me and Whippy Bird looked at him with our mouths open. We knew May Anna made a lot of money, but it hit us when we saw that chauffeur that she wasn’t just rich; she was loaded. “Mrs. O’Reilly?” he asked me.

“I’m Effa Commander. She’s Whippy Bird.”

“I’m Thomas. I’ll take care of your luggage. Would you follow me, please? Miss Street’s car is just outside.” Just as he said that, the man with the two-pair-of-pants suit walked by, and his mouth fell open. Whippy Bird sent him a snooty glance that would have done May Anna proud in any of her movies. The chauffeur snapped his fingers, and before you knew it a porter had picked up our suitcases. He put them on a rack, and we followed the chauffeur down the track to the biggest limousine you ever saw.

It was white. A white Cadillac. White outside and white inside. In fact, everything May Anna owned was white. “May I fix you a drink before we start?” the chauffeur asked.

“At nine o’clock in the morning?” Whippy Bird asked. We could belt them down, all right, but not thirty minutes after breakfast.

“Very good,” he said, and me and Whippy Bird had to be careful not to laugh and hurt his feelings.

“We’ll be going directly to Miss Street’s home. Beverly Hills,” he said when we got going. “She’s between films just now, so she’ll be there. She doesn’t like to meet people at the station.” Thomas sounded English, but we learned everybody in Hollywood sounded English.

Me and Whippy Bird didn’t know if you were supposed to talk to the chauffeur, but we did anyway. We asked him if it was true Alan Ladd was only five feet two, and did he know where Grauman’s Chinese Theatre was, and could we visit the tar pits, and would he take us by Hollywood and Vine. We said please call us Whippy Bird and Effa Commander because we forgot he meant us when he said Mrs. O’Reilly and Mrs. Varscoe. Whippy Bird said if he didn’t, we’d call him Tommy. He told us he was at our disposal the whole time we were there, and he would give us a grand tour, but right now “Miss Street would be most distressed if I didn’t take you directly to her.”

“You mean May Anna said she’d have your ass,” Whippy Bird said, and Thomas laughed. By the time we got to May Anna’s house, he didn’t talk English anymore.

I guess you’d call it a house, though it looked more like a hospital. No porches. No towers. Just long white brick walls, and bathroom windows. There were lots of bushes trimmed in different shapes like circles and upside-down ice cream cones, and we could see in the back where there was a swimming pool and a lot of white lawn furniture.

“May Anna sure has it made with a dump like this,” Whippy Bird said, and Thomas laughed.

A lady with a white apron over a black dress and a little bit of ribbon tied around her head came to the door. “Miss Street’s expecting you,” she announced.

Whippy Bird said, “I surely hope so.”

There was a big white marble floor with a white iron staircase that made half a circle to the second floor. It was covered with white carpet. Everything in that room was white, and so was May Anna. White slacks and blouse and platinum hair. The only thing that wasn’t white was her nail polish and her lipstick, which were bright red. She looked like a cherry sundae. And she smelled even better than Evening in Paris.

She was just coming down the stairs when we walked in, and later on Whippy Bird asked me did I suppose May Anna was waiting there for us so she could make her grand entrance. I said why would May Anna do that for us, so we decided it was just a coincidence. She came down those stairs just as smooth as rainwater sliding out of a barrel.

Maybe she did want to make a grand entrance, but by the time she got to the bottom, she was the old May Anna. “You darlings,” she said, hugging us. “I’m so glad you’re here. I didn’t sleep a wink last night I was so excited!” You couldn’t tell it by us because May Anna didn’t have a line on her face or any black smudges under her eyes. She didn’t look any older than when she worked Venus Alley.

“You don’t weigh any more than Moon,” I told her when we got through saying how good everybody looked even though me and Whippy Bird looked about like we’d been riding herd for a week in the Beartooth Mountains. I took out a Kleenex and rubbed May Anna’s lipstick off Whippy Bird’s face, then she did the same for me.

“I should of had you bring him,” May Anna said.

“No, you shouldn’t. In about five minutes your house wouldn’t be white anymore,” said Whippy Bird, though that wasn’t true. Moon always minded just fine, though he did spill sometimes.

“How do you like it?” May Anna asked.

“Well, it looks like every window goes to a bathroom,” I told her.

“That’s glass block. People here use it everywhere. It lets in the light but not the view. You ought to use it in Butte.”

If anybody else said that about Butte, we wouldn’t have liked it, but May Anna was us, and we knew just what she meant.

“Come and see my bedroom,” she said, and we went up the circle stairs and down a hall to a room that had a round satin bed.

