Buster Midnight's Cafe (21 page)

“I run the West Park Cafe now,” I said. “It’s closed, but I have a key, and I’ll fix you a pot of coffee.” I had the feeling he didn’t want to see anybody.

Buster never talked much, but that night I couldn’t stop him. We must have made five pots of coffee and eaten about a dozen sinkers that had been delivered for morning. He told me he’d been knocking around all over the country for two years, doing odd jobs, running that orange picker crew, loading trucks, bartending. Then he wound up in New York and thought he’d get a job as a sparring partner, maybe hit up some of the gyms that would like the idea of using a one-time champion as a has-been punching bag for the fighters coming up. He was sitting on a bench in a park in New York City thinking about this when somebody said aren’t you Buster Midnight and asked for his autograph. That made Buster ask himself what was he doing asking for a job to get punched out. “Effa Commander, I said to myself, I was the champ. I’m going out with some dignity, even if everybody in America hates me for killing a creep they called a war hero. That’s when I decided to come home.”

“I don’t know about the rest of the world, but in Butte, Montana, you’re still Buster Midnight, the champ,” I said. “Around here, people don’t talk about the murder. They just remember you were the champion. And that you’re a Butte boy.”

I talked, too, telling Buster how happy Whippy Bird and Toney were. Buster said Toney with one leg was more of a man than anybody else with two. When I said I still missed Pink, Buster put his arms around me and let me have a cry. We talked until the crew came in to open up. Jimmy Soo, the short-order cook, came up to Buster shyly and held out his hand. “Remember me, Mr. Midnight?” Buster said he surely did. Then Jimmy turned to Toady Madden, the dishwasher, and whispered, “Looky there. The champ’s home.”

“It’s what I’ve been telling you all night, Buster. You belong in Butte, Montana.”

We walked outside. It was still dark though we saw the miners hustle up and down the street, getting ready to go on shift. A few of the hookers from Venus Alley, which was still wide open, headed home while a drunk or two looked for a doorway to sleep in for a couple of hours. There were sounds of men working on the Hill, of trucks heaving and whistles blowing. You could set your Bulova by the whistles blowing shift changes on the Hill. “There’s no place like Butte,” I told Buster, and he said I surely was right.

“Toney didn’t know I was planning to come. I’ll walk you home, then I’ll check into a hotel uptown.”

“You can stay at my place. There’s no need for you to get a hotel room this late at night,” I told him.

“Effa Commander …”

“On the couch. It isn’t the best place in the world to sleep, but it’s free. We’re old friends, Buster, but I’m not giving up my bed for you.”

Whippy Bird says right here that me giving up my bed was not what Buster was thinking about. Well, I know that, but Buster was still May Anna’s man as far as I was concerned. I wasn’t going to make any mistake there. So Buster slept on the couch, and I slept in the bed. Being on the night shift, I slept late. It was almost noon when I got up, and Buster had breakfast on the table.

Toney wanted Buster to stay with them. “You can sleep with Moon,” he said.

“Yippee!” Moon yelled.

“Sure. I’ll roll over and flatten him out, and Whippy Bird will kill me with a fry pan.” So Buster got a room over a bank on Park, and he took his meals at the cafe. I think the real reason he turned down Toney was he wanted to be alone. He had to find out if he really could come back to Butte.

It was even harder for Buster to get a job than Toney, not that he didn’t have offers. He called most of them freak-show jobs. Car dealers, for instance, wanted to hire Buster to sell Kaiser-Frazers or step-down Hudsons, because they thought people would come in just to meet him. Buster said too many people already took him for a ride in his life, so he turned them down. Whippy Bird told me Buster was broke. What he hadn’t spent on having a good time when he was a champ went to the fancy lawyer May Anna’s studio got for him, which was a waste of money since he didn’t keep Buster out of jail. So he worked a day or two a week down at the Texaco with Toney to earn enough to pay his hotel and board.

Sometimes Toney took a day off to go fishing with Buster. Whippy Bird said they both needed time to adjust. I told her it wasn’t as easy for a man as old as Toney, who was more than forty, to get married for the first time and settle down with a ready-made family. But we both knew that wasn’t the problem. The two of them were restless. After spending most of their lives in the big time, they weren’t happy pumping gas. She said we had to give them time to work it out.

