You want to know about Butte, you go over to the twenty-four-hour Jim Hill Cafe & Cigar Store on Silver Street and ask for me and Whippy Bird. The lunch counter, not the bar since Whippy Bird doesn't drink anymore, not after she got half of her stomach taken out.

Whippy Bird can't eat very well unless she lies down. When I get invited to her house for dinner, she serves it in the bedroom, where she can stretch out. With real company, she lies down on the couch, but me and Whippy Bird have been family all our lives, so we eat in the bedroom. "Whippy Bird," I say to her, "you have more fun in that bed with a pork chop than you ever had with your husbands." And she laughs and says, "You're right. You are surely right, Effa Commander." Though I surely am not.

Everybody knows the Jim Hill on Silver Street. That's because there's a big sign in front that says JIM HILL CAFE in pink neon. Even without the sign, you'd know it was special. The front is covered in stainless steel just like an old North Coast Limited streamliner, and in the window is a blue neon champagne glass with pink bubbles coming out of it as flashy as May Anna's diamond earrings, which she left me in her will.

Classy. That's what I told Whippy Bird the first time we saw the Jim Hill all spruced up like that. "Whippy Bird, that's classy. Just like May Anna's house," I said. Of course, that was forty years ago when people knew who Jim Hill was. Now people think Jim Hill is Joe Mapes. Sometimes Joe Mapes even gets confused. Whenever a customer calls, "Jim!" he answers, "Yo!" I doubt Joe even knows who Jim Hill was. That was the name of the restaurant when he bought it in 1964. He didn't have the money for a new sign. Then or now.

I don't know how the word got out to the tourists about the Jim Hill being the place to learn about Butte. Maybe it's the newspaper people from back east. Every time some paper wants a story on Butte, their boys come whipping into the Jim Hill and say hi, I'm a reporter from The New York Times, like we're supposed to swing around and fall over backward off the stool. Then they ask a couple of fool questions like will the price of copper go up. Or down. How the hell should we know? Then they go back and write us up like we're cuter than a bug in lace pants. Local color, it's called.

You've seen those stories. They quote me and Whippy Bird, then they tell you Montana's so quaint the governor has his home phone number listed in the telephone book. I asked Whippy Bird once if that was true, and she said she didn't know; she didn't have any reason to call up the governor.

Maybe all those tourists read about the Jim Hill in the newspaper stories or maybe they read about it in Hunter Harper's book, which you might have seen. Its title is That Hellhole Called Butte, which I think is a stinking name. Nobody but Hunter Harper ever called Butte a hellhole. I never liked Hunter Harper much, and I hated him after that book came out. He hangs around the Jim Hill counter, sitting on the corner stool with his legs crossed, smoking one of those little cigars, the kind that look like you can't make up your mind if you want a cigarette or a real stogie. Hunter Harper wears Levi's and boots and a hat that's too big and a yellow kerchief around his neck. He thinks somebody might mistake him for a cowboy. But anybody who knows cowboys knows yellow scarves are bad luck.

I started reading Hunter Harper's book, but I never got to the end. It's just made up of stories he picked up around the Jim Hill that he never got right. He tries to sound like he's one of us, but he isn't. Nobody who grew up in Butte uses words like heretofore and built environment. You have to have a dictionary just to get through the first page. Of course, Hunter's not a Butte native. He's just a summer person, who teaches history in Iowa the rest of the year. Folk history, he calls it, us being the folks, I guess.

I asked Whippy Bird if he was a queer, but she didn't think so. Not that we care. Butte had "sissies," as we called them when we were growing up, but not very many. It isn't a good idea to be a fairy with all those miners and tough cowboys in Montana.

It's a funny thing about tourists. They come here to see us, but they really don't want to get to know us. They want to find somebody who's like them. You see tourists walking down the street in their baseball caps saying SIOUX FALLS ELKS and wearing orange jumpsuits with the Expand-O waistbands. They nod a little to everybody, but when they see another tourist in a baseball cap and an Expand-O jumpsuit, they get real friendly, like they just found they were war allies in enemy territory. Even though Hunter doesn't wear a jumpsuit, the tourists spot him for one of them just the same.

Your better class of tourists, however, look for me and Whippy Bird.

Mostly they say the same things, like how far they drove that day or is it always cold up here. Then real friendly like, they ask about the history. Whippy Bird likes to go into detail about the copper kings who got rich here and had big mansions and race horses. Or she tells them about Columbia Gardens because it was the best amusement park in the state of Montana. Also, it's the place where Buster got his start.

If she's feeling sassy and has the time, she draws it out so those people are sorry they asked. If she's busy, she lets them get to the big question right away. Sometimes she even brings it up herself. But mostly, she makes the tourists get around to it on their own with a lot of heming and hawing. Sooner or later, they always do, like it was something that occurred to them just then over their bacon and eggs.

Take yesterday. Whippy Bird was behind the counter as she sometimes is when the Jim Hill is shorthanded or Alta, who's the regular waitress, has trouble with her bunions. Me, I help, too, if they need me, but I've cooked about a million meals in my time back when we had our own restaurant, and enough's enough, so I was just sitting on a stool in front, enjoying my morning coffee.

Whippy Bird was half paying attention to what this particular tourist was saying, a real windbag, I thought. First, he had to talk about everything on the menu, asking were the eggs fresh and was it link or patty sausage? And did the Jim Hill serve skim milk, and could he have blueberry pancakes instead of regular? Then he said to his wife did she remember when he got fresh-picked blueberries in his hot cakes in the year of 1979 in the state of Vermont? Your fatties surely like to talk about their food. Then after he ordered the short stack of pancakes, even though they didn't have blueberries, he cleared his throat. "You from around here?" he asked in kind of a casual way.

"I been a native all my life," Whippy Bird said.

"You know, I read Marion Street was from Butte."

"Marion Street?" Whippy Bird asked.

"Yeah. You know Marion Street?"

"Is that a person or an address?" She pronounces it "ay-dress." I've heard Whippy Bird ask that about a thousand times, but I always have to put down my coffee and laugh.

The tourists think that address business is funny, too, but not for the same reason. You see, me and Whippy Bird know that Marion Street took her name from an ay-dress. Hunter's book tells you that her real name was May Anna Kovak, which it was not. It was Kovaks — but it doesn't explain that when she turned out, she wanted a fancy name, and me and Whippy Bird came up with it. We just...