The Drummond Girls

by Mardi Jo Link

  Which was, of course, impossible. Just because it was an island, remote, and situated on the northern border, that didn’t mean it was wholly immune from time, weather, people, or anything else, no matter how much we wanted it to be.

  Andrea was right—we couldn’t be sure what would happen on Drummond, who we’d become there or what we’d see. And that crazy-looking boat symbolized all those feelings.

  It was small—perhaps only a dozen feet long—and someone had propped it haphazardly in the extended bed of a pickup truck. Even stationary it looked aggressive, as if that canvas flap could open at any moment and reveal something lethal. A speargun, the barrel of a cannon, or even a whaling harpoon.

  Linda, Bev, and I volunteered to brave our way past it and go into Wazz’s for supplies while the rest of the girls stayed in the cars and mixed drinks. Our annual afternoon of two-tracking deep in the primeval core of Drummond awaited, but we needed to be iced up first. Venturing into the forest on the more rarely traveled car paths and over to the side of the island that had no electricity, no plumbing, no paved roads, and no human habitation was, Bev said, no reason to settle for a warm cocktail.

  Wazz’s Party Plus was a gas station, deli, video rental store, to-go pizza shop, and package liquor outlet all in one. It was centrally located on one of the island’s two paved arteries, East Channel Road, six miles past the ferry dock and a half mile before the Northwoods bar. The place was often a hub of activity, yet none of us could remember seeing it quite that busy. Every parking spot but the two we occupied were taken by pickup trucks, most with boat trailers attached, laden with vessels altered to look like swamp grass or bog shrubbery. Shotguns in gun racks obscured the back windows and many of their radio antennas were disguised to look like cattails.

  I didn’t hunt and neither did my husband, but my brother did, and from him I knew that fall in Michigan was the start of deer, black squirrel, fox, bear, and coyote season. What I didn’t know was which animal the owners of those boats could possibly be preparing to kill. As far as any of us could tell, no one had collected the $1,000 bounty on Megabear, and perhaps he was their quarry. Yet I also thought bear hunters used dogs, not camouflaged rowboats, so that didn’t fit.

  Wolves were taken off the endangered species list in 2012, and since then Michigan’s legislature has toyed with the idea of a legal wolf season, but back then it was still illegal to hunt them, so the rigs weren’t for that. They had to be for stalking something that lived in the swamps. Moose? Elk? Muskrat invasion? Rabid beaver pack?

  As far as the U.S. government was concerned, a “frontier” was a population unit and not a mind-set. Another thing I’d learned from my brother. The term was used as a census designation, a holdover from pioneer days, and any region in the United States with fewer than six people per square mile qualified. When I’d checked out those library books about Drummond’s history, I’d looked at its current population density, too. Five point six people per square mile, so it just qualified. Maybe the truck and boat combos belonged to the last of the great hunters: men and women who stalked their prey by boat, shooting the creatures down when they came to the shore to drink.

  “A hundred bucks says I can guess which guy owns that thing,” Linda said, jerking her chin toward the vessel.

  “How do you know it doesn’t belong to a woman?” I’d countered, inspiring Bev to give me a high five.

  “Look around, Gloria,” Linda said.

  When we’d waitressed together, she had sometimes called me that in sarcastic homage to Gloria Steinem. I tolerated it. “I could launch that thing right here, right now, if I wanted to,” I told her.

  “Go for it,” she’d said.

  If I could have gotten it to the water, I have no doubt that I could have piloted it, but I was bluffing and she knew it. I glanced inside the truck’s cab and spied a panting dog in the driver’s seat and a Cabela’s catalog on the dashboard. Crammed into the passenger seat were a sawed-off canoe paddle, a life jacket, and a small trolling motor.

  “It’s like Mad Max,” I said, looking the boat over, “but with bath toys.”