Meanwhile, people got used to seeing Buster in Butte. They would call, “Hey, champ!” and pretend to take a poke at him when they ran into him around town. After a while when he realized they weren’t being smart alecks, Buster liked it. He knew he was accepted back in Butte at last. “Do you notice Buster doesn’t stoop anymore?” Whippy Bird asked one day, and she was right. He stood up tall and looked people straight in the eye, just the way he did when he was a fighter.

We were at Whippy Bird’s one night, full of pot roast and vinegar pie, when we made our big decision about the future. Me and Whippy Bird figured something was going on in Toney’s head since he was so keyed up. All night he smiled to himself, and once he even whistled a little tune. We knew it wouldn’t do any good to push him, though. He’d take his own sweet time to tell us.

“I got it,” he said at last, after me and Whippy Bird had finished the dishes and taken off our aprons.

“Got what?” Whippy Bird asked.

“We are going to get rich,” Toney said, sitting back, proud of himself.

“So, we’re going to break the bank, are we?” Whippy Bird asked.

“I’m not kidding.” Toney leaned forward, looking at each one of us. “We’re going to open a restaurant. We’ll call it Buster Midnight’s Restaurant. Buster’ll be the greeter, Effa Commander can be the manager, you’ll be the bookkeeper, and I’ll be bartender.” I never saw Toney look that proud of himself since the day he told Buster he could be a famous boxer.

Whippy Bird turned around and looked at Toney with her mouth open. Then she shut it and kept quiet. We were all quiet, sitting around the table thinking it over.

“Yeah? What’ll we do for money?” Buster finally asked.

“I ain’t Toney the hustler for nothing. You let me worry about that. I know plenty of people who’ll invest in a sure thing.”

“What if it doesn’t work? We’ll all be out of a job.” I said.

“Jobs. Jobs. We can always get jobs. This is a career opportunity. Once in a lifetime. You have to take a chance in this life, Effa Commander.” Toney lit a cigarette. “We open a steakhouse uptown. Real deluxe. Get a big picture of Buster in neon lights out front and load the place down wall-to-wall with pictures of Buster as the champ. People’ll roll in off the street just to meet him. You ever see people around here look at Buster like he’s a reincarnated Butte Copper King? They’ll pay money just to shake his hand. Then they’ll come back because Effa Commander is the best cook in the world.”

“I don’t know how to run a restaurant,” Buster said.

“You don’t have to. Effa Commander does,” Toney told him. “All you have to do is say hello to the folks and sign autographs.”

“Right, Tone. Effa Commander would like that,” Buster said sarcastically. “She’ll be cooking up a storm in the kitchen while I’m shaking hands.”

“It won’t be that easy, Buster,” I told him. “There’s all kinds of things you’ll have to do like talking people into having a drink when we don’t have a table ready for them and calming them down when their dinners don’t arrive on time.”

“Somebody’ll have to deal with drunks, too,” Whippy Bird added.

We talked about that restaurant all night, and the thing of it was, none of us could find anything really wrong with the idea except for the money. Toney said that was his department, and the money was as good as in the bank. By the time me and Buster climbed in the Jackpot to leave, we’d designed the kitchen and the bar and a nice area to wait for your table. I’d worked out a menu, which was heavy on steaks and big shrimp cocktails with hot sauce. Toney said to make sure we gave them plenty to eat since our customers would be miners, and they wouldn’t come back if we skimped.

Buster, who had been in some of the great restaurants of America, had ideas, too. First he said call it Buster Midnight’s Cafe, not Buster Midnight’s Restaurant. He said
cafe
was a Hollywood word that people thought was spiffy. Toney liked that because it’d be cheaper to spell out
cafe
in neon than
restaurant.
And have plenty of booths, Buster said. People in Hollywood and New York like little tables with chairs, but in Montana, we eat in booths.

Also, Buster knew just the right building on Galena Street for us, not too far from where the Jim Hill is today. If we made our sign big enough, the miners could see it from the Hill. Then Buster told us he’d be the bartender instead of the greeter. That way people would have to buy a drink to introduce themselves. People in Butte never ordered anything other than a Shawn O or a Ditch or a Sage, which is a Ditch with 7Up, and he knew how to fix those with his eyes closed. That way Toney could handle the buying and work with the suppliers; he was used to wheeling and dealing.