“Where do you buy round sheets?” Whippy Bird asked.

“How do I know? I don’t go shopping for sheets. That’s the maid’s job. I help out sometimes though. I make the bed myself every morning.”

“That’ll take a load off somebody,” I told her.

There were mirrors everywhere. “Nell Nolan would love it,” May Anna said. Well, who wouldn’t except a fat lady or Eleanor Roosevelt. She had mirrors on all the walls, the doors, inside the closet, and even the ceiling. They were all over the bathroom, too, but I wouldn’t care to see that much of myself in there.

Still, the bathroom was swell. It looked like the pictures of the Romans throwing an orgy that you see in the
National Geographic.
There was a marble tub and a separate shower where the water came out of a duck’s mouth. A fish spit out the water in the sink.

“I wish my mama could have seen this,” May Anna said.

“She’d be proud, all right,” I said.

“And clean,” Whippy Bird added. When we first met May Anna, the Kovakses didn’t even have indoor plumbing.

Off the bathroom May Anna had what she called a wardrobe, which was a room the size of our house. It had closets for dresses and for shoes and for furs. There was an entire bureau for her stockings, too. Real nylon. The war could last ten years, and May Anna wouldn’t have to show a bare leg.

She took us for a tour of the whole house. The rest of it was just like the bedroom, with lots of white and some stainless steel. Snazzy, like the front of the Jim Hill. She was like a little kid showing us her Christmas stocking, I told Whippy Bird later. Whippy Bird asked me when did May Anna ever have a Christmas stocking? There was a wall between the living room and dining room that was a fish tank with goldfish the size of dinner plates swimming around in it. “Hey, May Anna, I forgot you were a fish eater. There’s enough here for a fish fry for you and Pig Face, and everybody else at Blessed Sacrament,” Whippy Bird said, and we all laughed. May Anna’s maid put her hand over her mouth in horror. Well, hell, me and Whippy Bird knew you didn’t catch goldfish in your house and eat them for dinner. It was just a joke.

The room I liked best was the sun room, which was shaped like half a circle with windows all around and a white leather couch that ran along the wall. It looked like the world’s biggest restaurant booth. I told Whippy Bird if May Anna ever got hard up she could put up a sign that said
WORLD’S BIGGEST RESTAURANT BOOTH
and charge admission. You could sit there and look out the windows—real windows, not glass blocks—and see the swimming pool with black designs May Anna called Greek fretwork painted in the bottom.

“May Anna,” Whippy Bird said after she saw the house, “when you left Butte, I thought you were a damn fool. But now I think you have done all right for yourself. I think you may have gotten even richer than me and Effa Commander.” May Anna laughed and snapped her fingers for the maid, who brought in a silver tray with three glasses and a bottle of champagne and cold toast, caviar, and chopped egg for a snack. That was when May Anna told us that caviar was just fish eggs.

A week later, we were sitting around May Anna’s pool looking at the statues and playing down-the-hatch with fish eggs and Ditches (whiskey and water was what we were drinking in Butte in those days) when me and Whippy Bird decided this wasn’t such a bad way to live after all. We’d never seen so many naked statues at one time—especially ones of men with all their parts.

“Hell, May Anna, if you’ve got so much money, why don’t you buy these folks some clothes?” Whippy Bird asked. “Or if you get me the material, I’ll make dresses for them myself.”

“Even the men?” May Anna asked.

“They can’t wear pants with their legs glued together like that. That’s for sure. Maybe towels.”

“No,” May Anna said. “Not for all of them anyway. I kind of like that second one in. His business is the size of a sweet potato. It makes my men friends jealous.”

May Anna was lying on a lounge chair in a white Catalina swimming suit that looked as if it would dissolve like Jell-O in water if she went in the pool. She didn’t have to worry about that because nobody in Hollywood used swimming pools for swimming. They jusl stretched out next to them. Or when they got drunk, they jumped into the swimming pool with all their clothes on, May Anna said. She was rubbing suntan lotion on her legs. This was the first time we evei heard of suntan lotion. But why would we know about it? Nobody in Butte ever sat in the backyard in a bathing suit.

“Were you thinking of strapless dresses?” I asked Whippy Bird

“Whatever May Anna wants. They’re her statues.”

“Maybe a variety. Like a fashion show,” May Anna said. “That one in the middle. She ought to have a gabardine suit. Don’t you think she looks like the world history teacher we had in Butte, Effa Commander?”

“Don’t ask me. She doesn’t have a head,” I told her.