  At the mention of one of her favorite leading men, Bev became even more interested in the boat. She didn’t just like the men she knew and could talk to; she liked the Hollywood ones, too. The character was played by Mel Gibson, and he navigated a low-budget, post-apocalyptic world of mutant machines, violence, and danger. He also did it in tight leather pants, which was probably why he was one of her favorites.

  Bev stopped abruptly then, and jutted her arms out as if Linda and I were about to cross a busy street without looking.

  “Wait,” she’d hissed, thinking for a minute. Then, “Maybe Mel’s here filming!”

  Her expression was initially dreamy, but then darkened. “Never mind. He’s married.”

  Bev had many endearing qualities and one of them was that her thought process could often be followed in real time because she would say out loud exactly the things other people might keep to themselves. Linda was the exact opposite. She usually thought things through before speaking, and sometimes their personality styles clashed. When that happened, Linda gave Bev “the look.”

  Shoulders back, chin dipped to the side, mouth in a clamp, and eyebrows scrunched tight as fists, translated “the look,” communicated one very simple concept: Don’t be a dumbass.

  “C’mon, Bev, think,” Linda said. “What does that boat look like it’s for?”

  Bev considered, then braved a guess.

  “Keeping Mel away from the paparazzi?”

  At fifty-three, Bev was still single and still boy crazy. She’d been married, been single, she’d dated, stopped dating, had men who were friends, men she’d wished were more than friends, lost men, dumped men, longed after men. She just hadn’t found the right one yet. And no one was going to convince her that a famous actor was out of her league. Unless, of course, he was married.

  While Linda gave her the look, I looked into the truck’s window again, and my eyes rested on the catalog sitting on the dashboard. I liked to know the proper names for things and that camouflaged boat had stymied me. I could not imagine what something like this might be called, but—in yet another legacy from my brother—I knew Cabela’s probably would.

  A subconscious urge propelled my hand through the open window, past the dog’s long strings of slobber, and soon I was flipping through the catalog’s pages. There in the boating section was a photograph of the vessel before us.

  “It’s a Beavertail Stealth twelve hundred,” I said, as if Linda and Bev should feel as satisfied to have acquired that information as I was.

  “It’s for duck hunting,” Linda said, nonplussed.

  Two decades prior, Linda had moved to Michigan from Florida and one of the first things she’d bought when she arrived was a hunting rifle. Rumor had it she’d once opened the sliding glass door on her patio, leveled her new rifle in the opening, and shot an eight-point buck through the heart without so much as nicking her chaise longue. So, although she hadn’t known the boat’s actual name, she did know what it was for. I could have bypassed larceny from a vehicle and just asked her.

  “Hunters hide inside that tent,” she explained, “float their decoys in the water, and wait for ducks to fly over. When they do, they blast ’em.”

  Bev and I both stared at her, open mouthed, and a gory scene took shape in my mind. Broken wings, bloody feathers, limp necks.

  “Oh. My. God!” Bev blurted. “Mel’s on our island to do that?”

  We both laughed out loud.

  I’m not against hunting—deer, turkey, pheasant, I’d eaten them all. But those animals had speed, camouflage, or both going for them, so it seemed like they had a chance, even against high-powered weapons. I’d eaten plenty of wild duck, and liked it, but I’d never considered how the duck in my salad or my stir-fry had been hunted.

  Even though she was naïve, Bev still had a point. Not about Mel (apparently, I was on a first-name basis with him now, t
oo), but about the ducks. All the camouflage, firepower, and testosterone in that parking lot wasn’t for facing the claws or hooves of some worthy opponent like a swimming bear, a wading cougar, or a rampaging moose. It was so full-grown men could sneak up on a duck. Right there in our midst was an aficionado of leading men, and yet we’d somehow stumbled into a meeting of the Elmer Fudd Fan Club.

  Just like Bev had predicted, I’d missed my sons terribly that weekend. Seeing those hunting boats and shotguns, remembering all I’d learned from my brother, made me wonder if my sons would be hunters, too, when they grew up. Was there something innate inside men that made them want to kill things? I thought of the three sweet faces back at home with their father, I imagined their block towers and their happy chatter, and it was impossible for me to picture any one of them aiming a gun. And yet, the men who owned those boats had once been toddlers, too.