Whippy Bird said she’d take a class in accounting at night just so she wouldn’t miss any tricks keeping the books.

Even so, we weren’t as smart as we thought about the restaurant business. Deciding to open the restaurant was like the time we all sat around at the Rocky Mountain Cafe and turned Buster into a champion. If we’d known more, we wouldn’t have done it, so it’s a good thing we were such dummies.

Toney was wrong about getting rich, too. None of us got rich, at least not rich like May Anna or even Toney and Buster during the championship days. Still, we made a comfortable living, and we had fun, too. Running Buster Midnight’s Cafe surely was a good life for all of us for a lot of years.

It was just before our grand opening—almost a year after Buster came back to Butte—that he stopped to see me one afternoon. I was in the backyard. It was fall, after the first hard frost, because I was picking rose hips to make jelly.

“You look nervous,” I told him. “Are you having second thoughts?” I leaned against the fence and ran my fingers through the rose hips. “It’s OK. I’ve been having second thoughts since the night we decided to do this, but I think it’s going to work out fine. Toney knows how to pick a winner.”

“It’s not that,” Buster said. “The restaurant’s fine. I’ve just been wondering if I ought to let my wife work.”

“What?” I said. My rose hips sounded like marbles hitting a sidewalk as they slid back into the bowl.

“That’s a proposal of marriage, Effa Commander. I want you to marry me.”

Whippy Bird said I shouldn’t have been surprised. I saw Buster almost every day after he came back, and we had as good a time together as any two people ever did. Still, I’d spent so many years thinking Buster would marry May Anna that it didn’t seem right to think about him and me. Of course, Whippy Bird and Toney said they knew from the first that sooner or later we’d tie the knot. But I didn’t, and I surely didn’t know what to say.

“I think we ought to get the cafe open first then we can talk about it,” I told Buster, trying to buy time. My mind surely wasn’t working.

“I think we ought to talk about it now, babe,” he said.

So I went to sit next to him on the porch steps and put down my bowl of rose hips. It was the old yelloware bowl, the one with the brown stripe that I got for a quarter at the secondhand store on North Main. I held my hands together in my lap while I thought how to explain it. “The truth is, Buster …” I stopped for a minute wondering if it was my business to say what I needed to. Then I decided it was my business, since Buster had asked me to marry him. “The truth is, Buster, you will always love May Anna Kovaks.”

“And the truth is, Effa Commander, you will always love Pink Varscoe. But both of them are dead. There isn’t any May Anna anymore. I knew that when I went to prison. She’s Marion Street now. That’s why I told her I didn’t want to see her again. I didn’t love who she’d turned into. She wasn’t a little girl falling into glory holes and getting hit with tomatoes anymore. Me and May Anna had some good times, and so did you and Pink. But we have to go on, just like I had to stop being a fighter and go into the restaurant business.

“I don’t want you to think you’re second choice to May Anna because you’re not. I’m not asking you to marry me because May Anna turned me down. The old Buster wanted to marry May Anna. This here’s a new Buster, and he loves you. You’re the strongest and finest person I know. You always stuck by me, and you never expected anything from me. I think me and you can have a fine life together, Effa Commander.”

That was the most I ever heard Buster say in one breath. I thought about Whippy Bird and Toney making a good marriage. I thought about Pink, and how he surely would want me to be happy, then about Buster, who was fine and loyal. Last, I looked in my heart and knew I loved Buster back. So I said yes, which, as Whippy Bird said later, is the shortest answer I’ve ever given anyone in my life.

We got married right after the restaurant opened. Then we had a big celebration at Buster Midnight’s Cafe with champagne and free drinks and steak dinners. People poured in to wish us luck, just like we were Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip.

There were flowers all over “like a funeral,” Toney said.

Whippy Bird poked him in the ribs with her elbow and said, “There surely will be a funeral if you keep talking like that—yours.”

Folks we didn’t even know sent us little bouquets and big flower arrangements that we lined up on the bar. Of course, I had my bridal bouquet, which was a white orchid that went nicely with my pink suit, which the bridal department at Hennessy’s recommended, this being a second wedding. The biggest bouquet of all was a giant horseshoe of white roses with
GOOD LUCK
in gold letters. It came with a little white card that said: “Love always, May Anna.”