  Later, I’d asked my brother why we’d never seen all those boats on the island before. He explained that Michigan’s Department of Natural Resources had developed complex rules for hunting waterfowl, with different seasons for ducks, mergansers, coots, and geese, and different start dates for the state’s three geographic zones. That year, not only had opening day of duck season fallen on a weekend—our weekend—some of the other waterfowl seasons had been combined and, for the first time in a generation, overlapped with duck season.

  “Ice?” Linda reminded us, pointing to the store.

  That one word encapsulated what, deep down, Bev and I knew to be true: Ducks were going to die that day on Drummond Island and forcing the girls to endure a warm cocktail wouldn’t do a thing to spare their lives.

  The fact that the boat could have belonged to a woman was only semantics. Inside Wazz’s, not one of the other shoppers looked female. Unless you counted the Labatt beer poster of Pamela Anderson on the wall above the fire extinguisher, the only women in the place were the three of us. It was just camouflaged men, who belonged to the camouflaged trucks pulling the camouflaged boats, who were carrying shopping baskets filled with six-packs of Bud Light, bags of beef jerky, and pine tree air fresheners on a string.

  “Do you think we should tell them we can see them?” Bev whispered out of the corner of her mouth. “Or just let them go on thinking they’re invisible?”

  Linda counted out a few dollars from the kitty, and Bev and I paid for the ice while Linda perused the snack aisle. From behind the chip display she gave each hunter the once-over. The one-hundred-dollar bet she’d proposed for matching the boat with its owner was just a figure of speech. I didn’t have that kind of money to wager with and neither did she.

  “And?” I asked her, when the three of us were outside the store.

  “I dunno,” she grumbled. “They all look alike.”

  “Well, duh!” Bev said. “They’re all in that camo crap, hello?”

  Linda gave Bev the look once more. She didn’t mean the men in the store looked alike because of their clothes; she meant they were all tall with dark hair, mustaches, and beards. The standard groom for northern Michigan males. Considering every single one in the store had been sporting this, it would have been impossible for anyone to connect man to watercraft.

  “Jack Pine Savages,” Bev said with a dismissive wave. Where vocabulary was concerned, the trip to Wazz’s had been amazingly productive. Beavertail Stealths were the boats hunters used to outsmart ducks and Jack Pine Savages were tall white men in scraggly facial hair.

  “See that really, really tall one?” Bev was saying. “He goes with the teeny-weeny boat.”

  As if on cue, the really, really tall one exited the store, cool stepped past the three of us, opened the door to his truck, shoved the dog over, slid inside, and drove away. Linda and I both looked at Bev with newfound respect. Even back then, there were not that many things that could hold Bev’s attention for long, but beefcake in camo was certainly one of them. We didn’t even have to ask her to explain how she’d guessed the owner because I’m sure the question was plainly on our faces.

  “I saw the shortest guy get into that thing over there,” Bev explained, indicating a truck-and-boat combo at the far side of the parking lot with considerable girth. “So, doesn’t it just figure the tallest guy would be in the little dinky one?”

  Her successful deduction rendered the bet irrelevant. Not to be outdone, though, Linda took immediate charge of our afternoon plans.

  “Let’s follow him,” she said.

  While Linda could sometimes be stubborn, and Bev could be naïve, I certainly had my quirks, too. I often lived in my head, and unless something jarred me out into the world, I could be oblivious to what was going on around me. That year I was just beginning to notice a few of the island’s most startling contradictions. For example, bounty hunters looking for Megabear needed only a bow, an arrow, and a hound, yet the men we’d just seen at the party store required a boat, a trolling motor, a truck, a tent, a trailer, spray paint, decoys, a dog, camouflage outfits, a paddle, a six-pack of Bud Light, and three shotguns to bag a duck.

  Such contradictions weren’t limited just to other people, though. I’d thought one of the reasons we were on the island at all, besides to be together, to be outside, and to explore the woods, was to get away from men. That Linda wanted to follow one was confusing to me. But there we went, bouncing down a two-track, following Bev’s Jack Pine Savage into the woods.

  After only a mile or so we arrived at a public boat launch and because the idea of contradictions was already top of mind, it came as only a small surprise that the facility revealed another one. Only on Drummond Island would a nationally recognized waterfowl sanctuary be located adjacent to a duck hunters’ public boat launch. Surveying the area, I thought I could even hear the island’s imaginary planning and zoning commissioner, whoever he or she was, explaining things: “Over here, you got your hippie-dippie bird sanctuary, and over there you got your ramp to launch your Beavertail Stealth.”

  We parked, all seven of us disembarked, someone lifted the two back hatches, slid open our coolers, and did what we always did when we found a scenic place to pause. We commenced an impromptu party. Bev raised a Jell-O shot, toasting every winged bird according to its kind but especially ducks. The ethereal voice of Stevie Nicks serenaded from Andrea’s boom box, and soon several more hunters arrived and launched their boats.

  Backing a boat trailer with a boat on it down a ramp toward open water is an acquired skill and on display that afternoon was a wide variety of abilities. Another contradiction: The owners of the oldest, grimiest, crappiest boats were the best at maneuvering them. One driver owned a ridiculously large torpedo-shaped vessel of showroom quality, but when he tried to get it in the water he missed the ramp completely and scraped the glossy hull over some rocks. The sound of ripping fiberglass is not a pleasant one, nor something expunged by the complex rhythms of Fleetwood Mac. Pam—animal lover, nonswimmer, boat avoider—was not someone I ever would have expected to confront a strange man, but something about a large boat, the bad driving, or both must have really irritated her.

  “That calls for a citation!” she’d said, strutting a few feet from our group, standing with her feet planted, one hand on her waist and the other jerking open the left side of her bomber jacket.

  Low on the horizon now, the sun glinted off something pinned to the lining. I squinted to make sure, but yes, it was a big silver star.

  Light reflected off one of the points, and with her short hair, her fit body, and her aviator sunglasses, anyone who didn’t know Pam, who didn’t know she spent her days behind an elaborate bar serving high-grade liquor and gourmet food to business travelers, would have surely raised their arms in surrender.

  To the rest of us, the idea of Pam as the law was hilarious. Pam was silly, Pam was friendly, Pam was fun, but Pam was not going to put anyone in a headlock. Yet it looked like a real sheriff’s badge and she’d had it pinned inside her jacket all weekend, just waiting for the right time to flash it.

  We al
l laughed, then crowded around to examine her credential up close. It looked real, but when we asked her where it had come from, she wouldn’t tell us. All she’d say was that one of her regular customers at the bar where she worked had given it to her as a gag. We tried to pry more details out of her, but to no avail.

  “Nope,” she’d said, “not sayin’. I don’t want to get anyone in trouble.”

  The reason it looked real was because it was real. If just having it wasn’t illegal, flashing it to someone definitely was, and we could tell by her tone that she wasn’t going to budge, and we relented. Most of the hunters were out in their boats by then anyway, with just a few stragglers remaining. The boat launch was filled with trucks, empty boat trailers, and us. We’d had our fun, and I thought we’d probably leave then, but before we could, a final vehicle pulled up. It had a gold emblem on the driver’s side door and a real cop behind the wheel. Pam saw him and blanched.

  “Act normal!” she hissed.

  Act normal? I thought. I am normal.

  The next sound I heard was Pam’s jacket zipper going up in a hurry. What were the odds? Pam was the first one to bed at night, the first one to caution us if we were planning something even slightly dangerous, and she never, never did anything risky or illegal. And, Drummond Island supposedly didn’t have any cops.

  The black-green truck had big side mirrors, a cowcatcher over the front grille (probably for deer), and the gold emblems on both doors identified the driver as an officer with the Department of Natural Resources (DNR).